She hurriedly made the sign of the cross over me several times and said: 

“Well, God be with you.  Be happy.  Anyuta Blagovo is a very clever girl; she says about your marriage that God is sending you a fresh ordeal.  To be sure—­married life does not bring only joy but suffering too.  That’s bound to be so.”

Masha and I walked a couple of miles to see her on her way; we walked back slowly and in silence, as though we were resting.  Masha held my hand, my heart felt light, and I had no inclination to talk about love; we had become closer and more akin now that we were married, and we felt that nothing now could separate us.

“Your sister is a nice creature,” said Masha, “but it seems as though she had been tormented for years.  Your father must be a terrible man.”

I began telling her how my sister and I had been brought up, and what a senseless torture our childhood had really been.  When she heard how my father had so lately beaten me, she shuddered and drew closer to me.

“Don’t tell me any more,” she said.  “It’s horrible!”

Now she never left me.  We lived together in the three rooms in the big house, and in the evenings we bolted the door which led to the empty part of the house, as though someone were living there whom we did not know, and were afraid of.  I got up early, at dawn, and immediately set to work of some sort.  I mended the carts, made paths in the garden, dug the flower beds, painted the roof of the house.  When the time came to sow the oats I tried to plough the ground over again, to harrow and to sow, and I did it all conscientiously, keeping up with our labourer; I was worn out, the rain and the cold wind made my face and feet burn for hours afterwards.  I dreamed of ploughed land at night.  But field labour did not attract me.  I did not understand farming, and I did not care for it; it was perhaps because my forefathers had not been tillers of the soil, and the very blood that flowed in my veins was purely of the city.  I loved nature tenderly; I loved the fields and meadows and kitchen gardens, but the peasant who turned up the soil with his plough and urged on his pitiful horse, wet and tattered, with his craning neck, was to me the expression of coarse, savage, ugly force, and every time I looked at his uncouth movements I involuntarily began thinking of the legendary life of the remote past, before men knew the use of fire.  The fierce bull that ran with the peasants’ herd, and the horses, when they dashed about the village, stamping their hoofs, moved me to fear, and everything rather big, strong, and angry, whether it was the ram with its horns, the gander, or the yard-dog, seemed to me the expression of the same coarse, savage force.  This mood was particularly strong in me in bad weather, when heavy clouds were hanging over the black ploughed land.  Above all, when I was ploughing or sowing, and two or three people stood looking how I was doing it, I had not the feeling that this work was inevitable and obligatory, and it seemed to me that I was amusing myself.  I preferred doing something in the yard, and there was nothing I liked so much as painting the roof.