Sketches from a Hunter's Album (49 page)

And on a wintry day to go walking through the high snowdrifts in search of hares, to breathe in the frosty, sharp-edged air, to crinkle one's eyes unwillingly against the dazzling, finely speckled glitter of the soft snow, to wonder at the green hue of the sky above a reddening forest!… And then there are the first spring days, when all around everything gleams and crashes down, and the smell of the warmer earth begins to rise through the heavy steam of melting snow, and skylarks sing trustingly under the sun's oblique rays on patches where the snow has thawed, and, with a gay noise, a gay roaring, the torrents go whirling from ravine to ravine…

*

It is time, however, to finish. Appropriately I have mentioned the spring; in springtime it is easy to say goodbye, in the spring even the happy are enticed to far-off places… Farewell, my reader; I wish you lasting happiness and well-being.

O
NCE
I followed my dog into a field of buckwheat which did not belong to me at all. In our obliging Fatherland anyone is free to shoot where he likes, on his own land or on his neighbour's. Apart from a few elderly and shrewish ladies, and landowners who have perfected themselves on the English pattern, no one so much as thinks of forbidding strangers from hunting on their lands. I had barely succeeded in taking a few steps when I heard loud shouts from behind me. It did not occur to me that I was being shouted at in person, and I continued very calmly, with all the thorough conscientiousness of a hunter, walking backwards and forwards across the field, until I finally heard quite clearly:

‘What're you doing, master, trampling down the buckwheat? You mustn't, it's not allowed…'

I turned round and saw a peasant in a cloth coat, with an unusually picturesque and wavy beard, who was walking directly towards me and waving his arms wildly. I stopped.

‘T'ain't right for you to be walking through the buckwheat. Stop, or I'll take you to the bailiff. A fine's laid down for this and there's an order issued about it,' the peasant said as he walked, shaking his head.

Eventually he came up to me. I apologized. He made a grumbling sound. But the prohibition against walking through the buckwheat seemed to me so strange in our beautiful Russia, the more so since it was a steppe province, that I could not refrain from asking the peasant who had given him such an order.

‘Who?' the peasant retorted with displeasure. ‘Who? The master himself.'

‘And who's your master?'

The peasant did not answer at once and played with his belt. ‘Makarat Ivanych Shvokhtel…'

‘Who on earth…?'

The peasant repeated his master's name. ‘But maybe,' he added, ‘you'd be having some snuff?'

‘No, I don't, but take this to buy some with.'

The peasant thanked me, took off his cap and became much happier.

‘So it's not allowed, is it?' I asked him.

‘ 'S not allowed,' he replied smiling, like a man who, though he is doing what his master orders, feels for his own part that the orders are in fact ridiculous. ‘ 'Course,' he continued, ‘buckwheat's not peas; no point in having someone to guard it, seein' as someone might start eatin' it raw… But that's the sort of master we have. He'd grind rye in a thimble, he would, the Lord forgive us.'

That same week it happened that I became acquainted with the very man. Mr Leberecht Fochtlender was born, so rumour had it, in the glorious German township of Guzbach. In his twenty-fifth year he entered the Russian civil service, occupied various posts for a period of thirty-two and a half years, retiring with the seventh-grade rank of aulic councillor and the Order of St Anne. He had married at forty. He was small in stature and on the thin side; he used to sport a brown frock-coat of old-style cut, grey trousers, a small silver watch attached by a string of blue beads and a high white cravat which gathered in folds right up to his ears. He held himself very straight and walked about with a prim haughtiness, now and then turning his small head. He had a small, smooth face, light-blue eyes, a sharp little nose, semicircular sideburns, a forehead covered with tiny wrinkles and thin tightly closed lips.

I
WAS
sitting in the so-called ‘clean' room of a wayside inn on the main Kursk road and asking the innkeeper, a stout man with wavy grey hair, bulging eyes and sagging stomach, about the number of hunters who had recently visited the Telegin marsh, when the door was suddenly flung wide open and a traveller entered the room, a tall, graceful gentleman in a stylish travelling coat. He removed his cap.

‘Yevgeny Alexandrych!' I cried. ‘What luck, eh?'

‘Ah, ***!' he exclaimed in his turn.

We shook each other's hands. ‘How pleased I am, how pleased,' we both babbled, not without a certain tenseness.

‘Where in God's name are you going?' I asked at last.

‘To Kursk… I've come into an inheritance.'

‘Has your aunt died?' I asked with a modest show of sympathy.

‘She's died,' he answered with a faint sigh. ‘Innkeeper!' he added in a loud voice, ‘the samovar – and quick about it! Yes,' he continued, turning to me again, ‘she's died. I'm just now on my way to receive what she's left me.'

Yevgeny Alexandrych's servant came in, a young man with reddish-coloured hair and dressed in the manner of a
chasseur
.

‘Hans!' my acquaintance declared. ‘
Geben Sie mir eine Pfeife
.'

Hans went out.

‘Is your valet a German?' I asked.

‘No, he's – er – a Finn,' answered Yevgeny Alexandrych, leaving intervals between the words. ‘But he understands German.'

‘And he speaks Russian?'

Yevgeny Alexandrych paused briefly before saying: ‘Oh, yes, he speaks it!'

Hans returned, respectfully set the pipe directly between his master's lips, placed a square-shaped scrap of white paper on the bowl and touched a match to it. His master began to smoke, taking the pipe with the side of his mouth, and contorting his lips over the amber stem like a dog seizing a hedgehog. The innkeeper brought in a hissing and bubbling samovar. I took a seat beside Yevgeny Alexandrych and struck up a conversation with him.

I had known Yevgeny Alexandrych Ladygin in St Petersburg. He was a tall, personable man with large bright eyes, an aquiline nose and a resolute expression of the face. All who knew him, and many who did not, spoke of him as a ‘practical' man. He expressed himself without grandiloquence, but powerfully; while listening to others, he used to clench his jaws in impatience and let his cheek twitch; he was self-assured in his speeches and he would walk about the streets at a brisk pace without moving either his arms or his head, darting his eyes rapidly from side to side. Seeing him, more than one passerby no doubt exclaimed despite himself: ‘Phew, there's a man for you, by God! Where's that fellow off to?' But Yevgeny Alexandrych was simply on his way to dinner.

Rising from the table, he used to button his coat right up to the neck with such chill and concentrated resoluteness that he might have been setting off at that very moment to fight a duel, having just put his signature to his will. And yet, despite this, there was not a trace of boastfulness to be discerned in him: he was a stubborn man, one-sided and insistent in his opinions, but no fool, not malicious, looking everyone straight in the eye and fond of justice… True, he would have found it much pleasanter to punish oppressors than alleviate the lot of the oppressed, but there can be no accounting for people's tastes. He did four years or so of service in a guards regiment, and the remainder of his life was fearfully busy – with what? you may ask… With nothing save various futile matters, which he always set about in a fever of activity and with systematic stubbornness. He was a type of Russian pedant – Russian, take note, not Little Russian. There is an enormous difference between the two, to which attention should be paid more than ever now that, since Gogol's time,
¹
these two related, but opposed, nationalities have often been confused.

‘Are you going to spend a long time in the country?' I asked Ladygin.

‘I don't know – perhaps it'll be a long time,' he answered me with concentrated energy and glanced away indifferently, like a man of strong character who has taken an irrevocable decision but is ready, notwithstanding, to take account of that fact.

‘You must have a host of plans in mind?' I remarked.

‘Plans? It depends what you call plans. You don't think, do you,' he added with a grin, ‘that I belong to the school of young landowners who find difficulty in telling the difference between oats and buckwheat and dream of English winnowing machines, threshing machines, rotation of crops, sugar-beet factories and brick huts with little gardens facing on to the street? I can assure you that I have nothing in common with those gentlemen. I'm a practical man. But I do have a number of ideas in mind… I don't know whether I'll succeed in doing everything I intend doing,' he added with modest arrogance, ‘but, in any case, I'll try.'

‘It's like this, you see,' he continued, transferring his pipe with dignity from his right hand to his left and grandly emitting smoke through his whiskers, ‘it's time for us landowners to start using our brains. It's time to look into the way our peasants live and, having once understood what their needs are, to lead them firmly along a new road towards a chosen aim…' He fell into a reverential silence in the presence of his own phrase. ‘That's my basic idea for you,' he started up again. ‘Russia in general must have – and consequently the way of life of the Russian peasant must have – its own indigenous, characteristic, so to speak, aim for the future. Isn't that true? It must, mustn't it? In that case you must strive to perceive it and then act in accordance with its spirit. It's a difficult task, but nothing is given us for nothing. I will gladly devote myself to it… I'm free to do it and I sense in myself a certain firmness of character. I have no preconceived system: I'm not a Slavophil and I'm not a devotee of the West… I, though I say it again, I am a practical man – and I know… I know how to get things done!'

‘That's all very fine,' I protested. ‘You – if I may be so bold as to say so – you want to be a little Peter the Great of your own village.'

‘You're laughing at me!' Yevgeny Alexandrych said animatedly. ‘Though,' he added after a short pause, ‘what you've said has an element of truth in it.'

‘I wish you every possible success,' I remarked.

‘Thank you for wishing…'

Yevgeny Alexandrych's servant entered the room.

‘
Sind die Pferde angespannt, Hans?
' my acquaintance asked.

‘
Ja… Sie sind
. They're ready, sir,' Hans answered.

Yevgeny Alexandrych hastily finished his tea, rose and drew on his overcoat.

‘I don't dare to invite you to stay with me,' he declared. ‘It's more than seventy miles to my village. However, if it should occur to you to…'

I thanked him. We said goodbye. He drove off.

For the space of a whole year I heard nothing of my St Petersburg friend. Once only, I recall, at a dinner given by the Marshal of Nobility a certain eloquent landowner, a retired chief of the fire brigade called Sheptunovich, referred in my presence (between swigs of madeira) to Yevgeny Alexandrych as a member of the nobility given to daydreaming and a man readily carried away by his own ideas. The majority of the guests at once expressed agreement with the fire-brigade chief, but one of them, a stout man with a purplish face and unusually wide teeth, who vaguely reminded one of some sort of healthy root vegetable, added for his own part that he, Ladygin, had something wrong with him up there (indicating his temples) – and gave regretful shakes of his own remarkable head. Apart from this instance, no one even so much as uttered Yevgeny Alexandrych's name in my presence. But on one occasion, in the autumn, it happened to me, while travelling from marsh to marsh, to land up a long way from home. A fearful thunderstorm caught me out on the open road. Happily, a village could be seen not far off. With difficulty we reached the outskirts of the village. My driver turned towards the gates of the nearest hut and shouted for the hut's owner. The man, an upstanding peasant of about forty, let us in. His hut was not remarkable for its neatness, but it was warm inside and not smoky. In the entrance-way a woman was frantically chopping up cabbage.