I galloped to the town and brought Masha books, newspapers, sweets, flowers; with Stepan I caught fish, wading for hours up to my neck in the cold water in the rain to catch eel-pout to vary our fare; I demeaned myself to beg the peasants not to make a noise; I plied them with vodka, bought them off, made all sorts of promises.  And how many other foolish things I did!

At last the rain ceased, the earth dried.  One would get up at four o’clock in the morning; one would go out into the garden—­where there was dew sparkling on the flowers, the twitter of birds, the hum of insects, not one cloud in the sky; and the garden, the meadows, and the river were so lovely, yet there were memories of the peasants, of their carts, of the engineer.  Masha and I drove out together in the racing droshky to the fields to look at the oats.  She used to drive, I sat behind; her shoulders were raised and the wind played with her hair.

“Keep to the right!” she shouted to those she met.

“You are like a sledge-driver,” I said to her one day.

“Maybe!  Why, my grandfather, the engineer’s father, was a sledge-driver.  Didn’t you know that?” she asked, turning to me, and at once she mimicked the way sledge-drivers shout and sing.

“And thank God for that,” I thought as I listened to her.  “Thank God.”

And again memories of the peasants, of the carts, of the engineer. . . .

XIII

Dr. Blagovo arrived on his bicycle.  My sister began coming often.  Again there were conversations about manual labour, about progress, about a mysterious millennium awaiting mankind in the remote future.  The doctor did not like our farmwork, because it interfered with arguments, and said that ploughing, reaping, grazing calves were unworthy of a free man, and all these coarse forms of the struggle for existence men would in time relegate to animals and machines, while they would devote themselves exclusively to scientific investigation.  My sister kept begging them to let her go home earlier, and if she stayed on till late in the evening, or spent the night with us, there would be no end to the agitation.

“Good Heavens, what a baby you are still!” said Masha reproachfully.  “It is positively absurd.”

“Yes, it is absurd,” my sister agreed, “I know it’s absurd; but what is to be done if I haven’t the strength to get over it?  I keep feeling as though I were doing wrong.”

At haymaking I ached all over from the unaccustomed labour; in the evening, sitting on the verandah and talking with the others, I suddenly dropped asleep, and they laughed aloud at me.  They waked me up and made me sit down to supper; I was overpowered with drowsiness and I saw the lights, the faces, and the plates as it were in a dream, heard the voices, but did not understand them.  And getting up early in the morning, I took up the scythe at once, or went to the building and worked hard all day.