Nekhlyúdov grew more and more dejected. He wearily touched the keys with his right hand, his elbow resting on his knee. Some sort of chord resulted, then another, and another.… He drew up his chair, took his other hand out of his pocket and began to play. The chords he struck were sometimes unprepared and not even quite correct; they were often trivial and commonplace, and did not indicate that he had any musical talent, but this occupation gave him a kind of indefinite, melancholy pleasure. At every change of harmony he waited with bated breath to see how it would resolve itself, and when a fresh harmony resulted his imagination vaguely supplied what was lacking. It seemed to him that he heard hundreds of melodies: a chorus and an orchestra in conformity with his harmony. What chiefly gave him pleasure was the intensified activity of his imagination which incoherently and fragmentarily, but with amazing clearness, presented him with the most varied, confused, and absurd pictures and images of the past and the future. Now it was the plump figure of White David responding to torment and privation with patience and submission: he saw his round shoulders, his immense hands covered with white hair, and his white lashes fluttering timidly at the sight of his mother’s brown sinewy fist. Then he saw his self-confident wet-nurse, emboldened by residence at the master’s house, and he imagined her for some reason going about the village and preaching to the serfs that they should hide their money from the landlord, and he unconsciously repeated to himself: ‘Yes, one must hide one’s money from the landlord.’ Then suddenly the small brown head of his future wife – for some reason in tears – presented itself to him, resting on his shoulder. Then he saw Chúris’s kindly blue eyes looking tenderly at his pot-bellied little son. ‘Yes, he sees in him not only a son, but a helper and deliverer. That is love!’ whispered Nekhlyúdov to himself. Then he remembered Epifán’s mother and the patient, all-forgiving expression he had noticed on her aged face in spite of her one protruding tooth and ugly features. ‘Probably I am the first person in the whole seventy years of her life to notice that,’ he thought, and whispering, ‘Strange!’ he unconsciously continued to touch the keys and listen to the sounds they produced. Then he vividly recalled his flight from the apiary and the expression on Ignát’s and Karp’s faces when they obviously wanted to laugh but pretended not to see him. He blushed, and involuntarily looked round at his nurse, who was still sitting silently by the door gazing intently at him and occasionally shaking her grey head. Then suddenly he seemed to see three sweating horses, and Ilyá’s fine powerful figure with his fair curls, his merrily beaming narrow blue eyes, his fresh ruddy cheeks, and the light-coloured down just beginning to appear on his lips and chin. He remembered how afraid Ilyá had been that he would not be allowed to go carting, and how warmly he had pleaded for that favourite job; and he suddenly saw a grey, misty early morning, a slippery highway and a long row of three-horsed carts, loaded high and covered by bast-matting marked with big black lettering. The strong-limbed, well-fed horses, bending their backs, tugging at the traces and jingling their bells, pull evenly uphill, tenaciously gripping the slippery road with their rough-shod hoofs. Rapidly descending the hill a mail-coach gallops towards the train of loaded carts, jingling its bells which re-echo far into the depth of the forest that extends along both sides of the road.
‘Hey, hey, hey!’ shouts the driver of the first cart in a boyish voice. He has a brass number-plate on his felt hat and flourishes his whip above his head.
Karp, with his red beard and gloomy looks, strides heavily in his huge boots beside the front wheel of the first cart. From the second cart Ilyá thrusts his handsome head out from under a piece of matting where he has been getting pleasantly warm in the early sunlight. Three tróykas loaded with boxes dash by with rattling wheels, jingling bells, and shouts. Ilyá again hides his handsome head under the matting and drops asleep. And now it is evening, clear and warm. The boarded gates open with a creak for the weary tróykas crowded together in the station yard, and one after another the high, mat-covered carts jolt over the board that lies in the gateway and come to rest under the roomy penthouse. Ilyá gaily exchanges greetings with the fair-faced, broad-bosomed hostess, who asks, ‘Have you come far? And how many of you will want supper?’ and with her bright kindly eyes looks with pleasure at the handsome lad. Now having seen to his horses he goes into the hot crowded house, crosses himself, sits down before a full wooden bowl, and chats merrily with the landlady and his comrades. And here, under the penthouse, is his place for the night, where the open starry sky is visible and where he will lie on the scented hay near the horses, which changing from foot to foot and snorting pick out the fodder from the wooden mangers. He goes up to the hay, turns to the east and, crossing his broad powerful chest some thirty times and shaking back his fair curls, repeats ‘Our Father’ and ‘Lord have mercy!’ some twenty times, covers himself head and all with his coat, and falls into the healthy careless sleep of strong young manhood. And now he dreams of the towns: Kiev with its saints and throngs of pilgrims, Rómen with its traders and merchandise, Odessa and the distant blue sea with its white sails, and Tsar-grad8 with its golden houses and white-breasted, dark-browed Turkish women – and thither he flies lifted on invisible wings. He flies freely and easily further and further, and sees below him golden cities bathed in bright radiance, and the blue sky with its many stars, and the blue sea with its white sails, and it is gladsome and gay to fly on further and further.…
‘Splendid!’ Nekhlyúdov whispered to himself, and the thought came to him: ‘Why am I not Ilyá?’
1Two kopéks were about a halfpenny.
2 Under serfdom a man and his wife had to work some days each week for the owner, and they were reckoned as one unit.
3 The proprietors had to send a certain proportion of their serfs to serve in the army, but they had to be fit men with sound teeth.
4 As to the desirability of flogging the peasants.
5 The feast of St Peter and St Paul is June 9th, o.s.
6 October 1st, o.s.
7 A desyatín is nearly two and three-quarter acres.
8 Constantinople.
MEETING A MOSCOW ACQUAINTANCE IN THE DETACHMENT
FROM PRINCE NEKHLYÚDOV’S CAUCASIAN MEMOIRS
LIST OF CHARACTERS IN
MEETING A MOSCOW ACQUAINTANCE
GUSKÓV, nicknamed Guskantíni, condemned for punishment to serve as a private.
PAUL DMÍTRICH, Adjutant.
NICHOLAS IVÁNICH S—, Lieutenant-Captain; a good-natured officer.
NIKÍTA, an Orderly.
MAKATYÚK, another Orderly.
ALEXÉY IVÁNICH, a Captain.
ANDRÉEV, a soldier.
WE were out with a detachment. The work in hand was almost done, the cutting through the forest was nearly finished, and we were expecting every day to receive orders from head-quarters to retire to the fort.