Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Other Stories / Леди Макбет Мценского уезда и другие повести. Книга для чтения на английском языке

The people in the kitchen had supper and went their ways across the yard to sleep: some to the sheds, some to the storehouses, some up into the fragrant haylofts. The last to leave the kitchen was Sergei. He walked about the yard, unchained the watchdogs, whistled, and, passing under Katerina Lvovna’s window, glanced at her and made a low bow.

“Good evening,” Katerina Lvovna said softly to him from her lookout, and the yard fell silent as a desert.

“Mistress!” someone said two minutes later at Katerina Lvovna’s locked door.

“Who is it?” Katerina Lvovna asked, frightened.

“Please don’t be frightened: it’s me, Sergei,” the clerk replied.

“What do you want, Sergei?”

“I have a little business with you, Katerina Lvovna: I want to ask a small thing of your honor; allow me to come in for a minute.”

Katerina Lvovna turned the key and let Sergei in.

“What is it?” she asked, going back to the window.

“I’ve come to you, Katerina Lvovna, to ask if you might have some book to read.

I’m overcome with boredom.”

“I have no books, Sergei: I don’t read them,” Katerina Lvovna replied.

“Such boredom!” Sergei complained.

“Why should you be bored?”

“For pity’s sake, how can I not be bored? I’m a young man, we live like in some monastery, and all I can see ahead is that I may just waste away in this solitude till my dying day. It sometimes even leads me to despair.”

“Why don’t you get married?”

“That’s easy to say, mistress – get married! Who can I marry around here? I’m an insignificant man: no master’s daughter will marry me, and from poverty, as you’re pleased to know yourself, Katerina Lvovna, our kind are all uneducated.

As if they could have any proper notion of love! Just look, if you please, at what notion there is even among the rich. Now you, I might say, for any such man as had feeling in him, you would be a comfort all his own, but here they keep you like a canary in a cage. ”

“Yes, it’s boring for me,” escaped Katerina Lvovna.

“How not be bored, mistress, with such a life! Even if you had somebody on the side, as others do, it would be impossible for you to see him.”

“Well, there you’re… it’s not that at all. For me, if I’d had a baby, I think it would be cheerful with the two of us.”

“As for that, if you’ll allow me to explain to you, mistress, a baby also happens for some reason, and not just so.