‘I’ll teach Shvabrin!’ said Pugachev threateningly. ‘He shall learn what it is to take the law into his own hands where I am concerned, and ill-treat people. I will have him hanged.’
‘Allow me to put in a word,’ said Hlopusha in a hoarse voice. ‘You were in overmuch of a hurry to make Shvabrin commandant of the fortress, and now you are in a hurry to hang him. You have already given offence to the Cossacks by setting a gentleman over them: do not now alarm the gentry by hanging them at the first denunciation.’
‘They are neither to be pitied nor favoured!’ said the little old man with the blue ribbon. ‘No harm in hanging Shvabrin; neither would it be amiss to interrogate this officer in due and proper form. Why has he come here? If he does not acknowledge you as Tsar he has no cause to seek justice from you; and if he does acknowledge you – then why to this day did he remain in Orenburg along with your enemies? Will you not let me take him to the office and there warm him up a little? My opinion is that his Grace has been sent to us by the Orenburg commanders.’
The old villain’s logic struck me as convincing enough. A shiver ran down my spine when I thought in whose hands I was. Pugachev noticed my agitation. ‘Well, your Honour?’ he said to me with a wink. ‘I fancy my field-marshal is talking sense. What do you think?’
Pugachev’s raillery restored my courage. I answered calmly that I was in his power and that he was free to deal with me in whatever way he pleased.
‘Good,’ said Pugachev. ‘Now tell me, how are things going with you in the town?’
‘Thanks be to God,’ I replied, ‘all is well!’
‘All well?’ Pugachev repeated. ‘With the population dying of hunger?’
The Pretender spoke the truth; but in accordance with my duty as an officer loyal to my oath I began assuring him that these were baseless rumours and that Orenburg had a sufficiency of every kind of provision.
‘You see,’ the little old man chimed in, ‘he is deceiving you to your face. All the refugees are unanimous that famine and plague are rife in Orenburg, that people eat carrion and think it a treat; and yet his Grace would have you believe there is plenty of everything. If you want to hang Shvabrin, then hang this young fellow on the same gallows, that neither may be envious of the other.’
The accursed old man’s words seemed to shake Pugachev. Fortunately Hlopusha began contradicting his comrade. ‘Stop. Naumich,’ he said to him. ‘You always want to be strangling and cutting throats. What sort of a hero are you? To look at you is to wonder what keeps your soul in your body. You have one foot in the grave yourself, and you want everyone else to perish. Isn’t there enough blood on your conscience?’
‘A fine saint you are, aren’t you?’ retorted Bieloborodov. ‘Whence this compassion?’
‘Of course I’ve done wrong too,’ replied Hlopusha, ‘and this arm’ (he clenched his bony fist and pushing back his sleeve disclosed a hairy arm) ‘has been guilty of shedding Christian blood. But I killed my enemy, not my guests: I killed at the cross-roads upon the open highway, or in a dark wood – not at home sitting before the fire. I killed with club and axe – not with womanish slander.’
The old man turned away and muttered the words: ‘Slit nostrils!…’
‘What are you muttering, you old greybeard?’ cried Hlopusha. ‘I’ll give you “slit nostrils”. You wait, your time will come: if God wills, you too will sniff the hangman’s pincers…. And meanwhile, take care I don’t pluck out your scurvy beard!’
‘Gentlemen yenerals!’ said Pugachev loftily, ‘that’s enough of your quarrelling. It would be no matter if all the Orenburg pack were dangling from the same cross-beam; but it does matter if our dogs are at one another’s throats. So make it up and be friends again.’
Hlopusha and Bieloborodov said not a word and looked at each other darkly. I felt the necessity of changing the conversation which might end very badly for me, and, turning to Pugachev, I said to him with a cheerful air:
‘Oh, I had almost forgotten to thank you for the horse and sheepskin pelisse. Had it not been for you, I should never have reached the town and should have frozen to death on the road.’
My ruse succeeded. Pugachev recovered his good humour.
‘One good turn deserves another,’ he said with a wink and a sidelong glance. ‘And now tell me, why are you concerned about the girl Shvabrin is ill-treating? Could she have kindled a flame in the young man’s heart, eh?’
‘She is my betrothed,’ I answered, observing the favourable change in the weather and not deeming it necessary to conceal the truth.
‘Your betrothed!’ exclaimed Pugachev. ‘Why did you not say so before? Why, we’ll have you married and make merry at your wedding!’ Then, turning to Bieloborodov, ‘Listen, Field-marshal! His Lordship and I are old friends, so let us sit down to supper. We will sleep on it, and see in the morning what we are to do with him.’
I would gladly have declined the proposed honour but there was no help for it. Two young girls, daughters of the Cossack to whom the hut belonged, spread the table with a white cloth, brought in bread, fish-soup and several bottles of vodka and beer, and for the second time I found myself at table with Pugachev and his terrible companions.
The orgy of which I was an involuntary witness lasted far into the night. At last drink overcame the company. Pugachev dozed in his chair; his friends rose and made signs to me to leave him. I went out with them. At Hlopusha’s orders the watchman took me to the cottage that served as an office, where I found Savelich and where we were locked up together. The old man was so bemused by all that was happening that he did not ask a single question. He lay down in the dark, and continued to sigh and groan for a long time; at last he began to snore, and I abandoned myself to reflections that did not allow me a wink of sleep the whole night.
In the morning Pugachev sent for me. I went to him. A chaise drawn by three Tartar horses was standing at the gate. A crowd waited in the street. I met Pugachev in the lobby. He was dressed for a journey in a fur cloak and a Kirghiz cap. His companions of the night before surrounded him with an air of servility contrasting strongly with all I had witnessed the previous evening. Pugachev greeted me cheerfully, and told me to step into the chaise with him.
We took our seats. ‘To the Bielogorsky fortress!’ said Pugachev to the broad-shouldered Tartar who drove the troika standing. My heart beat violently. The horses set off, the hand-bell pealed, the sledge was away like an arrow….
‘Stop! Stop!’ cried a voice which I knew only too well, and I saw Savelich running towards us. Pugachev ordered the driver to halt.
‘Piotr Andreich, dear!’ shouted Savelich. ‘Do not abandon me in my old age among those rasc…’
‘Ah, old greybeard!’ Pugachev said to him. ‘So God has brought us together again. Well, sit yourself on the box.’
‘Thank you, sire, thank you, good father!’ said Savelich, taking his place. ‘May God let you live to be a hundred for your kindness to an old man. I will pray for you all the days of my life, and never breathe another word about that hare-skin jacket.’
This allusion to the hare-skin jacket might have made Pugachev seriously angry. Fortunately, the Pretender either had not heard or took no notice of the inopportune remark. The horses set off at a gallop; the people in the streets stood still and bowed to the waist. Pugachev nodded right and left. A minute later we left the village and whirled along the smooth surface of the road.
It is not difficult to imagine what my feelings were at that moment. In a few hours I was to see her whom I had already considered lost to me. I pictured to myself the moment of our reunion…. I was thinking, too, of the man who held my fate in his hands and by a strange concourse of circumstances had become mysteriously connected with me. I remembered the impetuous cruelty and bloodthirsty habits of this man who had come forward to rescue my beloved. Pugachev did not know that she was Captain Mironov’s daughter; Shvabrin, infuriated, might tell him everything; Pugachev might find out the truth in some other way…
. Then what would happen to Maria Ivanovna? A shiver ran down my back and my hair stood on end.
Suddenly Pugachev interrupted my reflections, turning to me with the question:
‘What are you so thoughtful about, your Honour?’
‘How can I help being thoughtful?’ I answered. ‘Only yesterday I was fighting against you, and now today I am riding side by side with you in the same sledge, and the happiness of my whole life depends upon you.’
‘Well, what about it?’ asked Pugachev. ‘Are you afraid?’
I replied that, since he had spared me once, I was trusting not only to his mercy but to his help, too.
‘And you are right, upon my soul, you are right!’ cried the Pretender. ‘You saw that my men were looking askance at you: and the old man insisted again this morning that you were a spy and ought to be tortured and hanged; but I would not agree,’ he added, lowering his voice so that Savelich and the Tartar should not hear, ‘because I remembered your glass of vodka and the hare-skin jacket. You can see that I am not the bloodthirsty creature your brethren make out.’
I thought of the taking of the Bielogorsky fortress but did not deem it necessary to join issue with him, and made no answer.
‘What do they say of me in Orenburg?’ Pugachev asked, after a short silence.
‘They say that it’s no easy matter to get the upper hand of you. There’s no denying it – you have made an impression.’
The Pretender’s face depicted satisfied vanity.
‘Yes!’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m a dab at fighting. Do you Orenburg people know about the battle of Yuzeyeva? Forty yenerals killed, four armies taken captive! What do you think – would the King of Prussia be a match for me?’
The brigand’s boasting seemed comical.
‘What do you think yourself?’ I asked him. ‘Could you beat Frederick?’
‘Why not? I beat your yenerals and they have often beaten him. So far I have been fortunate in war. With time you’ll see even better things, when I march on Moscow.’
‘Are you thinking of marching on Moscow?’
The Pretender pondered for a moment and then said in a low voice:
‘Only God knows. My hands are tied: I cannot do as I like. My followers are too independent. They are robbers and highwaymen. I have to keep a sharp look-out: at the first reverse they will save their own necks at the expense of my head.’
‘That’s just it!’ I said to Pugachev. ‘Would it not be better to abandon them first, in good time, and throw yourself on the Empress’s mercy?’
Pugachev smiled bitterly.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘It is too late for me to repent now. There will be no mercy for me. I will go on as I have begun. Who knows? I may succeed after all! Grisha Otrepyev did reign over Moscow, you remember.’
‘And do you know what his end was? They threw him out of a window, tore his body limb from limb, burned it and fired a cannon with his ashes!’
‘Listen,’ Pugachev said, with a kind of wild inspiration. ‘I will tell you a story which was told to me in my childhood by an old Kalmyck woman. The eagle asked the raven one day: “Tell me, raven-bird, how is it that you live in the wide world for three hundred years, and I, all in all, for thirty-three?” – “Because, dear eagle,” the raven replied, “you drink fresh blood, while I feed on carrion.” The eagle pondered and thought: “I will try living on the food he does.” Very well. The eagle and the raven flew off together. Suddenly they caught sight of a dead horse, alighted and perched on it. The raven began to pick the flesh and found it very tasty. The eagle took one peck, then another, waved his wing and said to the raven: “No, brother raven, rather than live on carrion for three hundred years better one long drink of fresh blood – and leave the rest to God!” What do you think of the Kalmyck tale?’
‘Very ingenious,’ I replied. ‘But to live by murder and robbery is to my mind just the same as pecking carrion.’
Pugachev looked at me in astonishment and made no answer. We both sank into silence, each absorbed in his own reflections. The Tartar broke into plaintive song. Savelich, dozing, swayed from side to side on the box. The sledge glided along the smooth winter road…. All of a sudden I caught sight of the little village on the steep bank of the Yaïk, with its palisade and belfry – and in another quarter of an hour we drove into the Bielogorsky fortress.
12
THE ORPHAN
Just as our little young apple-tree
Neither branches has, nor leafy top,
So our fair young bride to care for her
Neither father has, nor mother dear –
No one to bless her, no one at all.
WEDDING SONG
THE sledge drew up in front of the commandant’s house. The people had recognized the sound of Pugachev’s bell, and ran after us in a crowd. Shvabrin met the Pretender on the steps. He was dressed like a Cossack and had grown a beard. The traitor helped Pugachev to alight from the sledge, expressing in obsequious terms his delight and devotion. He was disconcerted when he saw me but, quickly recovering himself, held out his hand, saying: ‘You one of us now? And high time too!’ I turned away from him and made no answer.
My heart ached when we found ourselves in the long familiar room, where the certificate of the late commandant still hung on the wall as a sad epitaph of bygone days. Pugachev seated himself on the same sofa on which Ivan Kuzmich used to doze, lulled to sleep by his wife’s scolding. Shvabrin himself brought him some vodka. The Pretender drank off a glass and said, pointing to me: ‘Serve some to his Honour, too.’ Shvabrin came up to me with the tray but I turned away a second time. He did not seem to me to be his usual self. With his customary quickwittedness he guessed, of course, that Pugachev was displeased with him. He was frightened and cast distrustful glances in my direction. Pugachev inquired about the state of the fortress, what reports there were of the enemy’s troops, and other like matters, then suddenly asked him point-blank: ‘Tell me, my friend, who is this young girl you keep locked up here? Show her to me.’
Shvabrin went deathly pale. ‘Sire,’ he said in a trembling voice. ‘Sire, she is not locked up… she is ill… she is upstairs, in bed.’
‘Then take me to her,’ said the Pretender, getting up.
It was impossible to refuse. Shvabrin led Pugachev to Maria Ivanovna’s room. I followed.
Shvabrin stopped on the stairs.
‘Sire!’ he said. ‘You are master and may demand of me whatever you please, but I do not allow a stranger to enter my wife’s bedroom.’
I shuddered.
‘So you are married!’ I said to Shvabrin, preparing to tear him to pieces.
‘Silence!’ Pugachev interrupted me. ‘This is my affair. And you,’ he continued, turning to Shvabrin, ‘keep your airs and graces to yourself, and don’t try to be clever: your wife or not, I take to her whomsoever I choose. Your Honour, follow me.’
At the door of the room Shvabrin stopped again and said in a faltering voice:
‘Sire, I warn you, she is delirious and has been raving incessantly for the last three days.’
‘Open the door!’ said Pugachev.
Shvabrin began searching in his pockets and then said that he had not brought the key with him. Pugachev kicked the door with his foot, the lock gave way, the door opened and we went in.
I looked – and was aghast. Maria Ivanovna, pale and thin and with dishevelled hair, was sitting on the floor, wearing a peasant dress which was all torn. A pitcher of water covered with a piece of bread stood before her. When she saw me she started and cried out. What I felt then I cannot describe.
Pugachev looked at Shvabrin and said with a biting smile:
‘A nice hospital you have here!’ Then he went up to Maria Ivanovna and said: ‘Tell me, my dear, what is your husband punishing you for? What wrong have you done him?’
‘My husband!’ she echoed. ‘He is not my husband. I will never be his wife! I would rather die, and I shall die if I am not set free.’
&nb
sp; Pugachev cast a threatening glance at Shvabrin.
‘And you dared to deceive me!’ he said to him. ‘Do you know, you scoundrel, what you deserve?’
Shvabrin dropped on his knees…. At that moment contempt outweighed in me all feelings of hatred and anger. I looked with disgust at the sight of a nobleman grovelling at the feet of a fugitive Cossack. Pugachev softened.
‘I will spare you this time,’ he said to Shvabrin. ‘But bear in mind that the next time you are at fault this wrong, too, will be remembered against you.’ Then he turned to Maria Ivanovna and said kindly: ‘Go, my pretty maid. I give you your liberty. I am the Tsar.’
Maria Ivanovna looked up at him quickly and realized that before her stood the murderer of her parents. She buried her face in her hands and fainted away. I rushed to her, but at that moment my old acquaintance Palasha pushed her way very boldly into the room and began attending to her mistress. Pugachev walked out and the three of us went downstairs to the parlour.
‘Well, your Honour,’ Pugachev said, laughing. ‘We have delivered the fair maiden! What do you say to sending for the priest and having him marry you to his niece? I’ll give her away if you like, and Shvabrin shall be best man. Then we will eat, drink and make merry on our own.’
The very thing that I was afraid of happened. Shvabrin lost control of himself when he heard Pugachev’s suggestion.
‘Sire!’ he cried in a frenzy. ‘I am in the wrong: I lied to you; but Griniov, too, is deceiving you. This girl is not the priest’s niece: she is the daughter of Captain Mironov who was hanged when the fortress was taken.’
Pugachev fixed me with his fiery eye.
‘What does this mean?’ he asked, taken aback.
‘Shvabrin is right,’ I answered firmly.
‘You did not tell me,’ remarked Pugachev, and his face clouded.
‘But just consider,’ I answered him. ‘How could I have said, in your men’s presence, that Mironov’s daughter was alive? They would have torn her to pieces. Nothing would have saved her!’
The Queen of Spades and Other Stories Page 26