‘I’m very glad you have come,’ she began with a racing, thumping heart, and not yet looking up. ‘Dronushka has told me that you’ve been ruined by the war. We are all in the same boat, and I shall spare no effort to help you. I’m going away, because it’s too dangerous here . . . and the enemy’s not far away . . . because . . . Well, I’m giving you all we have, my friends, and I want you to take everything, all our grain, so that you don’t go hungry. But if you’ve been told that I’m giving you grain to keep you here, that is not true. It’s the other way round – I’m asking you to move out with all your things and go to our Moscow estate, and there I shall take full responsibility for you, and I promise you won’t go hungry. You will have somewhere to live and something to eat.’
The princess stopped. No comment came from the crowd, only sighs.
‘I’m not doing this on my own,’ the princess went on. ‘I do it in the name of my dead father, who was a good master to you, and my brother and his son.’
She paused again. No one broke the silence.
‘We are all in the same boat, and we shall share our troubles equally. All that is mine is yours,’ she said, looking round at the faces before her. All eyes were on her and all faces held the same inscrutable expression. Whether it was curiosity, loyalty, gratitude, or fear and mistrust, the expression on every face was the same.
‘Thank ye kindly, only we’m not for taking the master’s grain,’ said a voice at the back of the crowd.
‘Why not?’ said the princess. There was no reply, and Princess Marya scanned the crowd, noticing that every eye that met hers soon looked away.
‘Why won’t you take it?’ she asked again.
There was no reply.
Princess Marya found the silence increasingly oppressive; she struggled to catch somebody’s eye.
‘Why don’t you say something?’ she said to a very old man standing right in front of her, leaning on his stick. ‘Tell me if you think you need more than this. I’ll do anything,’ she said, catching his eye. But he seemed to be stung by her approach and he bent his head right down, mumbling, ‘Why should we do what you say? We don’t want your grain.’
‘Why should we cut and run? We’re not going to . . . We’re not, you know . . . We’re not having it. Sorry about you, but we’re not having it. Go on. You go. Go away on your own . . .’ The voices came from all parts of the crowd. And again every face in the throng wore the same expression, only now it was clearly not one of curiosity and gratitude – it was an expression of bloody-minded truculence.
‘I don’t think you quite understand,’ said Princess Marya with a despondent smile.
‘Why won’t you move out? I promise I’ll get you settled and provide for you. If you stay here the enemy will ravage you . . .’ But her voice was lost in the shouting of the crowd.
‘We’re not having it! Let ’em ravage us! We’re not taking your grain! We’re not having it!’
Princess Marya tried again to catch someone’s eye in the crowd, but no one’s eyes were on her; all were averted. She felt awkward and embarrassed.
‘That’s a good ’un, that is! . . . Follow her – and give up your freedom! Burn your house down and go and be a slave. Nice idea, that! “Have some grain,” she says!’ came voices from the crowd.
With downcast eyes Princess Marya left the group and went back into the house. For Dron’s benefit she repeated her order for the horses to be ready for an early start in the morning, then she went off to her room and stayed there, alone with her thoughts.
CHAPTER 12
Well into the night Princess Marya sat by the open window of her room listening to the sound of peasants’ voices floating across from the village, but she wasn’t thinking about them. She felt she would never understand them however much thought she gave to them. There was only one thing on her mind – her grief, which, after the break forced upon her by having to worry about the present, now seemed part of the past. Now at last she could remember, and weep, and pray. After sunset the wind had dropped. The night was cool and still. Towards midnight the voices in the village were beginning to die down, somewhere a cock crowed, the full moon rose slowly behind the linden-trees, a cool, white, dewy mist came up from the ground, and stillness reigned over village and house.
One after another images from the recent past – her father’s illness and his last moments – rose up in her imagination. And with the taste of sweet melancholy she lingered over those images, suppressing with a feeling of horror only the final death scene, which she could not bear to contemplate even in her imagination at that quiet and mysterious hour of the night. And those images rose before her with such clarity and detail that they seemed to blur in and out between reality, the past and the future.
