I
Reader, do you know those little homesteads of country gentlefolks,
which were plentiful in our Great Russian Oukraïne twenty-five or thirty
years ago? Now one rarely comes across them, and in another ten years
the last of them will, I suppose, have disappeared for ever. The running
pond overgrown with reeds and rushes, the favourite haunt of fussy
ducks, among whom one may now and then come across a wary ‘teal’; beyond
the pond a garden with avenues of lime-trees, the chief beauty and glory
of our black-earth plains, with smothered rows of ‘Spanish’
strawberries, with dense thickets of gooseberries, currants, and
raspberries, in the midst of which, in the languid hour of the stagnant
noonday heat, one would be sure to catch glimpses of a serf-girl’s
striped kerchief, and to hear the shrill ring of her voice. Close by
would be a summer-house standing on four legs, a conservatory, a
neglected kitchen garden, with flocks of sparrows hung on stakes, and a
cat curled up on the tumble-down well; a little further, leafy
apple-trees in the high grass, which is green below and grey above,
straggling cherry-trees, pear-trees, on which there is never any fruit;
then flower-beds, poppies, peonies, pansies, milkwort, ‘maids in green,’
bushes of Tartar honeysuckle, wild jasmine, lilac and acacia, with the
continual hum of bees and wasps among their thick, fragrant, sticky
branches. At last comes the manor-house, a one-storied building on a
brick foundation, with greenish window-panes in narrow frames, a
sloping, once painted roof, a little balcony from which the vases of the
balustrade are always jutting out, a crooked gable, and a husky old dog
in the recess under the steps at the door. Behind the house a wide yard
with nettles, wormwood, and burdocks in the corners, outbuildings with
doors that stick, doves and rooks on the thatched roofs, a little
storehouse with a rusty weathercock, two or three birch-trees with
rooks’ nests in their bare top branches, and beyond--the road with
cushions of soft dust in the ruts and a field and the long hurdles of
the hemp patches, and the grey little huts of the village, and the
cackle of geese in the far-away rich meadows.... Is all this familiar to
you, reader? In the house itself everything is a little awry, a little
rickety--but no matter. It stands firm and keeps warm; the stoves are
like elephants, the furniture is of all sorts, home-made. Little paths
of white footmarks run from the doors over the painted floors. In the
hall siskins and larks in tiny cages; in the corner of the dining-room
an immense English clock in the form of a tower, with the inscription,
‘Strike--silent’; in the drawing-room portraits of the family, painted
in oils, with an expression of ill-tempered alarm on the brick-coloured
faces, and sometimes too an old warped picture of flowers and fruit or a
mythological subject. Everywhere there is the smell of kvas, of apples,
of linseed-oil and of leather. Flies buzz and hum about the ceiling and
the windows. A daring cockroach suddenly shows his countenance from
behind the looking-glass frame.... No matter, one can live here--and
live very well too.