Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and
at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but
there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing
but gold.
Now in the solitude of the country, she began to be more and more
frequently aware of those joys. Often, looking at them, she would make
every possible effort to persuade herself that she was mistaken, that she as a
mother was partial to her children. All the same, she could not help saying
to herself that she had charming children, all six of them in different ways,
but a set of children such as is not often to be met with, and she was happy
in them, and proud of them.
Chapter 8
Towards the end of May, when everything had been more or less
satisfactorily arranged, she received her husband’s answer to her complaints
of the disorganized state of things in the country. He wrote begging her
forgiveness for not having thought of everything before, and promised to
come down at the first chance. This chance did not present itself, and till the
beginning of June Darya Alexandrovna stayed alone in the country.
On the Sunday in St. Peter’s week Darya Alexandrovna drove to mass for
all her children to take the sacrament. Darya Alexandrovna in her intimate,
philosophical talks with her sister, her mother, and her friends very often
astonished them by the freedom of her views in regard to religion. She had
a strange religion of transmigration of souls all her own, in which she had
firm faith, troubling herself little about the dogmas of the Church. But in
her family she was strict in carrying out all that was required by the Church
—and not merely in order to set an example, but with all her heart in it. The
fact that the children had not been at the sacrament for nearly a year
worried her extremely, and with the full approval and sympathy of Marya
Philimonovna she decided that this should take place now in the summer.
For several days before, Darya Alexandrovna was busily deliberating on
how to dress all the children. Frocks were made or altered and washed,
seams and flounces were let out, buttons were sewn on, and ribbons got
ready. One dress, Tanya’s, which the English governess had undertaken,
cost Darya Alexandrovna much loss of temper. The English governess in
altering it had made the seams in the wrong place, had taken up the sleeves
too much, and altogether spoilt the dress. It was so narrow on Tanya’s
shoulders that it was quite painful to look at her. But Marya Philimonovna
had the happy thought of putting in gussets, and adding a little shoulder-
cape. The dress was set right, but there was nearly a quarrel with the
English governess. On the morning, however, all was happily arranged, and
towards ten o’clock—the time at which they had asked the priest to wait for
them for the mass—the children in their new dresses, with beaming faces,
stood on the step before the carriage waiting for their mother.
To the carriage, instead of the restive Raven, they had harnessed, thanks
to the representations of Marya Philimonovna, the bailiff’s horse, Brownie,
and Darya Alexandrovna, delayed by anxiety over her own attire, came out
and got in, dressed in a white muslin gown.
Darya Alexandrovna had done her hair, and dressed with care and
excitement. In the old days she had dressed for her own sake to look pretty
and be admired. Later on, as she got older, dress became more and more
distasteful to her. She saw that she was losing her good looks. But now she
began to feel pleasure and interest in dress again. Now she did not dress for
her own sake, not for the sake of her own beauty, but simply that as the
mother of those exquisite creatures she might not spoil the general effect.
And looking at herself for the last time in the looking-glass she was
satisfied with herself. She looked nice. Not nice as she would have wished
to look nice in old days at a ball, but nice for the object which she now had
in view.
In the church there was no one but the peasants, the servants and their
women-folk. But Darya Alexandrovna saw, or fancied she saw, the
sensation produced by her children and her. The children were not only
beautiful to look at in their smart little dresses, but they were charming in
the way they behaved. Aliosha, it is true, did not stand quite correctly; he
kept turning round, trying to look at his little jacket from behind; but all the
same he was wonderfully sweet. Tanya behaved like a grown-up person,
and looked after the little ones. And the smallest, Lily, was bewitching in
her naïve astonishment at everything, and it was difficult not to smile when,
after taking the sacrament, she said in English, “Please, some more.”
On the way home the children felt that something solemn had happened,
and were very sedate.
Everything went happily at home too; but at lunch Grisha began
whistling, and, what was worse, was disobedient to the English governess,
and was forbidden to have any tart. Darya Alexandrovna would not have let
things go so far on such a day had she been present; but she had to support
the English governess’s authority, and she upheld her decision that Grisha
should have no tart. This rather spoiled the general good humor. Grisha
cried, declaring that Nikolinka had whistled too, and he was not punished,
and that he wasn’t crying for the tart—he didn’t care—but at being unjustly
treated. This was really too tragic, and Darya Alexandrovna made up her
mind to persuade the English governess to forgive Grisha, and she went to
speak to her. But on the way, as she passed the drawing-room, she beheld a
scene, filling her heart with such pleasure that the tears came into her eyes,
and she forgave the delinquent herself.
The culprit was sitting at the window in the corner of the drawing-room;
beside him was standing Tanya with a plate. On the pretext of wanting to
give some dinner to her dolls, she had asked the governess’s permission to
take her share of tart to the nursery, and had taken it instead to her brother.
While still weeping over the injustice of his punishment, he was eating the
tart, and kept saying through his sobs, “Eat yourself; let’s eat it together …
together.”
Tanya had at first been under the influence of her pity for Grisha, then of
a sense of her noble action, and tears were standing in her eyes too; but she
did not refuse, and ate her share.
On catching sight of their mother they were dismayed, but, looking into
her face, they saw they were not doing wrong. They burst out laughing, and,
with their mouths full of tart, they began wiping their smiling lips with their
hands, and smearing their radiant faces all over with tears and jam.
“Mercy! Your new white frock! Tanya! Grisha!” said their mother, trying
to save the frock, but with tears in her eyes, smiling a blissful, rapturous
smile.
The new frocks were taken off, and orders were given for the little girls
to have their blouses put on, and the boys their old jackets, and the
wagonette to be harnessed; with Brownie, to the bailiff’s annoyance, again
in the shafts, to drive out for mushroom picking and bathing. A roar of
delighted shrieks arose in the nursery, and never ceased till they had set off
for the bathing-place.
They gathered a whole basketful of mushrooms; even Lily found a birch
mushroom. It had always happened before that Miss Hoole found them and
pointed them out to her; but this time she found a big one quite of herself,
and there was a general scream of delight, “Lily has found a mushroom!”
Then they reached the river, put the horses under the birch trees, and
went to the bathing-place. The coachman, Terenty, fastened the horses, who
kept whisking away the flies, to a tree, and, treading down the grass, lay
down in the shade of a birch and smoked his shag, while the never-ceasing
shrieks of delight of the children floated across to him from the bathing-
place.
Though it was hard work to look after all the children and restrain their
wild pranks, though it was difficult too to keep in one’s head and not mix up
all the stockings, little breeches, and shoes for the different legs, and to
undo and to do up again all the tapes and buttons, Darya Alexandrovna,
who had always liked bathing herself, and believed it to be very good for
the children, enjoyed nothing so much as bathing with all the children. To
go over all those fat little legs, pulling on their stockings, to take in her arms
and dip those little naked bodies, and to hear their screams of delight and
alarm, to see the breathless faces with wide-open, scared, and happy eyes of
all her splashing cherubs, was a great pleasure to her.
When half the children had been dressed, some peasant women in
holiday dress, out picking herbs, came up to the bathing-shed and stopped
shyly. Marya Philimonovna called one of them and handed her a sheet and a
shirt that had dropped into the water for her to dry them, and Darya
Alexandrovna began to talk to the women. At first they laughed behind their
hands and did not understand her questions, but soon they grew bolder and
began to talk, winning Darya Alexandrovna’s heart at once by the genuine
admiration of the children that they showed.
“My, what a beauty! as white as sugar,” said one, admiring Tanitchka,
and shaking her head; “but thin….”
“Yes, she has been ill.”
“And so they’ve been bathing you too,” said another to the baby.
