III
On the evening when the village Meeting, in the cold darkness of an October night, was choosing the recruits and vociferating in front of the office, Polikéy sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing down some horse medicine upon the table with a bottle; but what it was, he himself did not know. He had there sublimate of mercury, sulphur, Glauber’s salts, and some kind of herb which he had gathered, having once imagined it to be good for broken wind, and now considered not useless in other disorders. The children had already gone to bed—two on the oven, two on the bed, and one in the cradle beside which Akoulína sat spinning. The remainder of a candle—one of the proprietress’s candles which had not been put away carefully enough—was burning in a wooden candlestick on the windowsill, and Akoulína every now and then got up to snuff it with her fingers, so that her husband should not have to break off his important occupation. There existed independent thinkers who regarded Polikéy as a worthless farrier and a worthless man. Others, the majority, considered him a bad man, but a great master of his art; but Akoulína, though she often scolded and even beat her husband, thought him the first among farriers and the first among men. Polikéy sprinkled some kind of specific on to the palm of his hand (he never used a balance, and spoke ironically about the Germans who use balances: “This is not a pharmacy,” he used to say). Polikéy weighed the specific in his hand and tossed it up, but there did not seem enough of it, and he poured in ten times as much. “I’ll put in the lot,” he said to himself. “It will pick ’em up better.”
Akoulína quickly turned round at the sound of the autocrat’s voice, expecting some order; but, seeing that the business did not concern her, shrugged her shoulders.
“What knowledge! … Where does he get it?” she thought, and went on spinning. The paper which had held the specific fell to the floor. Akoulína did not let this pass unnoticed.
“Annie,” she cried, “look! Father has dropped something. Pick it up!”
Annie put out her thin little bare legs from under the cloak with which she was covered, slid down under the table like a kitten, and got the paper.
“Here, daddy,” she said, and with her little chilled feet darted back into bed.
“Don’t puth!” squeaked her lisping younger sister sleepily.
“I’ll give it you!” muttered Akoulína; and both heads disappeared again under the cloak.
“He’ll give me three roubles,” said Polikéy, corking up the bottle. “I’ll cure the horse. It’s even too cheap,” he added, “brain-splitting work! … Akoulína, go and ask Nikíta for a little ’baccy. I’ll return it tomorrow;” and Polikéy took out of his trouser-pocket a limewood pipe-stem which had once been painted, with a mouthpiece of sealing-wax, and began fixing it on to the bowl.
Akoulína left her spindle and went out, managing to steer clear of everything—though this was not easy. Polikéy opened the cupboard and put away the medicine, then tilted a vodka bottle into his mouth, but it was empty, and he made a grimace; but when his wife brought the tobacco he sat down on the edge of the bed after filling and lighting his pipe, and his face shone with the content and pride of a man who has completed his day’s task. Whether he was thinking how on the morrow he would catch hold of a horse’s tongue and pour his wonderful mixture down its throat, or considering the fact that a useful person never gets a refusal—“There, now! Hadn’t Nikíta sent him some tobacco?”—anyhow, he felt happy.
Suddenly the door, hanging on one hinge, was thrown open, and a maidservant from up there—not the second maid, but the third, the little one that was kept to run errands—entered the cubicle. (Up there, as everyone knows, means the proprietor’s house, even if it is situated lower down.) Aksyúta—that was the girl’s name—always flew like a bullet, and did it without bending her arms, which, keeping time with the speed of her flight, swung like pendulums, not by her sides, but in front of her. Her cheeks were always redder than her pink dress, and her tongue moved as rapidly as her legs. She flew into the room, and for some reason catching hold of the stove, began to sway to and fro; then, as if reluctant on any account to bring out more than two or three words at a time, she all of a sudden breathlessly addressed Akoulína as follows:
“The mistress … has given orders … that Polikoúshka should come this minute … orders to come up. …”
She stopped, breathing heavily.
“Egór Miháylovitch has been with the mistress … they talked about rickruits … they mentioned Polikoúshka … Avdótya Nikoláyevna … has ordered you to come this minute … Avdótya Nikoláyevna has ordered …” again a sigh, “to come this minute. …”
For half a minute Aksyúta looked round at Polikéy and at Akoulína and the children—who had put out their heads from under their bedclothes—picked up a nutshell that lay on the stove, and threw it at little Annie. Then she repeated:
“To come this minute! …” and rushed out of the room like a whirlwind, the pendulums swinging as usual at right angles to the line of her flight.
Akoulína again rose, and got her husband’s boots—abominable soldier’s boots, with holes in them—and got down his coat and passed it to him without speaking.
“Won’t you change your shirt, Polikéy?”
“No,” he answered.
Akoulína never once looked at his face while he put on his boots and coat, and she did well not to look. Polikéy’s face was pale, his nether jaw trembled, and in his eyes there was that tearful, submissive and deeply mournful look one only sees in the eyes of kindly, weak, and guilty people.
He combed his hair, and was going out; but his wife stopped him, hid the string of his shirt that hung down from under his coat, and put his cap on for him.
“What’s that, Polikoúshka? Has the mistress sent for you?” came the voice of the carpenter’s wife from behind the partition.
Only that morning the carpenter’s wife had had high words with Akoulína about her pot of potash that Polikéy’s children had upset, and at first she was pleased to hear Polikéy being summoned to the mistress: most likely for no good. She was a cute, diplomatic lady, with a biting tongue. Nobody knew better than she how to pay anyone out with a word: so she imagined.
“I expect you’ll be sent to town to do the shopping,” she continued. “I suppose a safe person must be chosen to do that job, so you’ll be sent! Please buy a quarter of a pound of tea for me there, Polikéy.”
Akoulína forced back her tears, and an angry expression distorted her lips. She felt as if she could have clutched “that vixen the joiner’s wife, by her mangy hair.” But when she looked at her children, and thought that they would be left fatherless and she herself a soldier’s wife and as good as widowed, she forgot the sharp-tongued joiner’s wife, hid her face in her hands, sat down on the bed, and let her head sink in the pillows.
“Mammy, you cluth me!” lisped her little girl, pulling the cloak with which she was covered from under her mother’s elbow.
“If you’d only die, all of you! I’ve brought you into the world for nothing but sorrow!” exclaimed Akoulína, and sobbed aloud, to the joy of the joiner’s wife, who had not yet forgotten the potash.