We went on another quarter of a mile. A little village came into sight
on the edge of a not very deep ravine; on one side stood the ‘lodge,’
with a half-ruined roof and a solitary chimney; in one of the two rooms
of this lodge lived the brigadier. The owner of the village, who always
resided in Petersburg, the widow of the civil councillor Lomov, had--so
I learned later--bestowed this little nook upon the brigadier. She had
given orders that he should receive a monthly pension, and had also
assigned for his service a half-witted serf-girl living in the same
village, who, though she barely understood human speech, was yet
capable, in the lady’s opinion, of sweeping a floor and cooking
cabbage-soup. At the door of the lodge the brigadier again addressed me
with the same eighteenth-century smile: would I be pleased to walk into
his ‘apartement’? We went into this ‘apartement.’ Everything in it was
exceedingly filthy and poor, so filthy and so poor that the brigadier,
noticing, probably, by the expression of my face, the impression it made
on me, observed, shrugging his shoulders, and half closing his eyelids:
‘Ce n’est pas ... oeil de perdrix.’ ... What precisely he meant by this
remained a mystery to me.... When I addressed him in French, I got no
reply from him in that language. Two objects struck me especially in the
brigadier’s abode: a large officer’s cross of St. George in a black
frame, under glass, with an inscription in an old-fashioned handwriting:
‘Received by the Colonel of the Tchernigov regiment, Vassily Guskov, for
the storming of Prague in the year 1794’; and secondly, a half-length
portrait in oils of a handsome, black-eyed woman with a long, dark face,
hair turned up high and powdered, with postiches on the temple and chin,
in a flowered, low-cut bodice, with blue frills, the style of 1780. The
portrait was badly painted, but was probably a good likeness; there was
a wonderful look of life and will, something extraordinarily living and
resolute, about the face. It was not looking at the spectator; it was,
as it were, turning away and not smiling; the curve of the thin nose,
the regular but flat lips, the almost unbroken straight line of the
thick eyebrows, all showed an imperious, haughty, fiery temper. No great
effort was needed to picture that face glowing with passion or with
rage. Just below the portrait on a little pedestal stood a half-withered
bunch of simple wild flowers in a thick glass jar. The brigadier went up
to the pedestal, stuck the pinks he was carrying into the jar, and
turning to me, and lifting his hand in the direction of the portrait, he
observed: ‘Agrippina Ivanovna Teliegin, by birth Lomov.’ The words of
Narkiz came back to my mind; and I looked with redoubled interest at the
expressive and evil face of the woman for whose sake the brigadier had
lost all his fortune.
‘You took part, I see, sir, in the storming of Prague,’ I began,
pointing to the St. George cross, ‘and won a sign of distinction, rare
at any time, but particularly so then; you must remember Suvorov?’
‘Alexander Vassilitch?’ the brigadier answered, after a brief silence,
in which he seemed to be pulling his thoughts together; ‘to be sure, I
remember him; he was a little, brisk old man. Before one could stir a
finger, he’d be here and there and everywhere (the brigadier chuckled).
He rode into Warsaw on a Cossack horse; he was all in diamonds, and he
says to the Poles: “I’ve no watch, I forgot it in Petersburg--no watch!”
and they shouted and huzzaed for him. Queer chaps! Hey! Cucumber! lad!’
he added suddenly, changing and raising his voice (the deacon-buffoon
had remained standing at the door), ‘where’s the rolls, eh? And tell
Grunka ... to bring some kvas!’
‘Directly, your honour,’ I heard Cucumber’s voice reply. He handed the
brigadier the bundle of rolls, and, going out of the lodge, approached a
dishevelled creature in rags--the half-witted girl, Grunka, I
suppose--and as far as I could make out through the dusty little window,
proceeded to demand kvas from her--at least, he several times raised one
hand like a funnel to his mouth, and waved the other in our direction.