the ring, it hurts, let go!” Katerina Lvovna cried, when Sergei pressed her hand in his, and she shoved him in the chest with her free hand.
The young man let go of his mistress’s hand, and her shove sent him flying two steps back.
“Mm-yes, and you reckoned she’s just a woman,” the little peasant said in surprise.
“Then suppose we try wrestling,” Sergei retorted, tossing back his curls.
“Well, go on,” replied Katerina Lvovna, brightening up, and she cocked her elbows.
Sergei embraced the young mistress and pressed her firm breasts to his red shirt. Katerina Lvovna was just trying to move her shoulders, but Sergei lifted her off the floor, held her in his arms, squeezed her, and gently sat her down on the overturned measuring tub.
Katerina Lvovna did not even have time to show her vaunted strength. Getting up from the tub, red as could be, she straightened the jacket that had fallen from her shoulders and quietly started out of the storehouse, but Sergei coughed dashingly and shouted:
“Come on, you blessed blockheads! Pour, look sharp, get a move on; if there’s a plus, the better for us.”
It was as if he had paid no attention to what had just happened.
“He’s a skirt-chaser, that cursed Seryozhka,” the cook Aksinya was saying as she trudged after Katerina Lvovna. “The thief’s got everything – the height, the face, the looks. Whatever woman you like, the scoundrel knows straight off how to cajole her, and he cajoles her and leads her into sin. And he’s fickle, the scoundrel, as fickle as can be!”
“And you, Aksinya…” said the young mistress, walking ahead of her, “that is, your boy, is he alive?”
“He is, dearest, he is – what could happen to him? Whenever they’re not wanted, they live.”
“Where did you get him?”
“Ehh, just from fooling around – you live among people after all – just from fooling around.”
“Has he been with us long, this young fellow?”
“Who? You mean Sergei?”
“Yes.”
“About a month. He used to work for the Kopchonovs, but the master threw him out.” Aksinya lowered her voice and finished: “They say he made love to the mistress herself… See what a daredevil he is!”
Chapter Three
A warm milky twilight hung over the town. Zinovy Borisych had not yet returned from the dam. The father-in-law, Boris Timofeich, was also not at home: he had gone to a friend’s name day party and had even told them not to expect him for supper. Katerina Lvovna, having nothing to do, had an early meal, opened the window in her room upstairs, and, leaning against the window frame, was husking sunflower seeds. The people in the kitchen had supper and went their ways across the yard to sleep: some to the sheds, some to the storehouses, some up into the fragrant haylofts. The last to leave the kitchen was Sergei. He walked about the yard, unchained the watchdogs, whistled, and, passing under Katerina Lvovna’s window, glanced at her and made a low bow.
“Good evening,” Katerina Lvovna said softly to him from her lookout, and the yard fell silent as a desert.
“Mistress!” someone said two minutes later at Katerina Lvovna’s locked door.
“Who is it?” Katerina Lvovna asked, frightened.
“Please don’t be frightened: it’s me, Sergei,” the clerk replied.
“What do you want, Sergei?”
“I have a little business with you, Katerina Lvovna: I want to ask a small thing of your honor; allow me to come in for a minute.”
Katerina Lvovna turned the key and let Sergei in.
“What is it?” she asked, going back to the window.
“I’ve come to you, Katerina Lvovna, to ask if you might have some book to read. I’m overcome with boredom.”
“I have no books, Sergei: I don’t read them,” Katerina Lvovna replied.
“Such boredom!” Sergei complained.
“Why should you be bored?”
“For pity’s sake, how can I not be bored? I’m a young man, we live like in some monastery, and all I can see ahead is that I may just waste away in this solitude till my dying day. It sometimes even leads me to despair.”
“Why don’t you get married?”
“That’s easy to say, mistress – get married! Who can I marry around here? I’m an insignificant man: no master’s daughter will marry me, and from poverty, as you’re pleased to know yourself, Katerina Lvovna, our kind are all uneducated. As if they could have any proper notion of love! Just look, if you please, at what notion there is even among the rich. Now you, I might say, for any such man as had feeling in him, you would be a comfort all his own, but here they keep you like a canary in a cage.”
“Yes, it’s boring for me,” escaped Katerina Lvovna.
“How not be bored, mistress, with such a life! Even if you had somebody on the side, as others do, it would be impossible for you to see him.”
“Well, there you’re… it’s not that at all. For me, if I’d had a baby, I think it would be cheerful with the two of us.”
“As for that, if you’ll allow me to explain to you, mistress, a baby also happens for some reason, and not just so. I’ve lived among masters for so many years now, and seen what kind of life women live among merchants, don’t I also understand? As the song goes: ‘Without my dearie, life’s all sad and dreary,’ and that dreariness, let me explain to you, Katerina Lvovna, wrings my own heart so painfully, I can tell you, that I could just cut it out of my breast with a steel knife and throw it at your little feet. And it would be easier, a hundred times easier for me then…”
Sergei’s voice trembled.
“What are you doing talking to me about your heart? That’s got nothing to do with me. Go away…”
“No, please, mistress,” said Sergei, trembling all over and taking a step towards Katerina Lvovna. “I know, I see very well and even feel and understand, that it’s no easier for you than for me in this world; except that now,” he said in the same breath, “now, for the moment, all this is in your hands and in your power.”
“What? What’s that? What have you come to me for? I’ll throw myself out the window,” said Katerina Lvovna, feeling herself in the unbearable power of an indescribable fear, and she seized hold of the windowsill.
“Oh, my life incomparable, why throw yourself out?” Sergei whispered flippantly, and, tearing the young mistress from the window, he took her in a firm embrace.
“Oh! Oh! Let go of me,” Katerina Lvovna moaned softly, weakening under Sergei’s hot kisses, and involuntarily pressing herself to his powerful body.
Sergei picked his mistress up in his arms like a child and carried her to a dark corner.
A
