I write to you of all this, dear Tánya, only that you should prepare her parents for the news, and through papa should find out from the doctors what this occurrence means, and whether it will not be bad for our expected child. Now we are alone, and she is sitting under my necktie and I feel how her sharp little nose cuts into my neck. Yesterday she had been left in a room by herself. I went in and saw that Dora (our little dog) had dragged her into a corner, was playing with her, and nearly broke her. I whipped Dora, put Sónya in my waistcoat pocket and took her to my study. To-day however I am expecting from Túla a small wooden box I have ordered, covered outside with morocco and lined inside with raspberry-coloured velvet, with a place arranged in it for her so that she can be laid in it with her elbows, head, and back all supported evenly so that she cannot break. I shall also cover it completely with chamois leather.
I had written this letter when suddenly a terrible misfortune occurred. She was standing on the table, when N.P.2 pushed against her in passing, and she fell and broke off a leg above the knee with the stump. Alexéy3 says that it can be mended with a cement made of the white of eggs. If such a recipe is known in Moscow please send it me.
1 ‘Auntie Tatiána’ – Tatiána Alexándrovna Érgolski (1795–1874), who brought Tolstoy up.
2 Natálya Petróvna Okhótnitskaya, an old woman who was living at Yásnaya Polyána.
3 Alexéy Stepánovich Orékhov (who died in 1882), a servant of Tolstoy’s who had accompanied him to the Caucasus and to Sevastopol during the Crimean War. He was employed as steward at Yásnaya Polyána.
POLIKÚSHKA
I
‘IT’S for you to say, ma’am! Only it would be a pity if it’s the Dútlovs. They’re all good men and one of them must go if we don’t send at least one of the house-serfs,’ said the steward. ‘As it is, everyone is hinting at them.… But it’s just as you please, ma’am!’
And he placed his right hand over his left in front of him, inclined his head towards his right shoulder, drew in his thin lips almost with a smack, turned up his eyes, and said no more, evidently intending to keep silent for a long time and to listen without reply to all the nonsense his mistress was sure to utter.
The steward – clean-shaven and dressed in a long coat of a peculiar steward-like cut – who had come to report to his proprietress that autumn evening, was by birth a domestic serf.
The report from the lady’s point of view meant listening to a statement of the business done on her estate and giving instructions for further business. From Egór Mikháylovich’s (the steward’s) point of view, ‘reporting’ was a ceremony of standing straight on both feet with out-turned toes in a corner facing the sofa, and listening to all sorts of irrelevant chatter, and by various ways and means getting the mistress into a state of mind in which she would quickly and impatiently say, ‘All right, all right!’ to all that Egór Mikháylovich proposed.
The business under consideration was the conscription. The Pokróvsk estate had to supply three recruits at the Feast of Pokróv.1 Fate itself seemed to have selected two of them by a coincidence of domestic, moral, and economic circumstances. As far as they were concerned there could be no hesitation or dispute either on the part of the mistress, the Commune, or of public opinion. But who the third was to be was a debatable point. The steward was anxious to save the Dútlovs (in which family there were three men of military age), and to send Polikúshka, a married house-serf with a very bad reputation, who had been caught more than once stealing sacks, harness, and hay; but the mistress, who had often petted Polikúshka’s ragged children and improved his morals by exhortations from the Bible, did not wish to give him up. At the same time she did not wish to injure the Dútlovs, whom she did not know and had never even seen. But for some reason she did not seem able to grasp the fact, and the steward could not make up his mind to tell her straight out, that if Polikúshka did not go one of the Dútlovs would have to. ‘But I don’t wish the Dútlovs any ill!’ she said feelingly. ‘If you don’t – then pay three hundred rubles for a substitute,’ should have been the steward’s reply; but that would have been bad policy.