The little town of B— became a merrier place when the *** Cavalry Regiment was billeted there. Before that it was terribly boring. It used to be that when you’d drive through and look at the squat little wattle-and-daub houses with their unbelievably sour aspect, something indescribable would happen in your heart. You’d feel the kind of anguish you’d feel if you had lost at cards, or said a really stupid thing at the wrong moment—in a word: not good. The clay on the houses was crumbling from the rains, and their walls had turned from white to piebald; the roofs were mostly thatched, as is customary in our southern towns; the mayor had long ago ordered that the little groves be cut down, to improve the view. You wouldn’t encounter a single soul on the streets, unless maybe a rooster crossed the roadway, which was as soft as a pillow from the dust that lay seven inches thick and would turn to mud from the slightest bit of rain, and then the streets of the little town of B— would be filled with those stout animals that the mayor calls Frenchmen. When they stick their serious snouts out of their mud baths, they raise such an oinking that all the traveler can do is urge his horses on faster. But it’s not easy to come across a traveler in the little town of B—. Only very, very rarely does a landowner who owns eleven peasant souls, wearing a nankeen frock coat, clatter along the roadway in a kind of half-britzka, half-wagon, looking out from under a pile of flour sacks and lashing his bay mare, with a foal running behind her.1 Even the market square has a somewhat mournful aspect: The tailor’s house is situated very stupidly, with its facade stuck on at an angle; on the opposite side they’ve been building a stone construction with two windows in it for about fifteen years; beyond that a fashionable board fence stands all by itself, painted gray to match the color of the mud. This fence was erected as a model for other structures by the mayor in the time of his youth, when he had not yet acquired the habit of sleeping immediately after the midday meal and drinking a decoction flavored with dried gooseberries before going to bed. Most of the other constructions are of wattle. In the middle of the square are tiny shops; in them you can always see a bundle of ring-shaped rolls, a peasant woman in a red scarf, a pood of soap, a few pounds of bitter almonds, shot for shooting, some poplin, and two shop assistants who are always near the door playing a game in which they pitch iron spikes into a ring.2
But as soon as the cavalry regiment was billeted in the little town of B—, everything changed. The streets got more colorful and lively—in short, they took on a completely different look. The squat houses often saw a nimble, well-built officer with a plume on his head walking by as he went to see his comrade to have a chat about promotions, about the most excellent tobacco, or sometimes to stake his droshky on a card. This droshky could be called the regimental droshky, because without ever leaving the regiment it had made the full rounds. Today a major would be riding in it, tomorrow it would appear in a lieutenant’s stable, and in a week, just look, it’s again being greased with lard by the major’s batman. The wooden lath fence between the houses was all sprinkled with soldiers’ peaked caps hung out to dry in the sun; a gray military overcoat would always be hanging on somebody’s gate; in the lanes you would encounter soldiers with mustaches as bristly as boot brushes. You could see these mustaches everywhere. If some lower-class townswomen gathered at the market with their baskets, then mustaches would inevitably peep out from behind their shoulders. On the main square, mustachioed soldiers would always be dressing down some country clodhopper, who would just utter little groans, bulging his eyes upward.3 The officers livened up local society, which up to that time consisted only of the judge, who lived in the same house with a deacon’s wife, and the mayor, who was a sensible man but who spent positively the whole day sleeping: from the midday meal until evening and from evening until the midday meal. Society became more populous and amusing when the brigadier-general moved his quarters here. Neighboring landowners of whose existence no one could have guessed hitherto started coming to the district town more frequently, in order to see the gentleman officers and sometimes to play a game of faro, the rules of which were only foggily preserved in their heads, so preoccupied with planting, their wives’ errands, and hares.4
I am very sorry that I cannot recall what the occasion was that prompted the brigadier-general to give a big dinner party. There were enormous preparations for it. The clattering of the cooks’ knives in the general’s kitchen could be heard as soon as you came through the town gates. The contents of the whole market had been confiscated for the dinner, so that the judge and his deaconess had nothing to eat but buckwheat flapjacks and farina porridge. The small courtyard of the general’s quarters was filled with droshkies and carriages. The company consisted of men: the officers and a few of the neighboring landowners. The most notable of the landowners was Pifagor Pifagorovich Chertokutsky, one of the chief aristocrats of the B. district, who made the biggest fuss at the nobility elections and would always arrive in a fashionable equipage.5 He had previously served in one of the cavalry regiments and was one of its most important and visible officers. At least, he was visible at many balls and gatherings, wherever their regiment roamed; by the way, you can ask the maidens of the Tambov and Simbirsk Provinces about that. It’s quite possible that he would have spread his favorable reputation in other provinces as well, if he had not had to resign his commission because of a certain incident of the kind that’s usually called an “unpleasant story.” Whether he had slapped somebody in the face once upon a time or somebody had slapped him, I don’t remember exactly, but the point is that he was asked to resign. Nevertheless, he did not lose any of his importance because of this: He wore a tailcoat with a high waist in the style of a military uniform, he had spurs on his boots and a mustache under his nose, because without that the noblemen might have thought that he had served in the infantry, which he would contemptuously call sometimes the infantile-ry, and sometimes the infantarium.
He would visit all the populous fairs to which the innards of Russia, consisting of mamas, children, daughters, and fat landowners, would travel to enjoy the britzkas, cabriolets, tarantasses, and such coaches as no one has ever even dreamed of. He would sniff out with his nose where a cavalry regiment was billeted, and he would always come to visit the gentleman officers. He would jump very nimbly down from his elegant carriage or droshky right in front of them and would make their acquaintance very quickly. At the last elections he gave a splendid dinner for the noblemen, at which he declared that if only they elected him marshal of the nobility, he would put them on the very best footing. In general he behaved in a lordly fashion, as they say in the districts and the provinces; he married a rather pretty woman, who came with a dowry of two hundred souls and several thousands in capital. The capital was immediately spent on a team of six truly excellent horses, gilded locks for the doors, a tame monkey for the house, and a French butler. The two hundred souls along with his own two hundred were put in hock for the sake of some commercial dealings. In short, he was a landowner of the proper kind… A pretty substantial landowner.
Besides him, there were a few other landowners at the general’s dinner, but there’s no need to speak of them. The rest of the guests were all military men of the same regiment and two staff officers, a colonel and a rather fat major. The general himself was hefty and corpulent, but a good commander, the officers said. He spoke in a deep, imposing bass voice. The dinner was extraordinary: The sturgeon, white sturgeon, sterlet, bustard, asparagus, quail, partridge, and mushrooms made it clear that the cook had not eaten any hot food since the day before and that four soldiers with knives in their hands had been working to assist him all night long making fricassées and gelées. The huge number of bottles—tall ones of Lafite, short-necked ones of madeira—the splendid summer day, the whole row of windows opened, the dishes of ice on the table, the last unbuttoned button of the gentleman officers’ jackets, the rumpled shirtfronts of the owners of capacious tailcoats, the conversation crisscrossing the table, dominated by the general’s bass voice and lubricated by champagne—everything was in harmony with itself. After dinner they all got up with a pleasant heaviness in their stomachs, and after lighting up pipes with long and short stems, they went out onto the porch with cups of coffee in their hands.
The uniforms of the general, the colonel, and even the major were completely unbuttoned, so that you could catch a glimpse of their noble suspenders made of silk, but the gentleman officers, maintaining due respect, kept their uniforms buttoned except for the last three buttons.6
“You can take a look at her now,” the general said. “Please, my dear man,” he added, turning to his adjutant, a rather nimble young man of pleasant appearance, “order the bay mare brought out! So you’ll see for yourselves.” The general drew on his pipe and blew out smoke. “She’s not in perfect shape. This damned hole of a town, there isn’t a decent stable. The horse—puff, puff—is quite decent!”
“Pray tell me, Your Excellency—puff, puff—have you had her a long time?” Chertokutsky said.
“Puff, puff, puff—well—puff—not so long. It’s only two years since I took her from the stud-farm!”
“And did you, pray tell me, obtain her already broken in or did you, pray tell me, break her in here?”
“Puff, puff, puh, puh, puh… uh… uh… ff—here,” the general said, disappearing completely into smoke.
Meanwhile a soldier jumped out of the stable, the clatter of hooves was heard, and finally another one appeared, wearing a white duster, with a huge black mustache, leading by the bridle a quivering, frightened horse who when she suddenly raised her head almost lifted the squatting soldier into the air along with his mustache. “Come on now, Agrafena Ivanovna!” he said, leading her up to the porch.7
The mare was named Agrafena Ivanovna. As strong and wild as a beautiful woman of the south, she crashed her hooves against the wooden porch and suddenly stopped.
The general lowered his pipe and started to look at Agrafena Ivanovna with a satisfied air. The colonel himself came down from the porch and took Agrafena Ivanovna by the muzzle. The major himself patted Agrafena Ivanovna on the leg, and the others clicked their tongues at her.
Chertokutsky came down from the porch and came at her from the rear. The soldier, standing at attention and holding the bridle, looked right into the visitors’ eyes, as if he wanted to leap up into them.
“A very, very good mare!” Chertokutsky said, “a beautifully formed horse! Pray tell, Your Excellency, how is her gait?”
“She has a good gait; but… the devil only knows, that fool medic gave her some kind of pills, and now she’s been sneezing for two days.”
“A very, very good mare. Pray tell, Your Excellency, do you have a commensurate equipage?”
“Equipage? But this is a saddle horse.”
“I know that; but I asked Your Excellency in order to find out whether you have a commensurate equipage for your other horses.”
“Well, my equipages are not too adequate. I must confess I’ve long wanted to have the latest model carriage. I wrote about it to my brother, who’s now in St. Petersburg, but I don’t know whether he will send one or not.”
“It seems to me, Your Excellency,” the colonel remarked, “that there is no better carriage than a Viennese one.”
“You’re quite correct—puff, puff, puff.”
“Your Excellency, I have an extraordinary carriage of real Viennese workmanship.”
“Which one? The one you came in?”
“Oh, no. That’s the one I ride around in, just for my own travels, but this one… it’s amazing, it’s as light as a feather; and when you sit in it, if Your Excellency will permit me to say, it’s just as if your nanny were rocking you in a cradle!”
“So it’s a very easy ride?”
“Very, very easy; pillows, springs—it’s all as if it were painted in a picture.”
“That’s good.”
“And it’s so roomy! At least, Your Excellency, I have never seen such a roomy carriage before. When I was in the service, I could fit ten bottles of rum and two pounds of tobacco in the compartments; besides that, I always had about six uniforms with me, linen, and two pipes with stems as long, if Your Excellency will permit me to say, as a tapeworm, and you could fit a whole bull into the side pockets.”8
“That’s good.”
“I paid four thousand for it, Your Excellency.”
“Judging by the price, it must be very fine. Did you buy it yourself?”
“No, Your Excellency, I acquired it by accident. It was bought by my friend, a rare person, my childhood comrade, with whom you would have gotten along perfectly. With us it was—what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine. I won it from him at cards. Your Excellency, wouldn’t you care to do me the honor of paying me a visit to have dinner and take a look at the carriage at the same time?”
“I don’t know what to say to that. For me to go alone is somehow… Would you permit me to come along with the gentleman officers?”
“I most humbly beg the gentleman officers to come as well. Gentlemen, I would consider it a great honor to have the pleasure of seeing you in my home!”
The colonel, the major, and the other officers thanked him with a courteous bow.
“Your Excellency, I am of the opinion that if you’re going to buy a thing, then it must be a good thing, and if it’s bad, then there’s no reason to acquire it. When you do me the honor of coming to see me tomorrow, I’ll show you a few articles that I have myself introduced into my household arrangements.”
The general looked at him and blew smoke out of his mouth.
Chertokutsky was extremely pleased that he had invited the gentleman officers to his house. In his head he was ordering pâtés and sauces in advance. He kept glancing very happily at the gentleman officers, who also seemed to double their good favor toward him, which was evident from their eyes and the small bodily movements they made resembling half-bows. Chertokutsky began addressing them in a more familiar fashion, and his voice got more relaxed. It was a voice that was laden with pleasure.
“There, Your Excellency, you will make the acquaintance of the mistress of the house.”
“I’d be delighted,” the general said, smoothing his mustache.
After this, Chertokutsky wanted to set off immediately for home in order to prepare everything for the reception of the guests and tomorrow’s dinner in good time. He had already almost picked up his hat, but strangely it somehow turned out that he stayed for a while. Meanwhile the card tables had been set up in the room. Soon the whole company divided into parties of four for whist and took their seats in various corners of the general’s rooms.
They brought candles. Chertokutsky took a long time deciding whether he should sit down to a game of whist or not. But since the gentleman officers had started urging him, it seemed to him to be very incompatible with the rules of social life to refuse. He took a seat. Without his noticing it a glass of punch appeared before him, which he drained on the spot without even thinking. After playing two rubbers, Chertokutsky again found a glass of punch at hand, which he also drained without thinking, saying beforehand: “Gentlemen, it’s time for me to go home, indeed it’s time.” But he again took a seat for a second round.
Meanwhile the conversation in various corners of the room had taken a quite particular turn. Those playing whist were largely silent, but the men who weren’t playing and were sitting on divans around the room were conversing among themselves. In one corner a staff cavalry captain, propped up sideways on a pillow, pipe between his teeth, was recounting his amorous adventures in a free and fluent way and had completely mastered the attention of the little circle gathered around him. One extraordinarily fat landowner, with short arms that looked a bit like two full-grown potatoes, was listening with an unusually sweet expression and only occasionally made the effort to reach behind his broad back with his short arm to get his snuffbox out. In another corner a fairly heated argument had started up about squadron drill, and Chertokutsky, who had already managed twice to discard a jack instead of a queen, suddenly started interrupting the others’ conversations and shouting from his corner: “In what year?” or “Which regiment?”—not noticing that sometimes his question was completely irrelevant.
Finally, a few minutes before supper, the whist ended, but it continued in words, and it seemed everyone’s heads were full of whist. Chertokutsky distinctly recalled that he had won a lot, but his hands didn’t move to take anything, and after getting up from the table he stood for a long time in the position of a man whose handkerchief is missing from his pocket. Meanwhile supper was served. It goes without saying that there was no shortage of wines and that Chertokutsky, almost against his will, was obliged to pour some into his glass sometimes, simply because there were bottles standing to his left and right.
An extremely long conversation started up at the table, but it was strangely conducted. One landowner who had served in the 1812 campaign narrated a battle that had never taken place, and then, for some utterly unknown reason, he took a cork out of a decanter and stuck it into the puff pastry dessert.9 In short, when they started to disperse it was three in the morning, and the coachmen had to take some of the personages into their arms as if they were shopping packages. Chertokutsky, despite all his aristocratism, bent so far over in his carriage and with such a sweep of his head that when he got home he brought with him two burrs in his mustache.
Everyone in the house was fast asleep. The coachman had a hard time finding the valet, who led the master through the parlor and turned him over to the maid. Chertokutsky somehow managed to follow her to the bedroom, where he lay down next to his young and pretty wife, who was lying in the most enchanting position, in a nightgown as white as snow. The movement caused by her spouse’s falling onto the bed woke her up. Stretching, raising her eyelashes, and quickly squinting three times, she opened her eyes with a half-angry smile; but seeing that this time he had absolutely no intention of showing her any affection, she turned onto her other side in annoyance, and placing her fresh cheek on her hand, fell asleep soon after he did.
It was already that time of day that in the country is not called early when the young mistress of the house awoke next to her snoring spouse. Recalling that he had come home after three in the morning the night before, she took pity on him and decided not to wake him up. Putting on the bedroom slippers that her husband had ordered for her from St. Petersburg and wearing a white blouse that draped on her body like flowing water, she went into her dressing room, washed with water that was as fresh as herself, and approached the dresser. She looked at herself twice and saw that she was quite pretty today. This apparently insignificant circumstance caused her to spend exactly two extra hours sitting in front of the mirror.
Finally she got dressed in a very charming outfit and went out into the garden to get some fresh air. As if on purpose, just then it was as beautiful a time as a July summer day can boast of. The sun, entering the noonday, was burning with all the power of its rays, but under the dense dark avenues of trees it was cool to walk, and the flowers warmed by the sun tripled their scent. The pretty mistress of the house completely forgot that it was twelve o’clock and her husband was still sleeping. She could already hear the after-dinner snoring of two coachmen and one postboy who were sleeping in the stables behind the garden. But she kept on sitting in the densely shaded avenue, from which she had a view of the highway, and she was absentmindedly looking at its deserted emptiness, when suddenly a cloud of dust that appeared in the distance attracted her attention. Looking more closely, she soon saw several equipages. In front was a light, open two-seat carriage; in it was sitting the general with thick epaulets that gleamed in the sunlight, and next to him the colonel. Behind that carriage followed another, with four seats; in it were sitting a major and the general’s adjutant and two more officers opposite them; behind the carriage followed the well-known regimental droshky, which on this occasion was in the possession of the corpulent major; behind the droshky came a four-seat bon voyage, in which four officers were sitting with a fifth on top of their arms… behind the bon voyage three officers were cutting a fine figure on splendid dapple-bay horses.
“Could they be coming to visit us?” the mistress of the house thought. “Oh, my God! Indeed, they’ve turned onto the bridge!” She screamed, threw up her hands, and set off running over the garden beds and flowers right into her husband’s bedroom. He was dead asleep.
“Get up, get up! Get up right now!” she screamed, pulling on his arm.
“Huh?” Chertokutsky said, stretching himself without opening his eyes.
“Get up, poopsie-pooh! Can’t you hear? We have guests!”
“Guests, what guests?” After he said this, he produced a little moo, like the one a calf emits when seeking his mother’s teats with his snout. “Mmmm…” he growled, “schnookums, stick out your little neck so I can kiss it.”
“Darling, get up, quickly, for the love of God. The general and the officers! Oh, my God, you have burrs in your mustache.”
“The general? Oh, is he already coming? Why didn’t anyone wake me up, dammit? The dinner, what about the dinner, is everything ready in the proper way?”
“What dinner?”
“Didn’t I order it?”
“You? You came home at four in the morning, and no matter what I asked you, you didn’t say anything. I didn’t wake you up, poopsie-pooh, because I felt sorry for you. You hadn’t slept at all…” She said the latter words in an extraordinarily languid and pleading voice.
Chertokutsky, his eyes bulging, lay for a moment in bed as if struck by lightning. Finally he jumped up from the bed in nothing but his nightshirt, forgetting for a moment that this was utterly indecent.
“Oh, what a horse I am!” he said, hitting himself in the forehead. “I invited them to dinner. What is to be done? Are they far away?”
“I don’t know… they should be here any minute.”
“Darling… hide! Hey, who’s there! You, girl! Go on, what are you afraid of, you little fool? The officers are going to be here any minute. Tell them that the master is not at home, tell them that I won’t be here at all, that I left first thing in the morning, got it? And tell all the servants, get going now!”
After saying this, he quickly grabbed his dressing-gown and ran off to hide in the coach house, supposing that he would be completely safe there. But after he took up a stance in a corner of the building, he saw that even here he could be seen somehow. “Now here’s what would be better,” flashed in his head, and in an instant he flung down the stairs to a carriage that was standing nearby, jumped in, closed the doors behind him, covered himself with the leather apron for greater safety, and fell completely silent, curled up in his dressing-gown.10
Meanwhile the equipages rode up to the porch.
The general got out and shook himself, then came the colonel, straightening the plume on his hat. Then the fat major jumped out of his droshky, holding his saber under his arm. Then the slim second lieutenants and the ensign who had been sitting on top of their arms jumped out of the bon voyage, and finally the officers who had cut a fine figure on their horses got down from their saddles.
“The master is not at home,” said the footman, coming out onto the porch.
“What do you mean he’s not at home? But surely he’s going to be here for dinner?”
“No, sir. The master left for the whole day. It is possible that he will return tomorrow at about this time.”
“That’s a good one!” the general said. “How can that be?”
“I must confess, this is quite a thing,” said the colonel, laughing.
“But really, how can anyone behave like that?” the general continued with displeasure. “Pfft… The devil… Well, if you aren’t going to be at home, why thrust your invitations on us?”
“Your Excellency, I cannot understand how anyone could do this,” said one of the young officers.
“What?” the general said, who had the habit of always uttering this interrogative particle when speaking with a subaltern.
“I said, Your Excellency: How can a person act in such a manner?”
“Naturally… Well, if it didn’t work out, at least let us know, or else don’t invite us.”
“Well, Your Excellency, there’s nothing to be done, let’s go back!” the colonel said.
“Of course, there’s no recourse. But anyway, we could take a look at the carriage even without him. He probably didn’t take it with him. Hey, who’s there? Come here, my boy!”
“What is your pleasure?”
“Are you the groom?”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
“Show us the new carriage your master recently acquired.”
“Please come into the coach house!”
The general and the officers set off for the coach house.
“Here, if you please, I’ll roll it out a little ways, it’s dark in here.”
“Enough, enough, that’s good!”
The general and the officers walked around the carriage and attentively inspected the wheels and the springs.
“Well, it’s nothing special,” the general said. “It’s the most ordinary carriage.”
“It’s not much to look at,” the colonel said, “there’s nothing fine about it at all.”
“It seems to me, Your Excellency, that it is certainly not worth four thousand,” one of the young officers said.
“What?”
“I said, Your Excellency, that it seems to me that it is not worth four thousand.”
“Four thousand! It’s not worth two. There’s nothing about it at all. Maybe there’s something special inside… Please unfasten the apron, my dear man…”
And to the eyes of the officers appeared Chertokutsky, sitting in his dressing-gown and curled up in an unusual fashion.
“Ah, you’re here!” the general said in amazement.
After saying this, the general immediately slammed the door shut, covered Chertokutsky with the apron again, and left together with the gentleman officers.