‘His poverty, his family… He was a drunkard, a gambler, that’s what!’
‘He started drinking from sorrow,’ remarked Mitya, lowering his voice.
‘From sorrow! Well, you should’ve helped him if your heart’s so fond and not sat in pubs with the drunkard. He’s got a wonderful line in talk – never seen anything like it!’
‘He’s the soul of kindness, he is…’
‘With you they’re all the soul of kindness… Was, er,’ Ovsyanikov went on, turning to his wife, ‘something sent to him – well, you know where…’
Tatyana Ilyinichna nodded.
‘So where’ve you been these last few days?’ the old man started asking.
‘In town.’
‘I reckon you’ve been playing billiards and drinking tea and strumming the guitar and rushing round from one government office to another and concocting petitions in back rooms and parading about with merchants’ sons? I’m right, aren’t I? Go on, tell us!’
‘OK, it was like that,’ said Mitya with a smile. ‘Oh, I almost forgot: Funtikov, Anton Parfenych, asked you to come and have dinner on Sunday.’
‘I won’t go to that big-bellied bloke. He’ll give us good fish and then cover it all with rancid butter. Bless him, anyway!’
‘And I met Fedosya Mikhaylovna.’
‘What Fedosya?’
‘The one belonging to Harpenchenko, the landowner, the one who bought Mikulino at auction. The Fedosya from Mikulino. She lived as a seamstress in Moscow paying quit-rent and paid her quit-rent punctually, 182 roubles and a half each year. And she knew her job, used to get good orders in Moscow. But now Harpenchenko’s had her brought back and is keeping her there and not giving her any work. She’d like to buy her freedom and has spoken to her master, only he’s not made any decision. Uncle, you know Harpenchenko, don’t you? Couldn’t you have a word with him? Fedosya’ll pay well.’
‘It’s not your money, is it? Eh? Well, all right, I’ll speak to him. ‘Cept I don’t know so much,’ went on the old man, looking dissatisfied. ‘God forgive me, but that Harpenchenko’s a right skinflint, the way he buys up IOUs, lends at high rates and acquires estates under the hammer… Who the hell brought him our way? Oh, these outsiders! It’ll take a while to get any sense from him, but anyhow, let’s see.’
‘Do your best, uncle.’
‘All right, I’ll do my best. Only just you look after yourself, just you watch out! I’m telling you that! No, no, don’t make excuses… God be with you! Only just watch out for yourself, Mitya, otherwise you’ll do yourself no good, you’ll come a cropper, by God. Anyhow I don’t want to have you round my neck all the time. I don’t carry much weight, as it is. Well, be off with you, in God’s name.’
Mitya went out. Tatyana Ilyinichna went after him.
‘Give him some tea, you old softie, you,’ Ovsyanikov shouted after her. ‘The lad’s no fool,’ he continued, ‘and he’s got a kind heart, only I’m fearful for him… In any case, forgive me for bothering you so long with trifles.’
The door from the hallway opened. A small, slightly grey-haired man came in dressed in a velvet jacket.
‘Ah, Franz Ivanych!’ cried Ovsyanikov. ‘Greetings! How’s the Good Lord treating you?’
Permit me, dear reader, to acquaint you with this gentleman.
Franz Ivanych Lejeune, my neighbour and an Oryol landowner, achieved the honoured title of Russian nobleman and gentleman in a rather unusual way. He was born in Orléans, of French parents, and together with Napoleon set off on the conquest of Russia as a drummer. To start with everything went swimmingly, and our Frenchman entered Moscow with head held high. But on the return route the poor Monsieur Lejeune, half-frozen and without his drum, fell into the hands of Smolensk peasants. The Smolensk peasants locked him up for the night in an empty fullery and the next day led him to a hole in the ice near the dam and began begging the drummer ‘de la grrrrande armée’ to do them the honour, that is to say to plunge under the ice. M. Lejeune was unable to agree to their suggestion and began in his turn to persuade the Smolensk peasants, in his French dialect, to let him go back to Orléans. ‘There, messieurs,’ he said, ‘I have a mother living, une tendre mère.’ But the peasants, doubtless through ignorance of the geographical location of the city of Orléans, went on suggesting to him that he take an underwater journey down the winding Gniloterka River and even began encouraging him with light shoves in his neck – and backbones when suddenly, to Lejeune’s indescribable joy, there was a sound of horse-bells and on to the dam came a large sledge with the most colourful of covers laid over its exaggeratedly high back and drawn by a troika of light-brown Vyatka horses. In the sledge sat a stout and red-cheeked landowner in wolf fur.
‘What’re you doing there?’ he asked the peasants.
‘Drownin’ a Frenchie, sir.’
‘Ah!’ the landowner responded indifferently and turned away.
‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’ exclaimed the poor fellow.
‘Aha!’ said the wolf fur reproachfully, ‘with your dozen tongues you came to our Russia, burned Moscow, you scoundrel, stole the cross from off Ivan the Great’s Tower and now it’s all monsieur, monsieur! Now you’ve got your tail between your legs! A thief deserves what’s coming to him… Off we go, Filka!’
The horses started away.
‘Oh, by the way, stop a moment!’ added the landowner. ‘Hey you, monsieur, do you know any music?’
‘Sauvez moi, sauvez moi, mon bon monsieur!’ Lejeune begged.
‘What a stupid people! Not a single one of them knows any Russian! Myuzik, myuzik, savvy myuzik voo? Savvy? Well, speak up! Comprenny? Savvy myuzik voo? On fortopiano zhooey savvy?’
Lejeune understood at last what the landowner was saying and nodded affirmatively.
‘Oui, monsieur, oui, oui, je suis musicien; je joue de tous les instruments possibles! Oui, monsieur… Sauvez moi, monsieur!’
‘Well, thank your lucky stars,’ the landowner replied. ‘Lads, let him go. Here’s twenty copecks for a drink!’
‘Thank you, sir, thank you. Please take him, sir.’
Lejeune was put in the sledge. He sighed with joy, wept, shivered, bowed to them and thanked the landowner, the coachman and the peasants. He was wearing only a green jersey with pink ribbons and there was a bitterly hard frost. The landowner gave one silent glance at his blue and freezing limbs and wrapped the unfortunate fellow in his own fur coat and took him home. The household ran to meet him. The Frenchman was quickly warmed up, fed and clothed. The landowner led him in to his daughters.
‘Here, children,’ he told them, ‘a teacher’s been found for you. You were going on and on at me about wanting to learn music and that French dialect. Well, here’s a Frenchman for you, and he plays the fortopiano… Well, monsieur,’ he continued, indicating a crummy little piano he’d bought five years before off a Jew, who was in any case an eau-de-cologne salesman, ‘show us what you know: zhooey!’
Lejeune sat down on the chair with quaking heart because he’d never played a piano in his life.
‘Zhooey, zhooey!’ the landowner repeated.
In desperation the poor fellow struck the keys, just as if he were beating a drum, and played the first thing that came into his head. ‘I literally thought,’ he used to say afterwards, ‘that my saviour would seize me by the scruff of the neck and throw me out of the house.’ But, to the extreme surprise of the unwilling improviser, the landowner after a short while tapped him appreciatively on the shoulder: ‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘I see you know what to do. Now go and rest.’
After a couple of weeks Lejeune transferred from this landowner to another, a cultivated and wealthy man, caught his fancy through his happy and engaging character, married his pupil, entered the civil service, became a nobleman and a gentleman, married his own daughter off to an Oryol landowner called Lobyzanyev, a retired dragoon officer and amateur poet, and himself took up residence in Oryol.
It was this very Lejeune or, as he was now k
nown, Franz Ivanych, who entered the sitting-room of Ovsyanikov, with whom he was on friendly terms…
But perhaps the reader has already grown tired of sitting with me at Farmer Ovsyanikov’s and so I will now eloquently fall silent.
LGOV
‘LET’S go to Lgov,’ Yermolay, who is already known to our readers, said to me one day, ‘we’ll shoot duck there to our heart’s content.’
Although wild duck is not particularly attractive to a real hunter, for want of any other kind of wildfowl (it was the beginning of September and the woodcock had not yet flown in and I was bored with scouring the fields for partridge) I listened to my hunter and set off for Lgov.
Lgov is a large steppe village with an exceedingly ancient stone, single-towered church and two mills on the marshy riverlet Rosota. About three miles from Lgov this riverlet turns into a broad stretch of pond water, overgrown at the edges and in parts of the middle by thick reeds which are known as ‘mayer’ in the Oryol region. On this pond, in the inlets and backwaters among the reeds, a great mass of ducks of every possible variety have found a habitat: mallard, half-mallard, pintail, teal, pochard, etc. Small flocks used continually to rise and fly about above the water, but at the sound of gunfire such clouds would rise that the hunter would be forced to hold down his hat and emit a prolonged ‘Phe-e-ew!’ Yermolay and I started off by going round the side of the pond but, firstly, the duck, being a cautious bird, does not come close to the bank and, secondly, if some slowcoach of an inexperienced teal should indeed have submitted itself to our shots and given up its life, then our dogs wouldn’t have been in any condition to retrieve it from the thick reeds because, despite their noblest and most self-sacrificing efforts, they wouldn’t have been able to swim or walk along the bottom and would only have cut their precious noses needlessly on the sharp edges of the reeds.
‘No,’ said Yermolay at last, ‘it’s no good, we’ve got to get a boat. Let’s go back to Lgov.’
We set off. We’d scarcely gone a few steps when a rather undistinguished-looking setter rushed towards us from behind a thick clump of willow and there then appeared a man of medium height in a blue, badly torn coat, a yellowish waistcoat and trousers the colour of gris de lin or bleu d’amour1 which had been hastily tucked into badly holed boots, with a red kerchief round his neck and a single-barrelled gun over his shoulder. While our dogs, with the usual Chinese ceremonial characteristic of their species, sniffed their new acquaintance, who, it appeared, got cold feet and tucked its tail between its legs, drew back its ears and rapidly twisted its body to and fro without bending its knees, its teeth bared, the stranger approached us and bowed exceedingly politely. He appeared to be about twenty-five. His long light-brown hair, liberally plastered with kvas, stuck up in fixed spikes, his small brown eyes blinked in welcome and his entire face, wound about with a black handkerchief as if he had toothache, was wreathed in a sugary smile.
‘Permit me to introduce myself,’ he began in a soft and insinuating voice. ‘I’m the local hunter, Vladimir… Learning of your arrival and knowing that you’d graciously made your way on to the banks of our pond, I resolved, if you have no objections, to offer you my services.’
The hunter Vladimir spoke, without putting too fine a point on it, like a young provincial actor playing a juvenile lead. I agreed to his offer and before reaching Lgov had already learned the story of his life. He was a freed manorial serf. In his tenderest youth he’d learned music, then he’d worked as a valet, had learned to read and had read, so far as I could gather, one or two books, and, living now as do so many in Russia, without a penny to call his own and no permanent employment, he fed himself on scarcely anything save manna from heaven. He expressed himself unusually elegantly and evidently prided himself on his fancy manners. He was also, no doubt, a frightful one with the girls and probably successful, because Russian girls love eloquence. Besides, he let me know that he sometimes visited local landowners and received hospitality in the town and played whist and was on good terms with people from the capital. He was expert at smiling and had an extraordinarily wide range of smiles. One particularly suited him, a modest, withdrawn smile which played on his lips when he was listening to a stranger speaking to him. He would listen to you and agree with you completely, but never leave go of his sense of personal dignity, and he always sought to let you know that he could, if the occasion arose, give expression to his own opinion. Yermolay, as a man who was not too well-educated and in no way ‘subtle’, began by speaking to him as one of his own. It was a sight to see the way Vladimir condescended to him by saying: ‘You, sir…’
‘Why’ve you got that handkerchief wound round your face?’ I asked him. ‘Have you got toothache?’
‘No, sir,’ he replied, ‘a far more ruinous consequence of inattention. I had a friend, a good man, sir, but in no sense a hunter, as things turned out, sir. One day, sir, he said to me: “My dear chap, take me hunting, I’m longing to know what sort of a sport it is.” I, of course, didn’t want to refuse a friend and obtained a weapon for him, for my part, sir, and took him hunting. Well, sir, we hunted, as we’re accustomed to, and then we rested, sir. I sat down under a tree and he, for his part, sir, sat opposite, started playing tricks with his gun and aimed at me. I begged him to decease but, in his inexperience, he didn’t pay any attention, sir. There was a loud shot and I lost my chin and the forefinger on my right hand.’
We reached Lgov. Both Vladimir and Yermolay had decided that it was impossible to hunt without a boat.
‘Old Knot’s got a punt,’* Vladimir remarked, ‘but I don’t know where he’s hidden it. I’ll have to go and see him.’
‘Who’s that?’ I asked.
‘There’s a man lives here nicknamed Old Knot.’
Vladimir and Yermolay set off to find Old Knot. I told them I’d wait for them by the church. As I was looking at the gravestones in the churchyard I came across a blackened four-cornered urn with the following inscriptions: on one side in French: ‘Ce gît Théophile Henri, vicomte de Blangy’, and on the other: ‘Beneath this stone is laid the body of the Frenchman, Count Blanzhy, born 1737, died 1799, his life numbering in all 62 years’; on the third: ‘May his Ashes Rest in Peace’, and on the fourth:
Beneath this stone there lies a Frenchman, immigrant;
Noble lineage had he and outstanding talent,
He mourned his murdered wife and family,
And left his country oppress’d by tyranny;
Come at last to shores of Russian earth,
In old age found he an hospitable hearth,
And children taught and parents much requited…
’Twas here with the Almighty was he reunited…
The arrival of Yermolay, Vladimir and the man with the strange nickname, Old Knot, interrupted my reflections. The barefoot, tattered and unkempt Old Knot seemed, to judge from appearances, a former manorial serf of about sixty.
‘Have you a boat?’ I asked.
‘I have,’ he answered in a hoarse and broken voice, ‘but it’s in a bad way.’
‘How’s that?’
‘It’s got leaky. An’ the rivets’ve come out.’
‘That’s nothing!’ exclaimed Yermolay. ‘You can fill ’em with oakum.’
‘Sure can,’ Old Knot agreed.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m the master’s fisherman, sir.’
‘How is it you’re a fisherman, but your boat’s in such a state of disrepair?’
‘Well, there’s no fish in the river.’
‘Fish dislike marsh mildew,’ my hunter remarked self-importantly.
‘Well,’ I said to Yermolay, ‘go and get some oakum and patch up the boat as soon as possible.’
Yermolay went off.
‘Surely we’ll sink to the bottom very likely, won’t we?’ I said to Vladimir.
‘God is merciful,’ he answered. ‘In any case, it must be supposed that the pond is not deep.’
‘Sure it’s not deep,’ said Old Knot
who spoke somewhat strangely, as if he’d only just woken up. ‘Sure it’s got a bottom full o’ weeds an’ grass, an’ sure it’s all overgrown with grass, it is. Mind you, it’s also got some real deep holes, it has.’
‘However, if the grass is so thick,’ remarked Vladimir, ‘it won’t be possible to row in it.’
‘Well, who rows in a punt, eh? You gotta punt it. I’ll come with you, ‘cos I gotta pole there. Or it’s possible to use a shovel.’
‘A shovel’s awkward, sometimes you can’t reach the bottom,’ said Vladimir.
‘It’s true it’s awkward.’
I sat down on a gravestone to wait for Yermolay. Vladimir went off a little to one side out of politeness and also sat down. Old Knot stayed standing in one place, his head lowered and his hands behind his back according to old custom.
‘Tell me, please,’ I began, ‘have you been fisherman here long?’
‘It’ll be seven years, sir,’ he answered, giving himself a shake.
‘And what were you before?’
‘Before I were a coachman.’
‘Who stopped you being a coachman?’
‘Our new lady.’
‘Which lady?’
‘The one who bought us. You’re not knowing her, sir: Alyona Timofevna, the stout lady… not young.’
‘What on earth made her turn you into a fisherman?’
‘God knows. She came to us from her estate, from Tambov, an’ ordered all us workers to gather in a group an’ then she came out to see us. First of all we go an’ kiss her hand and she doesn’t mind, doesn’t get upset… Then she started askin’ us one after another what we do, what employment we have. When it was my turn, she asks: “What were you?” I said: “Coachman.” “Coachman? Well, what sort of coachman do you think you are, just look at yourself, ask yourself that, eh? It’s not right for you to be a coachman, but you can be my fisherman and shave off your beard. Whenever I have occasion to visit and come to dinner, you have fish ready, do you hear?” Since then I’ve been counted among the fishermen. “And see you keep my pond water in good condition,” she said. But how can I do that?’