My mother was exceedingly particular in her choice of acquaintances,
but she made Harlov welcome with special cordiality and allowed him
many privileges. Twenty-five years before, he had saved her life by
holding up her carriage on the edge of a deep precipice, down which
the horses had already fallen. The traces and straps of the harness
broke, but Martin Petrovitch did not let go his hold of the wheel he
had grasped, though the blood spurted out under his nails. My mother
had arranged his marriage. She chose for his wife an orphan girl of
seventeen, who had been brought up in her house; he was over forty at
the time. Martin Petrovitch’s wife was a frail creature--they said he
carried her into his house in the palms of his hands--and she did not
live long with him. She bore him two daughters, however. After her
death, my mother continued her good offices to Martin Petrovitch. She
placed his elder daughter in the district school, and afterwards found
her a husband, and already had another in her eye for the second.
Harlov was a fairly good manager. He had a little estate of nearly
eight hundred acres, and had built on to his place a little, and the
way the peasants obeyed him is indescribable. Owing to his stoutness,
Harlov scarcely ever went anywhere on foot: the earth did not bear
him. He used to go everywhere in a low racing droshky, himself driving
a rawboned mare, thirty years old, with a scar on her shoulder, from
a wound which she had received in the battle of Borodino, under the
quartermaster of a cavalry regiment. This mare was always somehow
lame in all four legs; she could not go at a walking pace, but could
only change from a trot to a canter. She used to eat mugwort and
wormwood along the hedges, which I have never noticed any other
horse do. I remember I always used to wonder how such a broken-down
nag could draw such a fearful weight. I won’t venture to repeat how
many hundred-weight were attributed to our neighbour. In the droshky
behind Martin Petrovitch’s back perched his swarthy page, Maximka.
With his face and whole person squeezed close up to his master, and
his bare feet propped on the hind axle bar of the droshky, he looked
like a little leaf or worm which had clung by chance to the gigantic
carcase before him. This same page boy used once a week to shave Martin
Petrovitch. He used, so they said, to stand on a table to perform this
operation. Some jocose persons averred that he had to run round his
master’s chin. Harlov did not like staying long at home, and so one
might often see him driving about in his invariable equipage, with
the reins in one hand (the other he held smartly on his knee with the
elbow crooked upwards), with a diminutive old cap on the very top of
his head. He looked boldly about him with his little bear-like eyes,
shouted in a voice of thunder to all the peasants, artisans, and
tradespeople he met. Priests he greatly disliked, and he would send
vigorous abjurations after them when he met them. One day on overtaking
me (I was out for a stroll with my gun), he hallooed at a hare that lay
near the road in such a way that I could not get the roar and ring of
it out of my ears all day.