I must explain that after Tyufyayev's dismissal the officials, seeing that I was on quite good terms with the new governor, had begun to be rather afraid of me.
I stopped him with my hand and asked him very gravely,
'How could you give orders that I shouldn't have horses?
What nonsense is this, stopping travellers on the high-road?'
'Why, I was joking; upon my soul, aren't you ashamed to be angry? Here, horses, order the horses! Why are you standing there, you rascal?' he shouted to the messenger. 'Do me the favour of having a cup of tea with rum.'
'Thank you very much.'
'But haven't we any champagne?
' He hurried to the
bottles; they were all empty.
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
2 1 8
'What are you doing here?'
'An inquiry, sir. This fine fellow here has killed his father and sister with an axe, in a quarrel, through jealousy.'
The police-captain was disconcerted. I glanced at the Cheremis; he was a young fellow of tv•;enty, with nothing savage about his facP. which was typically Oriental, with shining, narrow eyes and black hair.
It \Yas all so nasty that I v\·ent out into the yard again. The police-captain ran out after me with a glass in one hand and a bottle of rum in the other, and pressPd me to have a drink.
To get rid of him I drank some; he caught hold of my hand and said:
'I am sorry, there, I am sorry! there it is, but I hope you won't speak of this to His ExcPllency ; don't ruin an honourable man! '
With that the police-captain seized my hand and kissed it, repeating a dozen times over:
'For God's sake don't ruin an honourable man.'
I pulled away my hand in disgust and said to him:
'Oh get away; as though I were likely to tell him.'
'But how can I be of service to you?'
'See they make haste and harness the horses.'
'Look alive,' he shouted, 'Ayda, ayda ! ' and he himself began dragging at some ropes and straps of the harness.
This incident is vividly imprinted on my memory. In 1846, when I was in Petersburg for the last time, I had to go to the secretariat of the Minister of Home Affairs to try to get a passport. While I was talking to the head-clerk of the table, a gentleman passed . . . shaking hands familiarly with the magnates of the secretariat and bowing condescendingly to the head-clerks of the tables. 'Bah, devil take it,' I thought, 'can that be he!'
'Who is that?' I asked.
'Lazarev, a clerk of special commissions and of great influence with the Minister.'
'Was he once a police-captain in the Vyatka Province?'
'Yes.'
'Well, I congratulate you, gentlemen: nine years ago he kissed my hand.'
Petrovsky was a mastl•r hand at choosing men !
Prison and Exile
2 1 9
The Begil1ning of
l\1y Life (lt V/(tdilrzir
WHEN 1 WENT ouT to get into my sledge a t Kosmodemyansk i t was harnessed i n the Russian style, with three horses abreast: one between the shafts and two flanking it. The shaft horse, with i ts yoke, rang the bells gaily.
In Perm and Vyatka the horses are put in tandem, one before the other or two side by side and the third in front.
So my heart throbbed with delight when I saw the familiar troika.
'Come now, show us your mettle,' I said to the young lad who sat smartly in the driver's seat in a sheepskin coat, the bare side turned outwards, and stiff gauntlets which barely allowed his fingers to close enough to take fifteen kopecks from my hand.
'We'll do our best, sir, we'll do our best. Hey, darlings! Now, sir,' he said, turning suddenly to me, 'you just hold on ; there is a hill yonder, so I'll let them go.'
It was a steep descent to the Volga ; in the winter the way lay across the ice.
He certainly did let the horses go. The sledge did not so much run as bound from right to left, from left to right, as the horses whirled it down-hill ; the driver was tremendously pleased, and indeed, sinful man that I am, so was l-it is the Russian temperament.
So my post-horses brought me into 1 838-into the best, the brightest year of my life. I shall describe how we saw the New Year in.
Eighty versts from Nizhny i\'ov�orod we. that is Matvey, my valet, and I, went into the station-superintendent's to warm ourselves. There was a very sharp frost, and it was windy too.
The superintendent, a thin, sickly, pitiful-looking man, inscribed my travelling permit, dictating every letter to himself and yet making mistakes. I took off my fur-lined coat and walked up and down the room in my huge fur boots, Matvey was warming himself at the red-hot stove, the superintendent muttered, and a wooden clock ticked on a faint, cracked note.
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220
'I say,' Matvey said to me, 'it will soon be twelve o'clock ; i t's the New Year, you know. I'll bring in something,' he added, looking at me half-inquiringly, 'from the stores they put in our sledge at Vyatka.' And without waiting for an answer he ran to fetch bottles and a bag with some food.
Matvey, of whom I shall have more to say later, was more than a servant: he was a friend, a younger brother to me. A man of Moscow, apprenticed to Sonnenberg, whose acquaintance we shall also make, to learn the art of bookbinding, in which Sonnenberg, however, was not very proficient, he passed into my hands.
I knew that if I refused it would disappoint Matvey, and besides I had nothing against celebrating the day at the postingstation. . . . The New Year is a station of a sort.
Matvey brought ham and champagne.
The champagne turned out to be frozen solid ; the ham could have been chopped with an axe, and was all glistening with ice; but a la guerre comme a la guerre.
'May the New Year bring new happiness.' Yes indeed, new happiness. Was I not on the way back? Every hour was bringing me nearer to Moscow-my heart was full of hopes.
The frozen champagne did not exactly please the superintendent. I added half a glass of rum to his wine. This new 'half-andhal£'1 was very successful.
The driver, whom I had also invited to join us, was still more extreme in his views; he sprinkled pepper into his glass of foaming wine, stirred it with a spoon, drank it off at one gulp, uttered a painful sigh and almost with a moan added: 'It did scorch fine!'
The superintendent himself tucked me into the sledge, and was so zealous in his attentions that he dropped the lighted candle into the hay and could not find it afterwards. He was in great spirits and kept repeating:
'You've given me a New Year's Eve, too ! '
The scorched driver started the horses off.
At eight o'clock on the following evening I reached Vladimir and put up at the hotel, which is extremely faithfully described in V. A. Sollogub's Tarantas with its fowls in rice, its dough-like patissrrie, and vinegar by way of Bordeaux.
'A man was asking for you this morning, he's probably waiting at the beer-shop,' the waiter told me after reading my name I In English in the text. ( R . )
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221
on my travel permit. He wore the rakish parting and dashing lovelocks, which in old days were only affected by Russian waiters, but now are also wom by Louis Napoleon.
I could not conceive who this could be.