It is impossible to say for certain whether the feeling of love had indeed awakened in our hero—it is even doubtful that gentlemen of his sort, that is, not really fat and yet not really thin, are capable of love; but for all that there was something strange here, something of a sort he could not explain to himself: it seemed to him, as he himself confessed later, that the whole ball with all its talk and noise had for a few moments moved as if to somewhere far away; fiddles and trumpets were hacking out somewhere beyond the mountains and everything was screened by a mist, resembling a carelessly daubed field in a painting. And on this hazy, haphazardly sketched field nothing stood out in a clear and finished way except the fine features of the engaging blonde: her ovally rounding little face, her slender, slender waist, such as boarding-school girls have for the first few months after graduation, her white, almost plain dress, lightly and nicely enveloping everywhere her young, shapely limbs, which were somehow purely outlined. All of her seemed to resemble some sort of toy, cleanly carved from ivory; she alone stood out white, transparent and bright against the dull and opaque crowd.
Evidently it can happen in this world; evidently the Chichikovs, too, for a few moments of their lives, can turn into poets; but the word “poet” would be too much here. In any case, he felt himself altogether something of a young man, all but a hussar. Seeing an empty chair beside them, he at once occupied it. The conversation faltered at first, but then things got going, and he even began to gather strength, but … here, to our profound regret, it must be observed that men of dignity who occupy important posts are somehow a bit heavy in their conversation with ladies; the experts here are gentlemen lieutenants or at least those of no higher rank than captain. How they do it, God only knows: the man seems to be saying nothing very clever, yet the girl keeps rocking with laughter in her chair; while a state councillor will talk about God knows what: he will speak of Russia being a very vast country, or deliver a compliment certainly not conceived without wit, but smacking terribly of books; and if he does say something funny, he himself will laugh incomparably more than she who is listening to him. This observation is made here so that the reader may see why the blond girl began to yawn while our hero talked. Our hero, however, did not notice it at all, telling a multitude of pleasant things, which he had already had the chance to utter on similar occasions in various places: namely, in Simbirsk province, at Sophron Ivanovich Bespechny’s, where his daughter Adelaida Sophronovna then happened to be, with her three sisters-in-law—Marya Gavrilovna, Alexandra Gavrilovna, and Adelheida Gavrilovna; at Fyodor Fyodorovich Perekroev’s in Ryazan province; at Frol Vassilievich Pobedonosny’s in Penza province, and at his brother Pyotr Vassilievich’s, where were his sister-in-law Katerina Mikhailovna and her second cousins Rosa Fyodorovna and Emilia Fyodorovna; in Vyatka province at Pyotr Varsonofievich’s, where Pelageya Yegorovna, his daughter-in-law’s sister, was with her niece Sofya Rostislavovna and two half sisters, Sofya Alexandrovna and Maklatura Alexandrovna.
The ladies were all thoroughly displeased with Chichikov’s behavior. One of them purposely walked past him to make him notice it, and even brushed against the blond girl rather carelessly with the thick rouleau of her dress, and managed the scarf that fluttered about her shoulders so that its end waved right in her face; and at the same time, from behind him, along with the scent of violets, a rather pointed and caustic remark wafted from one lady’s lips. But either he actually did not hear, or he pretended not to hear, though that was not good, because the opinion of the ladies must be appreciated: he repented of it, but only afterwards, and therefore too late.
Indignation, justified in all respects, showed on many faces. However great Chichikov’s weight in society might be, though he were a millionaire and with an expression of majesty, even of something Mars-like and military, in his face, still there are things that ladies will not forgive anyone, whoever he may be, and then he can simply be written off. There are cases when a woman, however weak and powerless of character in comparison with a man, suddenly becomes harder, not only than a man, but than anything else in the world. The scorn displayed almost inadvertently by Chichikov even restored the harmony among the ladies, which had been on the brink of ruin since the occasion of the capturing of the chair. Certain dry and ordinary words that he chanced to utter were found to contain pointed allusions. To crown the disaster, one of the young men made up some satirical verses about the dancers, which, as we know, almost no provincial ball can do without. These verses were straightaway ascribed to Chichikov. The indignation was mounting, and ladies in different corners began to speak of him in a most unfavorable way; while the poor boarding-school graduate was totally annihilated and her sentence was already sealed.
And meanwhile a most unpleasant surprise was being prepared for our hero: while the girl yawned, and he went on telling her little stories of some sort that had happened at various times, even touching on the Greek philosopher Diogenes, Nozdryov emerged from the end room. Whether he had torn himself away from the buffet or from the small green sitting room, where a game a bit stiffer than ordinary whist was under way, whether it was of his own free will or he had been pushed out, in any case he appeared gay, joyful, grasping the arm of the prosecutor, whom he had probably been dragging about for some time, because the poor prosecutor was turning his bushy eyebrows in all directions, as if seeking some way to get out of this friendly arm-in-arm excursion. Indeed, it was insufferable. Nozdryov, having sipped up some swagger in two cups of tea, not without rum, of course, was lying unmercifully. Spotting him from afar, Chichikov resolved even upon sacrifice, that is, upon abandoning his enviable place and withdrawing at all possible speed: for him their meeting boded no good. But, as ill luck would have it, at that same moment the governor turned up, expressing extraordinary joy at having found Pavel Ivanovich, and stopped him, asking him to arbitrate in his dispute with two ladies over whether woman’s love is lasting or not; and meanwhile Nozdryov had already seen him and was walking straight to meet him.
“Ah, the Kherson landowner, the Kherson landowner!” he shouted, approaching and dissolving in laughter, which caused his cheeks, fresh and ruddy as a rose in spring, to shake. “So, have you bought up a lot of dead ones? You don’t even know, Your Excellency,” he went on bawling, addressing the governor, “he deals in dead souls! By God! Listen, Chichikov! you really—I’m telling you out of friendship, all of us here are your friends, yes, and His Excellency here, too—I’d hang you, by God, I’d hang you!”
Chichikov simply did not know where he was.
“Would you believe it, Your Excellency,” Nozdryov went on, “when he said ‘Sell me dead souls,’ I nearly split with laughter. I come here, and they tell me he’s bought up three million worth of peasants for resettlement—resettlement, hah! he was trying to buy dead ones from me. Listen, Chichikov, you’re a brute, by God, a brute, and His Excellency here, too, isn’t that right, prosecutor?”
But the prosecutor, and Chichikov, and the governor himself were so nonplussed that they were utterly at a loss what to reply, and meanwhile Nozdryov, without paying the least attention, kept pouring out his half-sober speech:
“And you, brother, you, you … I won’t leave your side till I find out why you were buying dead souls. Listen, Chichikov, you really ought to be ashamed, you know you have no better friend than me. And His Excellency here, too, isn’t that right, prosecutor? You wouldn’t believe, Your Excellency, how attached we are to one another, that is, if you simply said—I’m standing here, see, and you say: ‘Nozdryov, tell me in all conscience, who is dearer to you, your own father or Chichikov?’ I’d say: ‘Chichikov,’ by God … Allow me, dear heart, to plant one baiser40 on you. You will allow me to kiss him, Your Excellency. So, Chichikov, don’t resist now, allow me to print one bitsy baiser on your snow-white cheek!”
Nozdryov was pushed away with his baisers, so hard that he almost went sprawling on the floor: everyone left him and no longer listened to him; but all the same his words about th
e buying of dead souls had been uttered at the top of his voice and accompanied by such loud laughter that they had attracted the attention even of those in the farthest corners of the room. This news seemed so strange that everyone stopped with some sort of wooden, foolishly quizzical expression. Chichikov noticed that many of the ladies winked at each other with a sort of spiteful, caustic grin, and certain faces bore an expression of something so ambiguous that it further increased his confusion. That Nozdryov was an inveterate liar everyone knew, and there was no wonder at all in hearing decided balderdash from him; but mortal man—truly, it is hard to understand how your mortal man is made: however banal the news may be, as long as it is news, he will not fail to pass it on to some other mortal, even if it is precisely with the purpose of saying: “See what a lie they’re spreading!” and the other mortal will gladly incline his ear, though afterwards he himself will say: “Yes, that is a perfectly banal lie, not worthy of any attention!” and thereupon he will set out at once to look for a third mortal, so that, having told him, they can both exclaim with noble indignation: “What a banal lie!” And it will not fail to make the rounds of the whole town, and all mortals, however many there are, will have their fill of talking and will then admit that it is unworthy of attention and not worth talking about.
This apparently absurd occurrence noticeably upset our hero. However stupid a fool’s words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man. He began to feel uneasy, ungainly—exactly as if he had suddenly stepped with a beautifully polished shoe into a dirty, stinking puddle; in short, not good, not good at all! He tried not to think about it, tried to get diverted, distracted, sat down to whist, but it all went like a crooked wheel: twice he played into his opponents’ strong suit, and, forgetting that one does not double trump, he swung his arm and, like a fool, took his own trick. The magistrate simply could not understand how Pavel Ivanovich, who had such a good and, one might say, subtle understanding of the game, could make such mistakes and even put under the axe his king of spades, in which, to use his own words, he trusted as in God. Of course, the postmaster and the magistrate, and even the police chief himself, kept poking fun at our hero, as is customary, suggesting that he might be in love, and don’t we know that Pavel Ivanovich’s heart has been smitten, and don’t we know who shot the dart; but all this was no comfort, however much he tried to smile and laugh it off. At supper, too, he was quite unable to be expansive, though the company at table was pleasant and Nozdryov had long ago been taken out; for even the ladies themselves finally noticed that his behavior was becoming much too scandalous. In the midst of the cotillion, he got down on the floor and started grabbing the dancers by their skirt hems, which was really beyond everything, as the ladies put it. The supper was very gay, all the faces flitting before the three-stemmed candlesticks, flowers, sweets, and bottles radiated the most unconstrained pleasure. Officers, ladies, tailcoats—everything became courteous, even to the point of cloying. Men jumped up from their chairs and ran to take dishes from the servants in order to offer them, with extraordinary adroitness, to the ladies. One colonel offered a dish of sauce to a lady on the tip of his bare sword. The men of respectable age, among whom Chichikov sat, were arguing loudly, following their sensible words with fish or beef dipped unmercifully in mustard, and arguing about subjects he had even always been interested in; but he was like a man worn-out or broken by a long journey, whose mind is closed to everything and who is unable to enter into anything. He did not even wait until supper was over, and went home incomparably earlier than was his custom.
There, in that little room so familiar to the reader, with the door blocked up by a chest of drawers, and cockroaches occasionally peeking from the corners, the state of his mind and spirit was uncomfortable, as uncomfortable as the armchair in which he sat. His heart felt unpleasant, troubled; some burdensome emptiness lingered in it. “Devil take all of you who thought up these balls!” he said in vexation. “What are the fools so glad about? There are crop failures, high prices in the provinces, and here they are with their balls! A fine thing: decked out in their female rags! So what if she’s wrapped herself in a thousand roubles’ worth! And it’s at the expense of peasant quitrent or, worse still, at the expense of our own good conscience. Everyone knows why you take bribes and bend the truth: so as to pay for your wife’s shawl or hoopskirt or whatever they’re called, confound them. And what for? So that some strumpet Sidorovna won’t say the postmaster’s wife’s dress was better, and so—bang, there goes a thousand roubles. They shout: ‘A ball, a ball, a gay time!’—a ball is just trash, not in the Russian spirit, not in the Russian nature; devil knows what it is: an adult, a man of age, suddenly pops out all in black, plucked and tightly fitted like a little imp, and goes mincing away with his feet. Some man, dancing with his partner, can be discussing important business with someone else, while at the same time twirling his legs right and left like a little goat … It’s all apery, all apery! The Frenchman at forty is the same child he was at fifteen, so let’s all do likewise! No, really … after each ball it’s as if you’d committed some sin; you don’t even want to remember it. The head is simply empty, as after talking with a man of society; he talks about all sorts of things, touches lightly on everything, says everything he’s pulled out of books, brightly, prettily, but there’s no trace of any of it in his head, and you see then that even talking with a simple merchant who knows only his business, but knows it firmly and practically, is better than all these baubles. So, what can possibly be squeezed out of this ball? So, what if some writer, say, decided to describe the whole scene as it is? So, then in the book it would come out just as witless as in nature. What is it—moral? immoral? It’s simply devil-knows-what! You’d spit and close the book.” So unfavorable was Chichikov’s opinion of balls in general; but it seems another reason for indignation was mixed in here. He was mainly vexed not at the ball, but at the fact that he had happened to trip up, that he had suddenly appeared before everyone looking like God knows what, that he had played some strange, ambiguous role. Of course, looking at it with the eye of a reasonable man, he saw that it was all absurd, that a stupid word meant nothing, particularly now, when the main business had already been properly done. But man is strange: he was greatly upset by the ill disposition of those very people whom he did not respect and with regard to whom he had spoken so sharply, denouncing their vanity and finery. This was the more vexatious to him since, on sorting out the matter clearly, he saw that he himself was partly the cause of it. He did not, however, get angry with himself, and in that, of course, he was right. We all have a little weakness for sparing ourselves somewhat, and prefer to try and find some neighbor on whom to vent our vexation, a servant, for instance, or a subordinate official who turns up at that moment, or a wife, or, finally, a chair, which gets flung devil knows where, straight at the door, so that the armrest and back come flying off: that will teach it what wrath is. So Chichikov, too, soon found a neighbor who could drag onto his own back everything his vexation might suggest to him. This neighbor was Nozdryov, and, needless to say, he got it from all sides and ends, as only some crook of a village elder or coachman gets it from some traveled, experienced captain, or even general, who on top of many expressions that have become classical, adds many unknown ones, the invention of which belongs properly to himself. The whole of Nozdryov’s genealogy was examined and many members of his family in the line of ascent suffered greatly.
But all the while he was sitting in his hard armchair, troubled by thoughts and sleeplessness, zealously giving what for to Nozdryov and all his kin, and the tallow candle glimmered before him, its wick long covered by a black cap of snuff, threatening to go out at any moment, and blind, dark night looked in his window, ready to turn blue with approaching dawn, and somewhere far away far-off roosters whistled to each other, and in a completely sleeping town, perhaps, a frieze greatcoat plodded along somewhere, a wretch of unknown class and rank, who knows (alas!) one path only, all too well beat
en by the devil-may-care Russian people—during this time, at the other end of town, an event was taking place which was about to increase the unpleasantness of our hero’s situation. Namely, through the remote streets and alleys of the town there came clattering a rather strange vehicle, causing bewilderment with regard to its name. It resembled neither a tarantass, nor a barouche, nor a britzka, but more closely resembled a round, fat-cheeked watermelon on wheels. The cheeks of this watermelon—the doors, that is—bearing traces of yellow paint, closed very poorly on account of the poor condition of the handles and latches, which were tied anyhow with string. The watermelon was filled with cotton pillows shaped like pouches, bolsters, and simple pillows, and it was stuffed with sacks of bread, kalatchi,41 cheesecakes, filled dumplings, and doughnuts. A chicken pie and a mince pie even peeked from the top. The footboard was occupied by a person of lackey origin, in a jacket of homespun ticking, with an unshaved beard shot with gray—a person known by the name of “lad.” The noise and screeching of iron clamps and rusty bolts awakened a sentinel on the other side of town, who, raising his halberd, shouted, half awake, with all his might: “Who goes there?”—but seeing no one going there, and hearing only a distant clatter, he caught some beast on his collar and, going up to the streetlamp, executed it then and there on his nail. After which, setting his halberd aside, he fell asleep again according to the rules of his knightly order. The horses kept falling on their knees, because they were not shod and, besides, evidently had little familiarity with the comforts of town cobblestones. The rattletrap made several turns from one street to another and finally turned onto a dark lane by the small parish church of St. Nicholas on Nedotychki42 and stopped by the gates of the archpriest’s wife’s house. A wench climbed out of the britzka in a quilted jacket, with a kerchief on her head, and banged on the gate with both fists as good as a man (the lad in the homespun jacket was later pulled down by his feet, for he was sleeping like the dead). The dogs barked and the gates, having gaped open, finally swallowed, though with great difficulty, this clumsy traveling contraption. The vehicle drove into a small yard cluttered with firewood, chicken coops, and all sorts of sheds; out of the vehicle climbed a lady: this lady was a landowner, the widow of a collegiate secretary, Korobochka. Soon after our hero’s departure, the old woman had become so worried with regard to the possible occurrence of deceit on his side that, after three sleepless nights in a row, she had resolved to go to town, even though the horses were not shod, and there find out for certain what was the going price for dead souls, and whether she had, God forbid, gone amiss, having perhaps sold them dirt cheap. What consequences this arrival produced, the reader may learn from a certain conversation that took place between a certain two ladies. This conversation … but better let this conversation take place in the next chapter.
Dead Souls: A Novel Page 22