widow of a lieutenant, received from her brother Ivan, a privy
councillor in Petersburg, a letter in which, among other things, this
passage occurred: "My liver trouble forces me to spend every summer
abroad, and as I have not at the moment the money in hand for a trip to
Marienbad, it is very possible, dear sister, that I may spend this
summer with you at Kotchuevko...."
On reading the letter my mother turned pale and began trembling all
over; then an expression of mingled tears and laughter came into her
face. She began crying and laughing. This conflict of tears and laughter
always reminds me of the flickering and spluttering of a brightly
burning candle when one sprinkles it with water. Reading the letter once
more, mother called together all the household, and in a voice broken
with emotion began explaining to us that there had been four Gundasov
brothers: one Gundasov had died as a baby; another had gone to the war,
and he, too, was dead; the third, without offence to him be it said, was
an actor; the fourth...
"The fourth has risen far above us," my mother brought out tearfully.
"My own brother, we grew up together; and I am all of a tremble, all of
a tremble!... A privy councillor with the rank of a general! How shall I
meet him, my angel brother? What can I, a foolish, uneducated woman,
talk to him about? It's fifteen years since I've seen him!
Andryushenka," my mother turned to me, "you must rejoice, little stupid!
It's a piece of luck for you that God is sending him to us!"
After we had heard a detailed history of the Gundasovs, there followed a
fuss and bustle in the place such as I had been accustomed to see only
before Christmas and Easter. The sky above and the water in the river
were all that escaped; everything else was subjected to a merciless
cleansing, scrubbing, painting. If the sky had been lower and smaller
and the river had not flowed so swiftly, they would have scoured them,
too, with bath-brick and rubbed them, too, with tow. Our walls were as
white as snow, but they were whitewashed; the floors were bright and
shining, but they were washed every day. The cat Bobtail (as a small
child I had cut off a good quarter of his tail with the knife used for
chopping the sugar, and that was why he was called Bobtail) was carried
off to the kitchen and put in charge of Anisya; Fedka was told that if
any of the dogs came near the front-door "God would punish him." But no
one was so badly treated as the poor sofas, easy-chairs, and rugs! They
had never, before been so violently beaten as on this occasion in
preparation for our visitor. My pigeons took fright at the loud thud of
the sticks, and were continually flying up into the sky.
The tailor Spiridon, the only tailor in the whole district who ventured
to make for the gentry, came over from Novostroevka. He was a hard-
working capable man who did not drink and was not without a certain
fancy and feeling for form, but yet he was an atrocious tailor. His work
was ruined by hesitation.... The idea that his cut was not fashionable
enough made him alter everything half a dozen times, walk all the way to
the town simply to study the dandies, and in the end dress us in suits
that even a caricaturist would have called outre and grotesque. We cut a
dash in impossibly narrow trousers and in such short jackets that we
always felt quite abashed in the presence of young ladies.
This Spiridon spent a long time taking my measure. He measured me all
over lengthways and crossways, as though he meant to put hoops round me
like a barrel; then he spent a long time noting down my measurements
with a thick pencil on a bit of paper, and ticked off all the
measurements with triangular signs. When he had finished with me he set
to work on my tutor, Yegor Alexyevitch Pobyedimsky. My beloved tutor was
then at the stage when young men watch the growth of their moustache and
are critical of their clothes, and so you can imagine the devout awe
with which Spiridon approached him. Yegor Alexyevitch had to throw back
his head, to straddle his legs like an inverted V, first lift up his
arms, then let them fall. Spiridon measured him several times, walking
round him during the process like a love-sick pigeon round its mate,
going down on one knee, bending double.... My mother, weary, exhausted
by her exertions and heated by ironing, watched these lengthy
proceedings, and said:
"Mind now, Spiridon, you will have to answer for it to God if you spoil
the cloth! And it will be the worse for you if you don't make them fit!"
Mother's words threw Spiridon first into a fever, then into a
perspiration, for he was convinced that he would not make them fit. He
received one rouble twenty kopecks for making my suit, and for
Pobyedimsky's two roubles, but we provided the cloth, the lining, and
the buttons. The price cannot be considered excessive, as Novostroevka
was about seven miles from us, and the tailor came to fit us four times.
When he came to try the things on and we squeezed ourselves into the
tight trousers and jackets adorned with basting threads, mother always
frowned contemptuously and expressed her surprise:
"Goodness knows what the fashions are coming to nowadays! I am
positively ashamed to look at them. If brother were not used to
Petersburg I would not get you fashionable clothes!"
Spiridon, relieved that the blame was thrown on the fashion and not on
him, shrugged his shoulders and sighed, as though to say:
"There's no help for it; it's the spirit of the age!"
The excitement with which we awaited the arrival of our guest can only
be compared with the strained suspense with which spiritualists wait
from minute to minute the appearance of a ghost. Mother went about with
a sick headache, and was continually melting into tears. I lost my
appetite, slept badly, and did not learn my lessons. Even in my dreams I
was haunted by an impatient longing to see a general--that is, a man with
epaulettes and an embroidered collar sticking up to his ears, and with a
naked sword in his hands, exactly like the one who hung over the sofa in
the drawing-room and glared with terrible black eyes at everybody who
dared to look at him. Pobyedimsky was the only one who felt himself in
his element. He was neither terrified nor delighted, and merely from
time to time, when he heard the history of the Gundasov family, said:
"Yes, it will be pleasant to have some one fresh to talk to."
My tutor was looked upon among us as an exceptional nature. He was a
young man of twenty, with a pimply face, shaggy locks, a low forehead,
and an unusually long nose. His nose was so big that when he wanted to
look close at anything he had to put his head on one side like a bird.
To our thinking, there was not a man in the province cleverer, more
cultivated, or more stylish. He had left the high-school in the class
next to the top, and had then entered a veterinary college, from which
he was expelled before the end of the first half-year. The reason of his
expulsion he carefully concealed, which enabled any one who wished to do
so to look upon my instructor as an injured and to some extent a
mysterious person. He spoke little, and only of intellectual subjects;
he ate meat during the fasts, and looked with contempt and condescension
on the life going on around him, which did not prevent him, however,
from taking presents, such as suits of clothes, from my mother, and
drawing funny faces with red teeth on my kites. Mother disliked him for
his "pride," but stood in awe of his cleverness.
Our visitor did not keep us long waiting. At the beginning of May two
wagon-loads of big boxes arrived from the station. These boxes looked so
majestic that the drivers instinctively took off their hats as they
lifted them down.
"There must be uniforms and gunpowder in those boxes," I thought.
Why "gunpowder"? Probably the conception of a general was closely
connected in my mind with cannons and gunpowder.
When I woke up on the morning of the tenth of May, nurse told me in a
whisper that "my uncle had come." I dressed rapidly, and, washing after
a fashion, flew out of my bedroom without saying my prayers. In the
vestibule I came upon a tall, solid gentleman with fashionable whiskers
and a foppish-looking overcoat. Half dead with devout awe, I went up to
him and, remembering the ceremonial mother had impressed upon me, I
scraped my foot before him, made a very low bow, and craned forward to
kiss his hand; but the gentleman did not allow me to kiss his hand: he
informed me that he was not my uncle, but my uncle's footman, Pyotr. The
appearance of this Pyotr, far better dressed than Pobyedimsky or me,
excited in me the utmost astonishment, which, to tell the truth, has
lasted to this day. Can such dignified, respectable people with stern
and intellectual faces really be footmen? And what for?
Pyotr told me that my uncle was in the garden with my mother. I rushed
into the garden.
Nature, knowing nothing of the history of the Gundasov family and the
rank of my uncle, felt far more at ease and unconstrained than I. There
was a clamour going on in the garden such as one only hears at fairs.
Masses of starlings flitting through the air and hopping about the walks
were noisily chattering as they hunted for cockchafers. There were
swarms of sparrows in the lilac-bushes, which threw their tender,
fragrant blossoms straight in one's face. Wherever one turned, from
every direction came the note of the golden oriole and the shrill cry of
the hoopoe and the red-legged falcon. At any other time I should have
begun chasing dragon-flies or throwing stones at a crow which was
sitting on a low mound under an aspen-tree, with his blunt beak turned
away; but at that moment I was in no mood for mischief. My heart was
throbbing, and I felt a cold sinking at my stomach; I was preparing
myself to confront a gentleman with epaulettes, with a naked sword, and
with terrible eyes!
But imagine my disappointment! A dapper little foppish gentleman in
white silk trousers, with a white cap on his head, was walking beside my
mother in the garden. With his hands behind him and his head thrown
back, every now and then running on ahead of mother, he looked quite
young. There was so much life and movement in his whole figure that I
could only detect the treachery of age when I came close up behind and
saw beneath his cap a fringe of close-cropped silver hair. Instead of
the staid dignity and stolidity of a general, I saw an almost
schoolboyish nimbleness; instead of a collar sticking up to his ears, an
ordinary light blue necktie. Mother and my uncle were walking in the
avenue talking together. I went softly up to them from behind, and
waited for one of them to look round.
"What a delightful place you have here, Klavdia!" said my uncle. "How
charming and lovely it is! Had I known before that you had such a
charming place, nothing would have induced me to go abroad all these
years."
My uncle stooped down rapidly and sniffed at a tulip. Everything he saw
moved him to rapture and excitement, as though he had never been in a
garden on a sunny day before. The queer man moved about as though he
were on springs, and chattered incessantly, without allowing mother to
utter a single word. All of a sudden Pobyedimsky came into sight from
behind an elder-tree at the turn of the avenue. His appearance was so
unexpected that my uncle positively started and stepped back a pace. On
this occasion my tutor was attired in his best Inverness cape with
sleeves, in which, especially back-view, he looked remarkably like a
windmill. He had a solemn and majestic air. Pressing his hat to his
bosom in Spanish style, he took a step towards my uncle and made a bow
such as a marquis makes in a melodrama, bending forward, a little to one
side.
"I have the honour to present myself to your high excellency," he said
aloud: "the teacher and instructor of your nephew, formerly a pupil of
the veterinary institute, and a nobleman by birth, Pobyedimsky!"
This politeness on the part of my tutor pleased my mother very much. She
gave a smile, and waited in thrilled suspense to hear what clever thing
he would say next; but my tutor, expecting his dignified address to be
answered with equal dignity--that is, that my uncle would say "H'm!" like
a general and hold out two fingers--was greatly confused and abashed when
the latter laughed genially and shook hands with him. He muttered
something incoherent, cleared his throat, and walked away.
"Come! isn't that charming?" laughed my uncle. "Just look! he has made
his little flourish and thinks he's a very clever fellow! I do like
that--upon my soul I do! What youthful aplomb, what life in that foolish
flourish! And what boy is this?" he asked, suddenly turning and looking
at me.
"That is my Andryushenka," my mother introduced me, flushing crimson.
"My consolation..."
I made a scrape with my foot on the sand and dropped a low bow.
"A fine fellow... a fine fellow..." muttered my uncle, taking his hand
from my lips and stroking me on the head. "So your name is Andrusha?
Yes, yes.... H'm!... upon my soul!... Do you learn lessons?"
My mother, exaggerating and embellishing as all mothers do, began to
describe my achievements in the sciences and the excellence of my
behaviour, and I walked round my uncle and, following the ceremonial
laid down for me, I continued making low bows. Then my mother began
throwing out hints that with my remarkable abilities it would not be
amiss for me to get a government nomination to the cadet school; but at
the point when I was to have burst into tears and begged for my uncle's
protection, my uncle suddenly stopped and flung up his hands in
amazement.
"My goo-oodness! What's that?" he asked.
Tatyana Ivanovna, the wife of our bailiff, Fyodor Petrovna, was coming
towards us. She was carrying a starched white petticoat and a long
ironing-board. As she passed us she looked shyly at the visitor through
her eyelashes and flushed crimson.
"Wonders will never cease..." my uncle filtered through his teeth,
looking after her with friendly interest. "You have a fresh surprise at
every step, sister... upon my soul!"
"She's a beauty..." said mother. "They chose her as a bride for Fyodor,
though she lived over seventy miles from here...."
Not every one would have called Tatyana a beauty. She was a plump little
woman of twenty, with black eyebrows and a graceful figure, always rosy
and attractive-looking, but in her face and in her whole person there
was not one striking feature, not one bold line to catch the eye, as
though nature had lacked inspiration and confidence when creating her.
Tatyana Ivanovna was shy, bashful, and modest in her behaviour; she
moved softly and smoothly, said little, seldom laughed, and her whole
life was as regular as her face and as flat as her smooth, tidy hair. My
uncle screwed up his eyes looking after her, and smiled. Mother looked
intently at his smiling face and grew serious.
"And so, brother, you've never married!" she sighed.
"No; I've not married."
"Why not?" asked mother softly.
"How can I tell you? It has happened so. In my youth I was too hard at
work, I had no time to live, and when I longed to live--I looked
round--and there I had fifty years on my back already. I was too late!
However, talking about it... is depressing."
My mother and my uncle both sighed at once and walked on, and I left
them and flew off to find my tutor, that I might share my impressions
with him. Pobyedimsky was standing in the middle of the yard, looking
majestically at the heavens.
"One can see he is a man of culture!" he said, twisting his head round.
"I hope we shall get on together."
An hour later mother came to us.
"I am in trouble, my dears!" she began, sighing. "You see brother has
brought a valet with him, and the valet, God bless him, is not one you
can put in the kitchen or in the hall; we must give him a room apart. I
can't think what I am to do! I tell you what, children, couldn't you
move out somewhere--to Fyodor's lodge, for instance--and give your room to
the valet? What do you say?"
We gave our ready consent, for living in the lodge was a great deal more
free than in the house, under mother's eye.
"It's a nuisance, and that's a fact!" said mother. "Brother says he
won't have dinner in the middle of the day, but between six and seven,
as they do in Petersburg. I am simply distracted with worry! By seven
o'clock the dinner will be done to rags in the oven. Really, men don't
understand anything about housekeeping, though they have so much
intellect. Oh, dear! we shall have to cook two dinners every day! You
will have dinner at midday as before, children, while your poor old
mother has to wait till seven, for the sake of her brother."
Then my mother heaved a deep sigh, bade me try and please my uncle,
whose coming was a piece of luck for me for which we must thank God, and
hurried off to the kitchen. Pobyedimsky and I moved into the lodge the
same day. We were installed in a room which formed the passage from the
entry to the bailiff's bedroom.
Contrary to my expectations, life went on just as before, drearily and
monotonously, in spite of my uncle's arrival and our move into new
quarters. We were excused lessons "on account of the visitor."
Pobyedimsky, who never read anything or occupied himself in any way,
spent most of his time sitting on his bed, with his long nose thrust
into the air, thinking. Sometimes he would get up, try on his new suit,
and sit down again to relapse into contemplation and silence. Only one
thing worried him, the flies, which he used mercilessly to squash
between his hands. After dinner he usually "rested," and his snores were
a cause of annoyance to the whole household. I ran about the garden from
morning to night, or sat in the lodge sticking my kites together. For
the first two or three weeks we did not see my uncle often. For days
together he sat in his own room working, in spite of the flies and the
heat. His extraordinary capacity for sitting as though glued to his
table produced upon us the effect of an inexplicable conjuring trick. To
us idlers, knowing nothing of systematic work, his industry seemed
simply miraculous. Getting up at nine, he sat down to his table, and did
not leave it till dinner-time; after dinner he set to work again, and
went on till late at night. Whenever I peeped through the keyhole I
invariably saw the same thing: my uncle sitting at the table working.
The work consisted in his writing with one hand while he turned over the
leaves of a book with the other, and, strange to say, he kept moving all
over--swinging his leg as though it were a pendulum, whistling, and
nodding his head in time. He had an extremely careless and frivolous
expression all the while, as though he were not working, but playing at
noughts and crosses. I always saw him wearing a smart short jacket and a
jauntily tied cravat, and he always smelt, even through the keyhole, of
delicate feminine perfumery. He only left his room for dinner, but he
ate little.
"I can't make brother out!" mother complained of him. "Every day we kill
a turkey and pigeons on purpose for him, I make a compote with my own
hands, and he eats a plateful of broth and a bit of meat the size of a
finger and gets up from the table. I begin begging him to eat; he comes
back and drinks a glass of milk. And what is there in that, in a glass
of milk? It's no better than washing up water! You may die of a diet
like that.... If I try to persuade him, he laughs and makes a joke of
it.... No; he does not care for our fare, poor dear!"
We spent the evenings far more gaily than the days. As a rule, by the
time the sun was setting and long shadows were lying across the yard,
we--that is, Tatyana Ivanovna, Pobyedimsky, and I--were sitting on the
steps of the lodge. We did not talk till it grew quite dusk. And,
indeed, what is one to talk of when every subject has been talked over
already? There was only one thing new, my uncle's arrival, and even that
subject was soon exhausted. My tutor never took his eyes off Tatyana
Ivanovna 's face, and frequently heaved deep sighs.... At the time I did
not understand those sighs, and did not try to fathom their
significance; now they explain a great deal to me.
When the shadows merged into one thick mass of shade, the bailiff Fyodor
would come in from shooting or from the field. This Fyodor gave me the
impression of being a fierce and even a terrible man. The son of a
Russianized gipsy from Izyumskoe, swarthy-faced and curly-headed, with
big black eyes and a matted beard, he was never called among our
Kotchuevko peasants by any name but "The Devil." And, indeed, there was
a great deal of the gipsy about him apart from his appearance. He could
not, for instance, stay at home, and went off for days together into the
country or into the woods to shoot. He was gloomy, ill-humoured,
taciturn, was afraid of nobody, and refused to recognize any authority.
He was rude to mother, addressed me familiarly, and was contemptuous of
Pobyedimsky's learning. All this we forgave him, looking upon him as a
hot-tempered and nervous man; mother liked him because, in spite of his
gipsy nature, he was ideally honest and industrious. He loved his
Tatyana Ivanovna passionately, like a gipsy, but this love took in him a
gloomy form, as though it cost him suffering. He was never affectionate
to his wife in our presence, but simply rolled his eyes angrily at her
and twisted his mouth.
When he came in from the fields he would noisily and angrily put down
his gun, would come out to us on the steps, and sit down beside his
wife. After resting a little, he would ask his wife a few questions
about household matters, and then sink into silence.
"Let us sing," I would suggest.
My tutor would tune his guitar, and in a deep deacon's bass strike up
"In the midst of the valley." We would begin singing. My tutor took the
bass, Fyodor sang in a hardly audible tenor, while I sang soprano in
unison with Tatyana Ivanovna.
When the whole sky was covered with stars and the frogs had left off
croaking, they would bring in our supper from the kitchen. We went into
the lodge and sat down to the meal. My tutor and the gipsy ate greedily,
with such a sound that it was hard to tell whether it was the bones
crunching or their jaws, and Tatyana Ivanovna and I scarcely succeeded
in getting our share. After supper the lodge was plunged in deep sleep.
One evening, it was at the end of May, we were sitting on the steps,
waiting for supper. A shadow suddenly fell across us, and Gundasov stood
before us as though he had sprung out of the earth. He looked at us for
a long time, then clasped his hands and laughed gaily.
"An idyll!" he said. "They sing and dream in the moonlight! It's
charming, upon my soul! May I sit down and dream with you?"
We looked at one another and said nothing. My uncle sat down on the
bottom step, yawned, and looked at the sky. A silence followed.
Pobyedimsky, who had for a long time been wanting to talk to somebody
fresh, was delighted at the opportunity, and was the first to break the
silence. He had only one subject for intellectual conversation, the
epizootic diseases. It sometimes happens that after one has been in an
immense crowd, only some one countenance of the thousands remains long
imprinted on the memory; in the same way, of all that Pobyedimsky had
heard, during his six months at the veterinary institute, he remembered
only one passage:
"The epizootics do immense damage to the stock of the country. It is the
duty of society to work hand in hand with the government in waging war
upon them."
Before saying this to Gundasov, my tutor cleared his throat three times,
and several times, in his excitement, wrapped himself up in his
Inverness. On hearing about the epizootics, my uncle looked intently at
my tutor and made a sound between a snort and a laugh.
"Upon my soul, that's charming!" he said, scrutinizing us as though we
were mannequins. "This is actually life.... This is really what reality
is bound to be. Why are you silent, Pelagea Ivanovna?" he said,
addressing Tatyana Ivanovna.
She coughed, overcome with confusion.
"Talk, my friends, sing... play!... Don't lose time. You know, time, the
rascal, runs away and waits for no man! Upon my soul, before you have
time to look round, old age is upon you.... Then it is too late to live!
That's how it is, Pelagea Ivanovna.... We mustn't sit still and be
silent...."