AT the beginning of April in 1870 my mother, Klavdia Arhipovna,
the 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...”