Sketches from a Hunter's Album (24 page)

‘Shut up!' thundered the forester and took two steps towards him.

‘Enough, Foma, enough!' I cried. ‘Leave him be! God be with him!'

‘I won't shut up!' the wretch went on. ‘It's all the same to me – I'll be done for! You bloody bastard, you animal, you, there's no end to what you do, but just you wait and see, you won't be lordin' it round here much longer! There'll be a tight noose round your neck, just you wait!'

Loner seized him by the shoulder. I hurled myself to the peasant's aid.

‘Don't touch him, sir!' the forester shouted at me.

I didn't pay any attention to his threat and was about to stretch out my hand when, to my extreme astonishment, he pulled the belt from the peasant's elbows with one twist, seized him by the nape of the neck, shoved his hat on his head, flung open the door and pushed him out.

‘Go to hell with your horse!' he shouted after him. ‘Take care you don't come my way again!'

He returned to the cottage and began fussing about in a corner.

‘Well, Loner,' I said at last, ‘you've astonished me! I realize you're an excellent fellow.'

‘Enough of that, sir,' he interrupted me in annoyance. ‘Please be good enough not to talk about it. I'd better be leading you out,' he added, ‘ 'cos you know the rain's not going to wait for you…'

The wheels of the peasant's cart rattled away out of the yard.

‘Look, he's off!' he said. ‘I'll give 'im what for!'

Half an hour later I said goodbye to him at the edge of the forest.

To begin with, I will describe to you the retired Major-General Vyacheslav Illarionovich Khvalynsky. Imagine a tall man, at one time possessing a graceful build, though now a little flabby, but by no means decrepit, not even really old – a man of mature age, in his prime, as they say. True, the formerly straight – even so, still pleasing – features of his face have changed a little, his cheeks have sagged, frequent wrinkles form ray-like surrounds to his eyes, here and there a tooth is gone, as Saadi
¹
was reputed to have said, according to Pushkin; the auburn hair – at least, what has remained of it – has turned a lilac grey, thanks to a preparation bought at the Romen horse fair from a Jew who passed himself off as an Armenian; but Vyacheslav Illarionovich has a lively manner of speaking, laughs boisterously, jingles his spurs, twirls his moustache and – to cap it all – speaks of himself as an old cavalry officer, whereas it is common knowledge that real oldsters never speak of themselves as old. He usually wears a coat buttoned up to the neck, a tall cravat with starched collar and wide grey speckled trousers of military cut; his cap he wears pulled straight down over his forehead, leaving the back of his head completely bare.

He is a man of great kindness, but with some fairly strange notions and habits. For example: he can never treat impoverished noblemen or those with no rank as people who are his equals. Conversing with them, he usually looks at them sideways, leaning his cheek strongly
against his firm, white collar, or he suddenly ups and glowers at them with a lucid and unwavering stare, stops talking and starts twitching the skin all over his scalp; he even takes to pronouncing words differently and does not say, for instance: ‘Thank you, Pavel Vasilych', or ‘Please approach, Mikhaylo Ivanych', but: ‘Sonk you, Pall Asilich', or ‘Pl-laase apprarch, Mikhal Vanych'. He deals even more oddly with those who occupy the lowest rungs of society: he does not look at them at all and, prior to explaining to them what he wants or giving an order, he has a way of repeating, several times in a row and with a perplexed and dreamy look on his face: ‘What's your name?… What's your name?', placing unusually sharp emphasis on the first word ‘what' and uttering the rest very rapidly, which gives his manner of speaking a fairly close resemblance to the cry of a male quail. He is a terrible one for fussing and frightfully grasping, but he is poor at managing his own affairs, having taken on as administrator of his estate a retired sergeant-major who is a Little Russian and an extraordinarily stupid man.

In the matter of estate-management, by the way, not one of us has yet outdone a certain important St Petersburg official who, having observed from the reports of his steward that the store-barns on his estate were frequently catching fire (as a result of which a great deal of his grain was being lost), issued the strictest edict to the effect that corn sheaves should not be placed in the barns until all fires were completely extinguished. This very same personage took it into his head to sow all his fields with poppies on the evidently very simple principle, so he claimed, that poppy-seed was dearer than rye, consequently poppies were more profitable. It was he who also ordered all his peasant women to wear tall headdresses designed according to a pattern sent from St Petersburg and in fact, right up to the present day, the womenfolk on his estates still wear such headdresses – except that the tall tops have been folded down… But we must return to Vyacheslav Illarionovich.

Vyacheslav Illarionovich is terribly keen on the fair sex and he no sooner catches sight of some pretty girl or other on the street of his local town than he at once sets off in hot pursuit, only to develop a sudden limp – which is a remarkable state of affairs. He likes to play cards, but only with people of lower rank, so that they will address him as ‘Your Excellency' while he can huff and puff at them and
abuse them as much as he wishes. Whenever he happens to be playing with the Governor or some high-ranking official, a surprising change comes over him: he even smiles and nods his head and looks them intently in the eyes – he positively exudes honey and sweetness… He even loses without grumbling.

Vyacheslav Illarionovich reads little and, when he does, he continuously moves his moustache and eyebrows – first his moustache, then his eyebrows, just as if a wave was passing upwards across his face. This wave-like movement on the face of Vyacheslav Illarionovich is particularly noteworthy when he happens – in the presence of guests, naturally – to be reading through the columns of the
Journal des Débats
. At the elections of marshals of nobility he plays a fairly important role, but out of meanness he always refuses the honourable title of marshal. ‘Gentlemen,' he says to the members of the nobility who usually approach him on the subject, and he says it in a voice redolent with condescension and self-confidence, ‘I am much obliged for the honour; but I have resolved to devote my leisure hours to solitude.' And, having once uttered these words, he will jerk his head several times to right and left, and then, with dignity, let the flesh of his chin and cheeks lap over his cravat.

In the days of his youth he was adjutant to some important personage, whom he never addressed otherwise than by his name and patronymic. They say that he assumed rather more than the duties of an adjutant, that decked out, for example, in full parade uniform, with everything buttoned-up and in place, he used to attend to his master's needs in the bath-house – but one can't believe everything one hears. Besides, General Khvalynsky is himself by no means fond of mentioning his service career, which is in general a somewhat odd circumstance; he also, it seems, has no experience of war. He lives, does General Khvalynsky, in a small house, by himself; he has had no experience of married happiness in his life, and consequently is regarded as an eligible bachelor even now – indeed, an advantageous match. Yet he has a housekeeper, a woman of about thirty-five, black-eyed and black-browed, buxom, fresh-faced and bewhiskered, who walks about on weekdays in starched dresses, adding muslin sleeves on Sundays.

Splendid is Vyacheslav Illarionovich's behaviour at large banquets given by landowners in honour of Governors and other persons in
authority: on such occasions, it might be said, he is truly in his element. It is usual for him on such occasions to sit, if not directly to the Governor's right, then not far from him; at the beginning of the banquet he is concerned more than anything with preserving a sense of his own dignity and, leaning back, though without turning his head, directs his eyes sideways at the stand-up collars of the guests and the round napes of their necks; then, towards the end of the sitting, he grows expansively gay, smiles in all directions (he had smiled in the Governor's direction from the beginning of the meal) and even occasionally proposes a toast in honour of the fair sex – an ornament to our planet, as he puts it. Likewise, General Khvalynsky makes a good showing on all solemn and public occasions, at inquiries, assemblies and exhibitions; masterly, also, is his fashion of receiving a blessing from a priest. At the end of theatrical performances, at river-crossings and other such places, Vyacheslav Illarionovich's servants never make a noise or shout; on the contrary, making a path for him through a crowd or summoning a carriage, they always say in pleasant, throaty baritones: ‘If you please, if you please, make way for General Khvalynsky' or ‘General Khvalynsky's carriage…' His carriage, if the truth be told, is of fairly ancient design; his footmen wear fairly tattered livery (it is hardly worth mentioning that it is grey with red piping); his horses are also fairly antiquated and have given service in their time; but Vyacheslav Illarionovich makes no pretensions to dandyishness and does not even consider it proper for a man of his rank to throw dust in people's eyes.

Khvalynsky has no particular gift for words, or it may be that he has no chance of displaying his eloquence since he cannot tolerate either disputes or rebuttals and studiously avoids all lengthy conversations, particularly with young people. Indeed, this is the proper way to handle things; any other way would be disastrous with the people as they are today: in no time at all they'd stop being servile and start losing respect for you. In the presence of those of higher rank Khvalynsky is mostly taciturn, but to those of lower rank, whom he evidently despises but who are the only ones he knows, he delivers sharp, abrupt speeches, endlessly using such expressions as: ‘You are, however, talking rubbish,' or ‘At last I find it necessary, my good fellah, to put you in your place,' or ‘Now, damn it all, you
surely ought to know who you're talking to,' and so on. Postmasters, committee chairmen and station-masters are especially awed by him. He never receives guests at home and lives, so rumour has it, like a regular Scrooge. Despite all this, he is an excellent landowner. Neighbours refer to him as ‘an old fellow who's done his service, a man who's quite selfless, with principles,
vieux grognard
, old grouser that he is'. The public prosecutor of the province is the only man to permit himself a smile when mention is made in his presence of General Khvalynsky's splendid and solid qualities – but, then, such is the power of envy!

Let me pass now to another landowner.

Mardary Apollonych Stegunov bore no resemblance at all to Khvalynsky; he was hardly likely to have served anywhere and was never accounted handsome. Mardary Apollonych is a squat little old man, roly-poly and bald, with a double chin, soft little hands and a thoroughgoing paunch. He is a great one for entertaining and has a fondness for pranks; he lives, as they say, in clover; and winter and summer he walks about in a striped quilted dressing-gown. In only one respect is he similar to General Khvalynsky: he is also a bachelor. He has five hundred serfs. Mardary Apollonych takes a fairly superficial interest in his estate; ten years ago, so as not to be too far behind the times, he bought from the Butenops in Moscow a threshing machine, locked it in his barn and then rested content. On a fine summer day he may indeed order his racing buggy to be harnessed and then ride out into the field to see how the grain is ripening and to pick cornflowers.

He lives, does Mardary Apollonych, completely in the old style. Even his house is of antiquated construction: the entrance hall, as one might expect, smells of
kvas
, tallow candles and leather; on the right stands a sideboard with pipes and hand-towels; the dining-room contains family portraits, flies, a large pot of geraniums and a down-in-the-mouth piano; the drawing-room has three divans, three tables, two mirrors and a wheezy clock of blackened enamel with fretted, bronze hands; the study has a table piled with papers, a bluish draught-screen pasted with pictures cut from various works of the last century, cupboards full of stinking books, spiders and thick black dust, a stuffed armchair and an Italian window and a door into the garden that has been nailed up… In a word, everything is quite
appropriate. Mardary Apollonych has a mass of servants, and they are all dressed in old-fashioned style: long blue coats with high collars, trousers of some muddy colouring and short yellowish waistcoats. They use the old-fashioned address ‘good master' in speaking to guests. His estate is managed by a bailiff drawn from among his peasants, a man with a beard as long as his sheepskin coat; his house is run by an old woman, wrinkled and tight-fisted, with a brown kerchief wound round her head. His stables contain thirty horses of various sizes; he rides out in a home-made carriage weighing well over two and a half tons. He receives guests with the utmost warmth and entertains them lavishly – that is to say, thanks to the stupefying characteristics of Russian cookery, he deprives them, until right up to the evening, of any opportunity of doing anything apart from playing preference. He himself never occupies himself with anything and has even given up reading his dream-book. But we still have a good many such landowners in Russia. It may be asked: what's led me to mention him and why? In place of a straight answer, let me tell you about one of my visits to Mardary Apollonych.

I went over to his place one summer, about seven o'clock in the evening. Evening prayers had just concluded, and the priest, a young man, evidently very shy and only recently graduated from his seminary, was sitting in the drawing-room beside the door, perched on the very edge of a chair. Mardary Apollonych, as was his custom, received me exceptionally fondly: he was genuinely delighted to receive guests and, by and large, he was the kindest of men. The priest rose and picked up his hat.

‘One moment, one moment, my good fellow,' said Mardary Apollonych without leaving hold of my arm. ‘You mustn't be going. I've ordered them to bring you some vodka.'

‘I don't drink, sir,' the priest mumbled in confusion and reddened up to his ears.

‘What rubbish! You say you're a priest and you don't drink!' Mardary Apollonych retorted. ‘Mishka! Yushka! Vodka for the gentleman!'

Yushka, a tall and emaciated old man of about eighty, came in with a glass of vodka on a dark-painted tray covered with a variety of flesh-coloured splodges.

The priest proceeded to refuse.

‘Drink, my good fellow, and no fussing, it's not proper,' the landowner remarked in a reproachful tone.

The poor young man acquiesced.

‘Well now, my good fellow, you can go.'

The priest started bowing.

‘All right, all right, be off with you… An excellent fellow,' Mardary Apollonych continued, watching him depart, ‘and I'm very satisfied with him. The only thing is – he's still young. Preaches sermons all the time, and he doesn't drink. But how are you, my good fellow? What're you doing, how're things? Let's go out on to the balcony – you see what a fine evening it is.'

We went out on to the balcony, sat down and began to talk. Mardary Apollonych glanced downwards and suddenly became frightfully excited.

‘Whose are these chickens? Whose are these chickens?' he started shouting. ‘Whose are these chickens walking about the garden? Yushka! Yushka! Off with you and find out at once whose are these chickens walking about the garden. Whose are these chickens? How many times I've forbidden this, how many times I've said so!'