I
I REMEMBER, when I was a high school boy in the fifth or sixth class, I was driving with my grandfather from the village of Bolshoe Kryepkoe in the Don region to Rostov-on-the-Don.It was a sultry, languidly dreary day of August.Our eyes were glued together, and our mouths were parched from the heat and the dry burning wind which drove clouds of dust to meet us; one did not want to look or speak or think, and when our drowsy driver, a Little Russian called Karpo, swung his whip at the horses and lashed me on my cap, I did not protest or utter a sound, but only, rousing myself from half-slumber, gazed mildly and dejectedly into the distance to see whether there was a village visible through the dust.We stopped to feed the horses in a big Armenian village at a rich Armenian's whom my grandfather knew.
Never in my life have I seen a greater caricature than that Armenian.Imagine a little shaven head with thick overhanging eyebrows, a beak of a nose, long gray mustaches, and a wide mouth with a long cherry-wood chibouk sticking out of it.This little head was clumsily attached to a lean hunch-back carcass attired in a fantastic garb, a short red jacket, and full bright blue trousers.This figure walked straddling its legs and shuffling with its slippers, spoke without taking the chibouk out of its mouth, and behaved with truly Armenian dignity, not smiling, but staring with wide-open eyes and trying to take as little notice as possible of its guests.
There was neither wind nor dust in the Armenian's rooms, but it was just as unpleasant, stifling, and dreary as in the steppe and on the road.I remember, dusty and exhausted by the heat, I sat in the corner on a green box.The unpainted wooden walls, the furniture, and the floors colored with yellow ocher smelt of dry wood baked by the sun.Wherever I looked there were flies and flies and flies....Grandfather and the Armenian were talking about grazing, about manure, and about oats..
..I knew that they would be a good hour getting the samovar;that grandfather would be not less than an hour drinking his tea, and then would lie down to sleep for two or three hours; that Ishould waste a quarter of the day waiting, after which there would be again the heat, the dust, the jolting cart.I heard the muttering of the two voices, and it began to seem to me that Ihad been seeing the Armenian, the cupboard with the crockery, the flies, the windows with the burning sun beating on them, for ages and ages, and should only cease to see them in the far-off future, and I was seized with hatred for the steppe, the sun, the flies....
A Little Russian peasant woman in a kerchief brought in a tray of tea-things, then the samovar.The Armenian went slowly out into the passage and shouted: "Mashya, come and pour out tea! Where are you, Mashya?"Hurried footsteps were heard, and there came into the room a girl of sixteen in a simple cotton dress and a white kerchief.As she washed the crockery and poured out the tea, she was standing with her back to me, and all I could see was that she was of a slender figure, barefooted, and that her little bare heels were covered by long trousers.
The Armenian invited me to have tea.Sitting down to the table, Iglanced at the girl, who was handing me a glass of tea, and felt all at once as though a wind were blowing over my soul and blowing away all the impressions of the day with their dust and dreariness.I saw the bewitching features of the most beautiful face I have ever met in real life or in my dreams.Before me stood a beauty, and I recognized that at the first glance as Ishould have recognized lightning.
I am ready to swear that Masha -- or, as her father called her, Mashya -- was a real beauty, but I don't know how to prove it.It sometimes happens that clouds are huddled together in disorder on the horizon, and the sun hiding behind them colors them and the sky with tints of every possible shade--crimson, orange, gold, lilac, muddy pink; one cloud is like a monk, another like a fish, a third like a Turk in a turban.The glow of sunset enveloping a third of the sky gleams on the cross on the church, flashes on the windows of the manor house, is reflected in the river and the puddles, quivers on the trees; far, far away against the background of the sunset, a flock of wild ducks is flying homewards....And the boy herding the cows, and the surveyor driving in his chaise over the dam, and the gentleman out for a walk, all gaze at the sunset, and every one of them thinks it terribly beautiful, but no one knows or can say in what its beauty lies.
I was not the only one to think the Armenian girl beautiful.My grandfather, an old man of seventy, gruff and indifferent to women and the beauties of nature, looked caressingly at Masha for a full minute, and asked:
"Is that your daughter, Avert Nazaritch?""Yes, she is my daughter," answered the Armenian.
"A fine young lady," said my grandfather approvingly.
An artist would have called the Armenian girl's beauty classical and severe, it was just that beauty, the contemplation of which -- God knows why!-- inspires in one the conviction that one is seeing correct features; that hair, eyes, nose, mouth, neck, bosom, and every movement of the young body all go together in one complete harmonious accord in which nature has not blundered over the smallest line.You fancy for some reason that the ideally beautiful woman must have such a nose as Masha's, straight and slightly aquiline, just such great dark eyes, such long lashes, such a languid glance; you fancy that her black curly hair and eyebrows go with the soft white tint of her brow and cheeks as the green reeds go with the quiet stream.Masha's white neck and her youthful bosom were not fully developed, but you fancy the sculptor would need a great creative genius to mold them.You gaze, and little by little the desire comes over you to say to Masha something extraordinarily pleasant, sincere, beautiful, as beautiful as she herself was.
