I went over to his place one summer, about seven o’clock in the evening. Evening prayers had just concluded, and the priest, a young man, evidently very shy and only recently graduated from his seminary, was sitting in the drawing-room beside the door, perched on the very edge of a chair. Mardary Apollonych, as was his custom, received me exceptionally fondly: he was genuinely delighted to receive guests and, by and large, he was the kindest of men. The priest rose and picked up his hat.
‘One moment, one moment, my good fellow,’ said Mardary Apollonych without leaving hold of my arm. ‘You mustn’t be going. I’ve ordered them to bring you some vodka.’
‘I don’t drink, sir,’ the priest mumbled in confusion and reddened up to his ears.
‘What rubbish! You say you’re a priest and you don’t drink!’ Mardary Apollonych retorted. ‘Mishka! Yushka! Vodka for the gentleman!’
Yushka, a tall and emaciated old man of about eighty, came in with a glass of vodka on a dark-painted tray covered with a variety of flesh-coloured splodges.
The priest proceeded to refuse.
‘Drink, my good fellow, and no fussing, it’s not proper,’ the landowner remarked in a reproachful tone.
The poor young man acquiesced.
‘Well now, my good fellow, you can go.’
The priest started bowing.
‘All right, all right, be off with you… An excellent fellow,’ Mardary Apollonych continued, watching him depart, ‘and I’m very satisfied with him. The only thing is – he’s still young. Preaches sermons all the time, and he doesn’t drink. But how are you, my good fellow? What’re you doing, how’re things? Let’s go out on to the balcony – you see what a fine evening it is.’
We went out on to the balcony, sat down and began to talk. Mardary Apollonych glanced downwards and suddenly became frightfully excited.
‘Whose are these chickens? Whose are these chickens?’ he started shouting. ‘Whose are these chickens walking about the garden? Yushka! Yushka! Off with you and find out at once whose are these chickens walking about the garden. Whose are these chickens? How many times I’ve forbidden this, how many times I’ve said so!’
Yushka ran off.
‘What disorders there are!’ repeated Mardary Apollonych. ‘It’s terrible!’
The unfortunate chickens – as I recall it now, there were two speckled and one white one with a crest – continued walking under the apple trees with the utmost lack of concern, occasionally expressing their feelings by making prolonged duckings, when suddenly Yushka, hatless and armed with a stick, and three other house-serfs who were well on in years made a combined attack on them. A riot followed. The chickens squawked, flapped their wings, leapt about and cackled deafeningly; the house-serfs ran to and fro, stumbling and falling; and their master shouted from the balcony like one possessed: ‘Catch them, catch them! Catch them, catch them! Catch them, catch them, catch them! Whose are these chickens, whose are these chickens?’ Finally, one of the house-serfs succeeded in catching the crested chicken by forcing its breast to the ground, and at that very moment a girl of about eleven years of age, thoroughly dishevelled and with a switch in her hand, jumped over the garden fence from the street.
‘So that’s who the chickens belong to!’ the landowner exclaimed triumphantly. ‘They’re Yermila the coachman’s! See, he’s sent his little Natalya to drive them back! It’s not likely he’d send Parasha,’ the landowner interjected under his breath and grinned meaningfully. ‘Hey, Yushka! Forget the chickens and bring little Natalya here.’
But before the puffing Yushka could reach the terrified little girl, she was grabbed by the housekeeper, who had appeared from nowhere, and given several slaps on her behind.
‘That’s right, that’s right,’ the landowner said, accompanying the slaps. ‘Yes, yes, yes! Yes, yes, yes! And mind you take the chickens off, Avdotya,’ he added in a loud voice and turned to me with a shining face: ‘Quite a chase, my good fellow, what? I’ve even worked myself into a sweat –just look at me!’
And Mardary Apollonych rattled off into thunderous laughter.
We remained on the balcony. The evening was really unusually beautiful. Tea was served to us.
‘Tell me,’ I began, ‘Mardary Apollonych, are they yours, those settlements out there on the road, beyond the ravine?’
‘They’re mine. What of it?’
‘How could you allow such a thing, Mardary Apollonych? It’s quite wrong. The tiny huts allotted to the peasants are horrible, cramped things; there’s not a tree to be seen anywhere; there’s nothing in the way of a pond; there’s only one well, and that’s no use. Surely you could have found somewhere else? And rumour has it that you’ve even taken away their old hemp-fields.’
‘But what’s one to do about these redistributions of the land?’ Mardary Apollonych asked me in turn. ‘This redistribution’s got me right here.’ He pointed to the back of his neck. ‘And I don’t foresee any good coming from it. And as to whether I took away their hemp-fields and didn’t dig out a pond for them there – about such matters, my good fellow, I haven’t the foggiest. I’m just a simple man and I have old-fashioned ways. In my way of thinking, if you’re the master, you’re the master, and if you’re a peasant, you’re a peasant. And that’s that.’
It goes without saying that such a lucid and convincing argument was unanswerable.
‘What’s more,’ he continued, ‘those peasants are a bad sort, not in my good books. Particularly two families over there. Even my late father, God rest his soul in the Kingdom of Heaven, even he wasn’t fond of them, not at all fond of them. And I’ll tell you something I’ve noticed: if the father’s a thief, then the son’ll be a thief, it doesn’t matter how much you want things to be otherwise… Oh, blood-ties, blood-ties – they’re the big thing! I tell you quite frankly that I’ve sent men from those two families to be recruits out of their turn and shoved them around here, there and everywhere. But what’s one to do? They won’t give up breeding. They’re so fertile, damn them!’
In the meantime, the air grew completely quiet. Only occasionally a light breeze eddied around us and, on the last occasion, as it died down around the house it brought to our ears the sound of frequent and regular blows which resounded from the direction of the stables. Mardary Apollonych had only just raised a full saucer to his lips and was already on the point of distending his nostrils, without which, as everyone knows, no true Russian can imbibe his tea, when he stopped, pricked up his ears, nodded his head, drank and, setting the saucer down on the table, uttered with the kindest of smiles and as if unconsciously in time with the blows: ‘Chooky-chooky-chook! Chooky-chook! Chooky-chook!’
‘What on earth is that?’ I asked in astonishment.
‘It’s a little rascal being punished on my orders. Do you by any chance know Vasya the butler?’
‘Which Vasya?’
‘The one who’s just been waiting on us at dinner. He’s the one who sports those large side-whiskers.’
The fiercest sense of outrage could not have withstood Mardary Apollonych’s meek and untrammelled gaze.
‘What’s bothering you, young man, eh?’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You think I’m wicked, is that why you’re staring at me like that? Spare the rod and spoil the child, you know that as well as I do.’
A quarter of an hour later I said goodbye to Mardary Apollonych. On my way through the village I saw Vasya the butler. He was walking along the street and chewing nuts. I ordered my driver to stop the horses and called to him.
‘Did they give you a beating today, my friend?’ I asked him.
‘How do you know about it?’ Vasya answered.
‘Your master told me.’
‘The master did?’
‘Why did he order you to be beaten?’
‘It served me right, good master, it served me right. You don’t get beaten for nothing here. That’s not how things are arranged here – oh, no. Our master’s not like that, our master’s… you won’t find anot
her master like ours anywhere else in the province.’
‘Let’s go!’ I told my driver. Well, that’s old-style Russia for you! I thought as I travelled home.
LEBEDYAN
ONE of the principal advantages of hunting, my dear readers, is that it forces you to travel ceaselessly from place to place, which for someone without any occupation is very pleasant. True, sometimes (particularly in rainy weather) it’s not too much fun to go wandering about on country roads, taking things ‘all in all’ and stopping every peasant along the way with the question: ‘Hey, my friend, how do we get to Mordovka?’ and then in Mordovka trying to elicit from some dim woman (all the workers being out in the fields) how far it is to the hostelries on the main road and how to get there, and then, having gone half-a-dozen miles, instead of finding hostelries finding oneself in the badly run-down little village of Dud-Diamond, to the extreme astonishment of a whole herd of pigs up to their ears in dark-brown mud in the middle of the street and quite unaware that anyone would be coming along to disturb them. It’s also an unhappy business to try crossing rickety bridges, descending into ravines and traversing marshy streams; there’s nothing joyful about travelling, day after day travelling through the greenish sea of main roads awash with water or, God forbid, getting stuck in mud for several hours by a signpost which says 22 on one side and 23 on the other; there’s no fun in spending whole weeks eating nothing but eggs, milk and over-rated rye bread… But all these inconveniences and mishaps are compensated for by advantages and satisfactions of another kind. However, let’s get on with the story.
As a consequence of all the above-said I’ve no need to inform the reader how, five years ago, I found myself in Lebedyan at the height of the horse fair. Hunters like us can set off one fine morning from their more or less ancestral estates with the intention of returning on the evening of the following day and little by little, without ceasing for a moment to shoot snipe, can end up finally by reaching the blessed banks of the Pechora;1 additionally, anyone keen on gun and gun-dog is also likely to be a passionate admirer of the noblest animal on earth, the horse. So I arrived in Lebedyan, stopped at a hotel, changed my clothes and set off for the horse fair. (A waiter, a tall, lean fellow of twenty with a sweet nasal tenor voice had already managed to inform me that His Highness, Prince N., Remount Officer of such-and-such a regiment, had dined there, that many other gentlemen had arrived, that there were gypsy singers performing in the evenings and Pan Tvardovsky2 was being performed at the theatre and that the horses were fetching good prices because good horses had after all been brought to the fair.)
On the fairground endless rows of carts stretched away, and behind the carts horses of every description: trotters, stud horses, cart-horses, dray-horses, coach-horses and ordinary peasant horses. Some, sleek and well-fed, arranged according to their colour, covered with cloths of varying hues and tethered on short leashes to tall ladder-backs of waggons, glanced timidly behind them at the all-too-familiar whips of their owners and masters. Landowners’ horses, dispatched by nobility of the steppes for a hundred and more miles in the charge of some decrepit coachman and two or three big-headed stableboys, waved their long necks, stamped their hoofs and gnawed their stakes out of boredom. Light-brown Vyatka horses pressed tightly against each other. In magnificent immobility, as if they were lions, stood the trotters with their broad hindquarters, wavy tails and shaggy manes, dappled grey, black and bay-coloured. Connoisseurs of horses stopped respectfully in front of them. In the thoroughfares created by the lines of carts were crowds of people of every calling, age and appearance: dealers in blue caftans and tall hats were craftily on the watch awaiting buyers; curly-haired gypsies with popping eyes rushed to and fro like mad things looking horses in the teeth, lifting their hoofs and tails, shouting, swearing, acting as go-betweens, making bets or swarming about some remount officer in his army cap and beaver-lined greatcoat. A hefty cossack perched on top of a gaunt gelding with a neck like a stag’s was offering it ‘with the bloody lot’, meaning with saddle and reins. Peasants in sheepskin jackets torn under the armpits desperately pushed their way through the crowds and poured in their dozens on to a cart to which a horse had been harnessed for ‘trying-out’ or, somewhere on the side, with the help of a shifty gypsy, engaged in trading to the point of exhaustion, slapping their hands together a hundred times over and each one insisting on their price while the object of their dispute, a wretched little nag covered in some warped matting, scarcely blinked her eyes as if the whole thing were no concern of hers… And in fact it didn’t matter to her a damn who’d be beating her from now on! Broad-browed landowners with tinted whiskers and dignified expressions, in peakless, rectangular caps and camlet cloth jackets worn on one arm only, chatted condescendingly to stout merchants in fluffy hats and green gloves. Officers of various regiments crowded there as well. An unusually tall cuirassier, of German extraction, coldly asked a limping dealer how much he wanted for ‘zet chestnut’oss’. A fair-haired little hussar of about nineteen tried to match a side-horse to a sinewy pacer. A coachman in a low hat wound about with a peacock feather and in brown coat with leather sleeves inserted under a narrow greenish belt was searching for a shaft-horse. Drivers were plaiting the tails of their horses, moistening their manes and offering respectful advice to their masters. All those who’d done deals dashed to a hostelry or a pub, depending on their status…
And all this bustling and shouting and hassling and quarrelling and dealing and swearing and laughing was going on among men with mud up to their knees. I wanted to purchase a trio of decent horses for my carriage because my present ones were getting past their best. I found two, but couldn’t pick up a third. After dinner, which I won’t undertake to describe (after all Aeneas knew long ago how unpleasant it is to recall past misfortune),3 I set off for the so-called coffee-house where each evening there were gatherings of remount men, horse-breeders and others. In the billiard-room, fuggy with leaden waves of tobacco smoke, there were about twenty men. Among them were dissolute young landowners in riding jackets and grey trousers, with long whiskers and waxed moustaches, looking grandly and boldly around them. Other members of the nobility in long frockcoats, with extraordinarily short necks and eyes swimming in fat, wheezed their way painfully about. Merchants sat to one side ‘on their tod’, as they say, while officers chattered freely among themselves. A game was being played by Prince N., a young man of about twenty-two in an open jacket, red silk shirt and wide velvet trousers, with a jolly and slightly condescending face. He was playing with a retired lieutenant, Victor Khlopakov.
Retired Lieutenant Victor Khlopakov, a small, dark, thin fellow of about thirty, with cropped black hair, brown eyes and a snouty turned-up nose, is an assiduous visitor of elections and fairs. He has a springy walk, a fancy way of moving his rounded hands about, a hat worn at a smart angle and turned-back sleeves of his military coat showing the grey calico lining. Mister Khlopakov possesses an ability for sucking up to rich St Petersburg men-about-town, smokes, drinks and plays cards with them and is always on familiar terms with them. Why they put up with him it is not all that easy to understand. He’s not clever, nor is he even witty: he’d be no good as a jester. True, they treat him in a carelessly amiable way as a good-enough, empty-headed fellow whom they can knock around with for two or three weeks and then suddenly not even bow to, just as he doesn’t bow to them. A peculiarity of Lieutenant Khlopakov is that, for a year, sometimes two, he constantly uses one and the same expression, appropriately and inappropriately, an expression in no way humorous which, God knows why, makes everyone laugh. Eight or so years ago he would say at every opportunity: ‘My honouring to you, sir, the very humblest gratitude,’ and his patrons of those days would die laughing on each occasion and force him to repeat ‘My honouring to you, sir.’ Later he took to using a more complex expression: ‘No, you’re doing your qu’est-ce que ça, what’s come out comes out,’ and with the same brilliant success. A couple of years ago he came out with a new catchphras
e: ‘Don’t vous get hot pas, you man of God, you sheepskin clod!’ and so on. So there it is! These, as you can see, wholly unimportant sayings are his food, drink and clothing. (He’s long ago used up his own estate and now lives solely off his friends.) Take note that there are absolutely no other niceties associated with him. It’s true that he smokes a hundred pipefuls of Zhukov tobacco a day and while playing billiards raises his right foot above his head and, in taking aim, makes a great show of playing with his cue – well, of course, not everyone’s keen on such accomplishments. He also drinks like a fish, but it’s hard to be remarkable for doing that in Russia. In a word, his success is to me a complete mystery. Maybe it’s because he’s careful, he doesn’t spread dirt about people and never says a bad word about a soul…
‘Well,’ I thought on seeing Khlopakov, ‘what’s his latest expression, I wonder?’
The prince addressed the cue ball.
‘Thirty, love,’ cried out a consumptive marker with a dark face and lead-grey bags under his eyes.
The prince sent a yellow ball banging into a far pocket.
‘Heck!’ a stoutish merchant wheezed approvingly, his stomach quivering as he sat in a corner at a shaky, one-legged little table, wheezed and stopped in embarrassment. But fortunately no one took any notice. He sighed and stroked his beard.
Sketches From a Hunter's Album Page 23