d all the
trees wherever one looked were ruddy or golden. They were ringing
the bells, they were carrying the ikons to the school, and we could
hear them sing: "Holy Mother, our Defender," and how limpid the air
was, and how high the doves were flying.

The service was being held in the classroom. Then the peasants of
Kurilovka brought Masha the ikon, and the peasants of Dubetchnya
offered her a big loaf and a gilt salt cellar. And Masha broke into
sobs.

"If anything has been said that shouldn't have been or anything
done not to your liking, forgive us," said an old man, and he bowed
down to her and to me.

As we drove home Masha kept looking round at the school; the green
roof, which I had painted, and which was glistening in the sun,
remained in sight for a long while. And I felt that the look Masha
turned upon it now was one of farewell.

XVI

In the evening she got ready to go to the town. Of late she had
taken to going often to the town and staying the night there. In
her absence I could not work, my hands felt weak and limp; our huge
courtyard seemed a dreary, repulsive, empty hole. The garden was
full of angry noises, and without her the house, the trees, the
horses were no longer "ours."

I did not go out of the house, but went on sitting at her table
beside her bookshelf with the books on land work, those old favourites
no longer wanted and looking at me now so shamefacedly. For whole
hours together, while it struck seven, eight, nine, while the autumn
night, black as soot, came on outside, I kept examining her old
glove, or the pen with which she always wrote, or her little scissors.
I did nothing, and realized clearly that all I had done before,
ploughing, mowing, chopping, had only been because she wished it.
And if she had sent me to clean a deep well, where I had to stand
up to my waist in deep water, I should have crawled into the well
without considering whether it was necessary or not. And now when
she was not near, Dubetchnya, with its ruins, its untidiness, its
banging shutters, with its thieves by day and by night, seemed to
me a chaos in which any work would be useless. Besides, what had I
to work for here, why anxiety and thought about the future, if I
felt that the earth was giving way under my feet, that I had played
my part in Dubetchnya, and that the fate of the books on farming
was awaiting me too? Oh, what misery it was at night, in hours of
solitude, when I was listening every min