Dead Souls
left a human face before its owner will have radically changed his or
her nature (though not his or her environment) with the result that
the face will suddenly become lit with a radiance never before seen
there?...
“Here is the britchka, here is the britchka!” exclaimed Chichikov on
perceiving that vehicle slowly advancing. “Ah, you blockhead!” he
went on to Selifan. “Why have you been loitering about? I suppose last
night’s fumes have not yet left your brain?”
To this Selifan returned no reply.
“Good-bye, madam,” added the speaker. “But where is the girl whom you
promised me?”
“Here, Pelagea!” called the hostess to a wench of about eleven who was
dressed in home-dyed garments and could boast of a pair of bare feet
which, from a distance, might almost have been mistaken for boots, so
encrusted were they with fresh mire. “Here, Pelagea! Come and show this
gentleman the way.”
Selifan helped the girl to ascend to the box-seat. Placing one foot upon
the step by which the gentry mounted, she covered the said step with
mud, and then, ascending higher, attained the desired position beside
the coachman. Chichikov followed in her wake (causing the britchka to
heel over with his weight as he did so), and then settled himself back
into his place with an “All right! Good-bye, madam!” as the horses moved
away at a trot.
Selifan looked gloomy as he drove, but also very attentive to his
business. This was invariably his custom when he had committed the fault
of getting drunk. Also, the horses looked unusually well-groomed. In
particular, the collar on one of them had been neatly mended, although
hitherto its state of dilapidation had been such as perennially to allow
the stuffing to protrude through the leather. The silence preserved was
well-nigh complete. Merely flourishing his whip, Selifan spoke to the
team no word of instruction, although the skewbald was as ready as usual
to listen to conversation of a didactic nature, seeing that at such
times the reins hung loosely in the hands of the loquacious driver,
and the whip wandered merely as a matter of form over the backs of the
troika. This time, however, there could be heard issuing from Selifan’s
sullen lips only the uniformly unpleasant exclamation, “Now then, you
brutes! Get on with you, get on with you!” The bay and the Assessor too
felt put out at not hearing themselves called “my pets” or “good lads”;
while, in addition, the skewbald came in for some nasty cuts across his
sleek and ample quarters. “What has put master out like this?” thought
the animal as it shook its head. “Heaven knows where he does not keep
beating me--across the back, and even where I am tenderer still. Yes, he
keeps catching the whip in my ears, and lashing me under the belly.”
“To the right, eh?” snapped Selifan to the girl beside him as he pointed
to a rain-soaked road which trended away through fresh green fields.
“No, no,” she replied. “I will show you the road when the time comes.”
“Which way, then?” he asked again when they had proceeded a little
further.
“This way.” And she pointed to the road just mentioned.
“Get along with you!” retorted the coachman. “That DOES go to the right.
You don’t know your right hand from your left.”
The weather was fine, but the ground so excessively sodden that the
wheels of the britchka collected mire until they had become caked as
with a layer of felt, a circumstance which greatly increased the weight
of the vehicle, and prevented it from clearing the neighbouring parishes
before the afternoon was arrived. Also, without the girl’s help the
finding of the way would have been impossible, since roads wiggled away
in every direction, like crabs released from a net, and, but for the
assistance mentioned, Selifan would have found himself left to his own
devices. Presently she pointed to a building ahead, with the words,
“THERE is the main road.”
“And what is the building?” asked Selifan.
“A tavern,” she said.
“Then we can get along by ourselves,” he observed. “Do you get down, and
be off home.”
With that he stopped, and helped her to alight--muttering as he did so:
“Ah, you blackfooted creature!”
Chichikov added a copper groat, and she departed well pleased with her
ride in the gentleman’s carriage.
CHAPTER IV
On reaching the tavern, Chichikov called a halt. His reasons for this
were twofold--namely, that he wanted to rest the horses, and that he
himself desired some refreshment. In this connection the author feels
bound to confess that the appetite and the capacity of such men are
greatly to be envied. Of those well-to-do folk of St. Petersburg and
Moscow who spend their time in considering what they shall eat on the
morrow, and in composing a dinner for the day following, and who never
sit down to a meal without first of all injecting a pill and then
swallowing oysters and crabs and a quantity of other monsters, while
eternally departing for Karlsbad or the Caucasus, the author has but a
small opinion. Yes, THEY are not the persons to inspire envy. Rather,
it is the folk of the middle classes--folk who at one posthouse call for
bacon, and at another for a sucking pig, and at a third for a steak of
sturgeon or a baked pudding with onions, and who can sit down to table
at any hour, as though they had never had a meal in their lives, and
can devour fish of all sorts, and guzzle and chew it with a view
to provoking further appetite--these, I say, are the folk who enjoy
heaven’s most favoured gift. To attain such a celestial condition the
great folk of whom I have spoken would sacrifice half their serfs and
half their mortgaged and non-mortgaged property, with the foreign and
domestic improvements thereon, if thereby they could compass such
a stomach as is possessed by the folk of the middle class. But,
unfortunately, neither money nor real estate, whether improved or
non-improved, can purchase such a stomach.
The little wooden tavern, with its narrow, but hospitable, curtain
suspended from a pair of rough-hewn doorposts like old church
candlesticks, seemed to invite Chichikov to enter. True, the
establishment was only a Russian hut of the ordinary type, but it was
a hut of larger dimensions than usual, and had around its windows and
gables carved and patterned cornices of bright-coloured wood which threw
into relief the darker hue of the walls, and consorted well with the
flowered pitchers painted on the shutters.
Ascending the narrow wooden staircase to the upper floor, and arriving
upon a broad landing, Chichikov found himself confronted with a creaking
door and a stout old woman in a striped print gown. “This way, if you
please,” she said. Within the apartment designated Chichikov
encountered the old friends which one invariably finds in such roadside
hostelries--to wit, a heavy samovar, four smooth, bescratched walls of
white pine, a three-cornered press with cups and teapots, egg-cups
of gilded china standing in front of ikons suspended by blue and red
ribands, a cat lately delivered of a family, a mirror which gives one
four eyes instead of two and a pancake for a face, and, beside the
ikons, some bunches of herbs and carnations of such faded dustiness
that, should one attempt to smell them, one is bound to burst out
sneezing.
“Have you a sucking-pig?” Chichikov inquired of the landlady as she
stood expectantly before him.
“Yes.”
“And some horse-radish and sour cream?”
“Yes.”
“Then serve them.”
The landlady departed for the purpose, and returned with a plate, a
napkin (the latter starched to the consistency of dried bark), a knife
with a bone handle beginning to turn yellow, a two-pronged fork as thin
as a wafer, and a salt-cellar incapable of being made to stand upright.
Following the accepted custom, our hero entered into conversation with
the woman, and inquired whether she herself or a landlord kept the
tavern; how much income the tavern brought in; whether her sons lived
with her; whether the oldest was a bachelor or married; whom the
eldest had taken to wife; whether the dowry had been large; whether the
father-in-law had been satisfied, and whether the said father-in-law
had not complained of receiving too small a present at the wedding.
In short, Chichikov touched on every conceivable point. Likewise
(of course) he displayed some curiosity as to the landowners of the
neighbourhood. Their names, he ascertained, were Blochin, Potchitaev,
Minoi, Cheprakov, and Sobakevitch.
“Then you are acquainted with Sobakevitch?” he said; whereupon the old
woman informed him that she knew not only Sobakevitch, but also Manilov,
and that the latter was the more delicate eater of the two, since,
whereas Manilov always ordered a roast fowl and some veal and mutton,
and then tasted merely a morsel of each, Sobakevitch would order one
dish only, but consume the whole of it, and then demand more at the same
price.
Whilst Chichikov was thus conversing and partaking of the sucking pig
until only a fragment of it seemed likely to remain, the sound of an
approaching vehicle made itself heard. Peering through the window, he
saw draw up to the tavern door a light britchka drawn by three fine
horses. From it there descended two men--one flaxen-haired and tall, and
the other dark-haired and of slighter build. While the flaxen-haired
man was clad in a dark-blue coat, the other one was wrapped in a coat
of striped pattern. Behind the britchka stood a second, but an empty,
turn-out, drawn by four long-coated steeds in ragged collars and
rope harnesses. The flaxen-haired man lost no time in ascending the
staircase, while his darker friend remained below to fumble at something
in the britchka, talking, as he did so, to the driver of the vehicle
which stood hitched behind. Somehow, the dark-haired man’s voice struck
Chichikov as familiar; and as he was taking another look at him the
flaxen-haired gentleman entered the room. The newcomer was a man of
lofty stature, with a small red moustache and a lean, hard-bitten face
whose redness made it evident that its acquaintance, if not with the
smoke of gunpowder, at all events with that of tobacco, was intimate
and extensive. Nevertheless he greeted Chichikov civilly, and the latter
returned his bow. Indeed, the pair would have entered into conversation,
and have made one another’s acquaintance (since a beginning was made
with their simultaneously expressing satisfaction at the circumstance
that the previous night’s rain had laid the dust on the roads,
and thereby made driving cool and pleasant) when the gentleman’s
darker-favoured friend also entered the room, and, throwing his cap upon
the table, pushed back a mass of dishevelled black locks from his brow.
The latest arrival was a man of medium height, but well put together,
and possessed of a pair of full red cheeks, a set of teeth as white as
snow, and coal-black whiskers. Indeed, so fresh was his complexion that
it seemed to have been compounded of blood and milk, while health danced
in his every feature.
“Ha, ha, ha!” he cried with a gesture of astonishment at the sight of
Chichikov. “What chance brings YOU here?”
Upon that Chichikov recognised Nozdrev--the man whom he had met at
dinner at the Public Prosecutor’s, and who, within a minute or two of
the introduction, had become so intimate with his fellow guest as to
address him in the second person singular, in spite of the fact that
Chichikov had given him no opportunity for doing so.
“Where have you been to-day?” Nozdrev inquired, and, without waiting for
an answer, went on: “For myself, I am just from the fair, and completely
cleaned out. Actually, I have had to do the journey back with stage
horses! Look out of the window, and see them for yourself.” And he
turned Chichikov’s head so sharply in the desired direction that he came