A Sportsman's Notebook Read online

  “There I’m certainly guilty,” answered Mitya, lowering his head. “But I don’t accept money from the poor and I don’t act against my conscience.”

  “You don’t accept from them now, but once things go badly for you, then you will. You don’t act against your conscience. Get along with you! I suppose you’re always on the side of the angels! . . . Why, have you forgotten Boris Perekhodov? Who was it who fussed about him? Who was it who took him under his wing, eh?”

  “Perekhodov deserved his fate, certainly . . .”

  “He embezzled Government money. . . . Nothing more than that!”

  “But, uncle, just imagine his poverty, his family . . .”

  “Poverty . . . he was a drunkard and a gambler—that’s what he was.”

  “It was his troubles that started him drinking,” observed Mitya, lowering his voice.

  “Troubles, indeed! Well, you could have helped him, if you’re so warm-hearted, but without sitting around in pot-houses with a drunkard like that, dazzled by his fine words, as though you’d never heard the like.”

  “He was the kindest of men . . .”

  “According to you, everyone is kind. . . . By the way,” continued Ovsyanikov, turning to his wife, “did you send him . . . well, you know?”

  Tatyana Ilyinichna nodded.

  “Where have you been, these days?” said the old man.

  “In town.”

  “Playing billiards, I suppose, and drinking tea, and strumming on the guitar, skipping round the offices, writing petitions in back rooms, and prancing about with the sons of merchants? Am I right? . . . Tell us!”

  “That’s about right,” said Mitya, with a smile. “Ah yes, I’d almost forgotten: Anton Parfenich Funtikov invites you to dine with him next Sunday.”

  “I shan’t go to see that pot-belly. He’ll give us an expensive fish and then put rancid butter on it. Good luck to him!”

  “And then I met Feodosya Mikhailovna.”

  “Which Feodosya d’you mean?”

  “The one who belongs to Garpenchenko, the landowner, the one who bought Mikulino by auction. This Feodosya is from Mikulino. She lived in Moscow on quit-rent, worked as a sempstress, and paid her rent regularly, 182½ rubles a year. And she knows her job, too; she got good orders in Moscow. But now Garpenchenko has sent for her and just keeps her here, and won’t give her any definite duties. She’d be ready to buy herself out, and has told the master so, but he won’t let her know his decision. You, uncle, know Garpenchenko—couldn’t you have a word with him about it? . . . Feodosya would pay a good price for her freedom.”

  “At your expense, eh? Well, all right, I will speak to him, yes. Only I don’t know,” continued the old man with an expression of disfavor. “This Garpenchenko—may the Lord forgive me—is a sharper: he buys up bills of exchange, and lends out money at interest: he acquires properties under the hammer . . . What ill wind brought him to our part of the world, I’d like to know? Oh, I’ve had enough of these birds of passage! It’s no easy matter to get sense out of him—but anyway we’ll see.”

  “Do your best, uncle.”

  “All right, I will. But you look out, look out, there! Don’t argue . . . God’s mercy on you! . . . But just look out in future. Look out or else, by God, you’ll come to no good—by God, you’ll come to a bad end. I can’t carry you on my shoulders all the time. . . . It’s not as if I were a man of influence. Well, you can go now, and God bless you.”

  Mitya went out. Tatyana Ilyinichna followed behind him.

  “Give him a good drink of tea, you mollycoddler,” Ovsyanikov called after her. “The boy’s no fool,” he continued, “and he’s got a good heart, only I’m worried about him. . . . But I’m sorry to have bored you for so long with trifles.”

  The door from the hall opened. A little gray-haired man in a velvet coat came in. “Ah, Franz Ivanich!” exclaimed Ovsyanikov; “good day to you! Is God in his mercy treating you well?”

  Allow me, dear reader, to introduce this gentleman to you.

  Franz Ivanich Lejeune, a landowner of Orel province and a neighbour of mine, had reached the honorable degree of Russian nobleman by a somewhat unusual path. He was born of French parents in Orleans and had set out with Napoleon for the conquest of Russia in the capacity of drummer-boy. At first everything went as smoothly as a knife through butter, and our Frenchman entered Moscow with his head held high. But on the way back poor Monsieur Lejeune, half-frozen and without his drum, fell into the hands of the peasants of Smolensk. The peasants of Smolensk shut him up for the night in an empty clothmill, and on the next morning brought him to a hole cut in the ice beside the weir, and began to request the drummer de la Grrrande Armée to oblige them by diving under the ice. Monsieur Lejeune was unable to agree to their suggestion and, in his turn, began to urge the peasants of Smolensk, in the French tongue, to let him go back to Orleans. “Messieurs,” he said, “I have a mother living there, une tendre mère.” But the peasants, probably through ignorance of the geographical situation of the city of Orleans, continued proposing to him an underwater journey down the stream of the sinuous river Gniloterka, and had already begun to urge him forward with gentle blows on the vertebrae of his neck and spine, when suddenly, to Lejeune’s indescribable joy, the sound of sleigh-bells was heard, and there drove out across the dam an enormous sledge with the brightest of rugs over its unusually high back-seat and with three roan horses harnessed to it. In the sledge sat a stout, ruddy-faced gentleman in a wolf-skin coat.

  “What are you doing there?” he asked the peasants.

  “We are drowning a Frenchman, sir.”

  “Oh,” replied the gentleman indifferently, and turned away.

  “Monsieur! Monsieur!” exclaimed the poor wretch.

  “Ah, ah,” said the wolfskin-coat reproachfully. “You marched on Russia, you and your twelve tongues, you burnt Moscow—damn you—you dragged down the cross from Ivan the Great and now—monsyor, monsyor! Now you have got your tail between your legs. The punishment fits the crime. . . . Go on, Filka-a!”

  The horses started off.

  “No, stop!” added the landowner. “Hey, you, monsyor, d’you know musik?”

  “Sauvez-moi, sauvez-moi, mon bon monsieur,” insisted Lejeune.

  “There’s a fine people for you! Not one of them knows even any Russian. Musik, musik, savay musik voo? Savay? Well, answer me! Comprenay? Savay musik voo? Savay jooay piano?”

  Lejeune at last understood what the landowner was driving at and nodded his head affirmatively: “Oui, monsieur, oui, oui, je suis musicien, je joue tous les instruments possibles! Oui, monsieur . . . Sauvez moi, monsieur!”

  “Well, you’re a lucky devil,” rejoined the gentleman. “Let him go, lads, here’s twenty copecks to buy yourselves a drink.”

  “Thank you, sir, thank you kindly. Take him, by all means.”

  Lejeune was installed in the sledge. He choked for joy, wept, trembled, bowed, thanked the gentleman and his driver and the peasants. He was wearing nothing but a green vest with pink ribbons, though it was a day of crackling frost. The gentleman glanced silently at his numb blue limbs, wrapped the poor wretch in his own fur coat and drove him home. There was a scurrying of serving-folk. The Frenchman was soon warmed, fed, and dressed. The gentleman took him to see his daughters.

  “Here, children,” he told them. “I have found a teacher for you. You were always nagging at me to have you taught music and French, well here is a Frenchman for you. He plays the piano too. Well, monsyor,” he continued, pointing at the cheap little piano he’d bought five years before from a Jew, who was really a seller of eau-de-Cologne, “show us your skill. Jooay!”

  Lejeune sat down with a sinking heart; he had never touched a piano in his life.

  “Go on, jooay, jooay,” repeated the gentleman.

  The poor wretch struck the keys in desperation, as he would have done a drum, and played away at random. . . .

  “I thought,” he used to say afterwards, “that m
y savior would seize me by the scruff of the neck and throw me out of his house.” But, to the extreme amazement of the reluctant improviser, the gentleman, after waiting a moment, patted him approvingly on the shoulder. “Good, good,” he said. “I see you can play; go and have a rest now.”

  Two weeks later Lejeune passed on from this gentleman to another, who was rich and cultivated, and took a fancy to him for his gay and gentle ways. Lejeune married his ward, entered the Government service, became a nobleman, married his daughter to a landowner of the Orel province named Lobyzanyev, a retired dragoon and a writer of verses, and came to settle in Orel province himself. This Lejeune, or, as he is now known, Franz Ivanich, was the gentleman I saw arriving to visit his friend Ovsyanikov.

  But perhaps the reader is tired of sitting with me at Ovsyanikov’s, and I shall therefore lapse into eloquent silence.

  Lgov

  “LET’S GO TO LGOV,” ERMOLAI, WHO IS ALREADY KNOWN TO the reader, said to me one day. “We’ll shoot all the duck we want there.”

  Although wild duck present no special attraction to a real sportsman, the temporary lack of other game (it was the beginning of September: the woodcock had not yet arrived, and I was tired of tramping the fields after partridges) led me to take the advice of my hunter and to make my way to Lgov.

  Lgov is a big village in the steppe with a very old single-domed stone church and two mills on the marshy stream of the Rosota. Five versts from Lgov this stream turns into a broad pond with thick rushes covering the banks and growing here and there in the middle. This pool, its creeks, and the still depths of its rushes, were the hatching-place and haunt of a countless multitude of duck of every possible kind: mallard, half-mallard, pintail, teal, pochard, and so forth. Small flights were continually circling and hovering over the water, but a shot would put up such clouds that the sportsman involuntarily held his hat with his hand and let out a longdrawn “phew!”

  Ermolai and I walked along the pool, but, in the first place, the duck, which is a canny bird, keeps well away from the bank, and secondly, even if some straggling inexperienced teal should expose itself to our fire and fall a victim, our dogs would not have been able to fetch it from the thick rushes: even with the noblest degree of self-denial, they would have been able neither to swim nor to walk on the bottom, but would only have cut their precious noses to no purpose on the sharp edges of the reeds.

  “No,” said Ermolai at last. “It won’t work, we must get a boat. . . . Let’s go back to Lgov.”

  We set off. We had gone only a few paces when we were met by a rather mongrelly pointer which came dashing out of a willow thicket, followed by a man of middle height in a threadbare blue coat, canary waistcoat and gris de laine or bleu d’amour trousers, the ends of which were carelessly stuck into a pair of leaky boots, with a red handkerchief round his neck, and a single-barrelled gun over his shoulder.

  While our dogs, with the Chinese ceremonial which is the special custom of their kind, exchanged sniffs with their new acquaintance, who in evident alarm had lowered his tail, thrown back his ears, and kept circling rapidly round, with knees stiff and teeth bared, the stranger came up to us and made us an extremely polite bow. He looked about twenty-five; his long reddish hair, which was fairly soaked in kvass, stuck out in solid tufts, his small brown eyes had a friendly twinkle in them, his whole face, which was bound up in a black handkerchief as though from toothache, was set in the sweetest of smiles.

  “Allow me to introduce myself,” he began in a soft wheedling voice. “I am Vladimir, a sportsman of these parts. . . . Hearing of your arrival, and learning that you were bound for the banks of our pool, I decided that, if you had no objection, I would offer you my services.”

  Vladimir’s turn of language was exactly that of a young actor who plays the part of leading man in the provinces. I accepted his offer and, while still on the way to Lgov, managed to find out his history. He was a house-serf who had been given his freedom. In tender youth he had learned music, had then served as a valet, knew his alphabet, had read—so far as I could make out—a few trashy books, and now lived, as so many do in Russia, without a farthing in his pocket, with no steady employment, more or less subsisting on manna from on high. He expressed himself with extreme refinement and was clearly enchanted with his own manners; he was doubtless also a terrible flirt and, in all probability, a successful one, too: Russian girls like fine language. Amongst other things, he gave me to understand that from time to time he visited the neighboring landowners, went calling in town, played Preference, and had friends in the capital. He was a master of the most different types of smile; what suited him best was the modest, restrained one which played on his lips when he was listening to someone else. He would hear you out, agree with you absolutely, but all the same he would never lose the sense of his own dignity and it was as if he wished to let you know that he too, on occasion, had his own opinion to give. Ermolai, like the none too well-educated and in no way subtle fellow that he was, began to address him in the second person singular. You should have seen the mocking smile with which Vladimir said to him: “You, sir . . .”

  “Why do you wear a handkerchief round your face?” I asked him. “Have you got toothache?”

  “No, sir,” he replied. “It’s something more serious, the result of carelessness. I had a friend, a good man, sir, but, as some people are, he was far from being a sportsman. Well, sir, one day he says to me: ‘My dear friend, take me out shooting, I’m curious to find out wherein the fun of it lies.’ As a matter of course, I didn’t want to say no to my friend: I myself found him a gun and took him out shooting. Well, sir, we duly had our shooting and finally we decided to take a rest. I sat beneath a tree, but he, on the contrary, started fooling about with his gun and taking aim at myself. I begged him to desist, but he had too little experience to take my advice. A shot rang out, and I lost my chin and the index finger of my right hand.”

  We had reached Lgov. Vladimir and Ermolai had both decided that it would be impossible to go shooting without a boat.

  “Suchok has a punt,” observed Vladimir; “but I don’t know where he has hidden it. I must run around to see him.”

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “A man who lives here, nicknamed Suchok.”

  Vladimir and Ermolai set off to find Suchok. I told them that I would wait for them by the church. As I was looking at the grave-stones in the churchyard, I came across a square and blackened urn with the following inscriptions: CI-GIT THÉOPHILE-HENRI, VICOMTE DE BLANGY; on the second side: BENEATH THIS STONE IS BURIED THE BODY OF A FRENCH SUBJECT, COUNT BLANGY; BORN 1737, DIED 1799, AGED 62; on the third side: PEACE TO HIS DUST; and on the fourth:

  BENEATH THIS STONE LIES A FRENCH ÉMIGRÉ;

  A MAN OF TALENT AND ILLUSTRIOUS BIRTH.

  MOURNING THE MASSACRE OF WIFE AND FAMILY,

  HE FORSOOK HIS COUNTRY, THE PREY OF TYRANTS;

  REACHING THE SHORES OF RUSSIA,

  HE FOUND A HOSPITABLE ROOF FOR HIS OLD AGE:

  HE TAUGHT THE YOUNG AND SOOTHED THE OLD . . .

  THE SUPREME JUDGE LAID HIM HERE TO REST.

  My reflections were interrupted by the arrival of Ermolai, Vladimir, and the man of the strange nickname, Suchok.

  Suchok, a bare-legged, shock-headed tatterdemalion, was, I thought, probably a retired house-serf, aged about sixty.

  “Have you got a boat?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he answered in a hoarse and broken voice. “But it’s a very bad one.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s come unstuck; the bolts have come out of their sockets.”

  “That’s nothing,” Ermolai put in. “You should caulk it with oakum.”

  “One could, of course,” agreed Suchok.

  “And what do you do?” I asked.

  “I am the master-fisherman.”

  “How is it that you are a fisherman and have a boat in such bad repair?”

  “Because there are no fish in our river.”

  “F
ish don’t like brackish marsh water,” observed my hunter importantly.

  “Well,” I said to Ermolai. “Go and find some oakum and mend the boat for us, only be quick about it.”

  Ermolai went off.

  “So we are likely to go to the bottom, it seems,” I said to Vladimir.

  “God’s mercy on us,” he answered. “In any event we may presume that the pool is not deep.”

  “No, it is not deep,” observed Suchok, who had a strange sleepy way of talking. “There’s slime and grass at the bottom, it’s all covered in grass. There are pot-holes, too, of course.”

  “But if the grass is so thick,” observed Vladimir, “it won’t be possible to row.”

  “And who rows a punt? You have to pole it. I’ll go with you, I have got a pole there—or you could use a spade as well.”

  “It’s awkward with a spade, as I suppose that often you can’t reach the bottom,” said Vladimir.

  “It’s certainly awkward.”

  I sat on a tombstone and waited for Ermolai. Vladimir went a little way off, for correctness’ sake, and sat down too. Suchok continued to stand where he was, hanging his head, his hands folded behind his back in the traditional attitude.

  “Tell me,” I began, “have you been a fisherman here for long?”

  “It will soon be seven years,” he answered, with a start.

  “And what was your job before?”

  “I was a coachman before.”

  “And who reduced you from the rank of coachman?”

  “The new lady.”

  “What lady?”

  “The lady who bought us. You don’t know her, sir: Alena Timofeyevna, a stout lady . . . and not young.”

  “What gave her the idea of making you into a fisherman?”