THE STUDENT

At first the weather was fine and still.  The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle.  A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air.  But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence.  Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest.  There was a whiff of winter.

Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical academy, returning home from shooting, walked all the time by the path in the water-side meadow.  His fingers were numb and his face was burning with the wind.  It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more rapidly than usual.  All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy.  The only light was one gleaming in the widows’ gardens near the river; the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all round was plunged in the cold evening mist.  The student remembered that, as he went out from the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the floor in the entry, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the stove coughing; as it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and the student was terribly hungry.  And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression—­all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better.  And he did not want to go home.

The gardens were called the widows’ because they were kept by two widows, mother and daughter.  A camp fire was burning brightly with a crackling sound, throwing out light far around on the ploughed earth.  The widow Vasilisa, a tall, fat old woman in a man’s coat, was standing by and looking thoughtfully into the fire; her daughter Lukerya, a little pock-marked woman with a stupid-looking face, was sitting on the ground, washing a caldron and spoons.  Apparently they had just had supper.  There was a sound of men’s voices; it was the labourers watering their horses at the river.

“Here you have winter back again,” said the student, going up to the camp fire.  “Good evening.”

Vasilisa started, but at once recognized him and smiled cordially.

“I did not know you; God bless you,” she said.

“You’ll be rich.”

They talked.  Vasilisa, a woman of experience, who had been in service with the gentry, first as a wet-nurse, afterwards as a children’s nurse, expressed herself with refinement, and a soft, sedate smile never left her face; her daughter Lukerya, a village peasant woman, who had been beaten by her husband, simply screwed up her eyes at the student and said nothing, and she had a strange expression like that of a deaf mute.