Sketches from a Hunter's Album (37 page)

‘I suppose that I was in love with her. Even though by now I should know, yet – my God! – I don't know even now whether I loved Sofia or not. She was a kind creature, intelligent, quiet, with a warm heart; but God knows why, whether from having lived such a long time in the country or from some other cause, she secreted at the bottom of her soul (if the soul may be said to have a bottom) a wound or, better, a festering hurt which it was impossible to cure and which neither she nor I was able to give a name to. Naturally, I did not perceive the existence of this trauma until after our marriage. What I didn't do to help her, but nothing was any good! In my
boyhood I had a little finch which the cat once got her claws into; we rescued it, nursed it, but my wretched finch didn't get right again; it began to droop and ail and stopped singing. The matter ended one night when a rat got into its open cage and bit off its beak, as a result of which it finally decided to die. I don't know what cat had got its claws into my wife, but she also started to droop and ail like my luckless finch. Sometimes she herself obviously wanted to flutter her wings and frolic in the fresh air, in sunlight and freedom; she'd try it and then curl up into a ball again. Yet she certainly loved me: she assured me time and again that she had nothing more to wish for – oh, the devil take it! – and yet there she was with her eyes already fading. Is there something in her past? I wondered. I sought around for information, but there was nothing to be found. Well, then, judge for yourself: an original fellow would have given a shrug of the shoulders, perhaps, sighed once or twice and then settled down to live his life in his own way; but I, unoriginal creature that I am, began looking for suitable beams. My wife had become so profoundly imbued with all the habits of an old maid – Beethoven, nightly strolls, mignonette, writing letters to friends, keeping albums and so on – that she was quite incapable of accustoming herself to any other form of life, particularly to the life of a lady of the house; and yet it's ridiculous for a married woman to languish from some nameless heartbreak and spend her evenings singing: “Awaken her not till dawn has broken.”
⁷

‘However, sir, in such a manner we passed a blissful three years. In the fourth year Sofia died in childbirth and – strange though it may be – I literally had a premonition that she would be in no condition to present me with a son or daughter and the earth with a new inhabitant. I remember her funeral. It happened in the spring. Our parish church is not large and it is ancient, with a blackened icon screen, bare walls and a brick floor with holes in it; each choir stall has a large antiquated icon. They brought in the coffin, set it down in the very middle of the church before the holy doors, draped it with a faded cloth and placed three candlesticks round it. The service began. A frail sexton, with a little plaited knot of hair on the nape of his neck, wearing a green girdle tied low down, made sad mumblings before the lectern; the priest, also elderly, with a small, kindly, purblind face, in a mauve cassock with yellowing patterning, officiated
both for himself and for the sexton. The entire area of open windows was filled with the shimmerings and rustlings of the young, fresh leaves of weeping birches; a smell of grass wafted in from the graveyard; the red flames of the wax candles paled in the gay sunlight of the spring day; sparrows chirruped throughout the whole church and occasionally the noisy twitterings of a swallow that had flown in resounded beneath the cupola. In the golden dust of the sun's rays the auburn heads of the sparse peasant congregation rose and fell in quick obeisances as they uttered earnest prayers for the soul of the departed; incense rose from the opening in the censer in a delicate, pale-blue stream. I looked at the dead face of my wife. My God! Even death, death itself, had not freed her, not healed her wound: her face wore the same sickly, timid, dumb look, as if she literally felt awkward lying in her coffin. My blood stirred bitterly within me. Kind, kind being that you were, but you still did well for yourself in dying!'

The speaker's cheeks reddened and his eyes lost their brightness.

‘Having rid myself finally,' he started to say again, ‘of the weight of despondency which settled on me after my wife's death, I thought I ought to get down to work, as they say. I entered the service in the provincial centre, but the large rooms of the government building made my head ache and also had a bad effect on my eyes; other convenient reasons also came along… So I retired. I had wanted to go to Moscow, but, in the first place, I hadn't enough money, and in the second place… I have already mentioned to you that I had become reconciled. Such reconciliation came to me both suddenly and gradually. In spirit, so to say, I had long ago become reconciled, yet my head was still unwilling to bow down. I used to ascribe the humble mood of my feelings and thoughts to the influence of country life and my misfortune. On the other hand, I had long ago noticed that almost all my neighbours, both old and young, who were cowed to begin with by my show of learning, foreign travel and other perquisites of my education, not only succeeded in becoming quite used to me but even began to treat me not so much rudely as off-handedly, not bothering to hear my discourses through to the end and failing to address me in a proper manner when speaking to me. I also forgot to tell you that during the first year of my marriage I attempted out of boredom to turn my hand to writing and even
sent a small piece – a short work of fiction, if I'm not wrong – to a journal; but after a certain lapse of time I received from the editor a polite letter, in which mention was made, among other things, of the fact that it was impossible to deny me intellect but it was possible to deny me talent, and talent was the one thing needed in literature. Over and above this, it came to my knowledge that a certain Moscovite who was passing through the province – the kindliest young man imaginable, by the way – had made a passing reference to me at a Governor's
soirée
as a person of no consequence who had exhausted his talents. But I still persisted in maintaining my partially voluntary blindness; I didn't feel, you know, like pulling down my ear-flaps. Eventually, one fine morning, I had my eyes opened.

‘This is how it happened. The local police inspector called on me with the object of directing my attention to a broken-down bridge on my property, which I definitely had no means of repairing. Tasting a tot of vodka along with a piece of cold sturgeon, this condescending pillar of the law reproached me in a fatherly way for my lack of scruple, entered none the less into my position and advised me simply to order my peasants to spread some muck by way of repairs, lit up his little pipe and started talking about the forthcoming elections. The honourable title of provincial marshal of nobility was being sought at that time by a certain Orbassanov, an empty loudmouth and, what is more, a bribe-taker. Besides, he was distinguished neither for wealth nor lineage. I expressed my opinion about him, and even rather freely: I confess that I looked down on Mr Orbassanov. The inspector looked at me, fondly tapped me on the shoulder and declared benevolently: “Now, now, Vasily Vasilych, it's not for you and me to discuss such people, so what's it got to do with us? Every cricket should know its own hearth.” “But kindly tell me,” I protested in annoyance, “what difference there is between me and Mr Orbassanov?” The inspector took his pipe out of his mouth, screwed up his eyes – and burst into spluttering laughter. “Well, you're one for a joke!” he uttered eventually, through his tears. “What a thing to say, what a thing to let drop just like that! You're a one, aren't you?” – and right up to his departure he kept on making fun of me, from time to time nudging me with his elbow and adopting an extremely intimate form of address in talking to me. He left finally. His attitude was all I needed: the cup of
my humiliation was full to overflowing. I walked several times about the room, stopped before the mirror, gazed for minutes on end at the look of confusion on my face and, slowly sticking out my tongue, shook my head in bitter derision. The scales had fallen from my eyes: I now saw clearly, more clearly even than I saw my own face in the mirror, what an empty, worthless, unnecessary, unoriginal person I was!'

The speaker fell silent.

‘In one of Voltaire's tragedies,'
⁸
he continued despondently, ‘some gentleman or other is overjoyed at having reached the extreme limit of unhappiness. Although there is nothing tragic in my fate, I admit that at that time I experienced something of the same kind. I learned to know the poisoned joys of chill despair; I learned to know how sweet it was, during the course of a whole morning, lying in bed and not hurrying over it, to curse the day and hour of my birth. I could not become reconciled at once. I mean, judge for yourself: lack of money tied me down in the country, which I hated; neither management of my estate, nor the service, nor literature – nothing had proved suitable; I avoided the local landowners like the plague, and books were repugnant to me; in the eyes of watery-puddingy, chronically sensitive young ladies who had a habit of shaking their curls and feverishly reiterating the word “life” (pronounced almost like “leaf”) I ceased to be an object of interest once I had stopped chattering and going into raptures; I simply didn't know how to cut myself off completely and was physically incapable of it… So I began – guess what? – I began dragging myself round from neighbour to neighbour. Literally drunk with self-disgust, I deliberately laid myself open to all sorts of petty humiliations. I was overlooked by the servants at table, greeted coldly and arrogantly, and finally, I wasn't noticed at all; I wasn't even allowed to add my bit to the general conversation, and I myself, it so happened, would deliberately nod agreement from my corner at some crass chatterbox or other who in the past, in Moscow, would have been delighted to lick the dust from my feet and kiss the hem of my overcoat… I did not even allow myself to think that I was submitting to the bitter pleasure of irony – after all, there's no such thing as irony in isolation! So that's the sort of life I've led for several years in a row and that's how things are up to the present time…'

‘I've never heard anything like it,' the sleepy voice of Mr Kantagryukhin grumbled from the next room, ‘who's the fool that's decided to talk away at this time of night?'

My room-mate swiftly plunged under the counterpane and, glancing out timorously, shook his finger at me.

‘Tut, tut,' he whispered, and as though literally apologizing and bowing in the direction of Kantagryukhin's voice murmured respectfully: ‘Of course, sir; of course, sir. Forgive me… His lordship must be allowed to sleep, he should sleep,' he continued again in a whisper, ‘he must gather his strength, well, at least so that he can eat tomorrow with the same enjoyment as he has eaten today. We have no right to disturb him. Besides, it seems I've told you all I wanted to tell; no doubt you also want to go to sleep. I wish you good night.'

The speaker turned away in feverish haste and buried his head in his pillow.

‘Permit me at least to know,' I asked, ‘with whom I've had the pleasure…'

He swiftly raised his head.

‘No, for God's sake,' he interrupted me, ‘don't ask me or anyone else for my name. Let me remain for you an unknown person, a Vasily Vasilyevych who has been crippled by fate. At the same time, as an unoriginal person, I don't deserve any particular name. But if you earnestly want to give me some kind of title, then call me… call me Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District. There are many such Hamlets in every district, but perhaps you haven't come across any others… And so farewell.'

He again buried himself in his feather-bed, and the next morning, when they came to wake me, he was no longer in the room. He had left before daybreak.

‘Hey!' he cried. ‘There'll be grouse round here! Let's get down!'

We stopped and went into the bushy area. My dog chanced on a covey. I fired and was about to reload my gun when suddenly behind me there arose a loud crackling sound and a man on horseback rode up to me, parting the bushes with his hands.

‘Parmit me to ahsk, sah,' he declared in a haughty voice, ‘by what right are you a-hahnting here, sah?'

The stranger spoke unusually fast, jerkily and through the nose. I looked him in the face. In all my born days I'd never seen anyone like him. Imagine to yourself, dear readers, a small man, fair-haired, with a red turned-up little nose and the longest imaginable ginger whiskers. A conical Persian hat with an upper part covered in raspberry-coloured cloth covered his forehead right down to his eyebrows. He was dressed in a worn, tight-fitting yellow coat with black velvet cartridge pleats across the chest and frayed silver linings to the seams. He had a horn hanging over his shoulder and a dagger in his belt. A wretched, hook-nosed, ginger horse pranced about under him like one possessed and a couple of borzoi dogs, thin and bowlegged, danced around under its feet. The face, glance, voice and every movement, the very being of this strange man exuded a daredevil valour and limitless, incredible arrogance. His pale-blue,
glass-like eyes darted about and squinted as if he were drunk. He had a way of throwing back his head, puffing out his cheeks, snorting and shaking his whole body as if in an excess of self-esteem exactly like a turkey-cock. He repeated his question.

‘I didn't know it was forbidden to shoot here,' I answered.

‘You are here, my good sah,' he continued, ‘on my land.'

‘I'm sorry, I'll leave.'

‘Parmit me to ahsk,' he said, ‘do I have the honour of speaking with a member of the nobility?'

I gave my name.

‘In that case, please go on hunting. I'm also a member of the nobility and very glad to be of service to another… My name's Cher-top-khanov, Panteley.'

He bent down, gave a whoop and tugged at his horse's neck. The horse started shaking its head, reared up on its hindlegs, flung itself to one side and crushed a dog's paw. The dog emitted a series of piercing yelps. Chertopkhanov seethed and hissed, struck the horse between the ears with his fist, jumped to the ground quicker than lightning, looked at the dog's paw, spat on the wound, gave the dog a shove in the side with his foot to stop it squealing, grabbed hold of the horse's withers and stuck his foot in the stirrup. The horse flung up its muzzle, raised its tail and dashed sideways into the bushes while he hopped along on one foot beside it before finally alighting in the saddle somehow or other. Like someone in a frenzy he twirled his whip, blew on his horn and galloped away.

I'd scarcely recovered from the unexpected appearance of Chertopkhanov when suddenly, with hardly any sound, there rode out of the bushes a stoutish man of about forty on a small black horse. He stopped, removed from his head a green-leather peaked cap and in a very delicate, soft voice asked me whether I'd seen a rider on a ginger horse. I said I had.

‘In which direction did he ride off, please?' he continued in the same voice and without replacing his cap.

‘That way, sir.'

‘Most humble thanks, sir.'

He made a smacking sound with his lips, let his legs bounce against the sides of his little horse and set off at a steady trot – clip-clop, clip-clop – in the direction indicated. I watched until his
horned cap was hidden among the branches. This new stranger bore no resemblance in outward appearance to his predecessor. His face, puffy and round as a ball, expressed diffidence, warmth and meek humility. His nose, also puffy and round and ingrained with small blue veins, revealed him as one fond of good living. There was not a single hair on the front of his head, while on the back there stuck up some sparse brown tufts. His little eyes, looking just like peepholes, blinked amiably. His small, full, red lips smiled sweetly. He was wearing a frock-coat with a stand-up collar and brass buttons, very worn, but clean; his short cloth trousers had ridden up high and plump calves were visible above the yellow tops of his boots.

‘Who's that?' I asked Yermolay.

‘That? He's Nedopyuskin, Tikhon Ivanych. He lives with Chertopkhanov.'

‘Is he a poor man, then?'

‘Not a rich one. But then Chertopkhanov hasn't got a brass farthing.'

‘So why's he living with him?'

‘They became friends, you see. The one won't go anywhere without the other… It's as they say: where the horse goes with its hoof, so the crab goes with its claw.'

We left the bushes. Suddenly two hounds began baying beside us and a big hare dashed through the oats which were already pretty high. In hot pursuit dogs raced out of a nearby wood, both hounds and borzois, and behind the dogs flew out Chertopkhanov himself. He didn't shout, didn't urge on the dogs, didn't tell them to be at it. He was panting and gasping and disjointed, meaningless sounds came from his mouth. He went speeding along, his eyes screwed up, beating his unfortunate horse frantically with his whip.

The borzois were almost on their prey… The hare sat down, turned sharply backwards and flew past Yermolay towards the bushes. The borzois rushed by.

‘Go o-o-on! Go o-o-on!' the literally tongue-tied, half-dead hunter bawled. ‘Mind out, there's a good chap!'

Yermolay fired. The wounded hare spun head over heels like a top across the smooth, dry grass, jumped up and gave a piteous cry in the teeth of a frenzied dog. The hounds at once fell upon it.

Chertopkhanov shot down from his horse, took out his dagger,
ran straddled over his dogs and with fierce oaths seized the torn hare from them and, his whole face one wild grimace, thrust his dagger into its neck right up to the hilt, thrust again and then burst into guffaws of laughter. Tikhon Ivanych appeared in the clearing.

‘Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho!' Chertopkhanov guffawed again.

‘Ho-ho-ho-ho!' his friend repeated calmly.

‘Surely you shouldn't be hunting for real in the summer,' I remarked, directing Chertopkhanov's attention to the trampled oats.

‘It's my field,' Chertopkhanov answered, scarcely able to draw breath.

He cut the paws off the hare, fixed it to his saddle and threw the paws to the dogs.

‘I owe you the cost of the shot, my good man, according to the rules of hunting,' he said, turning to Yermolay. ‘And you, my good sir,' he added in the same jerky, sharp voice, ‘I thank.'

He mounted his horse.

‘Par-rmit me to know… I've forgotten… your name and surname?'

I again gave my name.

‘I'm very glad to make your acquaintance. Should the occasion arise, please call on me… Now where's that Fomka, Tikhon Ivanych?' he went on heatedly. ‘We hunted the hare without him.'

‘His horse fell under him,' answered Tikhon Ivanych with a smile.

‘Fell? Orbassan
¹
fell? Phew, dammit! Where is he, eh?'

‘There, on the other side of the wood.'

Chertopkhanov struck his horse over the muzzle with his whip and galloped off at top speed. Tikhon Ivanych bowed to me twice – for himself and for his friend – and again set off at a trot into the bushes.

These two gentlemen aroused my curiosity very keenly. What could have bound by bonds of indissoluble friendship such evidently different human beings? I began to ask around. This is what I learned.

Chertopkhanov, Panteley Yeremeich, had a reputation throughout the region as a dangerous and madcap man, an arrogant troublemaker of the first order. He served a very short time in the army and retired ‘for reasons of unpleasantness' with the rank of ensign, the very rank on account of which opinion has it that a chicken's not a bird, so an
ensign's not an officer. He came of a line which had at one time been wealthy. His forebears had lived sumptuously in the manner of the steppes, that is to say they'd kept open house for all comers, fed them to the limit, handed out a quarter of oats to visiting drivers for their troikas of horses, kept musicians, singers, buffoons and dogs, at time of festivals dispensed wine and ale to the peasants, in winter travelled under their own horse-power, in heavy conveyances, to Moscow and yet sometimes for months at a time they wouldn't have a penny to their name and would live off whatever livestock and provisions came to hand. Panteley Yeremeich's father inherited an estate that was already ruined. He, in his turn, had led a wild life and, dying, left his only descendant, Panteley, the little mortgaged village of Unsleepy Hollow together with thirty-five male serfs and seventy-six female and about thirty-seven acres or so of poor land in the arid Tumbledown area, for which, incidentally, no deeds could be found in the deceased's papers. The deceased, it has to be said, ruined himself in the oddest way: ‘economic self-help' did for him. According to his ideas, a member of the nobility should not be dependent on merchants, townees and ‘thieves of that sort', as he put it. So he set up all manner of crafts and workshops. ‘Both better and cheaper,' he used to say, ‘that's what economic self-help is!' Right to the end of his life he kept to this ruinous idea and it was what destroyed him.

But he had his compensations! He never denied himself a single whim. Among other projects he once built, according to his own plans, such an enormous family carriage that, despite the joint efforts of all the peasant horses in the village and their owners, it came a cropper at the first gradient and fell to pieces. Yeremey Lukich (as Panteley's father was called) ordered a monument to be set up on this gradient and, besides, was not in the least dismayed. He also took it into his head to build a church – naturally, by himself, without the help of an architect. He burned down a whole wood to fire the bricks, laid out enormous foundations as if building a provincial cathedral, raised the walls and began to erect a cupola: it fell in. He tried again and the cupola again collapsed. He tried a third time and the cupola came tumbling down a third time. This made my Yeremey Lukich think. It's a bad business, he thought. Clearly some damned witchcraft's at work. Suddenly he knew what it was and
ordered all the old women in the village to be given a beating. The old women were given a beating, but still the cupola wouldn't stay up.

Then he began rearranging the structure of his peasants' houses according to a new plan, all on the grounds of ‘economic self-help'. He'd set three households together in a triangle and in the middle he'd put a pole with a painted starling-house and a flag. Each day he'd think of something new, whether it was soup made from burdock or having the horses' tails docked to provide horsehair caps for his servants, replacing flax with nettles or feeding mushrooms to the pigs… One day he read an article in the
Moscow News
by a Kharkhov landowner, a certain Khryaka-Khrupyorsky, about the value of morality in peasant life and the very next day ordered that all the peasants should instantly learn it by heart. The peasants learned it and he asked them whether they'd understood it. His steward answered of course they'd understood it, they couldn't fail to! About the same time he ordered that all the people over whom he had authority, in the interests of order and ‘economic self-help', should be given a number and each should have the number sewn into his collar. On meeting their lord and master each would instantly shout: ‘Number so-and-so out walking, sir!' whereupon their lord and master would answer amiably: ‘And God be with you!'

However, despite order and ‘economic self-help', Yeremey Lukich gradually found himself in extreme difficulty and he began to mortgage his villages and even to start selling them. The last nest of his forebears, the village with the unfinished church, was finally sold by the state, happily not while Yeremey Lukich was still alive – he'd never have survived such a blow – but a couple of weeks after his death. He managed to die in his own home, in his own bed, surrounded by his servants and attended by his doctor. But poor Panteley inherited only Unsleepy Hollow.

Panteley learned of his father's illness while he was still in the army and at the very height of the above-mentioned ‘unpleasantness'. He was just nineteen. Since boyhood he'd never been away from home and under the care of his mother, a very kind but utterly stupid woman, Vasilisa Vasilyevna, he'd grown into a spoilt brat and a little milord. She alone had concerned herself with his education. Yeremey Lukich, absorbed by his economic interests, had taken no part in it.
True, he'd once administered corporal punishment to his son for mispronouncing ‘rtsy' as ‘artsy', but that day Yeremey Lukich had been nursing a profound and secret grief at the fact that his best dog had been killed by running into a tree. Besides, all Vasilisa Vasilyevna's concerns for young Panteley's education had been limited to one tortuous effort. By the sweat of her brow she'd hired for him as tutor an ex-soldier from Alsace, a certain Bierkopf, and trembled before him like a leaf to the day of her death at the thought that he might refuse: ‘I'd be finished! Where'd I look? Where'd I find another teacher? After all, didn't it cost me almost all my strength to entice him away from that woman neighbour of mine?' and Bierkopf, calculating chap that he was, at once made use of the uniqueness of his position to become dead drunk and asleep from morning to night. At the conclusion of his ‘course of learning' Panteley went into the army. By that time Vasilisa Vasilyevna was no longer alive. She died six months before this important event, frightened to death: she'd dreamed of a man all in white riding a bear. Yeremey Lukich followed his better half shortly afterwards.

Panteley, on first learning of his illness, had galloped home at full tilt, but had not arrived in time to find his parent still among the living. Imagine the astonishment of the dutiful son when he completely unexpectedly found himself turned from a wealthy heir into a pauper! Few are capable of surviving such a sharp turn of events. Panteley became unsociable and embittered. From someone honest, generous and kind, even though spoilt and wilful, he turned into an arrogant troublemaker, ceased having any dealings with his neighbours – he felt ashamed in front of the rich ones, while disdaining the poor ones – and behaved unspeakably rudely to everyone, even to the powers-that-be, as if asserting to one and all that ‘I am a true-blue aristocrat, I am.' On one occasion he almost shot dead a local constable who'd come into his room with his cap on. It goes without saying that the authorities for their part didn't give in to him and let him know how they felt whenever the occasion arose. But nevertheless people were a bit afraid of him because he had a frightful temper and at the drop of a hat would challenge you to a duel with daggers. At the slightest objection to his views Chertopkhanov's eyes would dart about and his voice would crack…