University of Virginia Library

VIII

ON the day Peter Avdéev died in the hospital at Vozdvizhensk, his old father, the wife of the brother in whose place he had enlisted, and that brother's daughter — who was already approaching womanhood and almost of age to get married — were threshing oats on the hard-frozen threshing floor.

The day before, there had been a heavy fall of snow followed towards morning by a severe frost. The old man woke when the cocks were crowing for the third time, and seeing the bright moonlight through the frozen window-panes, got down from the oven-top, put on his boots, his sheepskin coat and cap, and went out to the threshing floor. Having worked there for a couple of hours, he returned to the hut and awoke his son and the women. When the younger woman and the girl came to the threshing-floor they found it ready swept, a wooden shovel sticking in the dry white snow, and beside it birch brooms with the twigs upwards,

and two rows of oat-sheaves laid ears to ears in a long line the whole length of the clean threshing-floor. They chose their flails and started threshing, keeping time with their triple blows. The old man struck powerfully with his heavy flail, breaking the straw; the girl struck the ears from above with measured blows; and his daughter-in-law turned the oats over with her flail.

The moon had set, dawn was breaking, and they were finishing the line of sheaves when Akim, the eldest son, in his sheepskin and cap, joined the threshers.

"What are you lazing about for?" shouted his father to him, pausing in his work and leaning on his flail.

"The horses had to be seen to."

"'Horses seen to!'" the father repeated, mimicking him. "The old woman will look after them .... Take your flail! You're getting too fat, you drunkard!"

"Have you been standing me treat?" muttered the son.

"What?" said the old man, frowning sternly and missing a stroke.

The son silently took a flail, and they began threshing with four flails.

"Trak, tapatam...trak, tapatam...trak..." came down the old man's heavy flail after the three others.

"Why, you've got a nape like a goodly gentleman! ... Look here, my trousers have hardly anything to hand on!" said the old man, omitting his stroke and only swinging his flail in the air, so as not to get out of time.

They had finished the row, and the women began removing the straw with rakes.

"Peter was a fool to go in your stead. They'd have knocked the nonsense out of you in the army; and he was worth five of such as you at home!"

"That's enough, father," said the daughter-in-law, as she threw aside the binders that had come off the sheaves.

"Yes, feed the six of you, and get no work out of a single one! Peter used to work for two. He was not like ..."

Along the trodden path from the house came the old man's wife, the frozen snow creaking under the new bark shoes she wore over her

tightly wound woolen leg-bands. The men were shovelling the unwinnowed grain into heaps, the woman and the girl sweeping up what remained.

The Elder has been, and orders everybody to go and work for the master, carting bricks," said the old woman. "I've got breakfast ready .... Come along, won't you?"

"All right .... Harness the roan and go," said the old man to Akím, "and you'd better look out that you don't get me into trouble, as you did the other day! ... One can't help regretting Peter!"

"When he was at home you used to scold him," retorted Akím. "Now he's away you keep nagging at me."

"That shows you deserve it," said his mother in the same angry tones. "You'll never be Peter's equal."

"Well, all right," said the son.

"'All right,' indeed! You've drunk the meal, and now you say 'all right!'"

"Let bygones be bygones!" said the daughter-in-law.

The disagreements between father and son had begun long ago — almost from the time

Peter went as a soldier. Even then the old man felt that he had parted with an eagle for a cuckoo. It is true that according to right — as the old man understood it — a childless man had to go in place of a family man. Akím had four children, and Peter had none; but Peter was a worker like his father, skilful, observant, strong, enduring, and above all, industrious. He was always at work. If he happened to pass by where people were working he lent a helping hand, as his father would have done, and took a turn or two with the scythe, or loaded a cart, or felled a tree, or chopped some wood. The old man regretted his going away, but there was no help for it. Conscription in those days was like death. A soldier was a severed branch; and to think about him at home was to tear one's heart uselessly. Only occasionally, to prick his elder son, the father mentioned him, as he had done that day. But his mother often thought of her younger son, and she had long — for more than a year now — been asking her husband to send Peter a little money, to which the old man made no reply.

The Kúrenkovs were a well-to-do family, and

the old man had some savings hidden away; but he would on no account have consented to touch what he had laid by. Now, however, his old woman, having heard him mention their younger son, made up her mind again to ask him to send him at least a rouble after selling the oats. This she did. As soon as the young people had gone to work for the proprietor, and the old folk were left alone together, she persuaded him to send Peter a rouble out of the oats-money.

So when ninety-six bushels of the winnowed oats had been packed on to three sledges, lined with sacking carefully pinned together at the top with wooden skewers, she gave her old man a letter written at her dictation by the church clerk; and the old man promised when he got to town to enclose a rouble, and send it off to the right address.

The old man, dressed in a new sheepskin with a homespun cloak over it, his legs wrapped round with warm white woollen leg-bands, took the letter, placed it in his wallet, said a prayer, got into the front sledge, and drove to town. His grandson drove in the last sledge. When

he reached the town the old man asked the innkeeper to read the letter to him, and listened to it attentively and approvingly.

In her letter Peter's mother first sent him her blessing, then greetings from everybody, and the news of his godfather's death; and at the end she added that Aksínya (Peter's wife) had not wished to stay with them, but had gone into service, where they heard she was living well and honestly. Then came a reference to that present of a rouble; and finally, in her own words, what the old woman, with tears in her eyes and yielding to her sorrow, had dictated and the church clerk had taken down exactly, word for word:—

"One thing more, my darling child, my sweet dove, my own Peterkin! I have wept my eyes out lamenting for thee, thou light of my eyes. To whom has thou left me?..." At this point the old woman had sobbed and wept, and said: "That will do!" So the words stood in the letter; but it was not fated that Peter should receive the news of his wife's having left home, nor the present of the rouble, nor his mother's last words. The letter with the money in it

came back with the announcement that Peter had been killed in the war, defending his Tsar, his Fatherland, and the Orthodox Faith. That is how the army clerk expressed it.

The old woman, when this news reached her, wept for as long as she could spare time, and then set to work again. The very next Sunday she went to church, and had a requiem chanted, and Peter's name entered among those for whose souls prayers were to be said; and she distributed bits of holy bread to all the good people, in memory of Peter the servant of God.

Aksínya, the soldier's widow, also lamented loudly when she heard of her beloved husband's death, with whom she had lived but one short year. She regretted her husband, and her own ruined life; and in her lamentations mentioned Peter's brown locks and his love, and the sadness of her life with her little orphaned Vánka, and bitterly reproached Peter for having had pity on his brother, but none on her — obliged to wander among strangers!

But in the depth of her soul Aksínya was glad of her husband's death. She was pregnant by the shopman in whose service she was living;

and no one would now have a right to scold her, and the shopman could marry her as, when he was persuading her to yield, he had said he would.