“Wasted effort, I won’t play.”
“But this isn’t faro; there can’t be any luck or bluffing here: it’s all art; I’m even warning you that I can’t play at all, unless you give me some kind of handicap.”
“Why not sit down and play checkers with him!” Chichikov thought. “I used to be not so bad at checkers, and it will be hard for him to pull any tricks here.”
“If you like, so be it, I’ll play checkers.”
“The souls against a hundred roubles.”
“Why so much? Fifty’s enough.”
“No, what kind of stake is fifty? Better let me throw in some puppy of a middling sort or a gold seal for a watch for the same money.”
“Well, if you like!” said Chichikov.
“How much of a handicap are you giving me?” said Nozdryov.
“Why on earth? Nothing, of course.”
“At least let me have the first two moves.”
“I will not, I’m a poor player myself.”
“We know what a poor player you are!” said Nozdryov, advancing a piece.
“I haven’t touched checkers in a long time!” said Chichikov, also moving a piece.
“We know what a poor player you are!” said Nozdryov, advancing a piece.
“I haven’t touched checkers in a long time!” said Chichikov, moving a piece.
“We know what a poor player you are!” said Nozdryov, moving a piece, and at the same time moving another piece with the cuff of his sleeve.
“I haven’t touched checkers in a long … Hey, hey, what’s this, brother? Put that one back!” said Chichikov.
“Which one?”
“That piece there,” said Chichikov, and just then he saw almost under his very nose another piece that seemed to be sneaking towards being kinged; where it had come from God only knew. “No,” said Chichikov, getting up from the table, “it’s absolutely impossible to play with you! You can’t move like that, three pieces at a time!”
“What do you mean three? It was a mistake. One got moved by accident, I’ll move it back if you like.”
“And the other one came from where?”
“Which other one?”
“This one that’s sneaking towards being kinged?”
“Come now, as if you don’t remember!”
“No, brother, I counted all the moves and remember everything; you stuck it in there just now. It belongs here!”
“What, where does it belong?” Nozdryov said, flushing. “Ah, yes, brother, I see you’re an inventor!”
“No, brother, it seems you are the inventor, only not a very successful one.”
“What do you take me for?” said Nozdryov. “Would I go and cheat?”
“I don’t take you for anything, I’ll just never play with you from now on.”
“No, you can’t refuse,” Nozdryov said, getting excited, “the game’s begun!”
“I have the right to refuse, because you’re not playing as befits an honest man.”
“No, you’re lying, you can’t say that!”
“No, brother, it’s you who are lying!”
“I wasn’t cheating, and you can’t refuse, you have to finish the game!”
“That you will not make me do,” Chichikov said coolly, and going over to the board, he mixed up the pieces.
Nozdryov flushed and came up to Chichikov so close that he retreated a couple of steps.
“I’ll make you play! Never mind that you’ve mixed up the pieces, I remember all the moves. We’ll put them back the way they were.”
“No, brother, the matter’s ended, I won’t play with you.”
“So you don’t want to play?”
“You can see for yourself that it’s impossible to play with you.”
“No, tell me straight out that you don’t want to play,” Nozdryov said, stepping still closer.
“I don’t!” said Chichikov, bringing both hands closer to his face anyhow, just in case, for things were indeed getting heated.
This precaution was quite appropriate, because Nozdryov swung his arm … and it might very well have happened that one of our hero’s pleasant and plump cheeks was covered in indelible dishonor; but, successfully warding off the blow, he seized Nozdryov by his two eager arms and held him fast.
“Porfiry, Pavlushka!” Nozdryov shouted in rage, trying to tear himself free.
Hearing these words, Chichikov, not wishing to have household serfs witness this tempting scene, and at the same time feeling that it was useless to hold Nozdryov, let go of his arms. At the same time, in came Porfiry and with him Pavlushka, a stalwart fellow, to deal with whom would have been altogether unprofitable.
“So you don’t want to finish the game?” Nozdryov said. “Answer me straight out!”
“It is impossible to finish the game,” Chichikov said and peeked out the window. He saw his britzka standing all ready, and Selifan seemed to be waiting for a sign to drive up to the porch, but it was impossible to get out of the room: in the doorway stood two stalwart bonded fools.
“So you don’t want to finish the game?” Nozdryov repeated, his face burning as if it were on fire.
“If you played as befits an honest man. But now I can’t.”
“Ah! so you can’t, scoundrel! You saw the game was going against you, so now you can’t! Beat him!” he shouted frenziedly, turning to Porfiry and Pavlushka, and himself seizing hold of his cherrywood chibouk. Chichikov turned pale as a sheet. He wanted to say something, but felt that his lips were moving soundlessly.
“Beat him!” shouted Nozdryov, charging forward with his cherrywood chibouk, all hot and sweaty, as if he were assaulting an impregnable fortress. “Beat him!” he shouted in the same voice in which some desperate lieutenant, during a major assault, shouts “Forward, boys!” to his detachment, his extravagant valor already of such renown that a special order has been issued to hold him by the arms when things get hot. But the lieutenant has already caught the feeling of martial fervor, his head is all in a whirl; Suvorov17 hovers before his eyes, he pushes on towards a great deed. “Forward, boys!” he shouts, charging, not thinking of how he is damaging the already worked-out plan for the general assault, of the millions of gun barrels thrust through the embrasures of the fortress walls, impregnable, soaring beyond the clouds, of how his powerless detachment will be blown into the air like swansdown, or of the fatal bullet already whistling and about to slam shut his clamorous gullet. But if Nozdryov himself represented the desperate, lost, fortress-assaulting lieutenant, the fortress he was attacking in no way resembled an impregnable one. On the contrary, the fortress was so afraid that its heart sank right into its shoes. Already the chair with which he had thought to defend himself had been torn from his hands by the serfs, already, with eyes shut, more dead than alive, he was preparing to get a taste of his host’s Circassian chibouk, and God knows what was going to happen to him; but it pleased the fates to spare the ribs, the shoulders, and all the polite parts of our hero. Unexpectedly, there suddenly came a clinking, as if from the clouds, a jingling sound of bells, there was a rattle of wheels as a cart flew up to the porch, and even into the room itself came the heavy snorting and heavy breathing from the overheated horses of the stopped troika. Everyone involuntarily glanced at the window: someone, with a mustache, in a half-military frock coat, was getting out of the cart. After making inquiries in the front hall, he entered at the very moment when Chichikov, having not yet managed to collect himself after his fear, was in the most pitiful position a mortal had ever been in.
“May I know which of you here is Mr. Nozdryov?” said the stranger, looking in some perplexity at Nozdryov, who was standing with the chibouk in his hand, and at Chichikov, who was barely beginning to recover from his unprofitable position.
“May I first know to whom I have the honor of speaking?” said Nozdryov, going up closer to him.
“The district captain of police.”
“And what would you like?”
“I have come t
o announce to you the notification which has been communicated to me that you are under arrest until the decision of your case is concluded.”
“Nonsense, what case?” said Nozdryov.
“You have been implicated in an episode on the occasion of the inflicting of a personal offense upon the landowner Maximov with birch rods in a drunken state.”
“You’re lying! I’ve never laid eyes on any landowner Maximov!”
“My dear sir! Allow me to report to you that I am an officer. You may say that to your servant, but not to me!”
Here Chichikov, without waiting for Nozdryov’s response to that, quickly took hat in hand, and behind the police captain’s back, slipped out to the porch, got into his britzka, and told Selifan to whip up the horses to full speed.
Chapter Five
Our hero, however, had turned quite properly chicken. Though the britzka was racing along like wildfire, and Nozdryov’s estate had long since rushed from sight, covered by fields, slopes, and hummocks, he still kept looking back in fear, as if he expected at any moment to be swooped upon by the pursuit. He had difficulty catching his breath, and when he tried putting his hand to his heart, he felt it fluttering like a quail in a cage. “Eh, what a hot time he gave me! just look at him!” Here all sorts of unholy and strong wishes were vowed upon Nozdryov; occasionally even in not very nice words. No help for it! A Russian man, and in a temper besides! Moreover, it was by no means a laughing matter. “Say what you like,” he said to himself, “if the police captain hadn’t shown up, I might not have been granted another look at God’s world! I’d have vanished like a bubble on water, without a trace, leaving no posterity, providing my future children with neither fortune nor an honest name!” Our hero was very much concerned with his posterity.
“What a bad master!” Selifan was thinking to himself. “I’ve never yet seen such a master. I mean, spit on him for that! Better not give a man food to eat, but a horse must be fed, because a horse likes oats. It’s his victuals: what provender is to us, for instance, oats is to him, it’s his victuals.”
The horses’ notions of Nozdryov also seemed to be unadvantageous: not only the bay and Assessor, but even the dapple-gray was out of spirits. Though it always fell to his lot to get the worst oats, and Selifan never poured them into his trough without first saying: “Eh, you scoundrel!”—still they were oats and not mere hay, he chewed them with pleasure and often shoved his long muzzle into his comrades’ troughs to have a taste of what they got for vittles, especially when Selifan was not in the stable, but now just hay—that was not nice; everyone was displeased.
But soon all the displeased were interrupted amid their outpourings in a sudden and quite unexpected way. Everyone, not excluding the coachman himself, recollected and recovered themselves only when a coach and six came galloping down on them and they heard, almost over their heads, the cries of the ladies sitting in the coach, the curses and threats of the other coachman: “Ah, you knave, didn’t I shout out to you: keep right, gawker! Are you drunk, or what?” Selifan felt himself at fault, but since a Russian man does not like to admit before another that he is to blame, he at once uttered, assuming a dignified air: “And what are you a-galloping like that for? Pawned your eyes in a pot-house?” After which he started backing the britzka up, so as to free it from the other’s harness, but nothing doing, it all got into a tangle. The dapple-gray sniffed curiously at his new friends, who ended up on either side of him. Meanwhile, the ladies sitting in the coach looked at it all with an expression of fear on their faces. One was an old lady, the other a young girl, a sixteen-year-old, with golden hair quite artfully and prettily smoothed back on her small head. Her lovely face was rounded like a fresh egg, and resembled one when, white with a sort of transparent whiteness, fresh, only just laid, it is held up by the housekeeper’s dark-skinned hand to be checked in the light and the rays of the shining sun pass through it; her thin little ears were also transparent, aglow with the warm light coming through them. That, and the fright on her parted, motionless lips, and the tears in her eyes—it was all so pretty in her that our hero gazed at her for several minutes, paying no attention to the tumult that was going on among the horses and coachmen. “Back off, will you, you Nizhni-Novgorod gawk!” the other coachman was shouting. Selifan pulled at the reins, the other coachman did the same, the horses backed up a little, then lurched into each other again, having stepped over the traces. In these circumstances, the dapple-gray took such a liking to his new acquaintance that he did not want at all to leave the rut to which the unforeseen fates had brought him, and, resting his muzzle on the neck of his new friend, seemed to be whispering right into his ear, probably some terrible nonsense, because the other horse was ceaselessly twitching his ears.
This commotion managed, however, to attract the muzhiks of a village which, fortunately, was not far away. Since such a spectacle is a real godsend for a muzhik, the same as newspapers or his club for a German, a whole multitude of them soon accumulated around the carriages, and there were only old women and small children left in the village. The traces were undone; a few prods in the dapple-gray’s muzzle made him back up; in short, they were separated and drawn apart. But whether from the vexation they felt at being parted from their friends, or from sheer cussedness, however much the coachman whipped them, the other horses would not move and stood as if rooted to the spot. The muzhiks’ sympathy increased to an unbelievable degree. They vied with each other in offering advice: “Go, Andryushka, take the outrunner, the one on the right, and Uncle Mityai will get up on the shaft horse! Get up there, Uncle Mityai!” Long and lean Uncle Mityai, with his red beard, climbed onto the shaft horse and came to resemble a village belfry, or, better, the crane used to draw water from a well. The coachman lashed the horses, but nothing doing, Uncle Mityai was no help. “Wait, wait!” the muzhiks shouted. “You, Uncle Mityai, get on the outrunner, and let Uncle Minyai get on the shaft horse!” Uncle Minyai, a broad-shouldered muzhik with a beard as black as coal and a belly resembling the giant samovar in which hot punch is brewed for a whole chilled marketplace, eagerly got on the shaft horse, who sagged almost to the ground under him. “Now it’ll work!” shouted the muzhiks. “Heat him up; heat him up! wallop him with the whip, that one, the sorrel, why’s he wriggling there like a daddy longlegs!” But seeing that it was not going to work and that no heating up helped, Uncle Mityai and Uncle Minyai together got on the shaft horse, and Andryushka was put on the outrunner. Finally the coachman lost patience and chased away both Uncle Mityai and Uncle Minyai, and it was a good thing he did, because the horses were steaming as if they had just ripped through a whole stage without stopping for breath. He gave them a minute’s rest, after which they went off by themselves. While all this was happening, Chichikov was looking very attentively at the unknown young girl. He made several attempts to converse with her, but somehow it did not come about. And meanwhile the ladies drove off, the pretty head with its fine features and the slender waist disappeared, like something resembling a vision, and what remained was again the road, the britzka, the troika of horses familiar to the reader, Selifan, Chichikov, the flatness and emptiness of the surrounding fields. Wherever in life it may be, whether amongst its tough, coarsely poor, and untidily moldering mean ranks, or its monotonously cold and boringly tidy upper classes, a man will at least once meet with a phenomenon which is unlike anything he has happened to see before, which for once at least awakens in him a feeling unlike those he is fated to feel all his life. Wherever, across whatever sorrows our life is woven of, a resplendent joy will gaily race by, just as a splendid carriage with golden harness, picture-book horses, and a shining brilliance of glass sometimes suddenly and unexpectedly goes speeding by some poor, forsaken hamlet that has never seen anything but a country cart, and for a long time the muzhiks stand gaping openmouthed, not putting their hats back on, though the wondrous carriage has long since sped away and vanished from sight. So, too, did the blond girl suddenly, in a completely unexpected manner,
appear in our story and also disappear. If, instead of Chichikov, some twenty-year-old youth had happened to be standing there, a hussar, or a student, or simply one starting out on his path in life—then, God! what would not have awakened, stirred, spoken up in him! For a long time he would have stood insensibly on the same spot, gazing senselessly into the distance, having forgotten the road, and all the reprimands that lay ahead of him, and the scoldings for the delay, having forgotten himself, and the office, and the world, and all there is in the world.
But our hero was already middle-aged and of a circumspectly cool character. He, too, waxed thoughtful and started thinking, but his reflections were more positive, not so unaccountable, and even in part quite substantial. “A nice wench!” he said, opening his snuffbox and taking a pinch. “But what is it, chiefly, that’s so good in her? What’s good in her is that, as one can see, she has just come out of some boarding school or institute, there’s nothing about her that is female, as they say, which is precisely what is most disagreeable in them. She’s like a child now, everything is simple in her, she says what she likes, she laughs when she wants to. Anything can be made of her, she may become a wonder, or she may turn out trash, and trash is what she’ll turn out. Just let the mamas and aunties start working on her now. In a year they’ll have her so filled with all sorts of female stuff that her own father won’t recognize her. Out of nowhere will come conceit and pomposity, she’ll start turning around on memorized instructions, she’ll start racking her brains thinking up with whom, and how, and for what length of time she should speak, how to look at whom, she’ll be afraid every moment of saying more than is necessary, she’ll finally get confused, and in the end she’ll finally start lying all her life, and the result will be devil knows what!” Here he fell silent for a short time, then added: “And it would be curious to know who her people are, what and who her father is, is he a rich landowner of respectable character or simply a well-meaning man with capital acquired in the service? For if, say, to this girl there were added some two-hundred-thousand-rouble dowry, she would make a very, very tasty little morsel. That might constitute happiness, so to speak, for a decent man.” The tidy little two hundred thousand began to picture itself so attractively in his head that he inwardly became vexed with himself for not having found out who the travelers were from the postillion or the coachman, while the bustle around the carriages was going on. Soon, however, the appearance of Sobakevich’s estate distracted his thoughts and made them turn to their perennial subject.
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