A Sportsman's Sketches: Works of Ivan Turgenev 1

by Ivan Turgenev

  Tatyana Ilyinitchna dropped her eyes, smiled, and blushed.

  ‘Well, I see it is so,’ continued Ovsyanikov. ‘Fie! you spoil the boy! Well, tell him to come in…. So be it, then; for the sake of our good guest I will forgive the silly fellow…. Come, tell him, tell him.’

  Tatyana Ilyinitchna went to the door, and cried ‘Mitya!’

  Mitya, a young man of twenty - eight, tall, well - made, and curly - headed, came into the room, and seeing me, stopped short in the doorway. His costume was in the German style, but the unnatural size of the puffs on his shoulders was enough alone to prove convincingly that the tailor who had cut it was a Russian of the Russians.

  ‘Well, come in, come in,’ began the old man; ‘why are you bashful? You must thank your aunt — you’re forgiven…. Here, your honour, I commend him to you,’ he continued, pointing to Mitya; ‘he’s my own nephew, but I don’t get on with him at all. The end of the world is coming!’ (We bowed to one another.) ‘Well, tell me what is this you have got mixed up in? What is the complaint they are making against you? Explain it to us.’

  Mitya obviously did not care to explain matters and justify himself before me.

  ‘Later on, uncle,’ he muttered.

  ‘No, not later — now,’ pursued the old man…. ‘You are ashamed, I see, before this gentleman; all the better — it’s only what you deserve. Speak, speak; we are listening.’

  ‘I have nothing to be ashamed of,’ began Mitya spiritedly, with a toss of his head. ‘Be so good as to judge for yourself, uncle. Some peasant proprietors of Reshetilovo came to me, and said, “Defend us, brother.” “What is the matter?”‘ “This is it: our grain stores were in perfect order — in fact, they could not be better; all at once a government inspector came to us with orders to inspect the granaries. He inspected them, and said, ‘Your granaries are in disorder — serious neglect; it’s my duty to report it to the authorities.’ ‘But what does the neglect consist in?’ ‘That’s my business,’ he says…. We met together, and decided to tip the official in the usual way; but old Prohoritch prevented us. He said, ‘No; that’s only giving him a taste for more. Come; after all, haven’t we the courts of justice?’ We obeyed the old man, and the official got in a rage, and made a complaint, and wrote a report. So now we are called up to answer to his charges.” “But are your granaries actually in order?” I asked. “God knows they are in order; and the legal quantity of corn is in them.” “Well, then,” say I, “you have nothing to fear”; and I drew up a document for them…. And it is not yet known in whose favour it is decided…. And as to the complaints they have made to you about me over that affair — it’s very easy to understand that — every man’s shirt is nearest to his own skin.

  ‘Everyone’s, indeed — but not yours seemingly,’ said the old man in an undertone. ‘But what plots have you been hatching with the Shutolomovsky peasants?’

  ‘How do you know anything of it?’

  ‘Never mind; I do know of it.’

  ‘And there, too, I am right — judge for yourself again. A neighbouring landowner, Bezpandin, has ploughed over four acres of the Shutolomovsky peasants’ land. “The land’s mine,” he says. The Shutolomovsky people are on the rent - system; their landowner has gone abroad — who is to stand up for them? Tell me yourself? But the land is theirs beyond dispute; they’ve been bound to it for ages and ages. So they came to me, and said, “Write us a petition.” So I wrote one. And Bezpandin heard of it, and began to threaten me. “I’ll break every bone in that Mitya’s body, and knock his head off his shoulders….” We shall see how he will knock it off; it’s still on, so far.’

  ‘Come, don’t boast; it’s in a bad way, your head,’ said the old man.

  ‘You are a mad fellow altogether!’

  ‘Why, uncle, what did you tell me yourself?’

  ‘I know, I know what you will say,’ Ovsyanikov interrupted him; ‘of course a man ought to live uprightly, and he is bound to succour his neighbour. Sometimes one must not spare oneself…. But do you always behave in that way? Don’t they take you to the tavern, eh? Don’t they treat you; bow to you, eh? “Dmitri Alexyitch,” they say, “help us, and we will prove our gratitude to you.” And they slip a silver rouble or note into your hand. Eh? doesn’t that happen? Tell me, doesn’t that happen?’

  ‘I am certainly to blame in that,’ answered Mitya, rather confused; ‘but I take nothing from the poor, and I don’t act against my conscience.’

  ‘You don’t take from them now; but when you are badly off yourself, then you will. You don’t act against your conscience — fie on you! Of course, they are all saints whom you defend!… Have you forgotten Borka Perohodov? Who was it looked after him? Who took him under his protection — eh?’

  ‘Perohodov suffered through his own fault, certainly.’

  ‘He appropriated the public moneys…. That was all!’

  ‘But, consider, uncle: his poverty, his family.’

  ‘Poverty, poverty…. He’s a drunkard, a quarrelsome fellow; that’s what it is!’

  ‘He took to drink through trouble,’ said Mitya, dropping his voice.

  ‘Through trouble, indeed! Well, you might have helped him, if your heart was so warm to him, but there was no need for you to sit in taverns with the drunken fellow yourself. Though he did speak so finely … a prodigy, to be sure!’

  ‘He was a very good fellow.’

  ‘Every one is good with you…. But did you send him?’ … pursued

  Ovsyanikov, turning to his wife; ‘come; you know?’

  Tatyana Ilyinitchna nodded.

  ‘Where have you been lately?’ the old man began again.

  ‘I have been in the town.’

  ‘You have been doing nothing but playing billiards, I wager, and drinking tea, and running to and fro about the government offices, drawing up petitions in little back rooms, flaunting about with merchants’ sons? That’s it, of course?… Tell us!’

  ‘Perhaps that is about it,’ said Mitya with a smile…. ‘Ah! I had almost forgotten — Funtikov, Anton Parfenitch asks you to dine with him next Sunday.’

  ‘I shan’t go to see that old tub. He gives you costly fish and puts rancid butter on it. God bless him!’

  ‘And I met Fedosya Mihalovna.’

  ‘What Fedosya is that?’

  ‘She belongs to Garpentchenko, the landowner, who bought Mikulino by auction. Fedosya is from Mikulino. She lived in Moscow as a dress - maker, paying her service in money, and she paid her service - money accurately — a hundred and eighty two - roubles and a half a year…. And she knows her business; she got good orders in Moscow. But now Garpentchenko has written for her back, and he retains her here, but does not provide any duties for her. She would be prepared to buy her freedom, and has spoken to the master, but he will not give any decisive answer. You, uncle, are acquainted with Garpentchenko … so couldn’t you just say a word to him?… And Fedosya would give a good price for her freedom.’

  ‘Not with your money I hope? Hey? Well, well, all right; I will speak to him, I will speak to him. But I don’t know,’ continued the old man with a troubled face; ‘this Garpentchenko, God forgive him! is a shark; he buys up debts, lends money at interest, purchases estates at auctions…. And who brought him into our parts? Ugh, I can’t bear these new - comers! One won’t get an answer out of him very quickly…. However, we shall see.’

  ‘Try to manage it, uncle.’

  ‘Very well, I will see to it. Only you take care; take care of yourself! There, there, don’t defend yourself…. God bless you! God bless you!… Only take care for the future, or else, Mitya, upon my word, it will go ill with you…. Upon my word, you will come to grief…. I can’t always screen you … and I myself am not a man of influence. There, go now, and God be with you!’

  Mitya went away. Tatyana Ilyinitchna went out after him.

  ‘Give him some tea, you soft - hearted creature,’ cried Ovsyanikov after her. ‘He’s not a stupid fellow,’ he continued, �
�and he’s a good heart, but I feel afraid for him…. But pardon me for having so long kept you occupied with such details.’

  The door from the hall opened. A short grizzled little man came in, in a velvet coat.

  ‘Ah, Frantz Ivanitch!’ cried Ovsyanikov, ‘good day to you. Is God merciful to you?’

  Allow me, gentle reader, to introduce to you this gentleman.

  Frantz Ivanitch Lejeune, my neighbour, and a landowner of Orel, had arrived at the respectable position of a Russian nobleman in a not quite ordinary way. He was born in Orleans of French parents, and had gone with Napoleon, on the invasion of Russia, in the capacity of a drummer. At first all went smoothly, and our Frenchman arrived in Moscow with his head held high. But on the return journey poor Monsieur Lejeune, half - frozen and without his drum, fell into the hands of some peasants of Smolensk. The peasants shut him up for the night in an empty cloth factory, and the next morning brought him to an ice - hole near the dyke, and began to beg the drummer ‘de la Grrrrande Armée’ to oblige them; in other words, to swim under the ice. Monsieur Lejeune could not agree to their proposition, and in his turn began to try to persuade the Smolensk peasants, in the dialect of France, to let him go to Orleans. ‘There, messieurs,’ he said, ‘my mother is living, une tendre mère’ But the peasants, doubtless through their ignorance of the geographical position of Orleans, continued to offer him a journey under water along the course of the meandering river Gniloterka, and had already begun to encourage him with slight blows on the vertebrae of the neck and back, when suddenly, to the indescribable delight of Lejeune, the sound of bells was heard, and there came along the dyke a huge sledge with a striped rug over its excessively high dickey, harnessed with three roan horses. In the sledge sat a stout and red - faced landowner in a wolfskin pelisse.

  ‘What is it you are doing there?’ he asked the peasants.

  ‘We are drowning a Frenchman, your honour.’

  ‘Ah!’ replied the landowner indifferently, and he turned away.

  ‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’ shrieked the poor fellow.

  ‘Ah, ah!’ observed the wolfskin pelisse reproachfully, ‘you came with twenty nations into Russia, burnt Moscow, tore down, you damned heathen! the cross from Ivan the Great, and now — mossoo, mossoo, indeed! now you turn tail! You are paying the penalty of your sins!… Go on, Filka!’

  The horses were starting.

  ‘Stop, though!’ added the landowner. ‘Eh? you mossoo, do you know anything of music?’

  ‘Sauvez - moi, sauvez - moi, mon bon monsieur!’ repeated Lejeune.

  ‘There, see what a wretched people they are! Not one of them knows

  Russian! Muzeek, muzeek, savey muzeek voo? savey? Well, speak, do!

  Compreny? savey muzeek voo? on the piano, savey zhooey?’

  Lejeune comprehended at last what the landowner meant, and persistently nodded his head.

  ‘Oui, monsieur, oui, oui, je suis musicien; je joue tous les instruments possibles! Oui, monsieur…. Sauvez - moi, monsieur!’

  ‘Well, thank your lucky star!’ replied the landowner. ‘Lads, let him go: here’s a twenty - copeck piece for vodka.’

  ‘Thank you, your honour, thank you. Take him, your honour.’

  They sat Lejeune in the sledge. He was gasping with delight, weeping, shivering, bowing, thanking the landowner, the coachman, the peasants. He had nothing on but a green jacket with pink ribbons, and it was freezing very hard. The landowner looked at his blue and benumbed shoulders in silence, wrapped the unlucky fellow in his own pelisse, and took him home. The household ran out. They soon thawed the Frenchman, fed him, and clothed him. The landowner conducted him to his daughters.

  ‘Here, children!’ he said to them, ‘a teacher is found for you. You were always entreating me to have you taught music and the French jargon; here you have a Frenchman, and he plays on the piano…. Come, mossoo,’ he went on, pointing to a wretched little instrument he had bought five years before of a Jew, whose special line was eau de Cologne, ‘give us an example of your art; zhooey!’

  Lejeune, with a sinking heart, sat down on the music - stool; he had never touched a piano in his life.

  ‘Zhooey, zhooey!’ repeated the landowner.

  In desperation, the unhappy man beat on the keys as though on a drum, and played at hazard. ‘I quite expected,’ he used to tell afterwards, ‘that my deliverer would seize me by the collar, and throw me out of the house.’ But, to the utmost amazement of the unwilling improvisor, the landowner, after waiting a little, patted him good - humouredly on the shoulder.

  ‘Good, good,’ he said; ‘I see your attainments; go now, and rest yourself.’

  Within a fortnight Lejeune had gone from this landowner’s to stay with another, a rich and cultivated man. He gained his friendship by his bright and gentle disposition, was married to a ward of his, went into a government office, rose to the nobility, married his daughter to Lobizanyev, a landowner of Orel, and a retired dragoon and poet, and settled himself on an estate in Orel.

  It was this same Lejeune, or rather, as he is called now, Frantz Ivanitch, who, when I was there, came in to see Ovsyanikov, with whom he was on friendly terms….

  But perhaps the reader is already weary of sitting with me at the

  Ovsyanikovs’, and so I will become eloquently silent.

  VII

  LGOV

  ‘Let us go to Lgov,’ Yermolaï, whom the reader knows already, said to me one day; ‘there we can shoot ducks to our heart’s content.’

  Although wild duck offers no special attraction for a genuine sportsman, still, through lack of other game at the time (it was the beginning of September; snipe were not on the wing yet, and I was tired of running across the fields after partridges), I listened to my huntsman’s suggestion, and we went to Lgov.

  Lgov is a large village of the steppes, with a very old stone church with a single cupola, and two mills on the swampy little river Rossota. Five miles from Lgov, this river becomes a wide swampy pond, overgrown at the edges, and in places also in the centre, with thick reeds. Here, in the creeks or rather pools between the reeds, live and breed a countless multitude of ducks of all possible kinds — quackers, half - quackers, pintails, teals, divers, etc. Small flocks are for ever flitting about and swimming on the water, and at a gunshot, they rise in such clouds that the sportsman involuntarily clutches his hat with one hand and utters a prolonged Pshaw! I walked with Yermolaï along beside the pond; but, in the first place, the duck is a wary bird, and is not to be met quite close to the bank; and secondly, even when some straggling and inexperienced teal exposed itself to our shots and lost its life, our dogs were not able to get it out of the thick reeds; in spite of their most devoted efforts they could neither swim nor tread on the bottom, and only cut their precious noses on the sharp reeds for nothing.

  ‘No,’ was Yermolaï’s comment at last, ‘it won’t do; we must get a boat…. Let us go back to Lgov.’

  We went back. We had only gone a few paces when a rather wretched - looking setter - dog ran out from behind a bushy willow to meet us, and behind him appeared a man of middle height, in a blue and much - worn greatcoat, a yellow waistcoat, and pantaloons of a nondescript grey colour, hastily tucked into high boots full of holes, with a red handkerchief round his neck, and a single - barrelled gun on his shoulder. While our dogs, with the ordinary Chinese ceremonies peculiar to their species, were sniffing at their new acquaintance, who was obviously ill at ease, held his tail between his legs, dropped his ears back, and kept turning round and round showing his teeth — the stranger approached us, and bowed with extreme civility. He appeared to be about twenty - five; his long dark hair, perfectly saturated with kvas, stood up in stiff tufts, his small brown eyes twinkled genially; his face was bound up in a black handkerchief, as though for toothache; his countenance was all smiles and amiability.

  ‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ he began in a soft and insinuating voice; ‘I am a sportsman of these parts — Vladimir…. Having h
eard of your presence, and having learnt that you proposed to visit the shores of our pond, I resolved, if it were not displeasing to you, to offer you my services.’

  The sportsman, Vladimir, uttered those words for all the world like a young provincial actor in the rôle of leading lover. I agreed to his proposition, and before we had reached Lgov I had succeeded in learning his whole history. He was a freed house - serf; in his tender youth had been taught music, then served as valet, could read and write, had read — so much I could discover — some few trashy books, and existed now, as many do exist in Russia, without a farthing of ready money; without any regular occupation; fed by manna from heaven, or something hardly less precarious. He expressed himself with extraordinary elegance, and obviously plumed himself on his manners; he must have been devoted to the fair sex too, and in all probability popular with them: Russian girls love fine talking. Among other things, he gave me to understand that he sometimes visited the neighbouring landowners, and went to stay with friends in the town, where he played preference, and that he was acquainted with people in the metropolis. His smile was masterly and exceedingly varied; what specially suited him was a modest, contained smile which played on his lips as he listened to any other man’s conversation. He was attentive to you; he agreed with you completely, but still he did not lose sight of his own dignity, and seemed to wish to give you to understand that he could, if occasion arose, express convictions of his own. Yermolaï, not being very refined, and quite devoid of ‘subtlety,’ began to address him with coarse familiarity. The fine irony with which Vladimir used ‘Sir’ in his reply was worth seeing.