The driver turned towards the gates and stopped the horses; Lavretsky’s servant raised himself on the box and, as if in readiness to jump down, shouted: Hey!’ Hoarse, muffled barking ensued, but not even a dog appeared; the servant again prepared to jump down and again cried out: ‘Hey!’ The croaky barking occurred again and an instant later there ran out into the yard, Heaven knows from where, a man in a nankeen caftan with a head as white as snow; he looked at the tarantass, shading his eyes from the sun, struck both hands against his thighs, hovered about uncertainly for an instant or so and then rushed to open the gates. The tarantass entered the courtyard, its wheels rustling through the nettles, and came to a halt before the entrance porch. The white-haired man, to all appearances extremely nimble, was already standing with his bow legs set wide apart on the bottom step of the porch. He undid the detachable front cover of the tarantass, jerkingly holding the leather up, and, in helping his master to set foot on the ground, kissed him on the hand.
‘Good to see you, my good chap,’ said Lavretsky. ‘You’re called Anton, aren’t you? Can you still be alive?’
The old man bowed silently and ran off to get the keys. While he was gone, the driver sat motionlessly, his arms at his sides, giving looks at the closed door; while Lavretsky’s servant, having jumped down, remained in exactly that picturesque pose with one hand thrown over the box. The old man brought the keys and, quite needlessly writhing like a snake, unlocked the door holding up his elbows high, stood aside and again gave a low bow from the waist.
‘Here I am at home, here I am back at last,’ thought Lavretsky, entering the tiny hall as the shutters were opened one after another with a clattering and a creaking and daylight penetrated into the desolate rooms.
XIX
THE small house to which Lavretsky had come and where two years ago Glafira Petrovna had died was built in the last century of solid pinewood; in appearance it seemed decrepit, but it could well stand another fifty years or more. Lavretsky went through all the rooms and, to the great discomfort of the ancient, enfeebled flies with their backs covered in white dust who were sitting motionless under the lintels, ordered that all the windows should be opened: from the moment of Glafira Petrovna’s death no one had unlatched them. Everything in the house had remained as it was. In the drawing-room little white divans standing on elegant legs and upholstered in sheeny grey damask, frayed and holed, were a lively reminder of the times of Catherine1; there also stood the mistress’s favourite armchair with its high straight back, against which she did not lean even in old age. On the main wall hung an ancient portrait of Fyodor’s great-grandfather, Andrey Lavretsky; the dark, bad-tempered face was scarcely distinguishable from the warped and blackened background; small malicious eyes gazed morosely from beneath drooping and literally swollen lids; black unpowdered hair rose in bristles above a heavy furrowed brow. On one corner of the portrait hung a dusty wreath of everlasting flowers. ‘Glafira Petrovna herself saw to the making of the wreath,’ Anton announced. In the bedroom stood a lofty narrow bed under a canopy of old-fashioned but very good-quality striped material; a pile of faded pillows and a threadbare quilted counterpane lay on the bed, at the head of which hung an icon, ‘The Blessed Virgin entering the Temple’ – the very same icon to which the old maiden lady, dying alone and forgotten by the world, pressed her already cold lips for the last time. By the window stood a little inlaid dressing-table with brass fittings and a crooked mirror in a tarnished gilt frame. Next to the bedroom was an icon-room, a tiny place with bare walls and a heavy icon-case set in one corner; on the floor lay a worn, wax-stained piece of carpet where Glafira Petrovna used to make her obeisances. Anton left with Lavretsky’s servant to unlock the stables and coach-house; in his place there appeared an old woman, almost his coeval, with a kerchief bound round her head to the level of her eyebrows; her head shook and her eyes stared vacantly, but she still contrived to express diligence, the long-term habit of unquestioning service and – at the same time – a kind of respectful regret. She approached Lavretsky’s hand and then stopped by the door in anticipation of orders. He simply could not remember what she was called, and did not even remember whether he had ever seen her before; it transpired that she was called Apraxia; some forty years ago Glafira Petrovna had despatched her from the house and ordered her to be a poultry-keeper; she spoke little, as if she had outlived her wits, but still gazed at him deferentially. Apart from these two old people and three pot-bellied children in long shirts, Anton’s great-grandchildren, there also lived at the house a little one-armed peasant who had been released from his obligations as a serf; he groused away to himself all day and was incapable of doing a thing; hardly more useful was the decrepit dog that had greeted Lavretsky’s return with its barking: it had spent ten years on a heavy chain bought on Glafira Petrovna’s orders and was barely in any condition to move about and drag its heavy burden. Having looked over the house, Lavretsky went into the garden and was satisfied by what he saw. It was entirely overgrown with thick weeds and burdock and gooseberry and raspberry bushes; but there was much shade and many old limes which were striking for their hugeness and the curious arrangements of their boughs, the result of having been planted too close together and – perhaps a hundred years ago – severely pruned back. The garden ended in a small bright pond with a fringe of tall reddish reeds. Traces of human life vanish very quickly: Glafira Petrovna’s estate had not yet gone wild, but it seemed already to have sunk into that quiet repose which possesses everything on earth wherever there is no restless human infection to affect it. Fyodor Ivanych also took a walk through the village; women gazed at him from the doorways of their huts, hands resting on their cheeks; the menfolk bowed from a distance, children ran off and dogs barked indifferently. Finally he wanted to have a meal, but he could not expect the rest of his servants and his cook before evening, and the waggons with supplies from Lavriki had not yet arrived – so he had to fall back on Anton. Anton at once made the arrangements: he caught, killed and plucked an old chicken; Apraxia took a long time rubbing and washing and belabouring it, as though it were linen, before putting it in a saucepan; when it was at last cooked, Anton spread a cloth and laid the table, setting before his master’s place a blackened plated salt-cellar on three legs and a cut-glass decanter with a round glass stopper and a thin neck; then he announced to Lavretsky in a sing-song voice that dinner was served and positioned himself behind Lavretsky’s chair with a napkin wrapped round his right fist and exuding a strong antique odour similar to that of cypress wood. Lavretsky dealt with the soup and then addressed himself to the chicken; its skin was covered all over with large pimples; a large tendon ran down each leg and the meat had an alkaline, woody taste. Having dined, Lavretsky said that he would like some tea if… ‘I’ll bring it, sir, this very minute, sir,’ the old man interrupted and was as good as his word. A pinch of tea was sought out, wrapped in a twist of red paper; a small but exceedingly fiery and noisy samovar was unearthed, along with sugar in very small lumps which looked as if they had been melted. Lavretsky drank his tea from a big cup; he remembered this cup from his childhood: it had playing cards painted on it and only guests were allowed to drink out of it – and he drank out of it now as if he were a guest. His servants arrived towards evening; Lavretsky did not want to sleep in his aunt’s bed; he ordered that a bed be made up for him in the dining-room. When he had put out the candle he gazed around him for a long while and thought unhappy thoughts; he experienced the feeling, familiar to anyone who has had to spend a night for the first time in a long uninhabited place, that the darkness surrounding him on all sides could not, as it were, accustom itself to this new inhabitant, that the very walls of the house were baffled by him. Eventually he sighed, drew the blanket over him and fell asleep. Anton remained on his feet longer than anyone else; he spent a long time whispering with Apraxia, groaning under his breath and crossing himself a couple of times; neither of them had expected that the master would settle in Vasilyevskoye when he had n
earby such a splendid estate with an admirably laid-out house and garden; they did not suspect that that very estate was repugnant to Lavretsky and aroused in him nothing but oppressive memories. Having whispered to his heart’s content, Anton took a stick and struck the watchman’s board which had long hung silent by the barn, and huddled down then and there out in the yard, without bothering to cover his white head. The May night was quiet and mild, and the old man slept sweetly.
XX
THE next day Lavretsky rose fairly early, chatted with the village elder, visited the threshing-floor, ordered the chain to be taken off the dog in the yard, who only barked a little but did not even leave his kennel, and then returned home to sink into a kind of peaceful torpor from which he did not emerge all day. ‘Here’s the point where I’ve fallen to the bottom of the river,’ he said to himself more than once. He sat at the window without stirring a muscle, literally absorbed in listening to the flow of the quiet life surrounding him and the occasional sounds of the peaceful rural world. Somewhere beyond the nettles someone hummed a melody in the finest of thin voices, and a gnat seemed to take up the refrain. The voice ceased, but the gnat continued to hum: through the concerted, naggingly plaintive buzzing of flies there resounded the droning of a fat bumble-bee which now and then tapped against the ceiling; a cock started crowing in the street, wheezily prolonging its final crowing note; a cart rattled by and in the village a gate creaked. ‘What’ sat?’ a woman’s voice suddenly screeched. ‘Oh, you’re a little madam!’ said Anton to the two-year-old girl he was dandling in his arms. ‘Bring the kvass,’ repeated the same woman’s voice – and suddenly dead silence ensued; nothing tapped, nothing stirred; one by one swallows swooped along the ground without a murmur, and the very silence of their flight made the heart sad. ‘Here am I as though I were at the bottom of a river,’ Lavretsky thought again. ‘And here always, at all times, life is quiet and unhurried,’ he reflected. ‘Whoever enters its charmed circle must submit to it: here there is nothing to worry about, nothing to disturb one; here success comes only to him who carves out his own unhurried path as the ploughman carves out the furrows with his plough. And what strength there is everywhere, what vigour in this static peace! Just there, beneath the window, a rugged burdock shoves its way through the thick grass; above it lovage stretches its juicy stalk, angels’ tears unfurls its rosy curls higher still; and there, further off, in the fields, the rye gleams brightly burnished, and the oats have formed their little trumpet ears, and every leaf on every tree, and every blade of grass on its stalk, has broadened out to its fullest breadth. My best years have passed in loving a woman,’ Lavretsky continued to reflect. ‘Now let this boredom bring me to my senses, let it calm me and prepare me to take up my task without hurry.’ And once again he began to listen to the silence, awaiting nothing – and yet at the same time endlessly expectant: the silence engulfed him on every side; the sun ran its course across the tranquil blue of the sky, and the clouds floated silently upon it; it seemed as if they knew why and where they were going. At that very time, in other places on the earth, life was seething, hurrying, roaring on its way; here the same life flowed by inaudibly, like water through marshy grass; and until evening Lavretsky could not tear himself away from contemplation of this receding, outflowing life; anguish for the past was melting in his soul like spring snow and – strangest of all! – never before had he felt so deep and strong a feeling for his country.
XXI
IN the course of a fortnight Fyodor Ivanych put Glafira Petrovna’s little house in order and cleaned up the courtyard and the garden; comfortable furniture was brought from Lavriki, wine, books and journals from the town; in a word, Fyodor Ivanych surrounded himself with all he needed and began to live the life of the cross between a landowner and a hermit. One day passed much like another; he was not bored although he had no visitors; he diligently and carefully attended to the estate, rode on horseback through the surrounding region and did some reading. However, he did not read much: he found it pleasanter to listen to old Anton’s stories. Usually Lavretsky would sit down with a pipe of tobacco and a cup of cold tea by the window; Anton would position himself at the door, his hands behind his back, and begin his unhurried stories about times long past, about those fairytale times when oats and rye were sold not in measures but in large sacks, for two or three copecks a sack; when on all sides, even in the vicinity of the town, there stretched impenetrable forests and untouched steppeland. ‘But now,’ the old man complained (he was already more than eighty), ‘everything’s cut down and ploughed up so much you can’t go anywhere.’ Anton also had many tales to tell about his mistress, Glafira Petrovna: how she had been so sensible and economical; how a certain gentleman, a young neighbour, had made up to her and come on frequent visits, and how she had even honoured him by wearing her Sunday bonnet with dark-red ribbons and a yellow dress of tru-tru-levantine; but how later, infuriated by the neighbouring gentleman’s indelicate question: ‘Pray, madam, how much capital would you say you have?’, banned him from the house and then and there gave orders that after her death everything, down to the smallest rag, should be left to Fyodor Ivanych. And Lavretsky did indeed find all his aunt’s worldly goods left intact, not excluding the Sunday bonnet with dark-red ribbons and the yellow dress of tru-tru-levantine. Of old papers and interesting documents, on which Lavretsky had counted, there remained nothing, apart from one ancient notebook into which his grandfather, Pyotr Andreyich, had copied ‘The Celebration in St Petersburg of the Peace Concluded with the Empire of Turkey by His Excellency Prince Alexander Alexandrovich Prozorovsky,’ a recipe for a décoction for relief of chest ailments with the attached note: ‘This Instruction was given to the General’s wife Praskovya Fyodorovna Saltykov by Fyodor Avksentyevich, Archpriest of Holy Trinity Church,’ political news of the following kind: ‘Things have quietened a bit about the French tigers,’ and beside this: ‘In the Moscow News it is announced that First Major Mikhail Petrovich Kolychev has died. Is this not Pyotr Vasilyevich Kolychev’s son?’ Lavretsky also found several old calendars and dream-books and the mysterious work by Mr Ambodik; many memories were aroused in him by the long-forgotten but still familiar Symbols and Emblems. In Glafira Petrovna’s dressing-table Lavretsky found a small packet tied with a black ribbon, sealed with black wax and shoved to the very back of the drawer. In the packet there lay face to face a pastel portrait of his father in his youth, with soft curls spilt over his temples, long languid eyes and a half-open mouth, and an almost completely faded portrait of a pale woman in a white dress, holding a white rose – his mother. Glafira Petrovna never allowed a portrait to be made of herself. ‘I, sir, Fyodor Ivanych,’ Anton would say to Lavretsky, ‘though in them days I weren’t livin in t’ master’s house, I can still call to mind your great-granfer, Andrey Afanasyevich, seein’ as I were just gone eighteen when ‘ee died. Once I met ‘im, I did, in the garden – an’ fair shivered in me shoes, I did, but ‘ee didn’t do nothin’, just asked me who I were an’ sent me off to ‘is room to fetch ‘im a ‘ankerchief. A real master ‘ee were, no sayin’ otherwise – an’ ‘ee wouldn’t ‘ave nobody over ‘im, ‘ee wouldn’t. I’ll tell you why, ‘cos your great-granfer ‘ad a sort of trinket, magical-like it were, what a monk gave ‘im from Mount Athos. And this monk did tell ‘im: “I give you this, sir, for your cordiality towards me; wear it and never be afraid.” Well, sir, it’s well known what times were like in those days: whatever the master might want, that ‘ee would ‘ave. It might be that one of the local gents even thought to contradict ‘im, so ‘ee’d just look at ‘im and say: “You’re small fry” – an’ that was ‘is favourite sayin’. An’ your great-granfer, of blessed memory, did live in a small wooden house; and what goods ‘ee left behind ‘im – silver an’ what ‘ave you, all the cellars stuffed with ‘em, they were! A grand manager of’is affairs, ‘ee were. That there decanter, what you were good enough to praise, was ‘is: ‘ee would drink ‘is vodka from it. But your granfer, Pyotr Andreyich,
build a brick house ‘ee might but ‘ee never did do no good; everything.’ee did went wrong; an’ ‘ee lived worse than ‘is father, an’ ‘ee never ‘ad no real pleasure – lost all’ is money, so there’s nothin to remember ‘im by, not even a silver spoon’s remained, an’ what there is remainin’ is thanks to Glafira Petrovna.’
‘Is it true’, Lavretsky interrupted him, ‘that they used to call her a browbeating old bitch?’
‘But who used to call her that!’ Anton replied with displeasure.
‘An’ what, sir,’ the old man on one occasion made to ask, ‘what of our mistress, where will she be stayin’?’
‘I have divorced my wife,’ Lavretsky said with an effort. ‘Please do not ask about her.’
‘Very good, sir,’ the old man responded sadly.
When three weeks had passed, Lavretsky rode into O… to the Kalitins and spent the evening at their house. Lemm was there; Lavretsky liked him very much. Although, through the kindness of his father, he could not play a single instrument, he was passionately fond of music – real music, classical music. Panshin was not at the Kalitins that evening. The Governor had sent him somewhere out of town. Liza played on her own and very precisely; Lemm became animated and expansive, rolling a piece of paper into a baton and conducting. Marya Dmitrievna laughed at first, seeing him do this, and then went off to bed; in her own words, Beethoven agitated her nerves too much. At midnight Lavretsky accompanied Lemm to his lodgings and sat with him there until three in the morning. Lemm talked a great deal; his bent back grew straight, his eyes widened and grew bright; even his hair rose more firmly above his temples. It was such a long time since anyone had taken any interest in him, and Lavretsky showed evident interest in him, asking him so many solicitous and attentive questions. The old man was touched; he ended by showing his guest his music, playing and even singing in a lifeless voice certain items from his works, among other things the whole of Schiller’s ballad ‘Fridolin’1 which he had set to music. Lavretsky complimented him, made him repeat certain pieces and, on leaving, invited him to be his guest for a few days. Lemm, who accompanied him down to the street, agreed at once and firmly clasped his hand; but when he was left standing alone in the fresh, raw air of imminent dawn he looked round him, frowned, was assailed by an attack of goose-flesh and crept back into his own room like a criminal. ‘Ich bin wohl nicht klug’(I am not in my right mind), he muttered as he lay down in his short, hard bed. He attempted to cry off on the grounds of illness when, a few days later, Lavretsky called on him in a carriage, but Fyodor Ivanych went up to his room and persuaded him to come. What affected Lemm most strongly was the fact that Lavretsky had personally arranged for a piano to be brought out to his house from the town. Together they went off to the Kalitins and spent the evening with them, but not as pleasantly as on the last occasion. Panshin was there with a great deal to tell about his travels, and he very entertainingly imitated and parodied the landowners he had met; Lavretsky laughed, but Lemm never left his corner, never spoke, quietly spun his restless web like a spider, looked gloomy and morose and only came to life when Lavretsky began to say good-bye. Even sitting in the carriage, the old man continued to sulk and bristle; but the calm warm air, the light breeze, the faint shadows, the scent of grass and birch buds, the peaceful glow of the moonless starlit sky, the concerted hoof beats and the snorts of the horses, all the enchantments of the road, the spring and the night sank into the soul of the poor German, and he was the first to talk.
Home of the Gentry Page 9