Nevertheless, in spite of his orderliness and Cost Accounting, Eremei Lukich fell on very hard times: he began by mortgaging his villages, then he went on to sell them; finally the cradle of his ancestors, the village with the unfinished church, was sold by the public exchequer, luckily not in Eremei’s lifetime—he could never have withstood the blow—but two weeks after his decease. He managed to die in his own house, in his own bed, surrounded by his own servants and under the care of his own doctor; but all that was left to poor Pantelei was Bessonovo.
When he heard of his father’s illness, Pantelei was already on military service, right in the thick of the “unpleasantness” referred to above. He had just turned nineteen. Since childhood he had never left home, and, under the guidance of his mother, a very kind-hearted but absolutely dull-witted lady named Vasilisa Vasilyevna, he had grown up into a thoroughly spoiled young gentleman. It was she alone who saw to his education; Eremei Lukich, plunged in his economic calculations, had no time for that. It is true that one day he personally gave his son a beating with a whip for saying “artsy,” instead of “rtsy,” but that was a day when Eremei Lukich was suffering from a deep and secret wound: his best dog had run into a tree and killed itself. Anyhow Vasilisa Vasilyevna’s exertions in regard to Pantyusha’s education were confined to a single painful effort: by the sweat of her brow she managed to give him a tutor, in the shape of a retired Alsatian soldier, one Bierkopf, and to the day of her death she trembled like a leaf before him: if he leaves, she would think—I’m done for! which way shall I turn? wherever shall I find another tutor? Even Bierkopf had only been enticed away from a neighbour with the greatest difficulty! And he, like a man of sagacity, at once exploited his monopoly: he drank himself silly and slept from morning to night. On the conclusion of his “course of studies” Pantelei went into the army. Vasilisa Vasilyevna was already dead. She passed away six months before this important event—from shock: in a dream she had seen a man in white riding a bear and, written on his chest, “Antichrist.” Eremei Lukich soon followed his spouse.
At the first news of his illness, Pantelei galloped off home helter-skelter, but was too late to find his parent alive. What was the astonishment of the dutiful son when he found himself quite unexpectedly transformed from the heir to a fortune into a beggar? There are few who can withstand such a violent change of fortune: Pantelei grew savage and embittered. From a man of honor, sobriety, and good nature (though also a flighty and quick-tempered one) he changed into an arrogant picker of quarrels, broke off relations with his neighbors—he was ashamed to meet the rich ones and despised the poor ones—and treated everyone with unheard-of impertinence, including even the powers that be, as much as to say: “I am a member of the old nobility.” Once he practically shot a police inspector who came into his room without taking his cap off. Of course the powers that be, on their side, did not forgive him, and reminded him of their existence on occasion; but all the same they were afraid of him because he was such a terrible hot-head and after the second word would be ready to fight you with knives. At the slightest rejoinder Chertopkhanov’s eyes would begin to rove, his voice would crack. . . . “Why, why—why,” he would mutter, “damn my eyes!” . . . and he would be ready to run up the walls! Yet with all that he was an honest man and never mixed up in any intrigue. Of course no one ever went to see him . . . And yet he was good-hearted, even great-hearted, in his own way: he could not stand the sight of others’ suffering, of injustice or oppression; he was a tower of strength to his peasants. “What?” he would say, furiously beating his own head. “Interfering with my people, mine? As if I was not Chertopkhanov!!! . . .”
Unlike Pantelei, Tikhon Ivanich Nedopyuskin could not boast of his origins. His father came of freeholder stock and only acquired noble rank after forty years of state service. Mr. Nedopyuskin the father belonged to that class of people whom misfortune dogs with unflagging, inexorable cruelty, with a cruelty like a personal hatred. Throughout his sixty years, from the day of his birth to the day of his death, the poor wretch had wrestled with all the constraints, ailments, and miseries which are the lot of small folk; he struggled like a fish on ice, never ate enough, never slept enough, bowed, fussed, brooded, and languished, trembled over every copeck, suffered quite unfairly in his official career, and died at last, in a garret or a cellar, without having managed to earn himself or his children their daily bread. Destiny had harried him like a hunted hare. He was a good, honest man, but took bribes—“according to rank”—from a ten-copeck piece up to two silver rubles inclusive. He had a thin, consumptive wife; there were children too; luckily they all died young, except for Tikhon and one daughter, Mitrodora, nicknamed the “merchant’s glory,” who after many sad and laughable adventures married a retired attorney. Mr. Nedopyuskin the father, while still alive, had managed to find Tikhon a place as a minor official in a chancery, but as soon as his father died Tikhon retired. The perpetual anxieties, the anguished struggles with cold and hunger, his mother’s brooding depression, the worrying and despair of his father, the bullying rudeness of landlords and shopkeepers, all this daily, continual suffering had engendered an indescribable shyness in Tikhon: the mere sight of his chief made him tremble and swoon like a bird in a snare. He gave up the service. An indifferent and perhaps mocking Nature endows people with different capacities and inclinations, without any regard to their means and position in society; with the care and love which are peculiar to her, she had molded Tikhon, the son of a poor official, into a sensitive, soft, susceptible creature—a creature excessively intent on enjoyment, gifted with an extraordinarily fine sense of smell and taste. . . . She molded him, carefully put the finishing touches, and—left her product to grow up on sour cabbage and rotten fish. And so this product grew up, and began, as it is called, to “live.” The fun started. Destiny, which had tormented Nedopyuskin the father unceasingly, now started on the son: she had clearly acquired a taste for it. But with Tikhon she used a different method: instead of tormenting him, she played with him. She never brought him to despair, never forced him to feel the shameful pangs of hunger, but tossed him about, from one end of Russia to another, from Veliky-Ustyug to Tsarevo-Kokshaisk, from one humiliating and ridiculous employment to another. First she would appoint him “major-domo” to an ill-tempered, bilious lady-bountiful, then she would place him as hanger-on to a rich skinflint of a merchant, then she would make him principal private secretary to a pop-eyed Muscovite prince with his hair cut in the English fashion, then she would promote him to be half-butler, half-buffoon to a steppe landowner, a keeper of hounds and picker of quarrels. . . . In a word, destiny made poor Tikhon drink, drop by drop and to the last dregs, the bitter, poisonous draught of the underdog’s life. He knew what it was to serve the oppressive caprice, the sleepy, ill-natured boredom, of idle masters. How often, alone in his room, released at last with God’s blessing by a pack of guests who had had their fill of amusement, fairly bursting with shame, and with cold tears of despair in his eyes, did he swear to run away secretly the next day, to try his luck in the town, to find himself if it were only a job as clerk, or just to die once and for all from hunger in the street. But, first, God had not given him the strength; secondly, his timidity was too much for him; and thirdly and lastly, how was he going to find himself a job, whom was he going to ask? “They’ll never give me one,” the poor wretch would murmur, dozing miserably on his bed, “they’ll never give me one!” And the following day he would return to his tread-mill. The situation was all the more painful in that the same considerate Nature had not bothered to endow him with the smallest share of those qualities and talents without which the buffoon’s profession is all but impossible. For instance, he could neither dance until he fell down, wearing a bearskin inside out, nor crack jokes and exchange pleasantries in the midst of a throng of excited whippers-in; if driven out stark naked into twenty degrees of frost, he sometimes caught cold; his stomach could not digest wine mixed with ink and other filth, nor fly-agaric and toad
-stool minced in vinegar. Lord knows what would have become of Tikhon if the last of his benefactors, a newly-rich tax-farmer, had not had the idea, by way of a joke, of adding to his will: “To Zyozyo (or Tikhon) Nedopyuskin, I bequeathe, for himself and his descendants in perpetuity, the village of Besselendeyevka, acquired by me, with all the dependencies thereto appertaining.” A few days later, over his sterlet soup, the benefactor died of a stroke. There was a great to-do; the law arrived unexpectedly and put seals on the property in due form. The relations assembled; they opened the will; they read it, they called for Nedopyuskin. Nedopyuskin appeared. The majority of those present knew what had been Tikhon’s functions in his benefactor’s household. He was met by deafening shouts and jocular congratulations. “Here he is, the new landowner!” shouted the other heirs. “Here he is,” repeated one of them, a well-known joker and wit, “yes, here he is, definitely . . . in actual fact . . . the . . . what d’you call it . . . the heir . . .” and everyone fairly exploded with laughter. For a while Nedopyuskin could not believe his good fortune. They showed him the will—he blushed, screwed up his eyes, and began throwing out his hands, and sobbing, and weeping buckets. The laughter of those present turned into a single sustained roar. The village of Besselendeyevka consisted of only twenty-two peasants; nobody minded much about it, so why not take the opportunity for a good laugh? Only one of the heirs, an official from Petersburg, a striking-looking man with a Greek nose and a noble expression, Rostislav Adamich Stoppel, was unable to restrain himself, and sidled up to Nedopyuskin and looked at him contemptuously over his shoulder. “As far as I can observe, my dear sir,” he began in a tone of contemptuous indifference, “you were employed by the respected Fyodor Fyodorich in the capacity of a kind of house-jester?” The official from Petersburg expressed himself in language that was unbeatably clear, crisp, and precise. In his distraction and excitement, Nedopyuskin did not take in the words of the gentleman, who was a stranger to him, but all the others immediately stopped talking: the wit smiled condescendingly. Mr. Stoppel rubbed his hands and repeated his question. Nedopyuskin looked up in amazement and opened his mouth. Rostislav Adamich narrowed his eyes offensively.
“Congratulations, my dear sir, congratulations,” he went on; “it’s true that not everyone would be prepared to earn his daily bread in such a fashion, but de gustibus non est disputandum, that is to say, we all have our own tastes . . . Haven’t we?”
Someone in the back rows gave a short, discreet whoop of astonishment and delight.
“Tell me,” went on Mr. Stoppel, much encouraged by the smiles of the whole company, “to what talent in particular do you owe your good fortune? No, don’t be shy, tell us; all of us here are, as it were, en famille. Isn’t that so, gentlemen, that we are en famille here?”
The gentleman to whom Rostislav Adamich happened to address this question unfortunately knew no French, and therefore confined himself to a single faint grunt of approbation. But another beneficiary, a young man with yellowish blotches on his forehead, asserted hastily: “Voui, voui, of course.”
“Perhaps,” began Mr. Stoppel again, “you can walk on your hands, with your legs in the air, as it were?”
Nedopyuskin looked round unhappily—every face wore a malicious grin, every eye was wet with mirth.
“Or, perhaps, you can crow like a cock?”
There was a burst of laughter all round which died away at once, stifled by anticipation.
“Or, perhaps, on your nose, you . . .”
“Stop!” A sharp and ringing voice suddenly broke in. “You ought to be ashamed to tease the poor fellow like that!”
Everyone looked round. In the doorway stood Chertopkhanov. As a third cousin of the deceased tax-farmer, he too had received a letter of invitation to the family gathering. While the will was being read he had, as usual, kept proudly at a distance from the others.
“Stop,” he repeated, arrogantly throwing back his head.
Mr. Stoppel turned round quickly and, seeing a badly-dressed, insignificant-looking man, asked his neighbor under his breath (for caution never harmed anyone): “Who’s that?”
“Chertopkhanov—a smallish bird,” replied the neighbor in his ear.
Rostislav Adamich assumed an expression of contempt: “And who are you to give orders?” he said, through his nose, with his eyes screwed up. “What sort of bird are you?”
Chertopkhanov blew up like powder from a spark. Rage hampered his breathing.
“Dz-dz-dz-dz,” he hissed, as if he was being throttled, then suddenly thundered out: “Who am I? Who am I? I am Pantelei Chertopkhanov, a man of the oldest nobility, my great-great-great-great-grandfather served the Tsar, and who are you?”
Rostislav Adamich turned pale and took a step back. He had not expected such a repulse.
“A bird, me, me, a bird . . . Oh, oh, oh!”
Chertopkhanov rushed forward; Stoppel jumped away in great agitation, and the guests dashed in to meet the indignant landowner.
“Shoot it out, shoot it out at once, across a handkerchief!” cried Pantelei in a frenzy. “Or apologize to me and to him too . . .”
“Apologize, apologize,” whispered the anxious beneficiaries surrounding Stoppel. “You see what he is; a madman—and a homicidal one, too.”
“Forgive me, forgive me, I didn’t know,” began Stoppel in a faltering voice. “I didn’t know.”
“Apologize to him, too!” shouted Pantelei indefatigably.
“You forgive me, too,” added Rostislav Adamich, addressing Nedopyuskin, who himself was trembling as if in a fever.
Chertopkhanov calmed down, went over to Tikhon, took his arm, looked arrogantly around, and, not meeting a single glance, solemnly, in the midst of a deep silence, walked from the room accompanied by the new owner of the Besselendeyevka property.
From that day on they were inseparable. (The village of Besselendeyevka was only eight versts away from Bessonovo.) Nedopyuskin’s unbounded gratitude soon changed to an obsequious devotion. Weak, soft, and not entirely straight, Tikhon humbled himself to the dust before the fearless, reproachless Pantelei. It’s tremendous! he thought to himself from time to time: he talks to the Governor, looks him straight in the eye . . . why, you would think he was Christ himself!
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