The Party | Page 8

last time made her a ceremonious bow, a little on one
side, and, shrinking into himself, made a scrape with his foot and
walked back.
"Idiot!" thought Olga Mihalovna. "I hope he will go home."

She found the ladies and the young people among the raspberries in the
kitchen garden. Some were eating raspberries; others, tired of eating
raspberries, were strolling about the strawberry beds or foraging among
the sugar-peas. A little on one side of the raspberry bed, near a
branching appletree propped up by posts which had been pulled out of
an old fence, Pyotr Dmitritch was mowing the grass. His hair was
falling over his forehead, his cravat was untied. His watch-chain was
hanging loose. Every step and every swing of the scythe showed skill
and the possession of immense physical strength. Near him were
standing Lubotchka and the daughters of a neighbour, Colonel
Bukryeev--two anaemic and unhealthily stout fair girls, Natalya and
Valentina, or, as they were always called, Nata and Vata, both wearing
white frocks and strikingly like each other. Pyotr Dmitritch was
teaching them to mow.
"It's very simple," he said. "You have only to know how to hold the
scythe and not to get too hot over it--that is, not to use more force than
is necessary! Like this. . . . Wouldn't you like to try?" he said, offering
the scythe to Lubotchka. "Come!"
Lubotchka took the scythe clumsily, blushed crimson, and laughed.
"Don't be afraid, Lubov Alexandrovna!" cried Olga Mihalovna, loud
enough for all the ladies to hear that she was with them. "Don't be
afraid! You must learn! If you marry a Tolstoyan he will make you
mow."
Lubotchka raised the scythe, but began laughing again, and, helpless
with laughter, let go of it at once. She was ashamed and pleased at
being talked to as though grown up. Nata, with a cold, serious face,
with no trace of smiling or shyness, took the scythe, swung it and
caught it in the grass; Vata, also without a smile, as cold and serious as
her sister, took the scythe, and silently thrust it into the earth. Having
done this, the two sisters linked arms and walked in silence to the
raspberries.
Pyotr Dmitritch laughed and played about like a boy, and this childish,
frolicsome mood in which he became exceedingly good-natured suited

him far better than any other. Olga Mihalovna loved him when he was
like that. But his boyishness did not usually last long. It did not this
time; after playing with the scythe, he for some reason thought it
necessary to take a serious tone about it.
"When I am mowing, I feel, do you know, healthier and more normal,"
he said. "If I were forced to confine myself to an intellectual life I
believe I should go out of my mind. I feel that I was not born to be a
man of culture! I ought to mow, plough, sow, drive out the horses."
And Pyotr Dmitritch began a conversation with the ladies about the
advantages of physical labour, about culture, and then about the
pernicious effects of money, of property. Listening to her husband,
Olga Mihalovna, for some reason, thought of her dowry.
"And the time will come, I suppose," she thought, "when he will not
forgive me for being richer than he. He is proud and vain. Maybe he
will hate me because he owes so much to me."
She stopped near Colonel Bukryeev, who was eating raspberries and
also taking part in the conversation.
"Come," he said, making room for Olga Mihalovna and Pyotr
Dmitritch. "The ripest are here. . . . And so, according to Proudhon," he
went on, raising his voice, "property is robbery. But I must confess I
don't believe in Proudhon, and don't consider him a philosopher. The
French are not authorities, to my thinking--God bless them!"
"Well, as for Proudhons and Buckles and the rest of them, I am weak in
that department," said Pyotr Dmitritch. "For philosophy you must apply
to my wife. She has been at University lectures and knows all your
Schopenhauers and Proudhons by heart. . . ."
Olga Mihalovna felt bored again. She walked again along a little path
by apple and pear trees, and looked again as though she was on some
very important errand. She reached the gardener's cottage. In the
doorway the gardener's wife, Varvara, was sitting together with her
four little children with big shaven heads. Varvara, too, was with child

and expecting to be confined on Elijah's Day. After greeting her, Olga
Mihalovna looked at her and the children in silence and asked:
"Well, how do you feel?"
"Oh, all right. . . ."
A silence followed. The two women seemed to understand each other
without words.
"It's dreadful having one's first baby,"