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 hush fell over the room, broken only by the measured ticking of her husband’s pocket watch, hanging over the head of Katerina Lvovna’s bed; but it did not interfere with anything.

“Go,” said Katerina Lvovna half an hour later, not looking at Sergei and straightening her disheveled hair before a little mirror.

“Why should I leave here now?” Sergei answered her in a happy voice.

“My father-in-law will lock the door.”

“Ah, my soul, my soul! What sort of people have you known, if a door is their only way to a woman? For me there are doors everywhere – to you or from you,” the young fellow replied, pointing to the posts that supported the gallery.

Chapter Four

Zinovy Borisych did not come home for another week, and all that week, every night till broad daylight, his wife made merry with Sergei.

During those nights in Zinovy Borisych’s bedroom, much wine from the father-in-law’s cellar was drunk, and many sweetmeats were eaten, and many were the kisses on the mistress’s sugary lips, and the toyings with black curls on the soft pillow. But no road runs smooth forever; there are also bumps.

Boris Timofeich was not sleepy: the old man wandered about the quiet house in a calico nightshirt, went up to one window, then another, looked out, and the red shirt of the young fellow Sergei was quietly sliding down the post under his daughter-in-law’s window. There’s news for you! Boris Timofeich leaped out and seized the fellow’s legs. Sergei swung his arm to give the master a hearty one on the ear, but stopped, considering that it would make a big to-do.

“Out with it,” said Boris Timofeich. “Where have you been, you thief you?”

“Wherever I was, I’m there no longer, Boris Timofeich, sir,” replied Sergei.

“Spent the night with my daughter-in-law?”

“As for where I spent the night, master, that I do know, but you listen to what I say, Boris Timofeich: what’s done, my dear man, can’t be undone; at least don’t bring disgrace on your merchant house. Tell me, what do you want from me now? What satisfaction would you like?”

“I’d like to give you five hundred lashes, you serpent,” replied Boris Timofeich.

“The guilt is mine – the will is yours,” the young man agreed. “Tell me where to go, and enjoy yourself, drink my blood.”

Boris Timofeich led Sergei to his stone larder and lashed him with a whip until he himself had no strength left. Sergei did not utter a single moan, but he chewed up half his shirtsleeve with his teeth.

Boris Timofeich abandoned Sergei to the larder until the mincemeat of his back healed, shoved a clay jug of water at him, put a heavy padlock on the door, and sent for his son.

But to go a hundred miles on a Russian country road is not a quick journey even now, and for Katerina Lvovna to live an extra hour without Sergei had already become intolerable. She suddenly unfolded the whole breadth of her awakened nature and became so resolute that there was no stopping her. She found out where Sergei was, talked to him through the iron door, and rushed to look for the keys. “Let Sergei go, papa” – she came to her father-in-law.

The old man simply turned green. He had never expected such insolent boldness from his sinful but until then always obedient daughter-in-law.

“What do you mean, you such-and-such,” he began shaming Katerina Lvovna.

“Let him go,” she said. “I swear on my conscience, there’s been nothing bad between us yet.”

“Nothing bad!” he said, gnashing his teeth. “And what were you doing during the nights? Plumping up your husband’s pillows?”

But she kept at it: “Let him go, let him go.”

“In that case,” said Boris Timofeich, “here’s what you’ll get: once your husband comes, you honest wife, we’ll whip you in the stable with our own hands, and I’ll send that scoundrel to jail tomorrow.”

So Boris Timofeich decided; but his decision was not to be realized.

Chapter Five

In the evening, Boris Timofeich ate a bit of buckwheat kasha with mushrooms and got heartburn; then suddenly there was pain in the pit of his stomach; he was seized with terrible vomiting, and towards morning he died, just as the rats died in his storehouses, Katerina Lvovna having always prepared a special food for them with her own hands, using a dangerous white powder entrusted to her keeping.

Katerina Lvovna delivered her Sergei from the old man’s stone larder and, with no shame before people’s eyes, placed him in her husband’s bed to rest from her father-in-law’s beating; and the father-in-law, Boris Timofeich, they buried without second thoughts, according to the Christian rule. Amazingly enough, no one thought anything of it: Boris Timofeich had died, died from eating mushrooms, as many had died from eating them. They buried Boris Timofeich hastily, without even waiting for his son, because the weather was warm, and the man sent to the mill for Zinovy Borisych had not found him there. He had had the chance to buy a woodlot cheaply another hundred miles away: he had gone to look at it and had not properly told anyone where he was going.

Having settled this matter, Katerina Lvovna let herself go entirely. She had not been a timid one before, but now there was no telling what she would think up for herself; she strutted about, gave orders to everyone in the house, and would not let Sergei leave her side. The servants wondered about it, but Katerina Lvovna’s generous hand managed to find them all, and the wondering suddenly went away. “The mistress is having an intriguery with Sergei, that’s all,” they figured. “It’s her business, she’ll answer for it.”

Meanwhile, Sergei recovered, unbent his back, and, again the finest of fellows, a bright falcon, walked about beside Katerina Lvovna, and once more they led a most pleasant life. But time raced on not only for them: the offended husband, Zinovy Borisych, was hurrying home after his long absence.