“How is it possible?” Papa admonished. “God help us, if they find out at school, you’ll be expelled. And shame on you, Mr. Lentilkin! It’s bad, sir! You’re the instigator, and I hope your parents will punish you. How is it possible? Where did you spend the night?”
“At the train station!” Lentilkin proudly replied.
Then Volodya lay down, and they put a towel soaked in vinegar to his head. A telegram was sent somewhere, and the next day a lady came, Lentilkin’s mother, and took her son away.
As Lentilkin was leaving, his face was stern, haughty, and, in parting with the girls, he did not say a single word; he only took Katya’s notebook and wrote as a memento:
“Montigomo Hawk’s Claw.”
1887
KASHTANKA
CHAPTER ONE / MISBEHAVIOR
A young, rusty-red dog, half dachshund and half mutt, her muzzle very much resembling a fox’s, was running up and down the sidewalk, looking anxiously in all directions. Every once in a while she stopped and whined, shifting from one frozen paw to the other, trying to figure out how she could have gotten lost.
She remembered perfectly well the events of the day that had brought her to this unfamiliar sidewalk.
The day had begun when her master, the cabinetmaker Luka Alexandrych, put on his hat, took some wooden thing wrapped in a red handkerchief under his arm, and hollered:
“Kashtanka, let’s go!”
Hearing her name, the half dachshund half mutt came out from under the workbench where she slept on the wood shavings, stretched sweetly, and ran after her master.
Luka Alexandrych’s customers lived terribly far apart, so on his way from one to the other he had to stop several times at a tavern to fortify himself. Kashtanka remembered that on the way she had behaved very improperly. She was so overjoyed to be going for a walk that she jumped about, barked at trolley cars, dashed into backyards, and chased other dogs. The cabinetmaker kept losing sight of her and would stop and shout angrily at her. Once, with an avid expression on his face, he even grabbed her foxlike ear in his fist, tugged at it, and said slowly, “Drop…dead…you…pest!”
Having seen his customers, Luka Alexandrych had stopped at his sister’s, where he had a bite to eat and a few more drinks. From his sister’s, he went to see a bookbinder he knew; from the bookbinder’s, he went to a tavern; from the tavern to a friend’s house, and so on. In short, by the time Kashtanka found herself on the unfamiliar sidewalk, it was getting dark and the cabinetmaker was as drunk as a fish. He waved his arms and, sighing deeply, moaned:
“In sin did my mother conceive me in my womb! Oh, my sins, my sins! So now we’re going down the street and looking at the streetlights, but when we die, we’ll burn in the fiery hyena…”1
Or else he fell into a good-natured tone, called Kashtanka to him, and said:
“You, Kashtanka, are an insect creature and nothing more. Compared to a man, you’re like a carpenter compared to a cabinetmaker…”
While he was talking to her in that fashion, suddenly there had come a burst of music. Kashtanka looked around and saw a regiment of soldiers marching down the street straight at her. She couldn’t stand music, which upset her nerves, and she rushed around and howled. But to her great surprise, the cabinetmaker, instead of being frightened, yelping and barking, grinned broadly, stood at attention, and gave a salute. Seeing that her master did not protest, Kashtanka howled even louder, then lost her head and rushed to the other side of the street.
When she came to her senses, the music had already stopped and the regiment was gone. She rushed back across the street to where she had left her master, but alas, the cabinetmaker was also gone. She rushed ahead, then back, ran across the street once more, but it was as if the cabinetmaker had vanished into thin air…Kashtanka began sniffing the sidewalk, hoping to find her master by the smell of his tracks, but some scoundrel had just walked past in new galoshes, and now all the delicate scents were mixed with the strong smell of rubber, so that it was impossible to tell one from the other.
Kashtanka ran here and there but could not find her master, and meanwhile night was falling. The lamps were lit on both sides of the street, and lights appeared in the windows. Big, fluffy snowflakes were falling, painting the sidewalks, the horses’ backs, and the coachmen’s hats white, and the darker it grew, the whiter everything became. Unknown customers ceaselessly walked back and forth past Kashtanka, obstructing her field of vision and shoving her with their feet. (Kashtanka divided the whole of mankind into two very unequal parts: the masters and the customers; there was an essential difference between them: the first had the right to beat her, the second she herself had the right to nip on the calves.) The customers were hurrying somewhere and did not pay the slightest attention to her.
When it was quite dark, Kashtanka was overcome by fear and despair. She huddled in some doorway and began to weep bitterly. She was tired from her long day’s travels with Luka Alexandrych, her ears and paws were cold, and besides she was terribly hungry. Only twice in the whole day had she had anything to eat: at the bookbinder’s she had lapped up some paste, and in one of the taverns she had found a sausage skin near the counter—that was all. If she had been a human being, she would probably have thought:
“No, it’s impossible to live this way! I’ll shoot myself!”
CHAPTER TWO / A MYSTERIOUS STRANGER
But she did not think about anything and only wept. When soft, fluffy snow had completely covered Kashtanka’s back and head, and she had sunk into a deep slumber from exhaustion, suddenly the door clicked, creaked, and hit her on the side. She jumped up. A man came out, belonging to the category of customers. As Kashtanka squealed and got under his feet, he could not help noticing her. He leaned down and asked:
“Where did you come from, pooch? Did I hurt you? Oh, poor thing, poor thing….Well, don’t be angry, don’t be angry…I’m sorry.”
Kashtanka looked up at the stranger through the snowflakes that stuck to her eyelashes and saw before her a short, fat little man with a plump, clean-shaven face, wearing a top hat and an unbuttoned fur coat.
“Why are you whining?” the man went on, brushing the snow from her back. “Where is your master? You must be lost. Oh, poor pooch! What shall we do now?”
Catching a warm, friendly note in the stranger’s voice, Kashtanka licked his hand and whined even more pitifully.
“You’re a nice, funny one!” said the stranger. “A real fox! Well, nothing to be done. Come with me, maybe I’ll find some use for you…Well, phweet!”
He whistled and made a gesture to Kashtanka which could only mean: Let’s go! Kashtanka went.
In less than half an hour she was sitting on the floor of a large, bright room, with her head cocked, looking tenderly and curiously at the stranger, who was sitting at the table eating supper. He ate and tossed her some scraps…At first he gave her bread and the green rind of cheese, then a small piece of meat, half of a dumpling, some chicken bones, and she was so hungry that she gobbled them up without tasting anything. And the more she ate, the hungrier she felt.
“Your master doesn’t feed you very well,” said the stranger, seeing with what fierce greed she swallowed the unchewed pieces. “And what a scrawny one! Skin and bones…”
Kashtanka ate a lot, yet she didn’t feel full, only groggy. After supper she sprawled in the middle of the room, stretched her legs and, feeling pleasantly weary all over, began wagging her tail. While her new master sat back in an armchair, smoking a cigar, she wagged her tail and kept trying to decide where she liked it better—at this stranger’s or at the cabinetmaker’s. At the stranger’s the furnishings were poor and ugly. Apart from the armchairs, the sofa, the lamp, and the rugs, he had nothing, and the room seemed empty. At the cabinetmaker’s, the whole place was chock-full of things: he had a table, a workbench, a pile of wood shavings, planes, chisels, saws, a basin, a goldfinch in a cage….The stranger’s room had no particular smell, while at the cabinetmaker’s there was always a fog and the wonderful smell of glue, varnish, and wood shavings. Still, being with the stranger had one great advantage: he gave her a lot to eat—one must give him full credit—and when she sat by the table with a sweet look on her face, he never once hit her or stamped his foot or shouted: “Get ou-u-ut, curse you!”