文档介绍：THE SCHOOLMISTRESS AND OTHER STORIES
THE
SCHOOLMISTRESS
AND OTHER STORIES
1
THE SCHOOLMISTRESS AND OTHER STORIES
THE SCHOOLMISTRESS
AT half-past eight they drove out of the town.
The highroad was dry, a lovely April sun was shining warmly, but the
snow was still lying in the ditches and in the woods. Winter, dark, long,
and spiteful, was hardly over; spring e all of a sudden. But neither
the warmth nor the languid transparent woods, warmed by the breath of
spring, nor the black flocks of birds flying over the huge puddles that were
like lakes, nor the marvelous fathomless sky, into which it seemed one
would have gone away so joyfully, presented anything new or interesting
to Marya Vassilyevna who was sitting in the cart. For thirteen years she
had been schoolmistress, and there was no reckoning how many times
during all those years she had been to the town for her salary; and whether
it were spring as now, or a rainy autumn evening, or winter, it was all the
same to her, and she always -- invariably -- longed for one thing only, to
get to the end of her journey as quickly as could be.
She felt as though she had been living in that part of the country for
ages and ages, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew
every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Her past
was here, her present was here, and she could imagine no other future than
the school, the road to the town and back again, and again the school and
again the road. . . .
She had got out of the habit of thinking of her past before she became
a schoolmistress, and had almost forgotten it. She had once had a father
and mother; they had lived in Moscow in a big flat near the Red Gate, but
of all that life there was left in her memory only something vague and
fluid like a dream. Her father had died when she was ten years old, and her
mother had died soon after. . . . She had a brother, an officer; at first they
used to write to each othe