‘Well, what is it?’ continued Arkady Pavlych and at once turned to Sofron. ‘From which family?’
‘From the Toboleyev family,’ the Bailiff answered slowly.
‘Well, what’s it you’re after?’ Mr Penochkin started asking again. ‘Haven’t you got tongues, eh? Can’t you tell me what it is?’ he added, giving a nod towards the old man. ‘Don’t be afraid, you fool.’
The old man stretched out his dark, coal-brown wrinkled neck, crookedly drew apart lips that had grown blue with age and uttered in a husky voice, ‘Help us, lord and master!’ and again struck the earth with his forehead. The young peasant also made an obeisance. Arkady Pavlych looked with dignity at the napes of their necks, threw back his head and placed his feet slightly apart.
‘What is it? Who are you complaining about?’
‘Have mercy on us, lord and master! Give us a chance to catch our breath… Completely done in we are!’ (The old man spoke with difficulty.)
‘Who’s done you in?’
‘Sofron Yakovlich, it is, good master.’
Arkady Pavlych was silent for a moment.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Antip, good master.’
‘And who’s this?’
‘My boy, good master.’
Arkady Pavlych was again silent for a moment and twitched his whiskers.
‘Well, and how has he done you in?’ he asked, looking at the old man over his moustache.
‘Good master, ruined us he has, utterly. Two sons, good master, he’s sent off out of turn to be recruits, and now he’s taking away my third son… Yesterday, good master, he led away the last little cow from my yard and gave my wife a beating – that’s his worship over there what done it.’ (He pointed to the elder.)
‘Hmmm!’ pronounced Arkady Pavlych.
‘Don’t leave us to be completely ruined, bountiful master.’
Mr Penochkin frowned. ‘What does this all mean?’ he asked the Bailiff under his breath with a look of dissatisfaction.
‘A drunkard, sir,’ the Bailiff answered, using the formal ‘sir’ for the first time. ‘Doesn’t do any work. It’s already the fifth year, sir, that he’s behind with his payments.’
‘Sofron Yakovlich’s paid the arrears in for me,’ continued the old man. ‘It’s the fifth year’s gone by and he’s paid in, and paid in he has so as I’m in bondage to him, good master, that’s how it is…’
‘And why did you get into arrears?’ Mr Penochkin asked threateningly. (The old man bowed his head). ‘Suppose it’s because you like getting drunk, like roaming about from tavern to tavern?’ (The old man was on the point of opening his mouth.) ‘I know your sort,’ Arkady Pavlych continued vehemently, ‘all you do is drink and lie on the stove and let good peasants answer for you.’
‘And insolent as well,’ the Bailiff inserted into his master’s speech.
‘Well, that goes without saying. That’s always the way of it – I’ve noticed that more than once. He’ll spend the whole year lazing about and being insolent and now he flops down on his knees at your feet!’
‘Good master, Arkady Pavlych,’ the old man started saying desperately, ‘be merciful, help me – how am I insolent? As I speak now before the Lord God I’m being made helpless by it all, I am. He’s taken a dislike to me, Sofron Yakovlich has, and why he’s done so only the Lord can judge! He’s ruining me utterly, good master… Here’s my last son – and now he’s to go, too…’ (Teardrops glittered in the old man’s yellow and wrinkled eyes.) ‘Be merciful, my lord and master, help me…’
‘Aye, and it’s not only us…’ the young peasant was on the point of beginning.
Arkady Pavlych suddenly flared up:
‘And who’s asking you, eh? Nobody’s asking you, so you be quiet… What is this? Be quiet, I’m telling you! Be quiet! Oh, my God, this is quite simply rebellion. No, my friend, I don’t advise you to try being rebellious on my property… on my property…’ (Arkady Pavlych took a step forward and then, no doubt, remembered my presence, turned away and placed his hands in his pockets.) ‘Je vous demande bien pardon, mon cher,’ he said with a forced smile, lowering his voice meaningfully. ‘C’est le mauvais côté de la médaille… Well, all right, all right,’ he continued without looking at the peasants, ‘I’ll issue an order… all right, be off with you.’ (The peasants did not rise.) ‘Well, didn’t I say to you… all right. Be off with you, I’ll issue an order, I’m telling you that.’
Arkady Pavlych turned his back on them. ‘No end of unpleasantness,’ he uttered through his teeth and made for home with big strides. Sofron followed in his wake. The clerk’s eyes almost popped out of his head, just as if he was preparing himself for a very high jump. The elder drove the ducks out of the pool. The petitioners remained for a short while where they were, looked at each other and then plodded off without looking back.
Two hours later I was already in Ryabovo, and together with Anpadist, a peasant acquaintance of mine, I was preparing to go hunting. Right up to my very departure Penochkin had been huffy towards Sofron. I struck up a conversation with Anpadist about the Shipilovka peasants and Mr Penochkin, and I asked whether he knew the Bailiff in that village.
‘Sofron Yakovlich, you mean? Sure!’
‘What sort of man is he?’
‘He’s a dog, not a man. You won’t find another dog like him this side of Kursk.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s like this. Shipilovka’s no more’n registered in the name of-what’s he called? – that Penkin. He doesn’t really own it. It’s Sofron who owns it.’
‘Do you really mean that?’
‘He owns it like it’s his own property. The peasants all around are owing him money. They work for him like they were in bondage to him. One he’ll send off with a string of carts, another he’ll send off somewhere else… bled them white he has.’
‘It seems they haven’t got much land?’
‘Not much? He rents 216 acres just from the Khlynov peasants and 324 from our peasants – that’s a good five hundred acres for you. And he isn’t only trading in land: he does trade in horses, too, and cattle, and tar, and butter, and hemp, and this and that… Clever, awful clever, he is, and rich, too, the varmint! What’s bad about him is – he’s always knocking someone about. A wild beast, not a man. I tell you he’s a dog, a cur, a real cur if ever there was one.’
‘Then why don’t they complain against him?’
‘Phew! The master doesn’t need to bother! There aren’t any arrears, so what’s it got to do with him? And just you try it,’ he added after a short pause, ‘try complaining. No, he’ll get you… yes, you just try it. No, he’ll just get you, just like that he will…’
I remembered about Antip and told him what I had seen.
‘Well,’ declared Anpadist, ‘he’ll eat him up now, eat him good and proper, he will. The elder’ll start beating him up now. What bad luck he’s had, the poor wretch, when you think of it! And what’s he going through it for?… It was just that at a meeting he got cross with him, with the Bailiff, couldn’t stand any more, you know… Mighty big matter, that! So he began pecking at him, at Antip. Now he’ll eat him right up. He’s just that kind of a cur, a dog – the Lord forgive me for my sins – that he knows who to get his teeth into. The old men what are richer and with bigger families, them he doesn’t touch, the bald-headed devil – but in this case he’s lost his control! After all, he sent off Antip’s sons out of turn to become recruits, the unpardonable rogue, the cur – the Lord forgive me for my sins!’
We went off hunting.
Salzbrunn, in Silesia
July 1847
THE OFFICE
IT was in the autumn. I’d already been wandering about the fields with my gun for several hours and would probably not have returned before evening to the inn on the Kursk highway where my troika was waiting for me, if an extraordinarily fine and chilly rain, which had been plaguing me since early morning as fractiously and mercilessl
y as a complaining old maid, hadn’t forced me finally to look somewhere close by for temporary shelter. While I was considering which way to go, my eyes were caught by a small shack beside a field sown with peas. I approached the shack, peered under the straw roof and saw an old man of such decrepitude that I immediately thought of the dying goat that Robinson Crusoe’d found in one of the caves on his island. The old man was squatting on his haunches, squeezing up his small darkened eyes and rapidly but carefully chewing like a hare (the poor fellow didn’t have a single tooth) a hard, dried pea, rolling it ceaselessly from one side to the other. He was so preoccupied by this that he didn’t notice my approach.
‘Grandad! Hey, grandad!’ I said.
He stopped chewing, lifted his brows high and with an effort opened his eyes.
‘What?’ he mumbled huskily.
‘Where’s a nearby village?’ I asked him.
The old man again set about chewing. He hadn’t heard me. I repeated my question more loudly.
‘A village. Which one d’you want?’
‘Just to shelter from the rain.’
‘What?’
‘To shelter from the rain.’
‘Ah!’ (He scratched the sunburnt nape of his neck.) ‘Well, you go, see,’ he started saying suddenly, waving his arms about disconnectedly, ‘see over there… see, you go by that wood, see it – you go by that – and there’s a road. Don’t pay no attention to it, that road, see, but keep right, keep right, keep right… Well, you’ll come to Ananyevo. The other way’ll be Sitovka.’
I had difficulty understanding the old man. His whiskers got in the way and his tongue wouldn’t obey him.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked him.
‘What?’
‘Where are you from?’
‘From Ananyevo.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘What?’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m keeping guard.’
‘On what?’
‘The peas.’
I couldn’t help laughing.
‘For heaven’s sake, how old are you?’
‘God knows.’
‘Maybe you don’t see so well?’
‘What?’
‘Your eyesight’s bad, isn’t it?’
‘It is. It does happen I don’t hear nothin’ neither.’
‘So how can you be a guard, for heaven’s sake?’
‘That’s for the guv’nors to know.’
‘The guv’nors!’ I thought and looked at the poor old man not without a certain pity. He felt about and got a piece of dry bread out of his breast pocket and started sucking at it like a baby, the effort pulling in his already sunken cheeks.
I went off in the direction of the wood, turned to the right and kept to the right, as the old man had advised me, and finally reached a large village with a stone church in the latest taste, that is, with columns, and an extensive manor house also with columns. From a distance, through the busy network of falling rain, I noticed a hut with a plank roof and two chimneys standing above the others, presumably the house of the village headman, and I directed my footsteps towards it in the hope of finding there a samovar, tea, sugar and cream that had not yet gone completely sour. Accompanied by my shivering dog I climbed on to the porch, went into the entrance-way and opened the door, but instead of the usual accoutrements of a peasant’s hut I found several tables piled with papers, two large red cupboards, ink-stained inkwells, tin sand-boxes of enormous weight, the longest quill pens imaginable and so on and so forth. Seated on one of the tables was a young man of about twenty with a puffy and unhealthy face, the tiniest eyes, a fat forehead and endlessly receding temples. He was appropriately dressed in a grey nankeen caftan which had gone shiny with dirt at the collar and over the stomach.
‘What do you want?’ he asked me, jerking his head up like a horse which hadn’t expected to be grabbed by the muzzle.
‘Does the bailiff live here… or…’
‘This is the main estate office,’ he interrupted. ‘I’m sitting here on duty. Didn’t you see the notice? That’s what the notice is there for.’
‘Is there anywhere I can get dry round here? Does anyone in the village have a samovar?’
‘Of course there are samovars,’ the fellow in the grey caftan answered pompously. ‘Try Father Timofey’s, or if not there then the servants’ hut, or if not there Nazar Tarasych, or if not there then Agrafena, the poultry-woman.’
‘Who’re you talking to, you bloody oaf? You’re not letting me sleep, you oaf!’ a voice shouted from the next room.
‘A gentleman’s come in, he’s asking where he can get dried.’
‘What gentleman?’
‘I dunno. With a dog and a gun.’
A bed creaked in the next room. The door opened and a man of about fifty entered, fat, stocky, with a bull neck, protruding eyes, unusually round cheeks and a face shiny with sweat.
‘What do you want?’ he asked me.
‘To get dried.’
‘This isn’t the place.’
‘I didn’t know this was an office. In any case, I’m prepared to pay…’
‘Please, make yourself at home here,’ the Fatso responded. ‘Maybe you’d care to come this way.’ (He led me into another room, but not the one he’d come out of.) ‘Will it be all right for you here?’
‘It’s all right… Would it be possible to have some tea and some cream?’
‘Of course, right away. You undress and have a rest, and the tea’ll be ready right away.’
‘Whose estate is this?’
‘It belongs to Mrs Losnyakova, Yelena Nikolaevna.’
He went out. I looked round me. Along the partition which separated my room from the office stood a large leather divan. Two chairs, also of leather, with extremely high backs, stood on either side of the only window, which looked out on to the street. On the walls hung with green wallpaper decorated in rose-coloured patterns were three enormous oil paintings. One depicting a setter in a blue collar bore the title: ‘Such is my Pleasure’. At the dog’s feet there flowed a river, and on the opposite bank of the river under a fir tree sat a hare of unbelievably large proportions with one ear raised. Another painting depicted two old men eating a melon. In the background behind the melon could be seen a Greek portico bearing the device: ‘The Temple of Contentment’.1 The third picture represented a half-naked woman in a recumbent position en raccourci or so foreshortened that her knees were red and her heels exceedingly fat. Without a moment’s hesitation my dog crawled under the divan with stupendous effort and evidently found a great deal of dust there, because it had an appalling sneezing fit. I went to the window. Lying diagonally across the street from the manor house to the office were wooden boards, which was a very useful precaution because all around, thanks to our black earth soil and the continuous rain, the mud was dreadful. In the vicinity of the manor itself, which stood with its back to the street, things were going on as they usually do in the vicinity of manors: maidservants in faded calico were dashing to and fro; menservants were wandering about in the mud, stopping occasionally and thoughtfully scratching their backs; the tethered horse of the local policeman lazily waved its tail and, its muzzle raised high, gnawed at the fence; hens clucked; consumptive-looking turkeys gobbled away endlessly. On the porch of a dark and rotting structure, very likely the bath-house, sat a hefty youth with a guitar, singing not without verve the well-known love-song:
Oy be offter deestant deeserts gone
Far away from thizere beauteous spots… (and so on)2
The Fatso came into my room.
‘Your tea’s just coming now,’ he told me with a pleasant smile.
The fellow in the grey caftan, the duty clerk, set out on an old card-table a samovar, teapot, a glass on a cracked saucer, a jug of cream and a string of local pretzels which were as hard as flint. The Fatso went out.
‘Who’s he?’ I asked the duty clerk. ‘The steward?’
&nbs
p; ‘No, sir, no way. He used to be the chief cashier, sir, but now he’s been made a chief clerk.’
‘Haven’t you any stewards, then?’
‘No, sir, no way. There’s a bailiff, Mikhail Vikulov, but there ain’t no stewards.’
‘Is there a manager, then?’
‘Why, ‘course there is, a German, Lindamandol, Karlo Karlych, only he doesn’t really manage.’
‘Who does, then?’
‘The mistress, she does, by herself.’
‘Well, well! Tell me, do you have many people in your office?’
The fellow gave it some thought.
‘There are six people.’
‘Who are they?’ I asked.
‘This is who they are. First there’ll be Vasily Nikolaevich, he’s chief cashier. Then there’s Pyotr the clerk, and his brother Ivan who’s a clerk, and another Ivan who’s a clerk. Koskenkin Narkizov, he’s also a clerk, and then there’s me. Oh, I can’t remember how many there are.’
‘So does your mistress keep a lot of servants?’
‘No, not all that many…’
‘How many then?’
‘It’ll run up to maybe hundred ‘n’ fifty.’
We were both silent.
‘Well, do you write well?’ I asked, setting things going again.
The fellow gave a broad smile, nodded, went off into the office and brought back with him a sheet of paper with writing on it.
‘Here’s how I write,’ he said, still smiling.
I looked at it. On a quarto sheet of greyish paper the following was written in handsome, large handwriting:
AN ORDER
FROM THE CHIEF MANORIAL HOME OFFICE OF ANANYEVO TO
BAILIFF MIKHAIL VIKULOV
NO. 209
It is hereby demanded of you that immediately on receipt of this you ascertain who did last night, being pissed and singing indecent songs, pass near the English garden and did awaken and disturb the governess, the French lady, Madame Eugenie? And what were the nightwatchmen up to and who was on duty in the garden and who permitted such disorders to occur? It is hereby demanded that you inquire in detail into all the above and report immediately to the office.