the last time, and then he cried as if his heart would break. It was pitiful to see him. At first Mashenka got her mother to stay with her so that she wouldn’t be bored by being alone; the mother stayed until the birth of the baby, who is this very Kuzka, and then went off to stay with another married daughter in Oboyan, and Mashenka was alone with her child. There were the five drivers—drunken and mischievous peasants, all of them—and then there were the horses and carts, and fences would get broken or the soot would catch fire in the chimney—things a woman couldn’t cope with—and being as how we were neighbors she would come to me for every least thing. So I would go over and put things right and give her advice. Naturally I’d go indoors and have a cup of tea and we’d fall to talking. I was a young fellow then, quite clever, and I was fond of talking on all manner of subjects, and she was refined and well-mannered. She dressed neatly—in summer she went about with a sunshade. I remember how I would start on theology or politics, and she would be flattered, and she would give me tea and jam.… In a word, not to make a long story out of it, I’m telling you, grandfather, a year had not passed before I was troubled with the Evil Spirit, the enemy of all mankind. I began by noticing I was getting bored and irritable on the days when I didn’t see her. All the time I was trying to think up excuses for going to see her. ‘It’s high time,’ I’d say, ‘to put in the double windows for winter,’ and I’d idle away a whole day putting in the windows for her and taking care to leave a couple for the next day. ‘I’d better count Vasya’s pigeons and see that none of them has got lost’—things like that. I was always talking to her across the fence, and in the end I made a little gate in it to avoid going all the way round. From women much evil and every abomination have come into the world. Not only we sinners, but even holy men have been seduced. Mashenka did not keep me at arm’s length. Instead of thinking of her husband and taking care of herself, she fell in love with me. I began to notice how she was bored without me, and she was always walking along the fence and looking through the chinks into my yard. My head was going round in a kind of frenzy. On Thursday in Easter Week I got up early before there was any light in the sky, and when I went to market I passed close to her gate, and the Evil One was waiting for me. I watched her, looking through the trellis at the top of the gate, and she was standing there in the middle of her courtyard, already awake and feeding her ducks. I lost control over myself and called to her. She came and looked at me through the trellis. Her little face was pale, her eyes soft and sleepy-looking.… I loved her so much, and I began paying her compliments as though we were not standing at the gate, but visiting on name days, while she blushed and laughed and looked me straight in the eyes, not blinking. I lost my senses. I began to tell her about my real feelings for her. She opened the gate, let me in, and from that morning we began to live as man and wife.”
At that moment the hunchback Alyoshka came into the yard from the street, and without paying any attention to them he ran breathlessly into the house. Soon he came running out with a concertina, and jingling some coins in his pocket and chewing sunflower seeds, he ran off and disappeared behind the gate.
“Who’s that fellow?” Matvey Savvich asked.
“My son Alexey,” Dyudya replied. “He’s gone off to have some fun, the scoundrel! God has afflicted him with a hunchback, so we don’t ask too much of him!”
“He’s always out with the boys, always having fun,” Afanasyevna sighed. “Before Shrovetide we married him off and thought he’d improve, but, well—he’s worse than ever now!”
“There’s nothing we can do,” Dyudya said. “All it comes to is that we are keeping another man’s daughter for nothing.”
From somewhere behind the church there came the sound of glorious mournful singing. The words were indistinguishable, but the voices of two tenors and a bass could be made