Flashman at the Charge fp-4

by George MacDonald Fraser

  "From me they have strict justice, under the law," says this amazing gorilla. "And they love me for it. Has anyone ever seen the knout, or the butuks,* (*Press for crushing feet.) used on my estate? No, and never shall. If I correct them, it is because without correction they will become idle and shiftless, and ruin me—and themselves. For without me, where are they? These poor souls, they believe the world rests on three whales swimming in the Eternal Sea! What are you to do with such folk? I will meet with the best; the wisest of them, the spokesman of their gromada,* (*Village assembly.) driving his droshky.*(*Gig.). 'Ha, Ivan,' I will say, 'your axles squeal; why do you not grease them?' And he ponders, and replies, 'Only a thief is afraid to make a noise, batiushka.' So the axles remain ungreased—unless I cudgel his foolish head, or have the Cossacks whip and salt his back for him. And he respects me"—he would thump his great fist on his thigh as he said it "because he knows I am a bread and salt man, and go with my neck open, as he does.26 And I am just—to the inch."

  And you may say he was: when he flogged his dvornik*(*Porter.) for insolence, and the fellow collapsed before the prescribed punishment was finished, they sent him to the local quack—and when he was better, gave him the remaining strokes. "Who would trust me again, if I excused him a single blow?" says Pencherjevsky.

  Now, I don't recite all these barbarities to shock or excite your pity, or to pose as one of those holy hypocrites who pretend to be in a great sweat about man's inhumanity to man. I've seen too much of it, and know it happens wherever strong folk have absolute power over spiritless creatures. I merely tell you truly what I saw—as for my own view, well, I'm all for keeping the peasants in order, and if hammering 'em does good, and makes life better for the rest of us, you won't find me leaping between the tyrant and his victim crying "Stay, cruel despot!" But I would observe that much of the cruelty I saw in Russia was pure senseless brutishness—I doubt if they even enjoyed it much. They just knew no better.

  I wondered sometimes why the serfs, dull, ignorant, superstitious clods though they were, endured it. The truth, as I learned it from Pencherjevsky, was that they didn't, always. In the thirty years just ending when I was in Russia, there had been peasant revolts once every fortnight, in one part of the country or another, and as often as not it had taken the military to put them down. Or rather, it had taken the Cossacks, for the Russian army was a useless thing, as we'd seen in the Crimea. You can't make soldiers out of slaves. But the Cossacks were free, independent tribesmen; they had land, and paid little tax, had their own tribal laws, drank themselves stupid, and served the Tsar from boyhood till they were fifty because they loved to ride and fight and loot—and they liked nothing better than to use their nagaikas on the serfs, which was just nuts to them.

  Pencherjevsky wasn't worried about revolution among his own moujiks because, as I say, he regarded himself as a good master. Also he had Cossacks of his own to strike terror into any malcontents. "And I never commit the great folly," says he. "I never touch a serf-woman—or allow one to be used or sold as a concubine." (Whether he said it for my benefit or not, it was bad news, for I hadn't had a female in ages, and some of the peasants—like Valla's maid—were not half bad-looking once they were washed.) "These uprisings on other estates—look into them, and I'll wager every time the master has ravished some serf wench, or stolen a moujik's wife, or sent a young fellow into the army so that he can enjoy his sweetheart. They don't like it, I tell you—and I don't blame them! If a lord wants a woman, let him marry one, or buy one from far afield—but let him slake his lust on one of his own serf-women, and he'll wake up one fine morning with a split head and his roof on fire. And serve him right!"

  I gathered he was unusual in this view: most landlords just used the serf-wenches the way American owners used their nigger girls, and pupped 'em all over the place. But Pencherjevsky had his own code, and believed his moujiks thought the better of him for it, and were content. I wondered if he wasn't gammoning himself.

  Because I paid attention, toady-like, to his proses, and was eager in studying his language, he assumed I was interested in his appalling country and its ways, and was at pains to educate me, as he saw it. From him I learned of the peculiar laws governing the serfs—how they might be free if they could run away for ten years, how some of them were allowed to leave the estates and work in the towns, provided they sent a proportion of earnings to their master; how some of these serfs became vastly rich—richer than their masters, sometimes, and worth millions—but still could not buy their freedom unless he wished. Some serfs even owned serfs. It was an idiotic system, of course, but the landowners were all for it, and even the humanitarian ones believed that if it were changed, and political reforms allowed, the country would dissolve in anarchy. I daresay they were right, but myself I believe it will happen anyway; it was starting even then, as Pencherjevsky admitted.

  "The agitators are never idle," says he. "You have heard of the pernicious German Jew, Marx?" (I didn't like to tell him Marx had been at my wedding, as an uninvited guest.*(*See Royal Flash)) "He vomits his venom over Europe—aye, he and other vile rascals like him would spread their poison even to our country if they could.27 Praise God the moujiks are unlettered folk—but they can hear, and our cities crawl with revolutionary criminals of the lowest stamp. What do they understand of Russia, these filth? What do they seek to do but ruin her? And yet countries like your own give harbour to such creatures, to brew their potions of hate against us! Aye, and against you, too, if you could only see it! You think to encourage them, for the downfall of your enemies, but you will reap the wild wind also, Colonel Flashman!"

  "Well, you know, Count," says I, "we let chaps say what they like, pretty well, always have done. We don't have any kabala,*(*Slavery.) like you—don't seem to need it, for some reason. Probably because we have factories, and so on, and everyone's kept busy, don't you know? I don't doubt all you say is true—but it suits us, you see. And our moujiks are, well, different from yours." I wondered, even as I said it, if they were; remembering that hospital at Yalta, I doubted it. But I couldn't help adding: "Would your moujiks have ridden into the battery at Balaclava?"

  At this he roared with laughter, and called me an evil English rascal, and clapped me on the back. We were mighty close, he and I, really, when I look back—but of course, he never really knew me.

  So you see what kind of man he was, and what kind of a place it was. Most of the time, I liked it—it was a fine easy life until, as I say, you got an unpleasant reminder of what an alien, brooding hostile land it was. It was frightening, then, and I had to struggle to make myself remember that England and London and Elspeth still existed, that far away to the south Cardigan was still croaking "Haw-haw" and Raglan was fussing in the mud at Sevastopol. I would look out of my window sometimes, at the snow-frosted garden, and beyond it the vast, white, endless plain, streaked only by the dark field-borders, and it seemed the old world was just a dream. It was easy then, to get the Russian melancholy, which sinks into the bones, and is born of a knowledge of helplessness far from home.

  The thing that bored me most, needless to say, was being without a woman. I tried my hand with Valla, when we got to know each other and I had decided she wasn't liable to run squealing to her father. By George, she didn't need to. I gave her bottom a squeeze, and she laughed at me and told me she was a respectable married woman; taking this as an invitation I embraced her, at which she wriggled and giggled, puss-like, and then hit me an atrocious clout in the groin with her clenched fist, and ran off, laughing. I walked with a crouch for days, and decided that these Russian ladies must be treated with respect.

  East felt the boredom of captivity in that white wilderness more than I, and spent long hours in his room, writing. One day when he was out I had a turn through his papers, and discovered he was writing his impressions, in the form of an endless letter to his odious friend Brown, who was apparently farming in New Zealand. There was some stuff about me in it, which I read with interest:
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  "… I don't know what to think of Flashman. He is very well liked by all in the house, the Count especially, and I fear that little Valla admires him, too—it would be hard not to, I suppose, for he is such a big, handsome fellow. (Good for you, Scud; carry on.) I say I fear—because sometimes I see him looking at her, with such an ardent expression, and I remember the kind of brute he was at Rugby, and my heart sinks for her fair innocence. Oh, I trust I am wrong! I tell myself that he has changed—how else did the mean, cowardly, spiteful, bullying toady (steady, now, young East) become the truly brave and valiant soldier that he now undoubtedly is? But I do fear, just the same; I know he does not pray, and that he swears, and has evil thoughts, and that the cruel side of his nature is still there. Oh, my poor little Valla—but there, old fellow, I mustn't let my dark suspicions run away with me. I must think well of him, and trust that my prayers will help to keep him true, and that he will prove, despite my doubts, to be an upright, Christian gentleman at last."

  You know, the advantage to being a wicked bastard is that everyone pesters the Lord on your behalf; if volume of prayers from my saintly enemies means anything, I'll be saved when the Archbishop of Canterbury is damned. It's a comforting thought.

  So time passed, and Christmas came and went, and I was slipping into a long, bored tranquil snooze as the months went by. And I was getting soft, and thoroughly off guard, and all the time hell was preparing to break loose.

  It was shortly before "the old wives' winter", as the Russians call February, that Valla's husband came home for a week's furlough. He was an amiable, studious little chap, who got on well with East, but the Count plainly didn't like him, and once he had given us the news from Sevastopol—which was that the siege was still going on, and getting nowhere, which didn't surprise me—old Pencherjevsky just ignored him, and retired moodily to his study and took to drink. He had me in to help him, too, and I caught him giving me odd, thoughtful looks, which was disconcerting, and growling to himself before topping up another bumper of brandy, and drinking sneering toasts to "the blessed happy couple", as he called them.

  Then, exactly a week after Valla's husband had gone back—with no very fond leave-taking from his little spouse, it seemed to me—I was sitting yawning in the salon over a Russian novel, when Aunt Sara came in, and asked if I was bored. I was mildly surprised, for she seldom said much, or addressed one directly. She looked me up and down, with no expression on that fine horse face, and then said abruptly:

  "What you need is a Russian steam-bath. It is the sovereign remedy against our long winters. I have told the servants to make it ready. Come."

  I was idle enough to be game for anything, so I put on my tulup,*(*Sheepskin coat.) and followed her to one of the farthest outbuildings, beyond the house enclosure; it was snowing like hell, but a party of the servants had a great fire going under a huge grille out in the snow, and Aunt Sara took me inside to show me how the thing worked. It was a big log structure, divided down the middle by a high partition, and in the half where we stood was a raised wooden slab, like a butcher's block, surrounded by a trench in the floor. Presently the serfs came in, carrying on metal stretchers great glowing stones which they laid in the trench; the heat was terrific, and Aunt Sara explained to me that you lay on the slab, naked, while the minions outside poured cold water through openings at the base of the wall, which exploded into steam when it touched the stones.

  "This side is for men-folk," says she. "Women are through there"—and she pointed to a gap in the partition. "Your clothes go in the sealed closet on the wall, and when you are ready you lie motionless on the slab, and allow the steam to envelop you." She gave me her bored stare. "The door is bolted from within." And off she went, to the other side of the partition.

  Well, it was something new, so I undressed. and lay on the slab, Aunt Sara called out presently from beyond the partition, and the water came in like Niagara. It hissed and splashed on the stones, and in a twinkling the place was like London fog, choking, scalding, and blotting you in, and you lay there gasping while it sweated into you, turning you scarlet. It was hellish hot and clammy, but not unpleasant, and I lay soaking in it; by and by they pumped in more water, the steam gushed up again, and I was turning over drowsily on my face when Aunt Sara's voice spoke unexpectedly at my elbow.

  "Lie still," says she, and peering -through the mist, I saw that she was wrapped in a clinging sheet, with her long, dark hair hanging in wet strands on either side of that strong, impassive face. I suddenly choked with what East would have called dark thoughts; she was carrying a bunch of long birch twigs, and as she laid a hot, wet hand on my shoulder she muttered huskily: "This is the true benefit of the baths; do not move."

  And then, in that steam-heat, she began to birch me, very lightly at first, up the backs of my legs and to my shoulders, and then back again, harder and harder all the time, until I began to yelp. More steam came belching up, and she turned me over and began work on my chest and stomach. I was fairly interested by now, for mildly painful though it was, it was distinctly stimulating.

  "Now, for me," says she, and motioned me to get up and take the birches. "Russian ladies often use nettles," says she, and for once her voice was unsteady. "I prefer the birch—it is stronger." And in a twinkling she was out of her sheet and face down on the slab. I was having a good gloat down at that long, strong, naked body, when the damned serfs blotted everything out with steam again, so I lashed away through the murk, belabouring her vigorously; she began to moan and gasp, and I went at it like a man possessed, laying on so that the twigs snapped, and as the steam cleared again she rolled over on her back, mouth open and eyes staring, and reached out to seize hold of me, pumping away at me and gasping:

  "Now! Now! For me! Pajalsta! I must have! Now! Pajalsta!"

  Now, I can recognize a saucy little flirt when I see one, so I gave her a few last thrashes and leaped aboard, nearly bursting. God, it must have been months—so in my perversity, I had to tease her, until she dragged me down, sobbing and scratching at my back, and we whaled away on that wet slab, with the steam thundering round us, and she writhed and grappled fit to dislocate herself, until I began to fear we would slither off on to the hot stones. And when I lay there, utterly done, she slipped away and doused me with a bucket of cold water—what with one thing and another, I wonder I survived that bath.

  Mind you, I felt better for it; barbarians they may be, but the Russians have some excellent institutions, and I remain grateful to Sara—undoubtedly my favourite aunt.

  I supposed, in my vanity, that she had just proposed our steam-bath romp to help pass the winter, but there was another reason, as I discovered the following day. It was a bizarre, unbelievable thing, really, to people like you and me, but in feudal Russia—well, I shall tell you.

  It was after the noon meal that Pencherjevsky invited me to go riding with him. This wasn't unusual, but his manner was; he was curt and silent as we rode—if it had been anyone but this hulking tyrant, I'd have said he was nervous. We rode some distance from the house, and were pacing our beasts through the silent snow-fields, when he suddenly began to talk—about the Cossacks, of all things. He rambled most oddly at first, about how they rode with bent knees, like jockeys ( which I'd noticed anyway), and how you could tell a Ural Cossack from the Black Sea variety because one wore a sheepskin cap and the other the long string-haired bonnet. And how the flower of the flock were his own people, the Zaporozhiyan Cossacks, or Kubans, who had been moved east to new lands near Azov by the Empress generations ago, but he, Pencherjevsky, had come back to the old stamping-ground, and here he would stay, by God, and his family after him forever.

  "The old days are gone," says he, and I see him so clearly still, that huge bulk in his sheepskin tulup, hunched in his saddle, glowerin with moody, unseeing eyes across the white wilderness, with the blood-red disc of the winter sun behind him. "The day of the great Cossack, when we thumbed our noses at T'sar and Sultan alike, and carried our lives and liberty on
our lance-points. We owed loyalty to none but our comrades and the hetman we elected to lead us—I was such a one. Now it is a new Russia, and instead of the hetman we have rulers from Moscow to govern the tribe. So be it. I make my place here, in my forefathers' land, I have my good estate, my moujiks, my land—the inheritance for the son I never sired." He looked at me. "I would have had one- Like you, a tall lancer fit to ride at the head of his own sotnia* (*Company, band.) You have a son, eh? A sturdy fellow? Good. I could it were not so—that you had no wife in England, no son, nothing to bind you or call you home. I would say to you then: 'Stay with us here. Be as a son to me. Be a Husband to my daughter, and get yourself a son, and me and a grandson, who will follow after us, and hold our land here, in this new Russia, this empire born of storm, where only a man who is a man can hope to plant himself and his seed and endure.' That is what I would say."

  Well, it was flattering, no question, although I might have pointed out to him that Valla had a husband already, and even if I'd been free and willing ..-. but it occurred to me that he probably Wasn't the man to let a little thing like that stand in the way. Morrison may not have been much of a father-in-law , but this chap would have been less comfortable still.

  "As it is," he growled on, "I have a son-in-law—you saw what kind of a thing he is. God knows how any daughter of mine could … but there. I have doted on her, and indulged her, for her dear mother's sake—aye, and because I loves her. And if he was the last man I would have chosen for her—well, she cared for him, and I thought, their sons will have my blood, they may be Cossacks, horse-and-lance men, grandchildren to be proud of. But I have no grandsons—he gets me none!"

  And he growled and spat and then swung round to face me. For a moment he wrestled with his tongue, and couldn't speak, and then it came out in a torrent.

  "There must be a man to follow me here! I am too old now, there are no children left in me, or I would marry again. Valla, my lovely child, is my one hope—but she is tied to this … this empty thing, and I see her going childless to her grave. Unless …" He was gnawing at his lip, and his face was terrific. "Unless … she can bear me a grandson. It is all I have to live for! To see a Pencherjevsky who will take up this inheritance when I am gone—be his father who he will, so long as he is a man! It cannot be her husband, so . . If it is an offence against God, against the Church, against the law—I am a Cossack, and we were here before God or the Church or the law! I do not care! I will see a male grandchild of mine to carry my line, my name, my land—and if I burn in hell for it, I shall count it worth the cost! At least a Pencherjevsky shall rule here—what I have built will not be squandered piecemeal among the rabble of that fellow's knock-kneed relatives! A man shall get my Valla a son!"