A Sportsman's Notebook

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A Sportsman's Notebook Page 22

by Ivan Turgenev


  Now let us pass on to another landowner.

  Mardary Apollonich Stegunov is not in the least like Khvalinsky; he can hardly have seen service and has never passed as handsome. He is an old man, short, podgy, bald, with a double chin, soft hands, and a fair-sized belly. He is a famous host and joker; he lives for his pleasure, as the saying goes; goes about winter and summer in a striped, quilted dressing-gown. In one respect only he resembles General Khvalinsky: he too is a bachelor. He has five hundred serfs. Mardary Apollonich occupies himself rather superficially with his estate; ten years or so ago, in order to keep in the swim, he bought a threshing-machine at Butenop’s in Moscow, locked it up in a barn, and worried no more. On a fine summer’s day he will even order his racing drozhky to be harnessed and drive into the fields to have a look at the crops and pick cornflowers. He lives entirely in the good old style. His house is of old-fashioned construction: in the hall there is the proper smell of kvass, tallow candles, and leather. On the right is a sideboard with pipes and towels; in the dining-room are family portraits, flies, a big pot of geraniums, and an ill-tuned piano; in the drawing-room, three sofas, three tables, two looking-glasses, and a wheezing clock, with blackened enamel and hands in carved bronze; in the study, a table covered with papers, bluish screens stuck with pictures cut out of various works of the last century, cupboards full of musty books, spiders and black dust, a bulging armchair, an Italian window, and a firmly nailed-up door to the garden . . . In a word, everything is as it should be. Mardary Apollonich has crowds of serving-folk, all dressed in the old-fashioned style: long blue coats with high collars, drab-colored pantaloons and short yellowish waistcoats. They address guests as “father” . . . The management of his land is in charge of a bailiff, one of his own peasants, with a beard that quite covers his sheepskin coat. His house is run by a wrinkled, mean old woman with a brown kerchief over her head. Mardary Apollonich has in his stables thirty horses of miscellaneous calibre; he drives out in a heavyweight home-made carriage. He loves receiving guests and entertains them lavishly, that’s to say, thanks to the stupefying qualities of Russian cooking, he deprives them, right up to nightfall, of any capacity to attend to anything but Preference. He himself has no occupations and has even stopped reading “The Dream Book.” But in Russia there are still fairly many landowners of this type; it will be asked, why, and with what object, I have started to speak of him. Well, allow me, instead of answering, to tell you about one of my visits to Mardary Apollonich.

  I arrived at his house at about seven o’clock on a summer evening. The evening service was just over and the priest, a young man who was evidently very timid and just out of the seminary, was sitting in the drawing-room near the door on the very edge of his chair. As was his custom, Mardary Apollonich gave me the warmest of welcomes; he was unfeignedly glad to see any guest, and he was anyway the kindest of men. The priest got up and took his hat.

  “Wait, Father, wait,” said Mardary Apollonich, without letting go of my hand. “Don’t go away . . . I’ve ordered some vodka for you.”

  “I don’t drink, sir,” murmured the priest, with embarrassment, and he blushed to the ears.

  “What nonsense! Not drinking, in your profession!” answered Mardary Apollonich. “Mishka! Yushka! Vodka for the Father!”

  Yushka, a tall, lean old man of about seventy, came in with a glass of vodka on a black-painted tray with flesh-colored spots on it.

  The priest began by refusing.

  “Drink, Father, drink; don’t make such a fuss, it isn’t right,” observed the landowner in a tone of reproach.

  The poor young man obeyed.

  “Well now, Father, you may go.”

  The priest started bowing.

  “Well, all right, all right, off you go. . . . A capital fellow,” continued Mardary Apollonich, looking after him. “I’m very pleased with him, but the only thing is that he’s a bit young. Preaches sermons all the time and then doesn’t drink. But how are you, my dear friend? How are you? Let’s go on to the balcony—it’s such a glorious evening.”

  We went out on to the balcony, sat down, and began to talk. Mardary Apollonich looked down, and suddenly became terribly agitated.

  “Whose are those hens? Whose are those hens?” he shouted. “Whose are those hens in the garden? . . . Yushka, Yushka! Go and find out at once whose they are; how many times have I forbidden it, how many times have I told them!”

  Yushka ran off.

  “That’s a fine state of things!” declared Mardary Apollonich. “It’s frightful!”

  The unfortunate hens—I remember them still, two speckled ones and a white one with a crest—were continuing to walk about under the apple-trees with the utmost calmness, from time to time expressing their feelings by a prolonged clucking, when suddenly Yushka, capless and with a stick in his hand, and three other serving-folk, all of whom had reached the years of discretion, darted at them simultaneously. Then the fun started. The hens squawked, flapped their wings, jumped, and clucked fit to deafen you; the servants ran, stumbled, fell; the master shouted from the balcony like a mad-man: “Catch them! catch them catch them! . . . Whose are they, whose are they?” Finally one of the servants succeeded in seizing the crested hen, catching it between his chest and the ground, when at the same moment, through the garden fence from the road, jumped a girl of about eleven, dishevelled and with a long switch in her hand.

  “Oh, that’s whose they are!” exclaimed the landowner triumphantly. “Ermil, the coachman’s! He sent his Natalka to chase them . . . of course he hasn’t sent Parasha,” added the landowner in a low voice, and with a significant grin. “Hey, Yushka! Leave the chickens. Catch Natalka for me.”

  But before the breathless Yushka could reach the terrified girl, the housekeeper, arriving from nowhere, caught her by the hand and slapped the poor girl several times on the back . . .

  “That’s the way, that’s the way,” asserted the landowner. “There, there, there! . . . Take the chickens away from her, Avdotya,” he added loudly, and turned to me with a radiant face: “What a chase, eh? Why, look, I’m all of a sweat.”

  And Mardary Apollonich burst out laughing.

  We stayed on the balcony. It was indeed an unusually fine evening.

  We were served with tea.

  “Tell me,” I began, “Mardary Apollonich, are those outlying farm-buildings yours, over there on the road beyond the ravine?”

  “Yes . . . what of it?”

  “But how can you allow it, Mardary Apollonich? Why, it’s shameful. The huts assigned to the peasants are mean and cramped; there’s not a tree to be seen around, not even a pond either, there’s one well, but even that is no use at all. Couldn’t you really find another site? . . . And they say that you’ve even taken away the old hempyards that were there?”

  “But what can you do, when your boundary is fixed by agreement?” answered Mardary Apollonich: “I’m fed right up to here with the whole business.” He pointed to the back of his neck. “And I foresee no good from it, either. But as for my taking away their hempyard, and not digging the pond for them there—well, my friend, I know all about that. I’m a simple chap and I go about things in the old-fashioned way. As I see it, the master is the master, and the peasant is the peasant . . . and that’s all there is to it.”

  There was of course nothing to be said in answer to such a clear and convincing argument.

  “And anyway,” he continued, “they’re a bad lot of peasants, they’re in disgrace. There are two families there in particular; even my late father, God rest his soul in peace, couldn’t stand them at any price. But I tell you, I believe in the saying that if the father’s a thief, the son’s a thief too; you can say what you like . . . it’s blood that counts. I tell you frankly, from those two families, I have sent men to the army out of turn and I have scattered them about all over the place. But they don’t change, and what can you do about it? They are great breeders, too, curse them.”

  Meanwhile the air had grown com
pletely still. Only occasionally a breeze rippled past and, finally dying away around the house, brought to our ears the sound of measured blows, sounding from the direction of the stable. Mardary Apollonich had just lifted to his lips a full saucer and was already dilating his nostrils, without which, as is well-known, no true Russian can imbibe tea, but he stopped, listened, nodded, gulped, and, putting the saucer down on the table, pronounced, with the kindest of smiles, as if involuntarily echoing the blows: “Chooky-chooky-chook! Chooky-chooky-chook!”

  “What’s that?” I asked in amazement.

  “That’s a naughty boy being punished on my instructions. D’you know my butler Vasily?”

  “Which is he?”

  “The one who served us at dinner the other day. He goes about with big side-whiskers like this.”

  The fiercest indignation could not have resisted the clear and gentle gaze of Mardary Apollonich.

  “What’s the matter, young man, what’s the matter?” he said, shaking his head. “D’you think I’m a brute, eh, that you are staring at me like that? Whom he loveth, he chasteneth—you know.”

  A quarter of an hour later I took my leave of Mardary Apollonich. Driving through the village, I saw Vasily the butler. He was walking along the road munching nuts. I told my driver to stop the horses and called to him. “Well, my lad, so you were punished to-day?” I asked him.

  “How d’you know?” rejoined Vasily.

  “Your master told me.”

  “The master himself?”

  “Why did he have you punished?”

  “It was quite right, sir, quite right. We don’t get punished for nothing; there’s none of that sort of thing with us—no, certainly not. Our master is not that sort, our master . . . you won’t find another master like him in the whole province.”

  “Go on!” I said to the driver. There’s the old Mother Russia for you, I thought on my way home.

  Lebedyan

  ONE OF THE CHIEF ADVANTAGES OF SHOOTING, MY DEAR READERS, is that it involves you in a constant change of scene, which, for an idle fellow, is a most agreeable condition. True, sometimes (particularly in rainy weather) there’s not much fun in roaming the byways, “keeping right on,” stopping every peasant you meet with the question: “Hey, my friend, what’s the best way to Mordovka?” then in Mordovka cross-examining some dull-witted peasant-woman (the men all being away working in the fields) about how far it is to the inn on the high road, and how to get there—and, after covering ten versts, instead of the inn, finding oneself in the ruined manor-village of Khudobubnov, to the extreme amazement of a whole herd of pigs who are up to their ears in dark brown mud right in the middle of the road and very far indeed from expecting any such interruption. It is no fun, either, to cross breath-takingly insecure foot-bridges, to clamber down into ravines, to ford marshy streamlets; it’s no fun driving for twenty-four hours on end over the greenish waves of the high road or—Heaven protect us from it—bogging down for several hours in front of a gaily-colored mile-post with the figure 22 on one side and the figure 23 on the other; it’s no fun living for weeks on eggs, milk, and the much-vaunted rye bread. But all these discomforts and setbacks are redeemed by advantages and satisfactions of another order. Anyway, let us get on to our story.

  After the above remarks I need not explain to the reader how it was that, five years ago, I chanced to arrive in Lebedyan when the horse-fair was in full swing. We sportsmen can easily drive out from our more or less ancestral homes on a fine morning with every intention of returning in the evening of the following day, and then, by easy stages, without ceasing to shoot snipe, finish up on the blessed banks of the Pechora; moreover, every sportsman of the gun-and-dog variety is a passionate admirer of the noblest animal in the world—the horse. So it was that I arrived in Lebedyan, put up at the inn, changed my clothes, and went out to the fair. (The waiter, a tall gaunt youth of twenty or so, who spoke in a sweet nasal tenor, had already had time to inform me that his Highness Prince N——, Remount Officer of the —— Regiment, was staying in the inn, that many other gentlemen had arrived, that in the evenings the gypsies were singing and there were performances of “Pan Tvardovsky” in the theater, that horses were fetching a decent price and that anyway there were some good ones to be seen.) On the fair-ground stood endless rows of carts and, behind them, horses of every possible kind: trotters, stallions, cart-horses, draught-horses, coach-horses, and plain peasant-nags. Some, well-fed and sleek, of matched colors, covered with blankets of various hues, tethered short to tall racks, gave anxious sidelong glances at the too familiar whips of their lords the dealers; gentlemen’s horses, sent by steppe-landowners from a couple of hundred versts away under the supervision of some decrepit coachman and two or three thick-skulled grooms, waved their long necks, stamped their hooves, and gnawed the fences out of sheer boredom; two little roan mongrel horses jostled each other closely; majestically immobile, like lions, the broad-cruppered trotters stood, with wavy tails and shaggy fetlocks, gray-roan, black, and bay. Fanciers paused respectfully in front of them. In the lanes between the carts people of every class, age, and appearance were jostling each other; horse-copers in blue coats and tall caps looked out knowingly as they waited for buyers; pop-eyed, curly-headed gypsies dashed backwards and forwards like a house on fire, looking horses in the teeth, lifting their hooves and tails, shouting, quarrelling, acting as go-betweens, drawing lots, or pressing round some remount officer in his forage-cap and beaver-trimmed military overcoat. A huge cossack sat on a lean gelding with a deerlike neck and offered to sell him “all-in,” that’s to say, with saddle and bridle. Peasants in sheepskin coats torn under the arms pressed their way desperately through the crowd and swarmed in their dozens into a cart harnessed to a horse which needed “trying out” or, away to one side, with the help of a shifty gypsy, bargained themselves silly, struck each other’s hands a hundred times, each insisting on his price, while the subject of their dispute, a wretched little nag covered with a piece of warped matting, just blinked as if it had nothing to do with him . . . and indeed it made no difference to the horse who was going to beat him! Landowners with wide foreheads, dyed moustaches, and pompous expressions, wearing confederate caps and camlet coats put on by one sleeve only, chatted condescendingly with fat-bellied merchants in pot-hats and green gloves. The place was alive with officers of different regiments; a long cuirassier of German extraction coolly asked a lame dealer “how much he wished to receive for that sorrel horse.” A little fair-haired hussar of about nineteen was trying to find a side-horse to match a lean pacer; a postilion, wearing a low hat with a peacock’s feather wound round it and a brown coat with leather gauntlets thrust under his narrow green belt, was looking for a shaft-horse. Coachmen plaited their horses’ tails, wetted their manes and gave gentlemen respectful pieces of advice. Those who had completed a deal hurried off to the inn or the pot-house, according to their condition. . . . And the whole crowd—hustling, shouting, fussing, quarrelling, and making it up again, cursing and laughing, were up to their knees in mud.

 

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