I tried to begin a conversation with the brigadier ... but Narkiz had
not misinformed me; the poor old man certainly had become weak in his
intellect. He asked me my surname, and after repeating his inquiry
twice, pondered and pondered, and at last brought out: ‘Yes, I fancy
there was a judge of that name here. Cucumber, wasn’t there a judge
about here of that name, hey?’ ‘To be sure there was, Vassily Fomitch,
your honour,’ responded Cucumber, who treated him altogether as a child.
‘There was, certainly. But let me have your hook; your worm must have
been eaten off.... Yes, so it is.’
‘Did you know the Lomov family?’ the brigadier suddenly asked me in a
cracked voice.
‘What Lomov family is that?’
‘Why, Fiodor Ivanitch, Yevstigney Ivanitch, Alexey Ivanitch the Jew, and
Fedulia Ivanovna the plunderer, ... and then, too ...’
The brigadier suddenly broke off and looked down confused.
They were the people he was most intimate with,’ Narkiz whispered,
bending towards me; ‘it was through them, through that same Alexey
Ivanitch, that he called a Jew, and through a sister of Alexey
Ivanitch’s, Agrafena Ivanovna, as you may say, that he lost all his
property.’
‘What are you saying there about Agrafena Ivanovna?’ the brigadier
called out suddenly, and his head was raised, his white eyebrows were
frowning.... ‘You’d better mind! And why Agrafena, pray? Agrippina
Ivanovna--that’s what you should call her.’
‘There--there--there, sir,’ Cucumber was beginning to falter.
‘Don’t you know the verses the poet Milonov wrote about her?’ the old
man went on, suddenly getting into a state of excitement, which was a
complete surprise to me. ‘No hymeneal lights were kindled,’ he began
chanting, pronouncing all the vowels through his nose, giving the
syllables ‘an,’ ‘en,’ the nasal sound they have in French; and it was
strange to hear this connected speech from his lips: ‘No torches ... No,
that’s not it:
“Not vain Corruption’s idols frail
Not amaranth nor porphyry
Rejoiced their hearts ...
One thing in them ...”
‘That was about us. Do you hear?
“One thing in them unquenchable,
Subduing, sweet, desirable,
To nurse their mutual flame in love!”
And you talk about Agrafena!’
Narkiz chuckled half-contemptuously, half-indifferently. ‘What a queer
fish it is!’ he said to himself. But the brigadier had again relapsed
into dejection, the rod had dropped from his hands and slipped into
the water.