When I remained at home on holidays I noticed that my sister and Masha were concealing something from me, and even seemed to be avoiding me.  My wife was tender to me as before, but she had thoughts of her own apart, which she did not share with me.  There was no doubt that her exasperation with the peasants was growing, the life was becoming more and more distasteful to her, and yet she did not complain to me.  She talked to the doctor now more readily than she did to me, and I did not understand why it was so.

It was the custom in our province at haymaking and harvest time for the labourers to come to the manor house in the evening and be regaled with vodka; even young girls drank a glass.  We did not keep up this practice; the mowers and the peasant women stood about in our yard till late in the evening expecting vodka, and then departed abusing us.  And all the time Masha frowned grimly and said nothing, or murmured to the doctor with exasperation:  “Savages!  Petchenyegs!”

In the country newcomers are met ungraciously, almost with hostility, as they are at school.  And we were received in this way.  At first we were looked upon as stupid, silly people, who had bought an estate simply because we did not know what to do with our money.  We were laughed at.  The peasants grazed their cattle in our wood and even in our garden; they drove away our cows and horses to the village, and then demanded money for the damage done by them.  They came in whole companies into our yard, and loudly clamoured that at the mowing we had cut some piece of land that did not belong to us; and as we did not yet know the boundaries of our estate very accurately, we took their word for it and paid damages.  Afterwards it turned out that there had been no mistake at the mowing.  They barked the lime-trees in our wood.  One of the Dubetchnya peasants, a regular shark, who did a trade in vodka without a licence, bribed our labourers, and in collaboration with them cheated us in a most treacherous way.  They took the new wheels off our carts and replaced them with old ones, stole our ploughing harness and actually sold them to us, and so on.  But what was most mortifying of all was what happened at the building; the peasant women stole by night boards, bricks, tiles, pieces of iron.  The village elder with witnesses made a search in their huts; the village meeting fined them two roubles each, and afterwards this money was spent on drink by the whole commune.

When Masha heard about this, she would say to the doctor or my sister indignantly: 

“What beasts!  It’s awful! awful!”

And I heard her more than once express regret that she had ever taken it into her head to build the school.

“You must understand,” the doctor tried to persuade her, “that if you build this school and do good in general, it’s not for the sake of the peasants, but in the name of culture, in the name of the future; and the worse the peasants are the more reason for building the school.  Understand that!”