A Sportsman's Notebook Read online

  “God knows. She came to us from her own estate in Tambov, called the whole staff together and came out to speak to us. First we went and kissed her hand, and she was all right: she didn’t get cross . . . Then she began to ask us one after the other what we did and what our jobs were. My turn came, and she asked me what I was. ‘A coachman,’ I said. ‘A coachman? Why, what sort of coachman are you, just look at yourself, what sort of coachman are you? It’s not right for you to be a coachman; you must shave your beard and be my fisherman. When I come, you must provide me with fish for my table, do you hear? . . .’ So since then I have counted as a fisherman. ‘And see that you keep my pond in order.’ . . . But how am I to do that?”

  “Whose were you before?”

  “We belonged to Sergei Sergeich Pekhterev. He inherited us. He was not our master for long, either, only six years altogether. It was with him that I was a coachman. . . . Not in town—he had other coachmen there, but in the country.”

  “Had you been a coachman since you were young?”

  “No, indeed. I became a coachman under Sergei Sergeich. Before that I was a cook—not a town cook, either, but just in the country.”

  “Whose cook were you?”

  “My former master’s, Afanasy Nefeditch, the uncle of Sergei Sergeich. He bought Lgov, Afanasy Nefeditch did, and Sergei Sergeich inherited it from him.”

  “From whom did he buy it?”

  “From Tatyana Vasilyevna.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one who died last year near Bolkhovo. . . . That’s to say, near Karachev. She died an old maid . . . she never married. Did you not know her, sir? We came to her from her father, Vasily Semyonich. She had us for a long time. . . . Twenty years or so.”

  “You were her cook?”

  “Yes, first I was cook, and then I became coffee-server.”

  “You became what?”

  “Coffee-server.”

  “What kind of job is that?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I stood by the sideboard and was called Anton instead of Kuzma. It was the mistress’s order.”

  “Your real name is Kuzma?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were coffee-server all the time?”

  “No, not all the time: I was an achtyeur too.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Certainly I was . . . I acted in the theater. Our mistress had a private theater.”

  “What sort of parts did you play?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “What did you do in the theater?”

  “Oh, don’t you know? They would take me and dress me up; then I would walk, all dressed up, or stand, or sit, as the case might be. They’d tell me what to say—and I’d say it. Once I played the part of a blind man. . . . They put a pea under each of my eyelids . . . Yes, that’s how it was.”

  “And what were you after that?”

  “Then I became a cook again.”

  “Why did they make you a cook again?”

  “Because my brother ran away.”

  “And what were you when you were with the father of your first mistress?”

  “I had various jobs. First I was a page, then I was a postilion, then a gardener, then a whipper-in.”

  “A whipper-in? . . . and you went out hunting, too?”

  “Yes, I did, and I hurt myself badly: I was thrown and damaged my horse. Our old master was very strict; he had me beaten, and sent me to a cobbler in Moscow to learn a trade.”

  “How was that? You couldn’t have been a child when you became a whipper-in?”

  “I was twenty-something at the time.”

  “Fancy teaching you a trade at that age.”

  “It must have been all right, it must have been possible, if the master ordered it. Luckily he soon died and they brought me back to the country.”

  “And when did you learn your skill as a cook?”

  Suchok raised his thin, yellowish face and chuckled: “What, lessons for that, too? . . . Why, even women can cook!”

  “Well,” I said. “You’ve seen a thing or two, Kuzma, in your time. What are you doing now as fisherman, if you haven’t got any fish?”

  “I don’t complain, sir. In fact it’s a mercy that they have made me a fisherman. Why, the mistress ordered them to put another old chap like me—Andrei Pupyr—into the paper factory as a pulper. It’s wicked, she says, to eat bread without working for it. And Pupyr had hoped for some special favor: he had a young cousin who worked as a clerk in the mistress’s office, and promised to speak to the mistress about him and to remind her of him. And a fine way he reminded her! . . . And with my own eyes I had seen Pupyr going down on his knees to this cousin of his.”

  “Have you a family? Did you get married?”

  “No, sir, I did not. The late Tatyana Vasilyevna—may God rest her soul!—allowed none of us to marry. ‘God forbid,’ she used to say. ‘Don’t I live unmarried? What’s all the fuss about? Whatever do they want to get married for?’”

  “What d’you live on now? D’you get any wages?”

  “Wages? Certainly not, sir . . . they give me food—and I am quite content, thank God. May God give the mistress a long life!”

  Ermolai returned.

  “The boat is mended,” he announced sulkily. “Go and get the pole, you! . . .”

  Suchok ran off for the pole. Throughout my conversation with the poor old man, the sportsman Vladimir had been gazing at him with a contemptuous smile.

  “A stupid old man,” he said, when Suchok had left us. “Completely uneducated, a peasant and nothing more, sir. . . . Not fit to be called a house-serf . . . and yet how he boasted. . . . Just fancy him as an actor! I ask you! You need never have bothered with him, sir, or troubled to talk to him!”

  Within a quarter of an hour we were sitting in Suchok’s punt. (We had left the dogs in a hut in the care of Yegudil the coachman.) We were not very comfortable, but sportsmen are an uncomplaining race. Suchok stood in the blunt stern-end and “poled”; Vladimir and I sat on the thwart; Ermolai installed himself forward, right in the bows. In spite of the oakum, water soon appeared under our feet. Luckily it was a calm day and the pond lay as if asleep.

  We made fairly slow progress. The old man had difficulty in pulling his long pole out of the sticky mud, as it was all tangled with green strands of water-grass; masses of round water-lily leaves further hindered the course of our boat. Eventually we reached the rushes, and the fun began. The duck rose noisily and fairly wrenched themselves from the surface, startled by our unexpected appearance in their realm; shots rang out together after them, and it was fun to see the short-tailed fowl turn a somersault in the air and come splashing down heavily on to the water. We did not manage to pick up all the duck we had shot, of course: the lightly wounded ones dived away; others, killed outright, fell so deep in the rushes that even the lynx eyes of Ermolai could not make them out; but all the same, by dinner-time, our boat was filled to the gunwales with game.

  Much to Ermolai’s satisfaction, Vladimir shot far from well and, after every miss, expressed astonishment, inspected his gun, blew through it, looked perplexed, and finally explained to us why he had missed. Ermolai, as he always did, shot triumphantly; I, fairly badly, as usual. Suchok looked at us with the eyes of a man who has been in domestic service since his youth, occasionally shouted: “Look, look there’s another one!”—and constantly scratched his back—not with his hand, but with a wriggle of his shoulders. The weather remained splendid; round white clouds floated quietly past overhead and were clearly mirrored in the water; the reeds rustled around us; here and there the pond glittered like steel in the sun. We were on the point of turning back to the village when suddenly something rather unpleasant happened. For some time we had noticed that the water was slowly rising inside the boat. Vladimir had been given the task of bailing it out with a scoop which my far-sighted hunter had spirited away, against possible emergencies, from an unsuspecting peasant woman. All went well, so long as Vlad
imir remembered his duties. But at the end of our shoot, as if by way of farewell, the duck began to rise in such masses that we hardly had time to load. In the heat of the fusillade we paid no attention to the condition of our punt—until suddenly, at a violent movement by Ermolai, who was trying to reach a dead bird and leaning across the gunwale with all the weight of his body, our ancient vessel listed over, took a plunge, and solemnly went to the bottom, luckily not in deep water. We shouted, but it was already too late: within a moment we were standing with water up to our throats, surrounded by the floating bodies of dead duck. To this day I cannot remember without a chuckle the pale, startled faces of my companions (probably my own face was not particularly ruddy at that moment either); but, at the time, I confess that it never occurred to me to laugh. Each of us held his gun over his head, and Suchok, doubtless from a habit of copying his masters, lifted his pole in the air. The first to break the silence was Ermolai.

  “The devil and all!” he muttered, spitting into the water. “That’s a fine thing to happen! And you, you old scoundrel!” he added with feeling, turning to Suchok, “what sort of boat is this of yours?”

  “I’m sorry,” whispered the old man.

  “And you’re a good one, too,” continued my hunter, turning in Vladimir’s direction. “What were you looking at? Why weren’t you bailing? . . . you . . .”

  But Vladimir was in no state to reply: he was trembling like a leaf, his teeth chattered without meeting, and he wore a completely witless smile. What had become of all his eloquence, his feeling for the finer shades of decency, his sense of his own importance?

  The wretched punt wobbled feebly beneath our feet. . . . In the moment of shipwreck the water seemed to us extremely cold, but we soon became used to it. When the first shock had passed, I looked round; on all sides, ten paces from us, the reeds began; in the distance, over their tops, the bank could be seen. It looks bad, I thought.

  “What shall we do about it?” I asked Ermolai.

  “Well, we’ll see; this is no place to spend the night,” answered he. “Here, you, hold the gun,” he said to Vladimir.

  Vladimir obeyed without demur.

  “I’ll go and look for a ford,” continued Ermolai confidently, as if a ford was bound to exist in every lake—took the pole from Suchok, and set off in the direction of the bank, carefully sounding the bottom as he went.

  “Can you swim?” I asked him.

  “No, I can’t,” came his voice from behind the rushes.

  “Very well, then, he’ll drown,” observed Suchok indifferently. From the beginning he had been afraid, not of the danger, but of our wrath, and now, completely reassured, simply let out a puff from time to time and, so it seemed, felt in no way impelled to change his situation.

  “And will perish to no avail,” added Vladimir mournfully.

  Ermolai did not return for more than an hour. That hour seemed to us an eternity. At first we and he exchanged cries with a good heart; then he began to answer our shouts less often, and finally he was completely silent. In the village the bells were ringing for evening service. We didn’t talk, and tried not to look at each other. Duck flew over our heads, some prepared to settle beside us, but suddenly shot straight up into the air, quacked and flew away. We began to feel numb. Suchok blinked as though he was getting ready to go to sleep.

  Finally, to our indescribable joy, Ermolai returned.

  “Well?”

  “I got to the bank; I found the ford. Let’s go.”

  We were all for setting off at once; but first Ermolai put his hand under the water, brought a line out of his pocket, made the dead duck fast to it by the legs, took both ends of the line between his teeth and set off ahead, with Vladimir behind him, and me behind Vladimir. Suchok brought up the rear. It was about two hundred yards to the bank and Ermolai went boldly and unhesitatingly forward (so well had he made out the way), with only an occasional cry of “Keep to the left—there’s a pothole on the right!” or “Keep to the right, you’ll sink in if you go to the left.” . . . At times the water rose to our throats and twice poor Suchok, who was shorter than the rest of us, choked and gave off bubbles. “Hey, hey, hey!” Ermolai shouted at him menacingly, and Suchok scrambled and floundered and jumped and somehow escaped to a shallower place, but even in these extremities could not make up his mind to take hold of the skirts of my coat. Exhausted, dirty, dripping, we reached the bank at last.

  Two hours later, having dried ourselves to the best of our ability, we were all sitting in a big hay-shed preparing to have supper. Yegudil the coachman, an extremely slow, phlegmatic, deliberate, sleepy fellow, stood in the gateway and diligently plied Suchok with snuff. (I have noticed that in Russia coachmen very soon make friends with each other.) Suchok sniffed with frenzy, to vomiting point: he spat and coughed and was clearly enjoying himself. Vladimir looked sad, leant his head on one side, and said little. Ermolai was cleaning our guns. The dogs were wagging their tails at top speed, in anticipation of their groats; the horses were stamping and neighing in the shed. . . . The sun was setting; its last rays ran out in broad crimson stripes; the sky was full of golden clouds that grew ever more fine-drawn, like a rinsed and combed-out fleece . . . From the village came the sound of singing.

  Bezhin Meadow

  IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL JULY DAY, ONE OF THOSE DAYS WHICH COME only after long spells of settled weather. From the earliest morning the sky is clear; the dawn does not blaze and flame, but spreads out in a gentle blush. Instead of the flaming incandescence that goes with sultriness and drought, or the dark crimson that precedes the storm, the sun has a bright and friendly radiance, as it swims peacefully up from behind a long, narrow cloud, shines out briskly, and then veils itself in the lilac-colored mist. The tenuous upper edge of the spreading cloud sparkles with a serpentine brilliance, like that of beaten silver. But now the dancing beams come shooting out again—and gaily, grandly, as if on wings, the mighty luminary emerges. About midday there usually appears a multitude of high, round clouds, golden-gray, with edges of tender white. Like islands, scattered across a boundless and brimming river, which surrounds them with deep, translucent expanses of an even blueness, they scarcely stir; farther off, towards the horizon, they concentrate, crowd together, there is no more blueness to be seen between them; but the clouds themselves are of the same azure as the heaven, they are penetrated through and through with light and warmth. The color of the horizon, a pale and floating lilac color, remains unchanged the whole day, and uniform all around; there is no darkening or deepening to foretell a storm; sometimes, here and there, there are bluish shafts falling down, betokening the passage of a hardly perceptible shower. Towards evening, these clouds vanish; the last of them, blackish and vague as smoke, lie with a pink curling face turned to the setting sun; over the place where it disappears, as quietly as it rose into the heavens, a scarlet radiance stands for a while over the darkening earth, and, trembling gently, like a carefully carried taper, the evening star begins to burn. On such days, all colors are softened; they are clear, but not brilliant; they are tinged with a gentleness that is somehow touching. Such days may be scorching-hot, and the steam may rise from the sloping fields; but the wind disperses and breaks up the accumulated sultriness, and whirlwinds—sure sign of settled weather—march in tall white pillars along the tracks across the plough-land. In the dry, clean air there is a smell of wormwood, of rye-harvest, and of buckwheat; even an hour before nightfall you feel no dampness. This is the weather that the husbandman needs to gather in his crop. . . .

  Once, on just such a day as this, I was shooting blackcock in the district of Chern, in the government of Tula. I had found and shot a fair quantity of game; a bulging game-bag cut mercilessly into my shoulder; but the sunset glow was already dying down, and in the air, still light, although no longer flushed with the rays of the vanished sun, cold shadows were beginning to deepen and to spread, when at last I decided to return home. At a quick pace I passed through a long brake of undergrowth, climb
ed a hill and, instead of the familiar plateau which I expected, with a clump of oaks to the right and a little white church in the distance, I saw a completely different, unknown landscape. Below my feet ran a narrow valley; immediately opposite, a dense wood of poplar rose in a steep wall. I stopped in perplexity and looked around. . . . Aha! I thought, I’ve come out in quite the wrong place, I’ve struck too far to the right; and, amazed at my own mistake, I went swiftly down the hill. I was immediately enveloped in a disagreeable, stagnant dampness, as if I had passed into a cellar; the thick tall grass at the bottom of the valley, dripping wet, made a pale, even tablecloth all round; walking over it was somehow an eerie business. I scrambled out to the other side with all speed and struck off to the left along the poplar wood. Bats were already flitting above the sleeping treetops, wheeling mysteriously and quivering against the dim radiance of the sky; a belated hawk flew briskly past on his straight, high course, hurrying back to his nest. As soon as I come out at that corner, I thought to myself, I shall strike the track at once; but I’ve gone a good mile out of my way.

  Eventually I reached the corner of the wood, but found no sign of any track there: stunted, straggling undergrowth stretched far and wide before me, and behind it, away in the distance, could be seen an empty plain. I halted again. What an extraordinary thing. . . . Where on earth was I?—I began going over again in my mind the course I had taken during the day. . . . “Oh! This must be Parakhin spinney,” I exclaimed at last. “Yes! and over there must be Sindeyev wood . . . However did I manage to get here? So far out of my way? . . . Very odd! Now I must bear to the right again.”

  I went to the right, through brushwood. Meanwhile night approached and grew on me like a storm-cloud; it was as if darkness was welling up from the ground on all sides, with the mists of evening, and streaming down from above at the same time. I fell in with a rough, overgrown path, and went along it, keeping a sharp look-out ahead. Soon it was all dark and still around me—there was only the call of quails from time to time. A small night-bird, flying low on soft and soundless wings, almost knocked into me and shied off to one side. I came to the end of the brushwood and continued along the edge of a field. It was already difficult to distinguish distant objects; the field made a white blur around me; beyond it was a gloomy, towering mass of darkness which looked nearer every moment. My footfalls sounded muffled in the stagnant air. The sky, which had become drained of color, began to grow blue again—but, this time, with the blue of night. Against it, little stars were stirring and twinkling.