through which it runs, there stood not long ago a roomy inn, very well
known to the drivers of troikas, peasants with trains of waggons,
merchants, clerks, pedlars and the numerous travellers of all sorts
who journey upon our roads at all times of the year. Everyone used to
call at the inn; only perhaps a landowner's coach, drawn by six
home-bred horses, would roll majestically by, which did not prevent
either the coachman or the groom on the footboard from looking with
peculiar feeling and attention at the little porch so familiar to them;
or some poor devil in a wretched little cart and with three five-kopeck
pieces in the bag in his bosom would urge on his weary nag when he
reached the prosperous inn, and would hasten on to some night's lodging
in the hamlets that lie by the high road in a peasant's hut, where he
would find nothing but bread and hay, but, on the other hand, would not
have to pay an extra kopeck. Apart from its favourable situation, the
inn with which our story deals had many attractions: excellent water in
two deep wells with creaking wheels and iron buckets on a chain; a
spacious yard with a tiled roof on posts; abundant stores of oats in
the cellar; a warm outer room with a very huge Russian stove with long
horizontal flues attached that looked like titanic shoulders, and
lastly two fairly clean rooms with the walls covered with reddish
lilac paper somewhat frayed at the lower edge with a painted wooden
sofa, chairs to match and two pots of geraniums in the windows, which
were, however, never cleaned--and were dingy with the dust of years.
The inn had other advantages: the blacksmith's was close by, the mill
was just at hand; and, lastly, one could get a good meal in it, thanks
to the cook, a fat and red-faced peasant woman, who prepared rich and
appetizing dishes and dealt out provisions without stint; the nearest
tavern was reckoned not half a mile away; the host kept snuff which
though mixed with wood-ash, was extremely pungent and pleasantly
irritated the nose; in fact there were many reasons why visitors of
all sorts were never lacking in that inn. It was liked by those who
used it--and that is the chief thing; without which nothing, of course,
would succeed and it was liked principally as it was said in the
district, because the host himself was very fortunate and successful
in all his undertakings, though he did not much deserve his good
fortune; but it seems if a man is lucky, he is lucky.
The innkeeper was a man of the working class called Naum Ivanov. He
was a man of middle height with broad, stooping shoulders; he had a
big round head and curly hair already grey, though he did not look
more than forty; a full and fresh face, a low but white and smooth
forehead and little bright blue eyes, out of which he looked in a very
queer way from under his brows and yet with an insolent expression, a
combination not often met with. He always held his head down and
seemed to turn it with difficulty, perhaps because his neck was very
short. He walked at a trot and did not swing his arms, but slowly
moved them with his fists clenched as he walked. When he smiled, and
he smiled often without laughing, as it were smiling to himself, his
thick lips parted unpleasantly and displayed a row of close-set,
brilliant teeth. He spoke jerkily and with a surly note in his voice.
He shaved his beard, but dressed in Russian style. His costume
consisted of a long, always threadbare, full coat, full breeches and
shoes on his bare feet. He was often away from home on business and he
had a great deal of business--he was a horse-dealer, he rented land,
had a market garden, bought up orchards and traded in various ways--but
his absences never lasted long; like a kite, to which he had
considerable resemblance, especially in the expression of his eyes, he
used to return to his nest. He knew how to keep that nest in order. He
was everywhere, he listened to everything and gave orders, served out
stores, sent things out and made up his accounts himself, and never
knocked off a farthing from anyone's account, but never asked more
than his due.
The visitors did not talk to him, and, indeed, he did not care to
waste words. "I want your money and you want my victuals," he used to
say, as it were, jerking out each word: "We have not met for a
christening; the traveller has eaten, has fed his beasts, no need to
sit on. If he is tired, let him sleep without chattering." The
labourers he kept were healthy grown-up men, but docile and well
broken in; they were very much afraid of him. He never touched
intoxicating liquor and he used to give his men ten kopecks for vodka
on the great holidays; they did not dare to drink on other days.
People like Naum quickly get rich ... but to the magnificent position
in which he found himself--and he was believed to be worth forty or
fifty thousand roubles--Naum Ivanov had not arrived by the strait
path....
The inn had existed on the same spot on the high road twenty years
before the time from which we date the beginning of our story. It is
true that it had not then the dark red shingle roof which made Naum
Ivanov's inn look like a gentleman's house; it was inferior in
construction and had thatched roofs in the courtyard, and a humble
fence instead of a wall of logs; nor had it been distinguished by the
triangular Greek pediment on carved posts; but all the same it had
been a capital inn--roomy, solid and warm--and travellers were glad to
frequent it. The innkeeper at that time was not Naum Ivanov, but a
certain Akim Semyonitch, a serf belonging to a neighbouring lady,
Lizaveta Prohorovna Kuntse, the widow of a staff officer. This Akim
was a shrewd trading peasant who, having left home in his youth with
two wretched nags to work as a carrier, had returned a year later with
three decent horses and had spent almost all the rest of his life on
the high roads; he used to go to Kazan and Odessa, to Orenburg and to
Warsaw and abroad to Leipsic and used in the end to travel with two
teams, each of three stout, sturdy stallions, harnessed to two huge
carts. Whether it was that he was sick of his life of homeless
wandering, whether it was that he wanted to rear a family (his wife
had died in one of his absences and what children she had borne him
were dead also), anyway, he made up his mind at last to abandon his
old calling and to open an inn. With the permission of his mistress,
he settled on the high road, bought in her name about an acre and a
half of land and built an inn upon it. The undertaking prospered. He
had more than enough money to furnish and stock it. The experience he
had gained in the course of his years of travelling from one end of
Russia to another was of great advantage to him; he knew how to please
his visitors, especially his former mates, the drivers of troikas,
many of whom he knew personally and whose good-will is particularly
valued by innkeepers, as they need so much food for themselves and
their powerful beasts. Akim's inn became c
elebrated for hundreds of
miles round. People were even readier to stay with him than with his
successor, Naum, though Akim could not be compared with Naum as a
manager. Under Akim everything was in the old-fashioned style, snug,
but not over clean; and his oats were apt to be light, or musty; the
cooking, too, was somewhat indifferent: dishes were sometimes put on
the table which would better have been left in the oven and it was not
that he was stingy with the provisions, but just that the cook had not
looked after them. On the other hand, he was ready to knock off
something from the price and did not refuse to trust a man's word for
payment--he was a good man and a genial host. In talking, in
entertaining, he was lavish, too; he would sometimes chatter away over
the samovar till his listeners pricked up their ears, especially when
he began telling them about Petersburg, about the Circassian steppes,
or even about foreign parts; and he liked getting a little drunk with
a good companion, but not disgracefully so, more for the sake of
company, as his guests used to say of him. He was a great favourite
with merchants and with all people of what is called the old school,
who do not set off for a journey without tightening up their belts and
never go into a room without making the sign of the cross, and never
enter into conversation with a man without first wishing him good
health. Even Akim's appearance disposed people in his favour: he was
tall, rather thin, but graceful even at his advanced years; he had a
long face, with fine-looking regular features, a high and open brow, a
straight and delicate nose and a small mouth. His brown and prominent
eyes positively shone with friendly gentleness, his soft, scanty hair
curled in little rings about his neck; he had very little left on the
top of his head. Akim's voice was very pleasant, though weak; in his
youth he had been a good singer, but continual travelling in the open
air in the winter had affected his chest. But he talked very smoothly
and sweetly. When he laughed wrinkles like rays that were very
charming came round his eyes:--such wrinkles are only to be seen in
kind-hearted people. Akim's movements were for the most part
deliberate and not without a certain confidence and dignified courtesy
befitting a man of experience who had seen a great deal in his day.
In fact, Akim--or Akim Semyonitch as he was called even in his
mistress's house, to which he often went and invariably on Sundays
after mass--would have been excellent in all respects--if he had not
had one weakness which has been the ruin of many men on earth, and was
in the end the ruin of him, too--a weakness for the fair sex. Akim's
susceptibility was extreme, his heart could never resist a woman's
glance: he melted before it like the first snow of autumn in the
sun ... and dearly he had to pay for his excessive sensibility.
For the first year after he had set up on the high road Akim was so
busy with building his yard, stocking the place, and all the business
inseparable from moving into a new house that he had absolutely no
time to think of women and if any sinful thought came into his mind he
immediately drove it away by reading various devotional works for
which he cherished a profound respect (he had learned to read when
first he left home), singing the psalms in a low voice or some other
pious occupation. Besides, he was then in his forty-sixth year and at
that time of life every passion grows perceptibly calmer and cooler
and the time for marrying was past. Akim himself began to think that,
as he expressed it, this foolishness was over and done with ... But
evidently there is no escaping one's fate.
Akim's former mistress, Lizaveta Prohorovna Kuntse, the widow of an
officer of German extraction, was herself a native of Mittau, where
she had spent the first years of her childhood and where she had
numerous poor relations, about whom she concerned herself very little,
especially after a casual visit from one of her brothers, an infantry
officer of the line. On the day after his arrival he had made a great
disturbance and almost beaten the lady of the house, calling her "du
lumpenmamselle," though only the evening before he had called her in
broken Russian: "sister and benefactor." Lizaveta Prohorovna lived
almost permanently on her pretty estate which had been won by the
labours of her husband who had been an architect. She managed it
herself and managed it very well. Lizaveta Prohorovna never let slip
the slightest advantage; she turned everything into profit for
herself; and this, as well as her extraordinary capacity for making a
farthing do the work of a halfpenny, betrayed her German origin; in
everything else she had become very Russian. She kept a considerable
number of house serfs, especially many maids, who earned their salt,
however: from morning to night their backs were bent over their work.
She liked driving out in her carriage with grooms in livery on the
footboard. She liked listening to gossip and scandal and was a clever
scandal-monger herself; she liked to lavish favours upon someone, then
suddenly crush him with her displeasure, in fact, Lizaveta Prohorovna
behaved exactly like a lady. Akim was in her good graces; he paid her
punctually every year a very considerable sum in lieu of service; she
talked graciously to him and even, in jest, invited him as a guest...
but it was precisely in his mistress's house that trouble was in store
for Akim.
Among Lizaveta Prohorovna's maidservants was an orphan girl of twenty
called Dunyasha. She was good-looking, graceful and neat-handed;
though her features were irregular, they were pleasing; her fresh
complexion, her thick flaxen hair, her lively grey eyes, her
little round nose, her rosy lips and above all her half-mocking,
half-provocative expression--were all rather charming in their way. At
the same time, in spite of her forlorn position, she was strict, almost
haughty in her deportment. She came of a long line of house serfs. Her
father, Arefy, had been a butler for thirty years, while her
grandfather, Stepan had been valet to a prince and officer of the
Guards long since dead. She dressed neatly and was vain over her
hands, which were certainly very beautiful. Dunyasha made a show of
great disdain for all her admirers; she listened to their compliments
with a self-complacent little smile and if she answered them at all it
was usually some exclamation such as: "Yes! Likely! As though I
should! What next!" These exclamations were always on her lips.
Dunyasha had spent about three years being trained in Moscow where she
had picked up the peculiar airs and graces which distinguish
maidservants who have been in Moscow or Petersburg. She was spoken of
Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories Page 5