PAGE 7
Gubin
by
“Have you noticed that the water-butts are rotted? Oh, that fine Yakinika! He ought long ago to have been dismissed.”
“Who is that young man over there?” Jonah repeated with an air of asperity.
“The son of his father and mother,” Gubin replied quietly, and without so much as a glance at the brothers.
“Well, come along,” snuffled Peter with a drawling of his vowels. “It is high time that we were moving. It doesn’t matter who the young man may be.”
And with that they slip-slopped across to the entrance gates, while Gubin gazed after them with knitted brows, and as the brothers were disappearing through the wicket said carelessly:
” The old sheep! They live solely by the wits of their stepmother, and if it were not for her, they would long ago have come to grief. Yes, she is a woman beyond words clever. Once upon a time there were three brothers–Peter, Alexis, and Jonah; but, unfortunately, Alexis got killed in a brawl. A fine, tall fellow HE was, whereas these two are a pair of gluttons, like everyone else in this town. Not for nothing do three loaves figure on the municipal arms! Now, to work again! Or shall we take a rest?”
Here there stepped on to the veranda a tall, well-grown young woman in an open pink bodice and a blue skirt who, shading blue eyes with her hand, scanned the courtyard and the steps, and said with some diffidence:
“Good day, Yakov Vasilitch.”
With a good-humoured glance in response, and his mouth open, Gubin waved a hand in greeting:
“Good day to YOU, Nadezhda Ivanovna,” he replied. “How are you this morning? “
Somehow this made her blush, and cross her arms upon her ample bosom, while her kindly, rounded, eminently Russian face evinced the ghost of a shy smile. At the same time, it was a face wherein not a single feature was of a kind to remain fixed in the memory, a face as vacant as though nature had forgotten to stamp thereon a single wish. Hence, even when the woman smiled there seemed to remain a doubt whether the smile had really materialised.
“How is Natalia Vasilievna?” continued Gubin.
“Much as usual,” the woman answered softly.
Whereafter hesitantly, and with downcast eyes, she essayed to cross the courtyard. As she passed me I caught a whiff of raspberries and currants.
Disappearing into the grey mist through a small door with iron staples, she soon reissued thence with a hencoop, and, seating herself on the steps of the doorway, and setting the coop on her knees, took between her two large palms some fluttering, chirping, downy, golden chicks, and raised them to her ruddy lips and cheeks with a murmur of:
“0h my little darlings! 0h my little darlings!”
And in her voice, somehow, there was a note as of intoxication, of abandonment. Meanwhile dull, reddish sunbeams were beginning to peer through the fence, and to warm the long, pointed staples with which it was fastened together. While in a stream of water that was dripping from the eaves, and trickling over the floor of the court, and around the woman’s feet, a single beam was bathing and quivering as though it would fain effect an advance to the woman’s lap and the hencoop, and, with the soft, downy chicks, enjoy the caresses of the woman’s bare white arms.
“Ah, little things!” again she murmured. “Ah, little children of mine!”
Upon that Gubin suddenly desisted from his task of hauling up the bucket, and, as he steadied the rope with his arms raised above his head, said quickly:
“Nadezhda Ivanovna, you ought indeed to have had some children–six at the least! “
Yet no reply came, nor did the woman even look at him.
The rays of the sun were now spreading, smokelike and greyish-yellow, over the silver river. Above the river’s calm bed a muslin texture of mist was coiling. Against the nebulous heavens the blue of the forest was rearing itself amid the fragrant, pungent fumes from the burning timber.