Russian Silhouettes: More Stories of Russian Life

One late afternoon, ten years ago, the examining magistrate, Peter Sergeitch, and I rode to the station together at hay-making time to fetch the mail.

The weather was superb, but as we were riding home we heard thunder growling, and saw an angry black cloud coming straight toward us. The storm was approaching and we were riding into its very teeth. Our house and the village church were gleaming white upon its breast, and the tall, silvery poplars were glistening against it. The scent of rain and of new-mown hay hung in the air. My companion was in high spirits, laughing and talking the wildest nonsense.

“How splendid it would be,” he cried, “if we should suddenly come upon some antique castle of the Middle Ages with towers battlemented, moss-grown, and owl-haunted, where we could take refuge from the storm and where a bolt of lightning would end by striking us!”

But at that moment the first wave swept across the rye and oat fields, the wind moaned, and whirling dust filled the air. Peter Sergeitch laughed and spurred his horse.

“How glorious!” he cried. “How glorious!”

His gay mood was infectious. I, too, laughed to think that in another moment we should be wet to the skin, and perhaps struck by lightning.

The blast and the swift pace thrilled us, and set our blood racing; we caught our breath against the gale and felt like flying birds.

The wind had fallen when we rode into our courtyard, and heavy drops of rain were drumming on the roof and lawn. The stable was deserted.

Peter Sergeitch himself unsaddled the horses, and led them into their stalls. I stood at the stable door waiting for him, watching the descent of the slanting sheets of rain. The sickly sweet scent of hay was even stronger here than it had been in the fields. The air was dark with thunder-clouds and rain.

“What a flash!” cried Peter Sergeitch coming to my side after an especially loud, rolling thunderclap that, it seemed, must have cleft the sky in two. “Well?”

He stood on the threshold beside me breathing deeply after our swift ride, with his eyes fixed on my face. I saw that his glance was full of admiration.

“Oh, Natalia!” he cried. “I would give anything on earth to be able to stand here for ever looking at you. You are glorious to-day.”

His look was both rapturous and beseeching, his face was pale, and drops of rain were glistening on his beard and moustache; these, too, seemed to be looking lovingly at me.

“I love you!” he cried. “I love you and I am happy because I can see you. I know that you cannot be my wife, but I ask nothing, I desire nothing; only know that I love you. Don’t answer me, don’t notice me, only believe that you are very dear to me, and suffer me to look at you.”

His ecstasy communicated itself to me. I saw his rapt look, I heard the tones of his voice mingling with the noise of the rain, and stood rooted to the spot as if bewitched. I longed to look at those radiant eyes and listen to those words for ever.

“You are silent! Good!” said Peter Sergeitch. “Do not speak!”

I was very happy. I laughed with pleasure, and ran through the pouring rain into the house. He laughed too, and ran after me.

We burst in wet and panting and tramped noisily up-stairs like two children. My father and brother, unaccustomed to seeing me laughing and gay, looked at me in surprise and began to laugh with us.

The storm blew over, the thunder grew silent, but the rain-drops still glistened on Peter Sergeitch’s beard. He sang and whistled and romped noisily with the dog all the evening, chasing him through the house and nearly knocking the butler carrying the samovar off his feet. He ate a huge supper, talking all kinds of nonsense the while, swearing that if you eat fresh cucumbers in winter you can smell the spring in your nostrils.

When I went to my room I lit the candle and threw the casement wide open. A vague sensation took hold of me. I remembered that I was free and healthy, well-born and rich, and that I was beloved, but chiefly that I was well-born and rich—well-born and rich! Goodness, how delightful that was! Later, shrinking into bed to escape the chill that came stealing in from the garden with the dew, I lay and tried to decide whether I loved Peter Sergeitch or not. Not being able to make head or tail of the question, I went to sleep.

Next morning when I awoke and saw the shadows of the lindens and the trembling patches of sunlight that played across my bed, the events of yesterday rose vividly before me. Life seemed rich, and varied, and full of beauty. I dressed quickly and ran singing into the garden.

And then, what happened? Nothing! When winter came and we moved to the city, Peter Sergeitch seldom came to see us. Country acquaintances are only attractive in the country. In town, in the winter, they lose half their charm. When they come to call they look as if they were wearing borrowed clothes, and they stir their tea much too long. Peter Sergeitch sometimes spoke of love, but his words did not sound as enchanting as they had in the country. Here we felt more keenly the barrier between us. I was titled and rich; he was poor and was not even a noble, but an examining magistrate, the son of a deacon. Both of us—I because I was very young, and he, heaven knows why—considered this barrier very great and very high. He smiled affectedly when he was with us in town and criticised high society; if any one beside himself was in the drawing-room he remained morosely silent. There is no barrier so high but that it may be surmounted, but, from what I have known of him, the modern hero of romance is too timid, too indolent and lazy, too finical and ready to accept the idea that he is a failure cheated by life, to make the struggle. Instead, he carps at the world, and calls it vile, forgetting that his own criticism at last becomes vile in itself.

I was beloved; happiness was near, seemed almost to be walking at my side; my path was strewn with roses, and I lived without trying to understand myself, not knowing what I was expecting nor what I demanded from life. And so time went on and on—Men with their love passed near me; bright days and warm nights flew by; the nightingales sang; the air was sweet with new-mown hay—all these things, so dear, so touching to remember, flashed by me swiftly, unheeded, as they do by every one, leaving no trace behind them, until they vanished like mist. Where is it all now?

My father died; I grew older. All that had been so enchanting, so gracious, so hope-inspiring; the sound of rain, the rolling of thunder, dreams of happiness, and words of love, all these grew to be a memory alone. I now see before me a level, deserted plain, bounded by a dark and terrible horizon, without a living soul upon it.

A bell rang. It was Peter Sergeitch. When I see the winter trees, remembering how they decked themselves in green for me in summer time, I whisper:

“Oh, you darling things!”

And when I see the people with whom I passed my own springtime, my heart grows warm and sad, and I whisper the same words.

Peter Sergeitch had moved to the city long ago through the influence of my father. He was a little elderly now, and a little stooping. It was long since he had spoken any words of love, he talked no nonsense now, and was dissatisfied with his occupation. He was a little ailing, and a little disillusioned; he snapped his fingers at life, and would have been glad to have had it over. He took his seat in the chimney-corner and looked silently into the fire. Not knowing what to say, I asked:

“Well, what news have you?”

“None at all.”

Silence fell once more. The ruddy firelight played across his melancholy features.

I remembered our past, and suddenly my shoulders shook; I bent my head and wept bitterly. I felt unbearably sorry for myself and for this man, and I longed passionately for those things which had gone by, and which life now denied us. I no longer cared for my riches or my title.

I sobbed aloud with my head in my hands murmuring: “My God, my God, our lives are ruined!”

He sat silent and did not tell me not to weep. He knew that tears must be shed, and that the time for them had come. I read his pity for me in his eyes, and I, too, pitied him and was vexed with this timid failure who had not been able to mould his life or mine aright.

As I bade him farewell in the hall he seemed purposely to linger there, putting on his coat. He kissed my hand in silence twice, and looked long into my tear-stained face. I was sure that he was remembering that thunder-storm, those sheets of rain, our laughter, and my face as it had then been. He tried to say something; he would have done so gladly, but nothing came. He only shook his head and pressed my hand—God bless him!

When he had gone, I went back into the study and sat down on the carpet before the fire. Grey ashes were beginning to creep over the dying embers. The wintry blast was beating against the windows more angrily than ever and chanting some tale in the chimney.

The maid servant came in and called my name, thinking that I had fallen asleep.

They left the city at half past eight.

The highway was dry and a splendid April sun was beating fiercely down, but the snow still lay in the woods and wayside ditches. The long, dark, cruel winter was only just over, spring had come in a breath, but to Maria Vasilievna driving along the road in a cart there was nothing either new or attractive in the warmth, or the listless, misty woods flushed with the first heat of spring, or in the flocks of crows flying far away across the wide, flooded meadows, or in the marvellous, unfathomable sky into which one felt one could sail away with such infinite pleasure. Maria Vasilievna had been a school teacher for thirty years, and it would have been impossible for her to count the number of times she had driven to town for her salary, and returned home as she was doing now. It mattered not to her whether the season were spring, as now, or winter, or autumn with darkness and rain; she invariably longed for one thing and one thing only: a speedy end to her journey.

She felt as if she had lived in this part of the world for a long, long time, even a hundred years or more, and it seemed to her that she knew every stone and every tree along the roadside between her school and the city. Here lay her past and her present as well, and she could not conceive of a future beyond her school and the road and the city, and then the road and her school again, and then once more the road and the city.

Of her past before she had been a school teacher she had long since ceased to think—she had almost forgotten it. She had had a father and mother once, and had lived with them in a large apartment near the Red Gate in Moscow, but her recollection of that life was as vague and shadowy as a dream. Her father had died when she was ten years old, and her mother had soon followed him. She had had a brother, an officer, with whom she had corresponded at first, but he had lost the habit of writing to her after a while, and had stopped answering her letters. Of her former belongings her mother’s photograph was now her only possession, and this had been so faded by the dampness of the school that her mother’s features had all disappeared except the eyebrows and hair.

When they had gone three miles on their way old daddy Simon, who was driving the cart, turned round and said:

“They have caught one of the town officials and have shipped him away. They say he killed the mayor of Moscow with the help of some Germans.”

“Who told you that?”

“Ivan Ionoff read it in the paper at the inn.”

For a long time neither spoke. Maria Vasilievna was thinking of her school, and the coming examinations for which she was preparing four boys and one girl. And just as her mind was full of these examinations, a landholder named Khanoff drove up with a four-in-hand harnessed to an open carriage. It was he who had held the examination in her school the year before. As he drove up alongside her cart he recognised her, bowed, and exclaimed:

“Good morning! Are you on your way home, may I ask?”

Khanoff was a man of forty or thereabouts. His expression was listless and blasé, and he had already begun to age perceptibly, but he was handsome still and admired by women. He lived alone on a large estate; he had no business anywhere, and it was said of him that he never did anything at home but walk about and whistle, or else play chess with his old man servant. It was also rumoured that he was a hard drinker. Maria Vasilievna remembered that, as a matter of fact, at the last examination even the papers that he had brought with him had smelled of scent and wine. Everything he had had on that day had been new, and Maria Vasilievna had liked him very much, and had even felt shy sitting there beside him. She was used to receiving the visits of cold, critical examiners, but this one did not remember a single prayer, and did not know what questions he ought to ask. He had been extremely considerate and polite, and had given all the children full marks for everything.

“I am on my way to visit Bakvist” he now continued to Maria Vasilievna. “Is it true that he is away from home?”

They turned from the highway into a lane, Khanoff in the lead, Simon following him. The four horses proceeded at a foot-pace, straining to drag the heavy carriage through the mud. Simon tacked hither and thither across the road, first driving round a bump, then round a puddle, and jumping down from his seat every minute or so to give his horse a helpful push. Maria Vasilievna continued to think about the school, and whether the questions at the examinations would be difficult or easy. She felt annoyed with the board of the zemstvo, for she had been there yesterday, and had found no one in. How badly it was managed! Here it was two years since she had been asking to have the school watchman discharged for loafing and being rude to her and beating her scholars, and yet no one had paid any heed to her request. The president of the board was hardly ever in his office, and when he was, would vow with tears in his eyes that he hadn’t time to attend to her now. The school inspector came only three times a year, and knew nothing about his business anyway, as he had formerly been an exciseman, and had obtained the office of inspector through favour. The school board seldom met, and no one ever knew where their meetings were held. The warden was an illiterate peasant who owned a tannery, a rough and stupid man and a close friend of the watchman’s. In fact, the Lord only knew whom one could turn to to have complaints remedied and wrongs put right!

“He really is handsome!” thought the schoolteacher glancing at Khanoff.

The road grew worse and worse. They entered a wood. There was no possibility of turning out of the track here, the ruts were deep and full of gurgling, running water. Prickly twigs beat against their faces.

“What a road, eh?” cried Khanoff laughing.

The school teacher looked at him and marvelled that this queer fellow should be living here.

“What good do his wealth, his handsome face, and his fine culture do him in this God-forsaken mud and solitude?” she thought. “He has abandoned any advantage that fate may have given him, and is enduring the same hardships as Simon, tramping with him along this impossible road. Why does any one live here who could live in St. Petersburg or abroad?”

And it seemed to her that it would be worth this rich man’s while to make a good road out of this bad one, so that he might not have to struggle with the mud, and be forced to see the despair written on the faces of Simon and his coachman. But he only laughed, and was obviously absolutely indifferent to it all, asking for no better life than this.

“He is kind and gentle and unsophisticated,” Maria Vasilievna thought again. “He does not understand the hardships of life any more than he knew the suitable prayers to say at the examination. He gives globes to the school and sincerely thinks himself a useful man and a conspicuous benefactor of popular education. Much they need his globes in this wilderness!”

“Sit tight, Vasilievna!” shouted Simon.

The cart tipped violently to one side and seemed to be falling over. Something heavy rolled down on Maria Vasilievna’s feet, it proved to be the purchases she had made in the city. They were crawling up a steep, clayey hill now. Torrents of water were rushing noisily down on either side of the track, and seemed to have eaten away the road bed. Surely it would be impossible to get by! The horses began to snort. Khanoff jumped out of his carriage and walked along the edge of the road in his long overcoat. He felt hot.

“What a road!” he laughed again. “My carriage will soon be smashed to bits at this rate!”

“And who asked you to go driving in weather like this?” asked Simon sternly. “Why don’t you stay at home?”

“It is tiresome staying at home, daddy. I don’t like it.”

He looked gallant and tall walking beside old Simon, but in spite of his grace there was an almost imperceptible something about his walk that betrayed a being already rotten at the core, weak, and nearing his downfall. And the air in the woods suddenly seemed to carry an odour of wine. Maria Vasilievna shuddered, and began to feel sorry for this man who for some unknown reason was going to his ruin. She thought that if she were his wife or his sister she would gladly give up her whole life to rescuing him from disaster. His wife? Alas! He lived alone on his great estate, and she lived alone in a forlorn little village, and yet the very idea that they might one day become intimate and equal seemed to her impossible and absurd. Life was like that! And, at bottom, all human relationships and all life were so incomprehensible that if you thought about them at all dread would overwhelm you and your heart would stop beating.

“And how incomprehensible it is, too,” she thought, “that God should give such beauty and charm and such kind, melancholy eyes to weak, unhappy, useless people, and make every one like them so!”

“I turn off to the right here,” Khanoff said, getting into his carriage. “Farewell! A pleasant journey to you!”

And once more Maria Vasilievna’s thoughts turned to her scholars, and the coming examinations, and the watchman, and the school board, until a gust of wind from the right bringing her the rumbling of the departing carriage, other reveries mingled with these thoughts, and she longed to dream of handsome eyes and love and the happiness that would never be hers.

She, a wife! Alas, how cold her little room was early in the morning! No one ever lit her stove, because the watchman was always away somewhere. Her pupils came at daybreak, with a great noise, bringing in with them mud and snow, and everything was so bleak and so uncomfortable in her little quarters of one small bedroom which also served as a kitchen! Her head ached every day when school was over. She was obliged to collect money from her scholars to buy wood and pay the watchman, and then to give it to that fat, insolent peasant, the warden, and beg him for mercy’s sake to send her a load of wood. And at night she would dream of examinations and peasants and snow drifts. This life had aged and hardened her, and she had grown plain and angular and awkward, as if lead had been emptied into her veins. She was afraid of everything, and never dared to sit down in the presence of the warden or a member of the school board. If she mentioned any one of them in his absence, she always spoke of him respectfully as “his Honour.” No one found her attractive; her life was spent without love, without friendship, without acquaintances who interested her. What a terrible calamity it would be were she, in her situation, to fall in love!

“Sit tight, Vasilievna!”

Once more they were crawling up a steep hill.

She had felt no call to be a teacher; want had forced her to be one. She never thought about her mission in life or the value of education; the most important things to her were, not her scholars nor their instruction, but the examinations. And how could she think of a mission, and of the value of education? School teachers, and poor doctors, and apothecaries, struggling with their heavy labours, have not even the consolation of thinking that they are advancing an ideal, and helping mankind. Their heads are too full of thoughts of their daily crust of bread, their wood, the bad roads, and their sicknesses for that. Their life is tedious and hard. Only those stand it for any length of time who are silent beasts of burden, like Maria Vasilievna. Those who are sensitive and impetuous and nervous, and who talk of their mission in life and of advancing a great ideal, soon become exhausted and give up the fight.

To find a dryer, shorter road, Simon sometimes struck across a meadow or drove through a back-yard, but in some places the peasants would not let him pass, in others the land belonged to a priest; here the road was blocked, there Ivan Ionoff had bought a piece of land from his master and surrounded it with a ditch. In such cases they had to turn back.

They arrived at Nijni Gorodishe. In the snowy, grimy yard around the tavern stood rows of wagons laden with huge flasks of oil of vitriol. A great crowd of carriers had assembled in the tavern, and the air reeked of vodka, tobacco, and sheepskin coats. Loud talk filled the room, and the door with its weight and pulley banged incessantly. In the tap room behind a partition some one was playing on the concertina without a moment’s pause. Maria Vasilievna sat down to her tea, while at a near-by table a group of peasants saturated with tea and the heat of the room were drinking vodka and beer.

A confused babel filled the room.

“Did you hear that, Kuzma? Ha! Ha! What’s that? By God! Ivan Dementitch, you’ll catch it for that! Look, brother!”

A small, black-bearded, pock-marked peasant, who had been drunk for a long time, gave an exclamation of surprise and swore an ugly oath.

“What do you mean by swearing, you!” shouted Simon angrily from where he sat, far away at the other end of the room. “Can’t you see there’s a lady here?”

“A lady!” mocked some one from another corner.

“You pig, you!”

“I didn’t mean to do it—” faltered the little peasant with embarrassment. “Excuse me! My money is as good here as hers. How do you do?”

“How do you do?” answered the school teacher.

“Very well, thank you kindly.”

Maria Vasilievna enjoyed her tea, and grew as flushed as the peasants. Her thoughts were once more running on the watchman and the wood.

“Look there, brother!” she heard a voice at the next table cry. “There’s the schoolmarm from Viasovia! I know her! She’s a nice lady.”

“Yes, she’s a nice lady.”

The door banged, men came and went. Maria Vasilievna sat absorbed in the same thoughts that had occupied her before, and the concertina behind the partition never ceased making music for an instant. Patches of sunlight that had lain on the floor when she had come in had moved up to the counter, then to the walls, and now had finally disappeared. So it was afternoon. The carriers at the table next to hers rose and prepared to leave. The little peasant went up to Maria Vasilievna swaying slightly, and held out his hand. The others followed him; all shook hands with the school teacher, and went out one by one. The door banged and whined nine times.

“Get ready, Vasilievna!” Simon cried.

They started again, still at a walk.

“A little school was built here in Nijni Gorodishe, not long ago,” said Simon, looking back. “Some of the people sinned greatly.”

“In what way?”

“It seems the president of the school board grabbed one thousand roubles, and the warden another thousand, and the teacher five hundred.”

“A school always costs several thousand roubles. It is very wrong to repeat scandal, daddy. What you have just told me is nonsense.”

“I don’t know anything about it. I only tell you what people say.”

It was clear, however, that Simon did not believe the school teacher. None of the peasants believed her. They all thought that her salary was too large (she got twenty roubles a month, and they thought that five would have been plenty), and they also believed that most of the money which she collected from the children for wood she pocketed herself. The warden thought as all the other peasants did, and made a little out of the wood himself, besides receiving secret pay from the peasants unknown to the authorities.

But now, thank goodness, they had finally passed through the last of the woods, and from here on their road would lie through flat fields all the way to Viasovia. Only a few miles more to go, and then they would cross the river, and then the railway track, and then they would be at home.

“Where are you going, Simon?” asked Maria Vasilievna. “Take the right-hand road across the bridge!”

“What’s that? We can cross here. It isn’t very deep.”

“Don’t let the horse drown!”

“What’s that?”

“There is Khanoff crossing the bridge!” cried Maria Vasilievna, catching sight of a carriage and four in the distance at their right. “Isn’t that he?”

“That’s him all right. He must have found Bakvist away. My goodness, what a donkey to drive all the way round when this road is two miles shorter!”

They plunged into the river. In summer time it was a tiny stream, in late spring it dwindled rapidly to a fordable river after the freshets, and by August it was generally dry, but during flood time it was a torrent of swift, cold, turbid water some fifty feet wide. Fresh wheel tracks were visible now on the bank leading down to the water’s edge; some one, then, must have crossed here.

“Get up!” cried Simon, madly jerking the reins and flapping his arms like a pair of wings. “Get up!”

The horse waded into the stream up to his belly, stopped, and then plunged on again, throwing his whole weight into the collar. Maria Vasilievna felt a sharp wave of cold water lap her feet.

“Go on!” she cried, rising in her seat. “Go on!”

They drove out on the opposite bank.

“Well, of all things! My goodness!” muttered Simon. “What a worthless lot those zemstvo people are——”

Maria Vasilievna’s goloshes and shoes were full of water, and the bottom of her dress and coat and one of her sleeves were soaked and dripping. Her sugar and flour were wet through, and this was harder to bear than all the rest. In her despair she could only wave her arms, and cry:

“Oh, Simon, Simon! How stupid you are, really——”

The gate was down when they reached the railway crossing, an express train was leaving the station. They stood and waited for the train to go by, and Maria Vasilievna shivered with cold from head to foot.

Viasovia was already in sight; there was the school with its green roof, and there stood the church with its blazing crosses reflecting the rays of the setting sun. The windows of the station were flashing, too, and a cloud of rosy steam was rising from the engine. Everything seemed to the school teacher to be shivering with cold.

At last the train appeared. Its windows were blazing like the crosses on the church, and their brilliance was dazzling. A lady was standing on the platform of one of the first-class carriages. One glance at her as she slipped past, and Maria Vasilievna thought: “My mother!” What a resemblance there was! There was her mother’s thick and luxuriant hair; there were her forehead and the poise of her head. For the first time in all these thirty years Maria Vasilievna saw in imagination her mother, her father, and her brother in their apartment in Moscow, saw everything down to the least detail, even to the globe of goldfish in the sitting-room. She heard the strains of a piano, and the sound of her father’s voice, and saw herself young and pretty and gaily dressed, in a warm, brightly lighted room with her family about her. Great joy and happiness suddenly welled up in her heart, and she pressed her hands to her temples in rapture, crying softly with a note of deep entreaty in her voice:

“Mother!”

Then she wept, she could not have said why. At that moment Khanoff drove up with his four-in-hand, and when she saw him she smiled and nodded to him as if he and she were near and dear to each other, for she was conjuring up in her fancy a felicity that could never be hers. The sky, the trees, and the windows of the houses seemed to be reflecting her happiness and rejoicing with her. No! Her mother and father had not died; she had never been a school teacher; all that had been a long, strange, painful dream, and now she was awake.

“Vasilievna! Sit down!”

And in a breath everything vanished. The gate slowly rose. Shivering and numb with cold Maria Vasilievna sat down in the cart again. The four-in-hand crossed the track and Simon followed. The watchman at the crossing took off his cap as they drove by.

“Here is Viasovia! The journey is over!”

Early in April in the year 1870, my mother, Klavdia Arhipovna, the widow of a lieutenant, received a letter from her brother Ivan, a privy councillor in St. Petersburg. Among other things the letter said:

“An affection of the liver obliges me to spend every summer abroad, but as I have no funds this year with which to go to Marienbad, it is very probable that I may spend the coming summer with you at Kotchneffka, dear sister——”

My mother turned pale and trembled from head to foot as she perused this epistle, and an expression both smiling and tearful came into her face. She began to weep and to laugh. This conflict between laughter and tears always reminds me of the glitter and shimmer that follow when water is spilled on a brightly burning candle. Having read the letter through twice, my mother summoned her whole household together, and in a voice quivering with excitement began explaining to them that there had been four brothers in the Gundasoff family; one had died when he was a baby; a second had been a soldier, and had also died; a third, she meant no offence to him in saying it, had become an actor, and a fourth——

“The fourth brother is not of our world,” sobbed my mother. “He is my own brother, we grew up together, and yet I am trembling all over at the thought of him. He is a privy councillor, a general! How can I meet my darling? What can a poor, uneducated woman like me find to talk to him about? It is fifteen years since I saw him last. Andrusha, darling!” cried my mother turning to me. “Rejoice little stupid, it is for your sake that God is sending him here!”

When we had all heard the history of the Gundasoff family down to the smallest detail, there arose an uproar on the farm such as I had not been accustomed to hearing except before weddings. Only the vault of heaven, and the water in the river escaped; everything else was subjected to a process of cleaning, scrubbing, and painting. If the sky had been smaller and lower, and the river had not been so swift, they too would have been scalded with boiling water and polished with cloths. The walls were white as snow already, but they were whitewashed again. The floors shone and glistened, but they were scrubbed every day. Bobtail, the cat (so-called because I had chopped off a good portion of his tail with a carving-knife when I was a baby), was taken from the house into the kitchen and put in charge of Anfisa. Fedia was told that if the dogs came anywhere near the front porch, “God would punish him.” But nothing caught it so cruelly as did the unfortunate sofas and carpets and chairs! Never before had they been so unmercifully beaten with sticks as they now were in expectation of our guest’s arrival. Hearing the blows, my doves fluttered anxiously about, and at last flew away straight up into the very sky.

From Novostroevka came Spiridon, the only tailor in the district who ventured to sew for the gentry. He was a sober, hard-working, intelligent man, not without some imagination and feeling for the plastic arts, but he sewed abominably nevertheless. His doubts always spoiled everything, for the idea that his clothes were not fashionable enough made him cut everything over five times at least. He used to go all the way to the city on foot on purpose to see how the young dandies were dressed, and then decked us in costumes that even a caricaturist would have called an exaggeration and a joke. We sported impossibly tight trousers, and coats so short that we always felt embarrassed whenever any young ladies were present.

Spiridon slowly took my measurements. He measured me lengthways and crossways as if he were going to fit me with barrel hoops, then wrote at length upon a sheet of paper with a very thick pencil, and at last marked his yardstick from end to end with little triangular notches. Having finished with me, he began upon my tutor Gregory Pobedimski. This unforgettable tutor of mine was just at the age when men anxiously watch the growth of their moustaches, and are critical about their attire, so that you may imagine with what holy terror Spiridon approached his person! Pobedimski was made to throw his head back, and spread himself apart like a V upside down, now raising, now lowering his arms. Spiridon measured him several times, circling about him as a love-sick pigeon circles about his mate; then he fell down on one knee, and bent himself into the form of a hook. My mother, weary and worn with all this bustle and faint from the heat of her irons in the laundry, said as she watched all these endless proceedings:

“Take care, Spiridon, God will call you to account if you spoil the cloth! And you will be an unlucky man if you don’t hit the mark this time!”

My mother’s words first threw Spiridon into a sweat and then into a fever, for he was very sure that he would not hit the mark. He asked one rouble and twenty copecks for making my suit, and two roubles for making my tutor’s. The cloth, the buttons, and the linings were supplied by us. This cannot but seem cheap enough, especially when you consider that Novostroevka was six miles away, and that he came to try on the clothes four different times. At these fittings, as we pulled on our tight trousers and coats all streaked with white basting threads, my mother would look at our clothes, knit her brows with dissatisfaction and exclaim:

“Goodness knows we have queer fashions these days! I am almost ashamed to look at you! If my brother did not live in St. Petersburg I declare I wouldn’t have you dressed in the fashion!”

Spiridon, delighted that the fashions and not he were catching the blame, would shrug his shoulders, and sigh, as much as to say:

“There is nothing to be done about it; it is the spirit of the times!”

The trepidation with which we awaited the arrival of our guest can only be compared to the excitement that prevails among spiritualists when they are awaiting the appearance of a spirit. My mother had a headache, and burst into tears every minute. I lost my appetite and my sleep, and did not study my lessons. Even in my dreams I was devoured by my longing to see a general, a man with epaulettes, an embroidered collar reaching to his ears, and a naked sword in his hand; in short, a person exactly like the general I saw hanging over the sofa in our drawing-room glaring so balefully with his terrible black eyes at any one who ventured to look at him. Pobedimski alone felt at ease. He neither trembled nor rejoiced, and all he said as he listened to my mother’s stories of the Gundasoff family was:

“Yes, it will be pleasant to talk with somebody new.”

My tutor was considered a very exceptional person on our farm. He was a young man of twenty or thereabouts, pimply, ragged, with a low forehead, and an uncommonly long nose. In fact, this nose of his was so long that if he wanted to look at anything closely he had to put his head on one side like a bird. He had gone through the six grades of the high-school, and had then entered the Veterinary College, from which he had been expelled in less than six months. By carefully concealing the reason of his expulsion, my tutor gave every one who wished it an opportunity for considering him a much-enduring and rather mysterious person. He talked little, and when he did it was always on learned subjects; he ate meat on fast-days, and looked upon the life about him in a high and mighty, contemptuous fashion, which, however, did not prevent him from accepting presents from my mother in the shape of suits of clothes, or from painting funny faces with red teeth on my kites. My mother did not like him on account of his “pride,” but she had a deep respect for his learning.

We had not long to wait for our guest. Early in May two wagons piled with huge trunks arrived from the station. These trunks looked so majestic that the coachman unconsciously took off his hat as he unloaded them from the wagons.

“They must be full of uniforms and gunpowder!” thought I.

Why gunpowder? Probably because in my mind the idea of a general was closely connected with powder and cannon.

When my nurse woke me on the morning of the tenth of May, she announced in a whisper that my “uncle had come!” I dressed hastily, washing anyhow and forgetting my prayers, and scampered out of my room. In the hall I ran straight into a tall, stout gentleman with fashionable side-whiskers and an elegant overcoat. Swooning with horror, I drew myself up before him, and remembering the ceremonial taught me by my mother, I bowed deeply and attempted to kiss his hand. But the gentleman would not give me his hand to kiss, and stated that he was not my uncle, but only Peter, my uncle’s valet. The sight of this Peter, dressed a great deal better than Pobedimski and myself, filled me with the profoundest astonishment which, to tell the truth, has not left me to this day. Is it possible that such grave, respectable men as he, with such stern, intelligent faces can be servants? Why should they be?

Peter told me that my uncle and mother were in the garden, and I rushed thither as fast as my legs could carry me.

Not knowing the history of the Gundasoff family and my uncle’s rank, Nature felt a great deal freer and less constrained than I did. There was an activity in the garden such as one only sees at a country fair. Countless magpies were cleaving the air and hopping along the garden paths, chasing the mayflies with noisy cries. A flock of crows was swarming in the lilac bushes that thrust their delicate, fragrant blossoms into my very face. From all sides came the songs of orioles and the pipings of finches and blackbirds. At any other time I should have darted off after the grasshoppers or thrown stones at a crow that was sitting on a low haycock under a wasp’s nest turning its blunt bill from side to side. But this was no time for play. My heart was hammering and shivers were running up and down my back. I was about to see a man with epaulettes, a naked sword, and terrible eyes!

Imagine, then, my disappointment! A slender little dandy in a white silk shirt and a white military cap was walking through the garden at my mother’s side. Every now and then he would run on ahead and, with his hands in his pockets and his head thrown back, he looked like quite a young man. There was so much life and vivacity in his whole figure that the treachery of old age only became apparent to me as I approached from behind, and, peeping under his cap, saw the white hairs glistening beneath the brim. Instead of a stolid, autocratic gravity I saw in him an almost boyish nimbleness, and instead of a collar to the ears he wore an ordinary light blue necktie. My mother and uncle were walking up and down the path, chatting together. I crept up softly from behind and waited for one of them to turn round and see me.

“What an enchanting place you have here, Klavdia!” my uncle exclaimed. “How sweet and lovely it all is! If I had known how beautiful it was nothing could have taken me abroad all these years!”

My uncle stooped abruptly, and put his nose to a tulip. Everything he saw was a source of curiosity and delight to him, as if he had never seen a garden, or a sunny day before in his life. The strange little man moved as if on springs and chattered incessantly, not giving my mother a chance to put in a word. All at once Pobedimski stepped out from behind an elder bush at a turn of the path. His appearance was so unexpected that my uncle started and fell back a step. My tutor was dressed in his gala overcoat with a cape, in which he looked exactly like a windmill, especially from behind. His mien was majestic and triumphant. With his hat held close to his chest in Spanish fashion he took a step toward my uncle, and bowed forward and slightly sideways like a marquis in a melodrama.

“I have the honour to present myself to your worshipful highness,” he said in a loud voice. “I am a pedagogue, the instructor of your nephew, and a former student at the Veterinary College. My name is Gregory Pobedimski, Esquire.”

My tutor’s beautiful manners pleased my mother immensely. She smiled and fluttered with the sweet expectation of his next brilliant sally, but my tutor was waiting for my uncle to respond to his lofty bearing with something equally lofty, and thought that two fingers would be offered him with a “h’m—” befitting a general. In consequence, he lost all his presence of mind and was completely embarrassed when my uncle smiled cordially and heartily pressed his hand. Murmuring some incoherent phrases, my tutor coughed and retired.

“Ha! Ha! Isn’t that beautiful?” laughed my uncle. “Look at him. He has put on his wings, and is thinking what a clever fellow he is! I like that, upon my word and honour, I do! What youthful aplomb, what life there is in those silly wings! And who is this boy?” he asked, suddenly turning round and catching sight of me.

“This is my little Andrusha,” said my mother blushing. “The comfort of my life.”

I put my foot behind me and bowed deeply.

“A fine little fellow, a fine little fellow!” murmured my uncle taking his hand away from my lips, and patting my head. “So your name is Andrusha? Well, well—yes—upon my word and honour. Do you go to school?”

My mother began to enumerate my triumphs of learning and behaviour, adding to them and exaggerating as all mothers do, while I walked at my uncle’s side and did not cease from bowing deeply according to the ceremonial we had agreed upon. When my mother began hinting that with my remarkable attainments it would not be amiss for me to enter the military academy at the expense of the state, and when, according to our plan, I should have burst into tears and implored the patronage of my uncle, that relative suddenly stopped short and threw up his hands in astonishment.

“Heavens and earth, who is that?” he exclaimed.

Down the garden path came Tatiana, the wife of our manager, Theodore Petrovitch. She was carrying a white starched skirt and a long ironing board, and as she passed us she blushed and glanced shyly at our guest from under her long lashes.

“Worse and worse!” said my uncle under his breath, looking tenderly after her. “Why, sister, one can’t take a step here without encountering some surprise, upon my word and honour!”

Not every one would have called Tatiana beautiful. She was a small, plump woman of twenty, graceful, black-eyed, and always rosy and sweet, but in all her face and figure there was not one strong feature, not one bold line for the eye to rest upon. It was as if in making her Nature had lacked confidence and inspiration. Tatiana was shy and timid and well behaved. She glided quietly along, saying little, seldom laughing; her life was as even and smooth as her face and her neatly brushed hair. My uncle half-closed his eyes and smiled as he watched her. My mother looked intently at his smiling face and grew serious.

“Oh, brother, why have you never married?” she sighed.

“I have never married because——”

“Why not?” asked my mother softly.

“What shall I say? Because things did not turn out that way. When I was young I worked too hard to have time for enjoying life, and then, when I wanted to live—behold! I had put fifty years behind me! I was too slow. However, this is a tedious subject for conversation!”

My mother and uncle sighed simultaneously, and walked on together while I stayed behind, and ran to find my tutor in order to share my impressions with him. Pobedimski was standing in the middle of the courtyard gazing majestically at the sky.

“He is obviously an enlightened man,” he said, wagging his head. “I hope we shall become friends.”

An hour later my mother came to us.

“Oh, boys, I’m in terrible trouble!” she began with a sigh. “My brother has brought a valet with him, you know, and he is not the sort of man, heaven help him, whom one can put in the hall or the kitchen, he absolutely must have a room of his own. Look here, my children, couldn’t you move into the wing with Theodore and give the valet your room?”

We answered that we should be delighted to do so, for, we thought, life in the wing would be much freer than in the house under the eyes of my mother.

“Yes, I’m terribly worried!” my mother continued. “My brother says he doesn’t want to have his dinner at noon, but at seven as they do in the city. I am almost distracted. Why, by seven the dinner in the stove will be burned to a crisp. The truth is men know nothing about housekeeping, even if they are very clever. Oh, misery me, I shall have to have two dinners cooked every day! You must have yours at noon as you always do, children, and let the old lady wait until seven for her brother.”

My mother breathed a profound sigh, told me to please my uncle whom God had brought here especially for my benefit, and ran into the kitchen. Pobedimski and I moved into the wing that very same day. We were put in a passage between the hall and the manager’s bedroom.

In spite of my uncle’s arrival and our change of quarters, our days continued to trickle by in their usual way, more drowsily and monotonously than we had expected. We were excused from our lessons “because of our guest.” Pobedimski, who never read or did anything, now spent most of his time sitting on his bed absorbed in thought, with his long nose in the air. Every now and then he would get up, try on his new suit, sit down again, and continue his meditations. One thing only disturbed him, and that was the flies, whom he slapped unmercifully with the palms of his hands. After dinner he would generally “rest,” causing keen anguish to the whole household by his snores. I played in the garden from morning till night, or else sat in my room making kites. During the first two or three weeks we saw little of my uncle. He stayed in his room and worked for days on end, heeding neither the flies nor the heat.

His extraordinary power of sitting as if glued to his desk appeared to us something in the nature of an inexplicable trick. To lazybones like ourselves, who did not know the meaning of systematic work, his industry appeared positively miraculous. Getting up at nine, he would sit down at his desk, and not move until dinner time. After dinner he would go to work once more, and work until late at night. Whenever I peeped into his room through the keyhole I invariably saw the same scene. My uncle would be sitting at his desk and working. His work consisted of writing with one hand while turning over the pages of a book with the other, and strange as it may seem, he constantly wriggled all over, swinging one foot like a pendulum, whistling and nodding his head in time to the music he made. His appearance at these times was extraordinarily frivolous and careless, more as if he were playing at naughts and crosses than working. Each time I looked in I saw him wearing a dashing little coat and a dandified necktie, and each time, even through the keyhole, I could smell a sweet feminine perfume. He emerged from his room only to dine, and then ate scarcely anything.

“I can’t understand my brother,” my mother complained. “Every day I have a turkey or some pigeons killed especially for him, and stew some fruits for him myself, and yet he drinks a little bouillon and eats a piece of meat no larger than my finger, after which he leaves the table at once. If I beg him to eat more he comes back and drinks a little milk. What is there in milk? It is slop, nothing more! He will die of eating that kind of food! If I try to persuade him to change his ways, he only laughs and makes a joke of it! No, children, our fare doesn’t suit him!”

Our evenings passed much more pleasantly than our days. As a rule the setting sun and the long shadows falling across the courtyard found Tatiana, Pobedimski, and me seated on the porch of our wing. We did not speak until darkness fell—what could we talk about when everything had already been said? There had been one novelty, my uncle’s arrival, but that theme had soon become exhausted as well as the others. My tutor constantly kept his eyes fixed on Tatiana’s face and fetched one deep sigh after another. At that time I did not understand the meaning of those sighs, and did not seek to inquire into their cause, but they explain much to me now.

When the shadows had merged into thick, black darkness Theodore would come home from the hunt or the field. This Theodore seemed to me to be a wild and even fearsome man. He was the son of a Russianised gipsy, and was swarthy and dark with large black eyes and a tangled curly beard, and he was never spoken of by our peasants as anything but “the demon.” There was a great deal of the gipsy in him beside his appearance. For instance, he never could stay at home, and would vanish for days at a time, hunting in the forest or roaming in the fields. He was gloomy, passionate, taciturn, and fearless, and could never be brought to acknowledge the authority of any one. He spoke gruffly to my mother, addressed me familiarly as “thou,” and treated Pobedimski’s learning with contempt, but we forgave him everything, because we considered that he had a morbidly excitable nature. My mother liked him in spite of his gipsy ways, for he was ideally honest and hard working. He loved his Tatiana passionately, in gipsy style, but his love was a thing of gloom, almost of suffering. He never caressed her in our presence, and only stared at her fiercely with his mouth all awry.

On coming back from the fields he would furiously slam down his gun on the floor of his room, and come out on the porch to take his seat beside his wife. When he had rested a while he would ask her a few questions about the housekeeping, and then relapse into silence.

“Let’s sing!” I used to suggest.

My tutor would tune his guitar, and in a thick, deaconly voice would drone: “In Level Valleys.” We would all chime in. My tutor sang bass, Theodore an almost inaudible tenor, and I contralto in tune with Tatiana.

When all the sky was strewn with stars, and the frogs’ voices were hushed, our supper would be brought to us from the kitchen, and we would go into the house and fall to. My tutor and the gipsy ate ravenously, munching so loudly that it was hard to tell whether the noise came from the bones they were crunching or the cracking of their jaws. Tatiana and I, on the contrary, could scarcely manage to finish our portions. After supper our wing of the house would sink into deep slumber.

One evening at the end of May we were sitting on the porch waiting for our supper. Suddenly a shadow flitted toward us, and Gundasoff appeared as if he had sprung from the ground. He stared at us for a long time, and then waved his hands and laughed gaily.

“How idyllic!” he cried. “Singing and dreaming under the moon! It is beautiful, upon my word and honour! May I sit here and dream with you?”

We silently looked at one another. My uncle sat down on the lowest step, yawned, and gazed at the sky. Pobedimski, who had long been intending to have a conversation with this “new person,” was delighted at the opportunity that now presented itself, and was the first to break the silence. He had only one subject for learned discussions, and that was the epizooty. It sometimes happens that, out of a crowd of thousands of persons with whom one is thrown, one face alone remains fixed in the memory, and so it was with Pobedimski. Out of all he had learned at the Veterinary College he remembered only one sentence:

“Epizooty is the cause of much loss to the peasant farmers. Every community should join hands with the state in fighting this disease.”

Before saying this to Gundasoff, my tutor cleared his throat three times, and excitedly wrapped his cape around him. When my uncle had been informed concerning the epizooty, he made a noise in his nose that sounded like a laugh.

“How charming, upon my word and honour!” he said under his breath, staring at us as if we were maniacs. “This is indeed life! This is real nature! Why don’t you say something, Pelagia?” he asked of Tatiana.

Tatiana grew confused and coughed.

“Go on talking, friends! Sing! Play! Don’t waste a moment! That rascal time goes fast and waits for no man. Upon my word and honour, old age will be upon you before you know it. It will be too late to enjoy life then; so come, Pelagia, don’t sit there and say nothing!”

At this point our supper was brought from the kitchen. My uncle went into the house with us, and ate five curd fritters and a duck’s wing for company. He kept his eyes fixed on us while he despatched his supper; we all filled his heart with enthusiasm and emotion. Whatever silliness that unforgettable tutor of mine was guilty of, whatever Tatiana did, was lovely and charming in his eyes. When Tatiana quietly took her knitting into a corner after supper, his eyes never left her little fingers, and he babbled without a moment’s pause.

“Friends, you must hurry and begin to enjoy life as fast as you can!” he said. “For heaven’s sake, don’t sacrifice the present to the future! You have youth and health and passion now, and the future is deceitful—a vapour! As soon as your twentieth year knocks at the door, then begin to live!”

Tatiana dropped a needle. My uncle jumped up, picked it up, and handed it to her with a bow, at which I realised for the first time that there was some one in the world with manners more polished than Pobedimski’s.

“Yes,” my uncle continued. “Fall in love! Marry! Be silly! Silliness is much more healthy and natural than our toiling and striving to be sensible.”

My uncle talked much and long, and I sat on a trunk in a corner listening to him and dozing. I felt hurt because he had never once paid the least attention to me. He left our wing of the house at two o’clock that night, when I had given up the battle, and sunk into profound slumber.

From that time on my uncle came to us every evening. He sang with us and sat with us each night until two o’clock, chatting without end always of the same thing. He ceased his evening and nocturnal labours, and by the end of July, when the privy councillor had learned to eat my mother’s turkeys and stewed fruits, his daytime toil was also abandoned. My uncle had torn himself away from his desk and had entered into “real life.” By day he walked about the garden whistling and keeping the workmen from their work by making them tell him stories. If he caught sight of Tatiana he would run up to her, and, if she were carrying anything, would offer to carry it for her, which always embarrassed her dreadfully.

The farther summer advanced toward autumn the more absent-minded and frivolous and lively my uncle became. Pobedimski lost all his illusions about him.

“He is too one-sided,” he used to say. “Nothing about him shows that he stands on the highest rung of the official hierarchic ladder. He can’t even talk properly. He says ‘upon my word and honour’ after every word. No, I don’t like him!”

A distinct change came over my tutor and Theodore from the time that my uncle began to visit us in our wing. Theodore stopped hunting and began to come home early. He grew more silent and stared more ferociously than ever at his wife. My tutor stopped talking of the epizooty in my uncle’s presence, and now frowned and even smiled derisively at sight of him.

“Here comes our little hop o’my thumb!” he once growled, seeing my uncle coming toward our part of the house.

This change in the behaviour of both men I explained by the theory that Gundasoff had hurt their feelings. My absent-minded uncle always confused their names, and on the day of his departure had not learned which was my tutor, and which was Tatiana’s husband. Tatiana herself he sometimes called Nastasia, sometimes Pelagia, sometimes Evdokia. Full of affectionate enthusiasm as he was for us all, he laughed at us and treated us as if we had been children. All this, of course, might easily have offended the young men. But, as I now see, this was not a question of lacerated feelings; sentiments much more delicate were involved.

One night, I remember, I was sitting on the trunk contending with my longing for sleep. A heavy glue seemed to have fallen on my eyelids, and my body was drooping sideways, exhausted by a long day’s playing, but I tried to conquer my sleepiness, for I wanted to see what was going on. It was nearly midnight. Gentle, rosy, and meek as ever, Tatiana was sitting at a little table sewing a shirt for her husband. From one corner of the room Theodore was staring sternly and gloomily at her, in another corner sat Pobedimski snorting angrily, his head half buried in his high coat collar. My uncle was walking up and down plunged in thought. Silence reigned, broken only by the rustling of the linen in Tatiana’s hands. Suddenly my uncle stopped in front of Tatiana, and said:

“Oh, you are all so young and fresh and good, and you live so peacefully in this quiet place that I envy you! I have grown so fond of this life of yours that, upon my honour, my heart aches when I remember that some day I shall have to leave it all.”

Sleep closed my eyes and I heard no more. I was awakened by a bang, and saw my uncle standing in front of Tatiana, looking at her with emotion. His cheeks were burning.

“My life is over and I have not lived,” he was saying. “Your young face reminds me of my lost youth, and I should be happy to sit here looking at you until I died. I should like to take you with me to St. Petersburg.”

“Why?” demanded Theodore in a hoarse voice.

“I should like to put you under a glass case on my desk; I should delight in contemplating you, and showing you to my friends. Do you know, Pelagia, that we don’t have people like you where I live? We have wealth and fame and sometimes beauty, but we have none of this natural life and this wholesome peacefulness——”

My uncle sat down in front of Tatiana and took her hand.

“So you won’t come with me to St. Petersburg?” he laughed. “Then at least let me take this hand away with me, this lovely little hand! You won’t? Very well then, little miser, at least allow me to kiss it!”

I heard a chair crack. Theodore sprang to his feet and strode toward his wife with a heavy, measured tread. His face was ashy grey and quivering. He raised his arm and brought his fist down on the table with all his might, saying in a muffled voice:

“I won’t allow it!”

At the same moment Pobedimski jumped out of his chair, and with a face as pale and angry as the other’s, he also advanced toward Tatiana and banged the table with his fist.

“I—I won’t allow it!” he cried.

“What? What’s the matter,” asked my uncle in astonishment.

“I won’t allow it!” Theodore repeated, with another blow on the table.

My uncle jumped up and abjectly blinked his eyes. He wanted to say something, but surprise and fright held him tongue-tied. He gave an embarrassed smile and pattered out of the room with short, senile steps, leaving his hat behind him. When my startled mother came into the room a few moments later, Theodore and Pobedimski were still banging the table with their fists like blacksmiths hammering an anvil, and shouting:

“I won’t allow it!”

“What has happened here?” demanded my mother. “Why has my brother fainted? What is the matter?”

When she saw the frightened Tatiana and her angry husband, my mother must have guessed what had been going on, for she sighed and shook her head.

“Come, come, stop thumping the table!” she commanded. “Stop, Theodore! And what are you hammering for, Gregory Pobedimski? What business is this of yours?”

Pobedimski recollected himself and blushed. Theodore glared intently first at him and then at his wife, and began striding up and down the room. After my mother had gone, I saw something that for a long time after I took to be a dream. I saw Theodore seize my tutor, raise him in the air, and fling him out of the door.

When I awoke next morning my tutor’s bed was empty. To my inquiries, my nurse replied in a whisper that he had been taken to the hospital early that morning, to be treated for a broken arm. Saddened by this news, and recalling yesterday’s scandal, I went out into the courtyard. The day was overcast. The sky was covered with storm-clouds, and a strong wind was blowing across the earth, whirling before it dust, feathers, and scraps of paper. One could feel the approaching rain, and bad humour was obvious in both men and beasts. When I went back to the house I was told to walk lightly, and not to make a noise because my mother was ill in bed with a headache. What could I do? I went out of the front gate, and, sitting down on a bench, tried to make out the meaning of what I had seen the night before. The road from our gate wound past a blacksmith’s shop and around a damp meadow, turning at last into the main highway. I sat and looked at the telegraph poles around which the dust was whirling, and at the sleepy birds sitting on the wires until, suddenly, such ennui overwhelmed me that I burst into tears.

A dusty char-à-banc came along the highway filled with townspeople who were probably on a pilgrimage to some shrine. The char-à-banc was scarcely out of sight before a light victoria drawn by a pair of horses appeared. Standing up in the carriage and holding on to the coachman’s belt was the rural policeman. To my intense surprise the victoria turned into our road and rolled past me through the gate. While I was still seeking an answer to the riddle of the policeman’s appearance at our farm, a troika trotted up harnessed to a landau, and in the landau sat the captain of police pointing out our gate to his coachman.

“What does this mean?” I asked myself. “Pobedimski must have complained to them about Theodore, and they have come to fetch him away to prison.”

But the problem was not so easily solved. The policeman and the police captain were evidently but the forerunners of some one more important still, for five minutes had scarcely elapsed before a coach drove into our gate. It flashed by me so quickly that, as I glanced in at the window, I could only catch a glimpse of a red beard.

Lost in conjectures and foreseeing some disaster, I ran into the house. The first person I met in the hall was my mother. Her face was pale, and she was staring with horror at a door from behind which came the sound of men’s voices. Some guests had arrived unexpectedly and at the very height of her headache.

“Who is here, mamma?” I asked.

“Sister!” we heard my uncle call. “Do give the governor and the rest of us a bite to eat!”

“That’s easier said than done!” whispered my mother, collapsing with horror. “What can I give them at such short notice? I shall be disgraced in my declining years!”

My mother clasped her head with her hands and hurried into the kitchen. The unexpected arrival of the governor had turned the whole farm upside down. A cruel holocaust immediately began to take place. Ten hens were killed and five turkeys and eight ducks, and in the hurly-burly the old gander was beheaded, the ancestor of all our flock and the favourite of my mother. The coachman and the cook seemed to have gone mad, and frantically slaughtered every bird they could lay hands upon without regard to its age or breed. A pair of my precious turtle doves, as dear to me as the gander was to my mother, were sacrified to make a gravy. It was long before I forgave the governor their death.

That evening, when the governor and his suite had dined until they could eat no more, and had climbed into their carriages and driven away, I went into the house to look at the remains of the feast. Glancing into the drawing-room from the hall, I saw my mother there with my uncle. My uncle was shrugging his shoulders, and nervously pacing round and round the room with his hands behind his back. My mother looked exhausted and very much thinner. She was sitting on the sofa following my uncle’s movements with eyes of suffering.

“I beg your pardon, sister, but one cannot behave like that! I introduced the governor to you, and you did not even shake hands with him! You quite embarrassed the poor man. Yes, it was most unseemly. Simplicity is all very pretty, but even simplicity must not be carried too far, upon my word and honour——And then that dinner! How could you serve a dinner like that? What was that dish-rag you gave us for the fourth course?”