Strawberries
It was June, and the weather was hot and still. In the forest the foliage was thick, sappy and green, and only rarely did a yellow leaf fall here and there from a birch or a lime-tree. The wild-rose bushes were covered with sweet blossoms; and the forest glades were a mass of honey-scented clover. The thick, tall and waving rye was growing darker, and its grain was swelling fast. In the low-lying land the corncrakes called to one another; in the rye and the oat field quails croaked and cried noisily; in the forests at rare intervals the nightingales sang a few notes and then were again silent. The heat was dry and scorching, and the dust lay an inch thick on the road, or rose in dense clouds, blown now to left and now to right by a stray gentle breeze.
The peasants were working to finish their buildings or were carting manure. The hungry cattle were out on the dry fallow land, awaiting the aftermath in the hayfields. The cows and calves were lowing, and, with uplifted hooked tails, abandoned their shady resting-places to scamper away from the herdsmen. By the roadside and on the banks, lads were pasturing horses; women were carrying sacks of grass out of the woods; young maidens and little girls, hurrying after one another, crept between the bushes where the trees were felled, picking strawberries to sell to the gentlefolk who had come to the country for the summer.
These summer inhabitants of ornamented, architecturally pretentious bungalows, strolled with open sunshades, in light, clean, costly clothes, along sand-strewn paths; or sat in the shade of trees and arbours, by decorated tables, and, overpowered by the heat, drank tea or sipped cooling drinks.
Before the splendid bungalow of Nicholas Semyónovitch, with its tower, veranda, little balconies and galleries (everything about it fresh, new, and clean), stood a troika-calèche with three horses, that had brought a Petersburg gentleman from the town six miles off.
This gentleman—a well-known and active Liberal member of every Committee—was on every Council, and signed every petition and every address—cunningly framed to appear faithfully loyal, but really very radical. He had come from the town (in which, as an extremely busy man, he was staying only twenty-four hours) to see the old friend and playmate of his childhood, who was almost his adherent.
They disagreed only on the best way of putting their Constitutional principles into practice; and as to that but slightly. The Petersburger was more of a European—even with a slight leaning towards Socialism—and in receipt of a very large salary from the different posts he occupied. Nicholas Semyónovitch, on the other hand, was a pure Russian, Orthodox, a bit of a Slavophil, and the owner of many thousands of acres.
They had had five courses for dinner, which was served in the garden; but the heat made it almost impossible to eat, so that all the work of the cook (who received £50 a year) and of his assistants, who had taken special trouble to prepare dinner for the visitor, was wasted. They had only eaten of the iced fish-soup, and the parti-coloured, prettily shaped ice-pudding, elaborately ornamented with spun sugar and biscuits. Besides the visitor, there had been present at dinner a Liberal doctor, the children’s tutor—a desperately Socialistic, Revolutionary student (but whom Nicholas Semyónovitch was able to keep within bounds)—Nicholas Semyónovitch’s wife, Marie, and their three children; the youngest of whom came only to dessert.
There had been a slight strain during dinner, because Marie, a very nervous woman, was anxious about the derangement of Gógo’s stomach (as is the custom among well-bred people, the name “Gógo” was given to their youngest son, Nicholas), and also because, as soon as a political subject was started by Nicholas Semyónovitch and the visitors, the desperate student—in his eagerness to show that he was not afraid of expressing his opinions to anyone—broke into the conversation. Then the visitor would cease talking, and Nicholas Semyónovitch would try to soothe the student.
They had dined at seven; and after dinner the friends sat on the veranda, refreshing themselves by sipping iced narzán311 with white wine, and conversing.
Their difference of opinion first showed itself on the question of elections: as to whether direct or secondary representation was better—and the discussion was growing heated when they were called to tea in the dining-room, which was carefully protected from the flies by nets. The conversation at tea was general, and directed to Marie, who could take no interest in it because her thoughts were absorbed by some symptoms of the derangement of Gógo’s digestive organs. They were talking about pictures, and Marie maintained that in decadent art there was a certain je ne sais quoi: which could not be denied. She was at that moment not thinking in the least about decadent art, but only repeating what she had often said before. As for the visitor, he did not care about it at all, but he had heard what was being said against decadence, and repeated it so naturally that no one could have guessed that neither decadence nor non-decadence concerned him in the least; and Nicholas Semyónovitch, looking at his wife, felt that she was dissatisfied about something, and that some unpleasantness might be expected—and, besides, it was very dull listening to what she was saying. He thought he must have heard it at least a hundred times.
Rich bronze lamps were lit inside the room, and lanterns outside. The children had been put to bed; Gógo having first been subjected to medical treatment.
The visitor, with Nicholas Semyónovitch and the doctor, went out on to the veranda. The footman brought candles with glass globes, and more narzán, and about midnight they started at last a real, animated conversation as to the best means of government to be adopted at the present, most critical, time for Russia. They all smoked and talked unceasingly.
Outside the gate clanked the bells on the harness of the horses, which had not been fed, and the old driver, sitting inside the calèche, alternately yawned and snored. He had worked for one master twenty years; and with the exception of three to five roubles a month, which he drank, he had sent all his money home to his brother, who worked their land in the village. When the cocks began to crow to one another from bungalow to bungalow (especially one from a neighbouring yard, who had a very loud shrill voice) the driver began to wonder whether they had forgotten him, and got down and went inside the gate. He saw his fare sitting, eating and talking. He became alarmed, and went to look for the footman. He found him in his livery, sitting asleep in the anteroom. The driver woke him up. The footman, formerly a serf, kept his large family out of his wages (it was a good place: he got £20 a year wages, and sometimes another £10 in tips); he had five girls and two boys. He jumped up, pulled himself together with a shake, and went to tell the gentleman that the driver was getting uneasy and asking to be dismissed.
When the footman entered, the discussion was at its height. The doctor also was taking part in it.
“I cannot admit that the Russian people …” the visitor was saying, “ought to develop on different lines. Before all things liberty is wanted—political liberty—that liberty … as all know well, is the greatest liberty … without infringing the rights of others.”
He felt that he was getting a little mixed, and that that was not the right way to put it; but he could not quite remember how it should be put.
“That is so,” answered Nicholas Semyónovitch, anxious to express his own thought, with which he was particularly pleased, and not listening to the visitor—“that is so, but it must be reached by other means—not by a majority of votes, but by common consent. Look at the Mir, how it arrives at its decisions!”
“Oh, that Mir!”
“It cannot be denied,” said the doctor, “that the Slavonic nations have an outlook of their own. Take, for instance, the Polish right of veto. I don’t maintain that it is a better way …”
“One moment … I will finish what I was going to say,” began Nicholas Semyónovitch. “The Russian people have special characteristics. These characteristics …”
But here Iván, the liveried, sleepy-eyed footman, interrupted him.
“The driver is getting uneasy,” he said.
“Please tell him” (the Petersburg visitor always spoke politely to footmen, and prided himself on doing so) “that I shall soon be going, and will pay for the extra time.”
“Yes, sir.”
The footman went away, and Nicholas Semyónovitch was able to finish expressing his view. But both the visitor and the doctor had heard him express it a score of times (or, at any rate, they thought so), and began disproving it, especially the visitor, who quoted instances from history. He knew history very thoroughly.
The doctor sided with the visitor, admired his erudition, and was glad of the opportunity of becoming acquainted with him.
While they were engrossed in their subject the dawn appeared behind the wood on the opposite side of the road, and the birds woke up, but the arguers still kept on smoking and talking, talking and smoking, and the conversation might have gone on still longer, if a maidservant had not appeared at the door.
This servant was an orphan, who had had to take service to earn her living. She had first gone into a tradesman’s house, where one of his assistants seduced her, and she had had a child. The child died, and she entered the house of an official whose son—a gymnasium student—gave her no peace; and now she was under-housemaid in Nicholas Semyónovitch’s family, and considered herself fortunate because she was not pursued by her master’s lust, and had her wages paid regularly. She came to say that her mistress wanted the doctor and Nicholas Semyónovitch.
“Oh dear! …” thought Nicholas Semyónovitch, “something must be wrong with Gógo.”
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nicholas Nikoláyevitch seems unwell.” Nicholas Nikoláyevitch—that was little Gógo, who had overeaten himself, and was now suffering from diarrhoea.
“And it’s high time for me to be going,” said the visitor. “Just look how light it is … how long we have been sitting here!” He smiled (as if approving of himself and his collocutors for having talked so much and so long) and took his leave.
Iván had to run about on his weary legs, searching for the visitor’s hat and umbrella, which the latter had himself left in the most unlikely places. Iván hoped to get a tip; but the visitor—always generous, and quite ready to give him a rouble—being carried away by the discussion, clean forgot him, and remembered only when well on his way that he had not tipped the footman. “Ah well,” he thought, “it cannot be helped now.”
The driver mounted the box and gathered up the reins, and, sitting sideways, touched up the horses. The bells clanked, and the Petersburg gentleman, rocked on the soft springs of the calèche, drove away, his thoughts full of the narrowness of his friend’s view.
Nicholas Semyónovitch, who had not gone to his wife at once, was thinking the same about his friend. “The shallow narrowness of these Petersburgers is awful, and they can’t get out of it,” he thought. He shrank from going to his wife, because he did not expect anything good from the interview at that moment. It was all on account of some strawberries. In the morning Nicholas Semyónovitch had bought, without even bargaining, two platefuls of not very ripe wild strawberries which some peasant boys were selling. His children came running and asking for some, and began eating them straight from the boys’ plates. Marie had not yet come down. When she came and heard that Gógo, whose stomach was already out of order, had been given strawberries, she became extremely angry. She reproached her husband, and he reproached her; so that they had some very unpleasant words—almost a quarrel.
Towards evening some unsatisfactory symptoms really showed themselves, but Nicholas Semyónovitch thought that after that everything would be all right. However, the fact that the doctor was called proved that things had taken a bad turn.
When he did go in, he found his wife in the nursery, dressed in a favourite bright-coloured silk dressing-gown, about which, however, she was not thinking at that moment, and holding a guttering candle for the doctor, who, with his pince-nez on his nose and a very attentive expression on his face, was carefully making an examination. “Yes,” she said meaningly, “it is all on account of those confounded strawberries.”
“What of the strawberries?” Nicholas Semyónovitch asked timidly.
“What of the strawberries? … It’s you that fed him on them, and here am I, not having a wink of sleep all night … and the child will die!”
“Oh, come, he won’t die,” said the doctor, with a smile. “Just a small dose of bismuth, and careful diet. … Let’s give him some now.”
“He’s asleep,” she said.
“Oh, then, it’s better not to disturb him. I’ll call in again tomorrow.”
“Please do!”
The doctor went away, and the husband, left alone with his wife, was long unable to soothe her. It was broad daylight before he fell asleep.
Early that morning, in the neighbouring village, the lads were returning with the horses they had pastured all night. Some of them had only the one they rode; others were leading a second horse as well, while the colts and two-year-olds ran free behind.
Taráska Resounóf, a lad of twelve in a sheepskin coat, with a cap on his head but barefooted, seated on a piebald mare and leading a gelding by a cord, outdistanced all the others and trotted up the hill to the village. A well-fed piebald colt ran, kicking up its legs (which looked as if they had white stockings on) to right and left. Taráska rode up to his hut, tied the horses to the gate, and entered the passage.
“Hullo, you there … oversleeping yourselves!” he cried to his sisters and brother, who were sleeping on some sacking in the passage.
Their mother, who had also slept there, was already up and milking the cow.
Little Ólga jumped up, smoothing down with both hands her tangled flaxen hair. But Fédka, who lay beside her, continued to lie with his head hidden in a sheepskin coat, and only rubbed with a rough little heel the shapely childish foot that peeped from under the coat.
The previous evening the children had arranged to go strawberry-picking, and Taráska had promised to call his sisters and little brother as soon as he came back with the horses. He had kept his promise. In the night, sitting under a bush, he had felt extremely sleepy, but now he was wide awake, and decided not to lie down at all, but to go strawberry-picking with the girls. His mother gave him a mug of milk and cut him a chunk of bread, and he sat down on the high bench by the table to eat his breakfast. Then, dressed only in a pair of trousers and a shirt, he hurried along the road, leaving the prints of his bare feet in the dust—which already bore a number of smaller and larger footprints, distinctly showing the imprint of the little toes. Far ahead he could see the girls, like red and white specks against the dark green of the forest. In the evening they had prepared a little jug and a mug to put the berries in; and this morning, after crossing themselves once or twice before the icon, they had run out without breakfast, and without even taking a bit of bread with them. Taráska caught them up near the big forest, just as they turned off the road.
The bushes, and even the lower branches of the trees, were covered with dew. The girls’ little bare feet at first grew cold, and then began to glow, as they stepped now on the soft grass and now on the rough earth. The strawberries grew chiefly where the trees had been felled. The girls first went to the part where the trees had been cut the year before and the young shoots had only just begun to grow: where between the sappy little bushes were patches of long grass, amid which the rosy-white strawberries—with here and there a red one—hid and ripened. The little girls, bent nearly double, picked the berries one by one with their small brown fingers, putting the worst in their mouths and the best ones into the mugs.
“Ólga dear, come here! Here’s an awful lot!”
“Nonsense! … Hullo!” they called to each other when they got behind the bushes.
Taráska went farther, beyond the hollow, where the trees had been felled two years before, and where the new growth, especially the hazels and maples, was already taller than a man. The grass there was thicker and more juicy, and the berries, protected by the grass, grew juicier and larger.
“Groúsha!”
“Eh?”
“Supposing a wolf came?”
“Well, what about a wolf? What do you frighten one for? … I’m not afraid, I’m not!” declared Groúsha; and absentmindedly, her thoughts wandering to the wolf, she put berry after berry—and some of the very finest—into her mouth instead of into the mug.
“See! our Taráska has gone beyond the ravine! … Taráska, hullo! …”
“Here!” answered Taráska across the ravine. “You come too!”
“Yes, let us; there are more berries there!” And the girls clambered down into the hollow, holding on to the bushes and along the little crevices, and up again on the other side. And here they chanced at once on a spot lying in the full glare of the sunlight, covered with fine grass and sprinkled thick with strawberries; and straightway they set to work with hands and mouths, silently and without pausing. Suddenly something rustled through the stillness, and with a terrible noise (as it seemed to them) rattled and clattered among the grass and bushes.
Groúsha fell down with a fright, upsetting the already half-filled jug. “Mammy!” she whimpered, and began to cry.
“A hare, a hare! … Taráska, a hare! … There he is!” shouted little Ólga, pointing to the grey-brown back that gleamed through the bushes. “What’s the matter with you?” she said to Groúsha, when the hare had disappeared.
“I thought it was a wolf,” answered Groúsha, and her terror and tears of despair changed instantly to loud laughter.
“There’s a stupid!”
“I was dreadfully frightened,” said Groúsha, with peals of ringing laughter. They picked up the berries and went on. The sun was now up, and threw bright flecks and shadows on the green, and glittered in the dew that lay everywhere, and that had now saturated the girls’ clothes up to their waists.
The girls had nearly reached the end of the wood, having gone on and on in the hope that the farther they went the more strawberries there would be, and now the shrill voices of girls and women who had come out later to pick berries, resounded from every side. The girls’ mug and jug were nearly full when they came across Aunty Akoulína, who had also come strawberrying. Behind her a little fat-bellied, bareheaded boy, with nothing on but a shirt, waddled along on thick bandy legs.
“Here, he hangs on to me,” said Aunty Akoulína to the girls, taking the boy up in her arms, “and I have no one to leave him with.”
“And we have just scared a hare; such a clatter he made … dreadful!”
“Dear me!” said Akoulína, and put the boy down again. Having exchanged these words, the girls parted from Akoulína and went on with their work.
“Suppose we rest a bit now,” said little Ólga, sitting down in the shade of a hazel-bush. “I’m tired! … Oh dear, we’ve not brought any bread! It would be nice to eat a bit now!”
“I’d like some, too.”
“What’s Aunty Akoulína shouting about? Hear? … Hullo, Aunty Akoulína!”
“Ólga dear … eh!”
“What?”
“Have you got my boy there?”
“No!”
The bushes rustled, and Akoulína appeared on the opposite side of a hollow, with her skirt tucked up to her knees and a basket on her arm.
“Haven’t you seen my boy?”
“No.”
“Here’s a nice business! … Míshka!”
“Míshka! …”
No one answered.
“What a bother! He’ll get lost! … He’ll wander off into the big forest.”
Ólga jumped up and went with Groúsha to look for him one way, and Akoulína another, unceasingly calling with their ringing voices; but no one answered.
“I’m tired!” Groúsha kept saying, as she lagged behind Ólga, who did not stop shouting, going now to the left, now to the right, and looking from side to side.
Akoulína’s tones of despair could be heard far off in the direction of the big forest. Ólga was about to give up the search, when, in one of the sappy bushes beside the stump of a lime-tree overgrown with young shoots, she heard the continuous angry, desperate chirping of some bird which probably had nestlings nearby, and was displeased about something. The bird was evidently frightened and angry. Ólga looked round the bush, which was surrounded by a mass of tall grass with white blossoms, and there she saw something blue—unlike any kind of forest plant. She stopped and gazed at it. It was Míshka—whom the bird feared and was angry with.
Míshka lay on his fat stomach, sleeping sweetly, his head on his arms, his plump, crooked little legs stretched out.
Ólga called his mother, woke the boy, and gave him some of her strawberries. And for a long time after that, Ólga used to tell her father, mother, neighbours and everybody she met, how she had looked for and found Akoulína’s boy.
The sun stood high above the forest, scorching the earth and everything on it.
“Ólga, come and bathe!” said some other girls she met. And the whole crowd of them went down, singing, to the river. Splashing, shrieking, and kicking about, the girls did not notice how a dark, lowering cloud arose, now hiding, now revealing the sun, nor how strong the flowers and birch-leaves began to smell, nor the low rumbling of thunder. They had hardly time to get dressed before the rain drenched them to the skin. With their garments dark with wet and clinging to them, the girls ran home, had something to eat, and then took their father his dinner in the field where he was earthing up potatoes with the plough.
By the time they got home again and had finished their dinner, their clothes were already dry. Then they picked over their strawberries, put them into bowls, and took them to Nicholas Semyónovitch’s house, where they were generally well paid; but this time the strawberries were refused.
Marie, who exhausted by the heat sat in a large easy-chair, holding an open sunshade, waved her fan at the girls when she saw them, and said:
“No, no! We don’t want any!”
But Vólya, her eldest, twelve-year-old son, who was resting after his fatiguing work at the Classical Gymnasium and playing croquet with some neighbours, saw the strawberries and ran up to Ólga.
“How much are they?”
“Thirty kopecks,” said she.
“That’s too much,” he replied, because the grown-up people spoke like that. “Wait a bit—just step round the corner,” he added, and ran to the nurse.
Ólga and Groúsha admired the large globe mirror-ornament which stood in the garden, in which one could see tiny little houses, woods and gardens. This globe, as well as many other things, did not surprise them, because they expected to see the most wonderful things in this mysterious, and to them incomprehensible, gentlefolks’ world.
Vólya came to his nurse and asked her to give him thirty kopecks. Nurse said it was too much, but produced twenty from her box. Then, going round out of his way to avoid his father (who had only just got up after his weary night, and who sat smoking and reading his paper), he gave twenty kopecks to the girls, and emptied the strawberries onto a plate.
When they got home, Ólga untied with her teeth the knot in her handkerchief where she had tied the twenty kopecks, and gave them to her mother; who, after putting them away, went to the river to rinse her washing.
Taráska, who had been helping his father earth up the potatoes, lay fast asleep in the shade of a dark oak. His father sat by him, keeping an eye on the horse—which he had taken out of the plough, and which was now grazing near the border of his neighbour’s land—for fear it might stray among the oats or into the neighbour’s meadow.
In Nicholas Semyónovitch’s family everything was pursuing its usual course. All was well. The three-course lunch was ready, and the flies were eating it because nobody felt inclined for food.
Nicholas Semyónovitch was pleased with the justice of his arguments, proved by what the papers said that morning. Marie was quiet because Gógo’s digestion was all right again. The doctor was satisfied because his medicine had been successful; and Vólya was contented because he had eaten a whole plateful of strawberries.