The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  “Then we should sweep you English bastards into the sea!” he roared. “A few of your Scarletts and Flashmans and Carragans – that is the name, no? – that is all we need!”

  But drunk as he was, when he finally rose from the table he was careful to turn in the direction of the church, and cross himself devoutly, before stumbling to guide me up the stairs.

  I was to see a different side to Pencherjevsky – and to all of them for that matter – in the winter that followed, but for the first few weeks of my sojourn at Starotorsk I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and felt absolutely at home. It was so much better than I had expected, the Count was so amiable in his bear-like, thundering way, his ladies were civil (for I’d decided to go warily before attempting a more intimate acquaintance with Valla) and easy with me, and East and I were allowed such freedom, that it was like a month of week-ends at an English country-house, without any of the stuffiness. You could come and go as you pleased, treat the place as your own, attend at meal-times or feed in your chamber, whichever suited – it was Liberty Hall, no error. I divided my days between working really hard at my Russian, going for walks or rides with Valla and Sara or East, prosing with the Count in the evenings, playing cards with the family – they have a form of whist called “biritsch” which has caught on in England this last few years, and we played that most evenings – and generally taking life easy. My interest in Russian they found especially flattering, for they are immensely proud and sensitive about their country, and I made even better progress than usual. I soon spoke and understood it better than East – “He has a Cossack somewhere in his family!” Pencherjevsky would bawl. “Let him add a beard to those foolish English whiskers and he can ride with the Kubans – eh, colonel?”

  All mighty pleasant – until you discovered that the civility and good nature were no deeper than a May frost, the thin covering on totally alien beings. For all their apparent civilization, and even good taste, the barbarian was just under the surface, and liable to come raging out. It was easy to forget this, until some word or incident reminded you – that this pleasant house and estate were like a medieval castle, under feudal law; that this jovial, hospitable giant, who talked so knowledgeably of cavalry tactics and the hunting field, and played chess like a master, was also as dangerous and cruel as a cannibal chief; that his ladies, chattering cheerfully about French dressmaking or flower arrangement, were in some respects rather less feminine than Dahomey Amazons.

  One such incident I’ll never forget. There was an evening when the four of us were in the salon, Pencherjevsky and I playing chess – he had handicapped himself by starting without queen or castle, to make a game of it – and the women at some two-handed game of cards across the room. Aunt Sara was quiet, as usual, and Valla prattling gaily, and squeaking with vexation when she lost. I wasn’t paying much attention, for I was happy with the Count’s brandy, and looked like beating him for once, too, but when I heard them talking about settling the wager I glanced across, and almost fell from my chair.

  Valla’s maid and the housekeeper had come into the room. The maid – a serf girl – was kneeling by the card table, and the housekeeper was carefully shearing off her long red hair with a pair of scissors. Aunt Sara was watching idly; Valla wasn’t even noticing until the housekeeper handed her the tresses.

  “Ah, how pretty!” says she, and shrugged, and tossed them over to Aunt Sara, who stroked them, and said:

  “Shall I keep them for a wig, or sell them? Thirty roubles in Moscow or St Petersburg.” And she held them up in the light, considering.

  “More than Vera is worth now, at any rate,” says Valla, carelessly. Then she jumped up, ran across to Pencherjevsky, and put her arms round his shaggy neck from behind, blowing in his ear. “Father, may I have fifty roubles for a new maid?”

  “What’s that?” says he, deep in the game. “Wait, child, wait; I have this English rascal trapped, if only …”

  “Just fifty roubles, father. See, I cannot keep Vera now.”

  He looked up, saw the maid, who was still kneeling, cropped like a convict, and guffawed. “She doesn’t need hair to hang up your dresses and fetch your shoes, does she? Learn to count your aces, you silly girl.”

  “Oh, father! You know she will not do now! Only fifty roubles – please – from my kind little batiushka!”d

  “Ah, plague take you, can a man not have peace? Fifty roubles, then, to be let alone. And next time, bet something that I will not have to replace out of my purse.” He pinched her cheek. “Check, colonel.”

  I’ve a strong stomach, as you know, but I’ll admit that turned it – not the disfigurement of a pretty girl, you understand, although I didn’t hold with that, much, but the cheerful unconcern with which they did it – those two cultured ladies, in that elegant room, as though they had been gaming for sweets or counters. And now Valla was leaning on her father’s shoulder, gaily urging him on to victory, and Sara was running the hair idly through her hands, while the kneeling girl bowed her pathetically shorn head to the floor and then followed the housekeeper from the room. Well, thinks I, they’d be a rage in London society, these two. You may have noticed, by the way, that the cost of a maid was fifty roubles, of which her hair was worth thirty.

  Of course, they didn’t think of her as human. I’ve told you something of the serfs already, and most of that I learned first-hand on the Pencherjevsky estate, where they were treated as something worse than cattle. The more fortunate of them lived in the outbuildings and were employed about the house, but most of them were down in the village, a filthy, straggling place of log huts, called isbas, with entrances so low you had to stoop to go in. They were foul, verminous hovels, consisting of just one room, with a huge bed bearing many pillows, a big stove, and a “holy corner” in which there were poor, garish pictures of their saints.

  Their food was truly fearful – rye bread for the most part, and cabbage soup with a lump of fat in it, salt cabbage, garlic stew, coarse porridge, and for delicacies, sometimes a little cucumber or beetroot. And those were the well-fed ones. Their drink was as bad – bread fermented in alcohol which they call qvass (“it’s black, it’s thick, and it makes you drunk,” as they said), and on special occasions vodka, which is just poison. They’ll sell their souls for brandy, but seldom get it.

  Such conditions of squalor, half the year in stifling heat, half in unimaginable cold, and all spent in back-breaking labour, are probably enough to explain why they were such an oppressed, dirty, brutish, useless people – just like the Irish, really, but without the gaiety. Even the Mississippi niggers were happier – there was never a smile on the face of your serf, just patient, morose misery.

  And yet that wasn’t the half of their trouble. I remember the court that Pencherjevsky used to hold in a barn at the back of the house, and those cringing creatures crawling on their bellies along the floor to kiss the edge of his coat, while he pronounced sentence on them for their offences. You may not believe them, but they’re true, and I noted them at the time.

  There was the local dog-killer – every Russian village is plagued in winter by packs of wild dogs, who are a real danger to life, and this fellow had to chase and club them to death – he got a few kopecks for each pelt. But he had been shirking his job, it seemed.

  “Forty strokes of the cudgel,” says Pencherjevsky. And then he added: “Siberia,” at which a great wail went up from the crowd trembling at the far end of the barn. One of the Cossacks just lashed at them with his nagaika,e and the wail died.

  There was an iron collar for a woman whose son had run off, and floggings, either with the cudgel or the whip, for several who had neglected their labouring in Pencherjevsky’s fields. There was Siberia for a youth employed to clean windows at the house, who had started work too early and disturbed Valla, and for one of the maids who had dropped a dish. You will say, “Ah, here’s Flashy pulling the long bow”, but I’m not, and if you don’t believe me, ask any professor of Russian history.25

  But
here’s the point – if you’d suggested to Pencherjevsky or his ladies, or even to the serfs, that such punishments were cruel, they’d have thought you were mad. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to them – why, I’ve seen a man cudgelled by the Cossacks in Pencherjevsky’s courtyard – tied to a post half-naked in the freezing weather, and smashed with heavy rods until he was a moaning lump of bruised and broken flesh, with half his ribs cracked – and through it all Valla was standing not ten yards away, never even glancing in his direction, but discussing a new sledge-harness with one of the grooms.

  Pencherjevsky absolutely believed that his moujiks were well off. “Have I hot given them a stone church, with a blue dome and gilt stars? How many villages can show the like, eh?” And when those he had condemned to years of exile in Siberia were driven off in a little coffle under the nagaikas of the Cossacks – they would be taken to the nearest town, to join other unfortunates, and they would all walk the whole way – he was there to give them his blessing, and they would embrace his knees, crying: “Izvenete, batiushka, veno vat,”f and he would nod and say “Horrosho,”g while the housekeeper gave them bundles of dainties from the “Sudariniah Valla”. God knows what they were – cucumber rinds, probably.

  “From me they have strict justice, under the law,” says this amazing gorilla. “And they love me for it. Has anyone ever seen the knout, or the butuksi used on my estate? No, and never shall. If I correct them, it is because without correction they will become idle and shiftless, and ruin me – and themselves. For without me, where are they? These poor souls, they believe the world rests on three whales swimming in the Eternal Sea! What are you to do with such folk? I will meet with the best, the wisest of them, the spokesman of their gromada,j driving his droshky.k ‘Ha, Ivan,’ I will say, ‘your axles squeal; why do you not grease them?’ And he ponders, and replies, ‘Only a thief is afraid to make a noise, batiushka.’ So the axles remain ungreased – unless I cudgel his foolish head, or have the Cossacks whip and salt his back for him. And he respects me” – he would thump his great fist on his thigh as he said it – “because he knows I am a bread and salt man, and go with my neck open, as he does.26 And I am just – to the inch.”

  And you may say he was: when he flogged his dvornikl for insolence, and the fellow collapsed before the prescribed punishment was finished, they sent him to the local quack – and when he was better, gave him the remaining strokes. “Who would trust me again, if I excused him a single blow?” says Pencherjevsky.

  Now, I don’t recite all these barbarities to shock or excite your pity, or to pose as one of those holy hypocrites who pretend to be in a great sweat about man’s inhumanity to man. I’ve seen too much of it, and know it happens wherever strong folk have absolute power over spiritless creatures. I merely tell you truly what I saw – as for my own view, well, I’m all for keeping the peasants in order, and if hammering ’em does good, and makes life better for the rest of us, you won’t find me leaping between the tyrant and his victim crying “Stay, cruel despot!” But I would observe that much of the cruelty I saw in Russia was pure senseless brutishness – I doubt if they even enjoyed it much. They just knew no better.

  I wondered sometimes why the serfs, dull, ignorant, superstitious clods though they were, endured it. The truth, as I learned it from Pencherjevsky, was that they didn’t, always. In the thirty years just ending when I was in Russia, there had been peasant revolts once every fortnight, in one part of the country or another, and as often as not it had taken the military to put them down. Or rather, it had taken the Cossacks, for the Russian army was a useless thing, as we’d seen in the Crimea. You can’t make soldiers out of slaves. But the Cossacks were free, independent tribesmen; they had land, and paid little tax, had their own tribal laws, drank themselves stupid, and served the Tsar from boyhood till they were fifty because they loved to ride and fight and loot – and they liked nothing better than to use their nagaikas on the serfs, which was just nuts to them.

  Pencherjevsky wasn’t worried about revolution among his own moujiks because, as I say, he regarded himself as a good master. Also he had Cossacks of his own to strike terror into any malcontents. “And I never commit the great folly,” says he. “I never touch a serf-woman – or allow one to be used or sold as a concubine.” (Whether he said it for my benefit or not, it was bad news, for I hadn’t had a female in ages, and some of the peasants – like Valla’s maid – were not half bad-looking once they were washed.) “These uprisings on other estates – look into them, and I’ll wager every time the master has ravished some serf wench, or stolen a moujik’s wife, or sent a young fellow into the army so that he can enjoy his sweetheart. They don’t like it, I tell you – and I don’t blame them! If a lord wants a woman, let him marry one, or buy one from far afield – but let him slake his lust on one of his own serf-women, and he’ll wake up one fine morning with a split head and his roof on fire. And serve him right!”

  I gathered he was unusual in this view: most landlords just used the serf-wenches the way American owners used their nigger girls, and pupped ’em all over the place. But Pencherjevsky had his own code, and believed his moujiks thought the better of him for it, and were content. I wondered if he wasn’t gammoning himself.

  Because I paid attention, toady-like, to his proses, and was eager in studying his language, he assumed I was interested in his appalling country and its ways, and was at pains to educate me, as he saw it. From him I learned of the peculiar laws governing the serfs – how they might be free if they could run away for ten years, how some of them were allowed to leave the estates and work in the towns, provided they sent a proportion of earnings to their master; how some of these serfs became vastly rich – richer than their masters, sometimes, and worth millions – but still could not buy their freedom unless he wished. Some serfs even owned serfs. It was an idiotic system, of course, but the landowners were all for it, and even the humanitarian ones believed that if it were changed, and political reforms allowed, the country would dissolve in anarchy. I daresay they were right, but myself I believe it will happen anyway; it was starting even then, as Pencherjevsky admitted.

  “The agitators are never idle,” says he. “You have heard of the pernicious German-Jew, Marx?” (I didn’t like to tell him Marx had been at my wedding, as an uninvited guest.m) “He vomits his venom over Europe – aye, he and other vile rascals like him would spread their poison even to our country if they could.27 Praise God the moujiks are unlettered folk – but they can hear, and our cities crawl with revolutionary criminals of the lowest stamp. What do they understand of Russia, these filth? What do they seek to do but ruin her? And yet countries like your own give harbour to such creatures, to brew their potions of hate against us! Aye, and against you, too, if you could only see it! You think to encourage them, for the downfall of your enemies, but you will reap the wild wind also, Colonel Flashman!”

  “Well, you know, Count,” says I, “we let chaps say what they like, pretty well, always have done. We don’t have any kabala,n like you – don’t seem to need it, for some reason. Probably because we have factories, and so on, and everyone’s kept busy, don’t you know? I don’t doubt all you say is true – but it suits us, you see. And our moujiks are, well, different from yours.” I wondered, even as I said it, if they were; remembering that hospital at Yalta, I doubted it. But I couldn’t help adding: “Would your moujiks have ridden into the battery at Balaclava?”

  At this he roared with laughter, and called me an evil English rascal, and clapped me on the back. We were mighty close, he and I, really, when I look back – but of course, he never really knew me.

  So you see what kind of man he was, and what kind of a place it was. Most of the time, I liked it – it was a fine easy life until, as I say, you got an unpleasant reminder of what an alien, brooding hostile land it was. It was frightening then, and I had to struggle to make myself remember that England and London and Elspeth still existed, that far away to the south Cardigan was still
croaking “Haw-haw” and Raglan was fussing in the mud at Sevastopol. I would look out of my window sometimes, at the snow-frosted garden, and beyond it the vast, white, endless plain, streaked only by the dark field-borders, and it seemed the old world was just a dream. It was easy then, to get the Russian melancholy, which sinks into the bones, and is born of a knowledge of helplessness far from home.

  The thing that bored me most, needless to say, was being without a woman. I tried my hand with Valla, when we got to know each other and I had decided she wasn’t liable to run squealing to her father. By George, she didn’t need to. I gave her bottom a squeeze, and she laughed at me and told me she was a respectable married woman; taking this as an invitation I embraced her, at which she wriggled and giggled, puss-like, and then hit me an atrocious clout in the groin with her clenched fist, and ran off, laughing. I walked with a crouch for days, and decided that these Russian ladies must be treated with respect.

  East felt the boredom of captivity in that white wilderness more than I, and spent long hours in his room, writing. One day when he was out I had a turn through his papers, and discovered he was writing his impressions, in the form of an endless letter to his odious friend Brown, who was apparently farming in New Zealand. There was some stuff about me in it, which I read with interest:

  “… I don’t know what to think of Flashman. He is very well liked by all in the house, the Count especially, and I fear that little Valla admires him, too – it would be hard not to, I suppose, for he is such a big, handsome fellow. (Good for you, Scud; carry on.) I say I fear – because sometimes I see him looking at her, with such an ardent expression, and I remember the kind of brute he was at Rugby, and my heart sinks for her fair innocence. Oh, I trust I am wrong! I tell myself that he has changed – how else did the mean, cowardly, spiteful, bullying toady (steady, now, young East) become the truly brave and valiant soldier that he now undoubtedly is? But I do fear, just the same; I know he does not pray, and that he swears, and has evil thoughts, and that the cruel side of his nature is still there. Oh, my poor little Valla – but there, old fellow, I mustn’t let my dark suspicions run away with me. I must think well of him, and trust that my prayers will help to keep him true, and that he will prove, despite my doubts, to be an upright, Christian gentleman at last.”