A Sportsman's Notebook Page 8

  “Anyway, I won’t attempt to bore you further, and, what’s more, to tell you the truth, it hurts me to remember. The following day my patient passed away. May God rest her soul!” added the doctor hurriedly, with a sigh. “Before she died, she asked that everyone should go out and leave me alone with her. ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I’ve acted wrongly towards you . . . it’s my illness . . . but, believe me, I’ve never loved anyone more than you . . . don’t forget me . . . treasure my ring. . . .’”

  The doctor turned away; I seized him by the hand.

  “Och!” he said, “let’s talk about something else, or perhaps you’d like a little game of Preference for low stakes? You know, in our profession we should never give way to such exalted sentiments. In our profession all we should think about is how to stop the children from yelling and the wife from nagging. For, since then, I have gone in for holy matrimony, as they call it . . . with a vengeance . . . I married a merchant’s daughter: seven thousand rubles dowry. Her name is Akulina; it’s on a par with Trifon. A spiteful hag, I must say, but luckily she sleeps all day. . . . What about that game of Preference?”

  We got down to Preference for copeck stakes. Trifon Ivanich won two and a half rubles from me—and went home late, very pleased with his victory.

  My Neighbor Radilov

  IN THE AUTUMN, WOODCOCK ARE OFTEN TO BE FOUND IN THE old type of lime-tree plantation. We have quite a number of such plantations in the province of Orel. Our forefathers, when choosing places to live in, never failed to plant five acres of good ground with orchards and avenues of lime. After fifty or often seventy years, these seats, these “gentle homes,” have gradually vanished from the face of the earth. The houses rotted away or were sold for scrap, the stone outbuildings were reduced to heaps of rubble, the apple-trees died and were sawn up into firewood, the hedges and fences were obliterated. Only the limes went on growing in their pristine glory and, now surrounded by ploughed fields, they speak to this feather-headed generation of “our fathers and forefathers that went before us.” This old lime is a splendid tree. . . . It is spared even by the Russian peasant’s ruthless axe. Its leaves grow delicately, its mighty branches spread out far and wide and beneath them there is perpetual shade.

  One day, roaming the fields with Ermolai after partridges, I found myself beside one of these neglected plantations and made my way towards it. As soon as I came up to the fringe of it, a woodcock rose noisily from a bush, I fired, and at the same moment, from a few paces away, there came a cry, the frightened face of a young girl looked out from behind the trees and immediately disappeared again. Ermolai came running up to me. “What are you shooting here for? There’s a gentleman lives here.” There was not time for me to answer him, nor for my dog, with noble self-importance, to bring me the dead bird, when hurried steps were heard and a tall man with moustaches emerged from the brushwood and came to a halt in front of me, wearing an expression of displeasure. I made such excuses as I could, said who I was, and offered him the bird which had been shot on his property.

  “Very well,” he said with a smile, “I’ll accept your bird, but only on condition that you stay and dine with us.”

  I confess that I was not overjoyed by his suggestion, but it would have been impossible to refuse. “This is my land. I am your neighbor Radilov—you may have heard of me,” continued my new acquaintance. “To-day being Sunday, there ought to be a decent dinner at home, otherwise I wouldn’t have invited you.”

  I answered as one does on such occasions, and set off at his heels. A path which had recently been cleared soon led us from the lime-grove up to a kitchen-garden. Between ancient appletrees and overgrown gooseberry-bushes, cabbages displayed their round, pale-green, mottled heads; hop tendrils wound their way round tall stakes; the borders were closely studded with brown stakes, lost in a mass of withered peas; great flat pumpkins lay about on the ground; yellow cucumbers were revealed underneath their dusty angular leaves; along the fence tall nettles waved; in two or three places there grew bushes of tartar, honeysuckle, elder, and dog-rose—remnants of former shrubberies. Close to a small pond, full of slimy reddish water, was a well, surrounded by puddles; ducks were splashing and waddling fussily about in them; in an open space a dog, trembling all over and screwing up its eyes, was gnawing a bone; close at hand a piebald cow was lazily browsing the grass, with an occasional flick of her tail against her bony back. The path took a turning, and behind a thick clump of willows and birches a small, gray old house with a wooden roof and a crooked porch peeped out at us. Radilov halted.

  “By the way,” he said, looking me full in the face, with a good-natured expression, “it’s just occurred to me that perhaps you don’t feel at all like coming in; in that case . . .”

  I didn’t let him finish, but assured him that on the contrary I would be delighted to dine with him.

  “Well, it’s as you wish.”

  We went into the house. A young fellow in a long coat of thick blue cloth met us in the porch. Radilov at once told him to give Ermolai a drink of vodka. My hunter bowed respectfully towards the back of the munificent donor. From a hall adorned with various brightly-colored pictures and hung with check curtains, we went into a small room—Radilov’s study. I took off my shooting gear and put my gun in the corner. The boy in the long-skirted coat fussed around brushing me.

  “Well, now let’s go into the drawing-room,” said Radilov agreeably; “I want to introduce you to my mother.”

  I followed him. In the drawing-room, on a sofa in the middle of the room, sat a little old lady in a brown dress and a white bonnet, with a kind, thin face, and a timid, sad expression.

  “Mother, let me introduce our neighbor.”

  The old lady half-rose and bowed to me without loosening the grip of her bony hands on her bulging, sack-shaped worsted reticule.

  “Have you been in our part of the country for long?” she asked in a low, faint voice, blinking her eyes.

  “No, not for long.”

  “Do you think of staying here for some time?”

  “Until winter, I think.”

  The old lady said nothing.

  “Now,” interposed Radilov, drawing my attention to a tall thin man whom I hadn’t noticed as I came into the drawing-room, “this is Fyodor Mikheich. . . . Well, Fedya, show our guest your skill. Why are you hiding in the corner?”

  Fyodor Mikheich at once rose from his chair, took a rickety violin from the window-sill, grasped the bow, not correctly by one end, but by the middle, propped the violin against his chest, shut his eyes, and went off into a dance, humming the tune and scraping away at the strings. He looked about seventy; his long nankeen coat hung sadly on his thin bony limbs. He danced; now he would perform a dashing jig, now sway his little bald head from side to side with a swooning motion and stick out his lean neck; he stood and stamped his feet; sometimes, with obvious difficulty, he flexed his knees; from his toothless mouth came a senile quavering. Radilov must have guessed from my expression that Fedya’s “skill” was giving me no particular satisfaction.

  “Thanks, old fellow, that will do,” he said. “You can go and get your reward.” Fyodor at once put down his violin on the window-sill, bowed, first to me, as a guest, then to the old lady, then to Radilov, and went out of the room.

  “He was a landowner, too,” went on my new friend, “and a rich one, but he ruined himself—and here he is, living with me. . . . In his day he was the biggest rake in the province; he ran off with two people’s wives, kept his own singers, sang and danced like a master. . . . But won’t you have some vodka? Dinner’s on the table.”

  A young girl, the same one I had seen for a flash in the garden, came into the room.

  “Ah, and here is Olga!” remarked Radilov, with a slight turn of his head. “Let me recommend her to your kindness. . . . Well, let’s go and dine.”

  We went into the dining-room and sat down. While we were passing in from the drawing-room and taking our places, Fyodor, whose “re
ward” had made his eyes sparkle and his nose slightly red, sang: “Let Vict’ry’s thunder sound!” A separate place had been laid for him in a corner, on a little table without a napkin. The poor old man couldn’t boast of cleanliness, and was therefore always kept at a certain distance from the company. He crossed himself, sighed, and began to eat with a shark-like voracity. The dinner was indeed not a bad one and, the day being Sunday, it didn’t fail to include a quivering jelly and the sweet dish known as “Spanish puffs.” At table Radilov, who had served ten years in an infantry regiment of the line and had campaigned in Turkey, started telling stories; I listened to him with attention and kept a furtive eye on Olga. She was not particularly pretty, but her calm, decisive expression, her broad, white forehead, her thick hair, and especially her brown eyes, which, though small, were clear and full of intelligence and life, would have struck anyone else in my place. She fairly hung on every word of Radilov’s; it was not just interest, it was a passionate concentration which expressed itself in her face. In years, Radilov could have been her father. He addressed her in the second person singular, but I guessed at once that she was not his daughter. In the course of conversation he mentioned his late wife. “Her sister,” he added, indicating Olga. She blushed swiftly and lowered her eyes. Radilov fell silent, then changed the subject. The old lady didn’t utter a word all through dinner; she hardly ate at all, and did not press me to do so either. Her features breathed that air of timorous, hopeless expectancy, that senile melancholy, which lays such a painful hand on the heart of the beholder. At the end of dinner, Fyodor was starting to “toast” his hosts and their guest, but Radilov glanced at me and begged him to be silent; the old man passed his hand over his lips, blinked, bowed, and sat down again, but this time on the very edge of his chair. After dinner, Radilov and I made our way to his study.

  In people who are intensely and continuously preoccupied with a single thought or a single passion, one can detect an element in common, a certain external likeness of manner, however much they may differ in qualities, capability, position in the world, or education. The longer I observed Radilov, the more strongly I became convinced that he belonged to this class of people. He spoke about farming, harvesting and haymaking, about war, local gossip, and the approaching elections. He spoke without constraint, and indeed with concern, then suddenly he would sigh, sink back in his chair, like a man exhausted by heavy labor, and pass his hand over his face. His whole good, warmhearted nature seemed penetrated through and through and saturated by a single feeling. I had already been surprised by my failure to find any passion on his part, either for food, drink, shooting, nightingales from Kursk, epilepsy in pigeons, Russian literature, trotting horses, Hungarian jackets, cards, billiards, soirées with dancing, trips to the provincial or national capitals, paper-mills, sugar-beet factories, painted summer-houses, tea, the progress of viciousness in side-horses, or even for fat coachmen, with belts right up under their armpits, those magnificent coachmen with whom, heaven knows why, every movement of the neck is accompanied by a roll and a bulge of the eyeballs. . . . “He’s a queer sort of landowner, anyway,” I thought. But, with it all, he made no pretence of moroseness or dissatisfaction with his lot; on the contrary, he fairly radiated undiscriminating goodwill, affability, and an almost irritating disposition to make friends with anyone and everyone he met. It was true that at the same time you felt he was incapable of making really close friends with anyone, not because he never needed other people’s society, but because for a time his whole life had been directed inwards. As I gazed at Radilov, I couldn’t begin to imagine him happy, either then or at any other time. He was no beauty, either, but in his glance, in his smile, in his whole being, there lurked—lurked in the true sense of the word—something extraordinarily seductive. It made you feel that you wanted to get to know him better and to love him. Of course sometimes the steppe landowner bobbed up in him, but all the same he was really a very fine man.