BerriesЯгоды

Hot, windless June days had set in. The leaves in the forest are full of sap, thick, and green; only here and there do yellowed birch and linden leaves come loose. The wild-rose bushes are strewn with fragrant blossoms; in the forest meadows the honey clover grows unbroken; the rye, thick and tall, darkens and ripples, half filled out; in the low ground the corncrakes call to one another; in the oats and the rye the quail now rasp, now click; the nightingale in the forest only now and then sings a phrase and falls silent; the dry heat bakes. Along the roads the dry dust lies motionless, a finger deep, and rises in a thick cloud, carried now to the right, now to the left, by a chance faint breath of wind.

The peasants are finishing their buildings and carting manure; the cattle go hungry on the parched fallow, waiting for the aftergrass. Cows and calves tear about with their tails crooked in the air and run from the herdsmen, away from the resting place. The boys watch the horses along the roads and the field edges. The women drag sacks of grass out of the forest; the girls, big and little, race one another crawling among the bushes through the cut-over woods, gathering berries and carrying them to sell to the summer people.

The summer people, in their ornamented, architecturally fanciful little houses, stroll lazily under umbrellas, in light, clean, expensive clothes, along sand-strewn paths, or sit in the shade of trees and arbors at painted tables and, languishing in the heat, drink tea or cooling drinks.

Outside Nikolai Semyonych’s magnificent dacha, with its tower, veranda, little balcony, and galleries — all of it nice and fresh, nice and new, nice and clean — stands a post troika with harness bells, hitched to a carriage, which has brought a Petersburg gentleman out from town for 15 “there and back,” as the coachman says.

This gentleman is a well-known liberal public figure, who has taken part in all the committees, commissions, and presentations of addresses, cunningly drafted, as if loyal to the throne, but in substance most liberal. He has come from town, where, a terribly busy man as always, he will stay only a day and a night, to see his friend, a companion of his childhood, and almost of one mind with him.

They differ only a little on the means of applying constitutional principles. The Petersburger is more of a European, with even a slight leaning toward socialism, and draws a very large salary from the posts he holds. Nikolai Semyonych, for his part, is a purely Russian man, Orthodox, with a tinge of Slavophilism, and owns many thousands of desyatinas of land.

They dined in the garden on a dinner of five courses, but in the heat they ate almost nothing, so that the labors of the 40-ruble cook and his helpers, who had worked especially hard for the guest, went almost for nothing. All they ate was some iced botvinya with fresh white salmon, and a many-colored ice cream in a handsome mold, decorated with all sorts of spun-sugar threads and sponge biscuits. At dinner were the guest; a liberal doctor; the children’s tutor, a student, a reckless Social Democrat, a revolutionary, whom Nikolai Semyonych knew how to keep on a tight rein; Marie, Nikolai Semyonych’s wife; and three children, of whom the youngest came only for the dessert.

The dinner was a little strained, because Marie, herself a very nervous woman, was worried about the upset stomach of Goga — so (as is the custom among respectable people) the youngest boy, Nikolai, was called — and also because, as soon as a political conversation began between the guest and Nikolai Semyonych, the reckless student, wishing to show that he was not shy of stating his convictions before anyone, would break into the conversation, and the guest would fall silent, while Nikolai Semyonych calmed the revolutionary down.

They dined at seven. After dinner the friends sat on the veranda, cooling themselves with cold Narzan and a light white wine, and talked.

Their disagreement showed itself first of all on the question of what the elections ought to be, in two stages or in one, and they had just begun a heated argument when they were called to tea in the dining room, screened with netting against the flies. At tea there was general conversation with Marie, whom this conversation could not interest, since she was wholly absorbed in the thought of the signs of Goga’s upset stomach. The talk was of painting, and Marie was arguing that in decadent painting there is un je ne sais quoi that cannot be denied. At that moment she was not thinking of decadent painting at all, but was saying what she had said many times. The guest had no need of it at all, but he had heard what is said against decadence, and he said it all so plausibly that no one would have guessed he cared nothing whatever for decadence or nondecadence. Nikolai Semyonych, for his part, looking at his wife, felt that she was displeased about something and that there would perhaps be some unpleasantness — besides, he found it very tedious to listen to what she was saying, which he had heard, it seemed to him, more than a hundred times.

The costly bronze lamps were lit, and the lanterns in the yard; the children were put to bed, after the sick Goga had been put through his treatments.

The guest, with Nikolai Semyonych and the doctor, went out on the veranda. The footman brought candles under shades and more Narzan, and toward twelve o’clock a real, lively conversation began at last about what measures of state ought to be taken at the present time, so important for Russia. Both smoked without stopping as they talked.

Outside, beyond the gates of the dacha, the coach horses, standing unfed, jingled their bells now and then, and in the carriage, unfed too, sat the old coachman, now yawning, now snoring. He had lived twenty years with one employer and sent all his wages home to his brother, except for some three or five rubles, which he drank away. When the roosters had begun calling to one another from the various dachas, and especially one loud, shrill one at the dacha next door, the coachman began to wonder whether they had forgotten him, got down from the carriage, and went into the dacha. He saw that his fare was sitting and drinking something and in between talking loudly. He took fright and went to look for the footman. The footman, in his little livery jacket, was asleep sitting up in the front hall. The coachman woke him. The footman, a former house serf, who fed his large family — five girls and two boys — by his service (it was a profitable place: fifteen rubles in wages, and from the masters, in tips, sometimes as much as a hundred rubles a year), jumped up and, straightening his clothes and shaking himself off, went to the masters to say that the coachman was getting anxious and was asking to be let go.

When the footman came in, the argument was at its height. The doctor, who had joined them, was taking part in it.

“I cannot admit,” the guest was saying, “that the Russian people should have to go by some other paths of development. Above all, freedom is needed — political freedom — that freedom, as is known to all, the greatest freedom — with the greatest rights of other people observed.”

The guest felt that he had gotten tangled up and was saying something not quite right, but in the heat of the argument he could not properly remember how it ought to be said.

“That is so,” answered Nikolai Semyonych, not listening to the guest and wishing only to state his own idea, which he particularly liked. “That is so, but it is reached by another path: not by a majority of votes, but by general consent. Look at the decisions of the mir.”

“Ah, that mir.”

“It cannot be denied,” said the doctor, “that the Slavic peoples have a particular outlook of their own. The Polish right of veto, for instance. I do not claim that it is better.”

“Allow me to finish my whole thought,” Nikolai Semyonych began. “The Russian people have particular qualities. These qualities…”

But Ivan, who had come in sleepy-eyed in his livery, interrupted him:

“The coachman is getting anxious…”

“Tell him” (the Petersburg guest said the polite “you” to every footman, and was proud of it) “that I shall be leaving soon. And I will pay for the extra time.”

“Very good, sir.”

Ivan went out, and Nikolai Semyonych was able to finish his whole thought. But both the guest and the doctor had heard it twenty times (or at least so it seemed to them), and they began to refute it, the guest especially, with examples from history. He knew history superbly.

The doctor was on the guest’s side, and admired his erudition, and was glad of the chance to make his acquaintance.

The conversation dragged on so long that it grew light beyond the forest on the other side of the road, and the nightingale woke; but the talkers went on smoking and talking, talking and smoking.

Perhaps the conversation would have gone on still longer, but the maid came out of the door.

This maid was an orphan who, to feed herself, had had to go into service. At first she had lived with merchants, where a clerk seduced her and she bore a child. Her child died; she took a place with an official, where the son, a gymnasium student, gave her no peace; then she took a place as under-housemaid with Nikolai Semyonych and counted herself lucky that the masters no longer pursued her with their lust and paid her wages regularly. She had come in to announce that the mistress was asking for the doctor and Nikolai Semyonych.

“Well,” thought Nikolai Semyonych, “something wrong with Goga, I suppose?”

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nikolai Nikolaevich is not quite well,” said the maid. Nikolai Nikolaevich, “they,” was Goga, who had overeaten and was in the grip of diarrhea.

“And high time,” said the guest, “look how light it is. How long we’ve sat up!” he said, smiling, as if praising himself and his companions for having talked so long and so much, and took his leave.

Ivan ran about for a long time on tired legs after the guest’s hat and umbrella, which the guest himself had stuck in the most unlikely places. Ivan hoped for a tip, but the guest, always generous, who would never have begrudged him a ruble, was carried away by the conversation and forgot all about it, and remembered only on the road that he had given the footman nothing. “Well, it can’t be helped.”

The coachman climbed up on the box, gathered the reins, sat sideways, and started off. The bells jingled. The Petersburger, swaying on the soft springs, rode along and thought about how limited and biased his friend’s ideas were.

Nikolai Semyonych, who did not go to his wife at once, was thinking the very same thing. “Dreadful, this limited Petersburg narrowness. They can’t get beyond it,” he thought.

He was slow to go in to his wife because he now expected nothing good from this meeting. It was all about the berries. Yesterday some boys had brought berries. Nikolai Semyonych had bought two plates of berries, not quite ripe, without bargaining. The children came running, asking for some, and began eating straight from the plates. Marie had not yet come out. And when she came out and learned that Goga had been given berries, she was terribly angry, since his stomach was already upset. She began to reproach her husband, and he her. And an unpleasant talk followed, almost a quarrel. Toward evening Goga had indeed done his business badly. Nikolai Semyonych had thought it would end at that, but the call for the doctor meant that things had taken a bad turn.

When he went in to his wife, she, in a gaily colored silk dressing gown that she liked very much but was not thinking about now, was standing in the nursery with the doctor over the chamber pot, holding a dripping candle to light it for him.

The doctor, with an attentive air, in his pince-nez, was looking into it and stirring the stinking contents with a little stick.

“Yes,” he said significantly.

“It’s all those cursed berries.”

“Come now, why the berries,” Nikolai Semyonych said timidly.

“Why the berries? You went and fed him, and I get no sleep all night, and the child will die…”

“Come, he won’t die,” said the doctor, smiling, “a small dose of bismuth, and care. We’ll give it now.”

“He’s fallen asleep,” said Marie.

“Well, better not to disturb him. I’ll look in tomorrow.”

“Please do.”

The doctor left; Nikolai Semyonych was left alone and for a long time still could not calm his wife. When he fell asleep it was already broad daylight.

In the neighboring village, at that very time, the men and boys were coming back from the night pasture. Some were riding a single horse; some had horses on a lead, and yearling colts and two-year-olds ran behind.

Taraska Rezunov, a lad of about twelve, in a sheepskin jacket but barefoot, and in a peaked cap, riding a piebald mare, with a gelding on a lead and a yearling as piebald as its mother, overtook everyone and galloped uphill to the village. A black dog ran merrily ahead of the horses, looking back at them. The sleek piebald yearling behind kicked up its white-stockinged legs, now to one side, now to the other. Taraska rode up to the cottage, got down, tied the horses at the gate, and went into the entry.

“Hey, you there, you’ve overslept,” he shouted at his sisters and brother, who were sleeping in the entry on a piece of sacking.

Their mother, who had been sleeping beside them, had already gotten up to milk the cow.

Olgushka jumped up, smoothing her long, tousled, flaxen hair with both hands, but Fedka, who had been sleeping beside her, still lay with his head buried in a sheepskin coat, only rubbing, with a calloused heel, his slender little leg that stuck out from under his kaftan.

The children had planned the evening before to go for berries, and Taraska had promised to wake his sister and the little one as soon as he came back from the night pasture.

And so he did. At the night pasture, sitting under a bush, he had been dropping with sleep; but now he had come wide awake and decided not to go to bed, but to go for berries with the girls. His mother gave him a mug of milk. He cut himself a slice of bread, sat down at the table on the high bench, and began to eat.

When, in nothing but his shirt and trousers, he set off down the road with quick steps, leaving clear prints of bare feet in the dust, a road on which several such barefoot tracks already lay, some bigger, some smaller, with the little toes clearly printed, the girls could already be seen far ahead as little spots of red and white against the dark green of the grove. (The evening before they had made ready a little pot and a little mug for themselves and, without breakfast and without taking any bread, had crossed themselves once or twice toward the icon corner and run out into the street.) Taraska caught up with them beyond the big forest, just as they turned off the road.

Dew lay on the grass, on the bushes, even on the lower branches of the bushes and trees, and the girls’ bare little legs were soaked at once and grew cold at first, then warmed up as they trod now on the soft grass, now on the bumps of the dry ground. The berry place was in the cleared forest. The girls went first into last year’s cutting. The young growth was only just coming up, and among the lush young bushes there were patches of low grass in which berries were ripening and hiding, still pinkish white and here and there red.

The girls, bent double, picked berry after berry with their small sunburned hands, and put the poorer ones in their mouths and the better ones in the mug.

“Olgushka! Come here. There’s a terrible lot here.”

“Really? Go on! Halloo!” they called to each other, never going far apart, when they went behind the bushes.

Taraska had gone on farther from them, across the ravine, into a wood felled earlier, the year before, where the young growth, the hazel and the maple especially, was taller than a man. The grass was lusher and thicker, and where patches of wild strawberries turned up, the berries were bigger and juicier under the shelter of the grass.

“Grushka!”

“Ye-es!”

“What if there’s a wolf?”

“Well, what of a wolf? What are you scaring me for? I’m not scared, I can tell you,” said Grushka; and, forgetting herself, thinking about the wolf, she put in berry after berry, and the very best ones not into the mug but into her mouth.

“And our Taraska’s gone off across the ravine. Taraska-a!”

“Ho-o!” Taraska answered from across the ravine, “come over here.”

“Let’s go, then, there’s more over there.”

And the girls climbed down into the ravine, holding on to the bushes, and out of the ravine by its side gullies to the other side; and there, in the full heat of the sun, they came at once upon a little clearing of short grass, strewn all over with berries. Both were silent and worked without stopping, with hands and lips alike.

Suddenly something bolted, and in the silence came a crashing through the grass and bushes, with what seemed to them a terrible din.

Grushka fell down in fright and spilled the berries she had picked, half a mugful.

“Mama!” she squealed, and began to cry.

“It’s a hare, a hare. Taraska! A hare. There it goes,” shouted Olgushka, pointing to a little gray-brown back, with ears, flashing between the bushes. “What’s the matter with you?” Olgushka said to Grushka when the hare had gone out of sight.

“I thought it was a wolf,” answered Grushka, and suddenly, right after her terror and her tears of despair, burst out laughing.

“What a silly!”

“I was scared something awful!” said Grushka, pealing with laughter as ringing as a little bell.

They picked up the berries and went on. The sun had risen now and dappled the greenery with bright, brilliant patches and shadows, and glittered in the drops of dew, in which the girls were now soaked right up to the waist.

The girls were almost at the end of the wood, going on farther and farther in the hope that the farther they went, the more berries there would be, when from different places came the ringing halloos of girls and women who had come out later and were also gathering berries.

At breakfast time the mug and the little pot were already half full, when the girls met Aunt Akulina, who had also come out for berries. Behind Aunt Akulina, on fat, bandy little legs, toddled a tiny potbellied boy in nothing but a little shirt, without a cap.

“He tagged along with me,” Akulina said to the girls, taking the boy up in her arms. “And there’s nobody to leave him with.”

“And just now we scared up a great big hare. How it went cra-ashing — it was awful…”

“You don’t say!” said Akulina, and set the little one down again.

Having talked a while like this, the girls parted from Akulina and went on with their work.

“Guess we’ll sit a while now,” said Olgushka, sitting down in the thick shade of a hazel bush. “I’m all worn out. Oh, we didn’t bring any bread; I could eat something now.”

“Me too,” said Grushka.

“What’s Aunt Akulina hollering so for? Hear that? Halloo, Aunt Akulina!”

“Olgushka-a!” Akulina called back.

“Wha-at!”

“Isn’t the little one with you?” Akulina shouted from beyond the side gully.

“No!”

But then the bushes rustled, and from beyond the side gully Aunt Akulina herself appeared, her skirt tucked up above her knees, a basket on her arm.

“Haven’t you seen the little one?”

“No.”

“What a misfortune! Mishka-a-a!”

“Mishka-a-a!”

No one answered.

“Oh, the grief of it, he’ll get lost. He’ll wander into the big forest.”

Olgushka jumped up and went with Grushka to search in one direction, Aunt Akulina in the other. They called Mishka without stopping, in ringing voices, but no one answered.

“I’m worn out,” said Grushka, falling behind; but Olgushka kept on hallooing without stopping and went now to the right, now to the left, looking about her.

Akulina’s desperate voice could be heard far off toward the big forest. Olgushka was already about to give up searching and go home when, in one lush bush near a linden stump with young shoots, she heard the persistent, angry, desperate cheeping of some bird, probably one with nestlings, displeased about something. The bird was plainly afraid of something and angry at something. Olgushka looked round at the bush, overgrown with thick, tall grass with white flowers, and right under it she saw a little blue heap, unlike any of the plants of the forest. She stopped and looked closer.

It was Mishka. And it was he the bird was afraid of and angry at.

Mishka was lying on his fat belly, his little hands tucked under his head and his plump, bandy little legs stretched out, sweetly asleep.

Olgushka called his mother and, after waking the little one, gave him some berries.

And for a long time afterward Olgushka told everyone she met — and at home her mother, and her father, and the neighbors — how she had searched for Akulina’s little one and how she had found him.

The sun had now come all the way out from behind the forest and was baking the earth and everything on it.

“Olgushka! Come swimming,” the little girls who had gathered with her invited Olga. And they all went to the river in a big ring, singing. Splashing about, squealing, and kicking their legs, the girls did not notice how a low black cloud was coming up from the west, how the sun began to hide and come out again, how the air began to smell of flowers and birch leaves and thunder began to rumble now and then. The girls had not had time to dress before the rain came pouring down and soaked them to the skin.

In their little shirts, darkened with wet and clinging to their bodies, the girls ran home, had something to eat, and carried dinner out to the field where their father was plowing the potatoes.

When they had come back and had their dinner, their little shirts were already dry. After sorting the strawberries and putting them in bowls, they took them to Nikolai Semyonych’s dacha, where they paid well; but this time they were turned away.

Marie, sitting under an umbrella in a big armchair and languishing in the heat, saw the girls with berries and waved them off with her fan.

“We don’t need any, we don’t need any.”

But Valya, the eldest, a boy of twelve, who was resting from the overwork of the classical gymnasium and playing croquet with the neighbors, saw the berries, ran up to Olgushka, and asked:

“How much?”

She said:

“Thirty kopecks.”

“Too much,” he said. He said “too much” because that was what the grown-ups always said. “Wait, just go around the corner,” he said, and ran off to his nurse.

Olgushka and Grushka, meanwhile, were admiring the mirrored globe, in which little houses, woods, and gardens of some sort could be seen.

Neither this globe nor much else surprised them, because they expected the most wondrous things of all from the mysterious world of the masters, which they could not understand.

Valya ran to his nurse and began asking her for thirty kopecks. The nurse said 20 was enough and got the money out of her little trunk for him. And, keeping clear of his father, who had only just gotten up after the hard night before and was smoking and reading the papers, he gave the girls a twenty-kopeck piece and, tipping the berries into a plate, fell upon them.

Back home, Olgushka untied with her teeth the knot in her kerchief in which the twenty-kopeck piece was tied, and gave it to her mother. Her mother put the money away and gathered up the washing to take to the river.

Taraska, meanwhile, who had been plowing the potatoes with his father since breakfast, was asleep at this time in the shade of a thick, dark oak; his father sat close by, keeping an eye on the hobbled, unharnessed horse, which was grazing at the edge of someone else’s land and at any minute might stray into the oats or into someone else’s meadows.

In Nikolai Semyonych’s family everything that day was as usual. Everything was in good order. A breakfast of three courses was ready, and the flies had long been eating it, but no one came, because no one wanted to eat.

Nikolai Semyonych was pleased with the rightness of his judgments, which had become clear from what he had read in the papers that day. Marie was at ease, because Goga had done his business well. The doctor was pleased that the remedies he had prescribed had done good. Valya was pleased that he had eaten a whole plate of strawberries.