Waiting for death.
O hunters! what harm have I done,
To vex or injure you? Although
Among the cabbages I run,
One leaf I nibble—only one,
And that's not yours!
Oh, no!'
Cucumber went on with ever-increasing energy:
'Into the forest dark he fled,
His tail he let the hunters see;
"Excuse me, gentlemen," says he,
"That so I turn my back on you—
I am not yours!"'
Cucumber was not singing now … he was bellowing:
'The hunters hunted day and night,
And still the hare was out of sight.
So, talking over his misdeeds,
They ended by disputing quite—
Alas, the hare is not for us!
The squint-eye is too sharp for us!'
The first two lines of each stanza Cucumber sang with each syllable drawn out; the other three, on the contrary, very briskly, and accompanied them with little hops and shuffles of his feet; at the conclusion of each verse he cut a caper, in which he kicked himself with his own heels. As he shouted at the top of his voice: 'The squint-eye is too sharp for us!' he turned a somersault…. His expectations were fulfilled. The brigadier suddenly went off into a thin, tearful little chuckle, and laughed so heartily that he could not go on, and stayed still in a half-sitting posture, helplessly slapping his knees with his hands. I looked at his face, flushed crimson, and convulsively working, and felt very sorry for him at that instant especially. Encouraged by his success, Cucumber fell to capering about in a squatting position, singing the refrain of: 'Shildi-budildi!' and 'Natchiki-tchikaldi!' He stumbled at last with his nose in the dust…. The brigadier suddenly ceased laughing and hobbled on.
XI
We went on another quarter of a mile. A little village came into sight on the edge of a not very deep ravine; on one side stood the 'lodge,' with a half-ruined roof and a solitary chimney; in one of the two rooms of this lodge lived the brigadier. The owner of the village, who always resided in Petersburg, the widow of the civil councillor Lomov, had—so I learned later—bestowed this little nook upon the brigadier. She had given orders that he should receive a monthly pension, and had also assigned for his service a half-witted serf-girl living in the same village, who, though she barely understood human speech, was yet capable, in the lady's opinion, of sweeping a floor and cooking cabbage-soup. At the door of the lodge the brigadier again addressed me with the same eighteenth-century smile: would I be pleased to walk into his 'apartement'? We went into this 'apartement.' Everything in it was exceedingly filthy and poor, so filthy and so poor that the brigadier, noticing, probably, by the expression of my face, the impression it made on me, observed, shrugging his shoulders, and half closing his eyelids: 'Ce n'est pas … oeil de perdrix.' … What precisely he meant by this remained a mystery to me…. When I addressed him in French, I got no reply from him in that language. Two objects struck me especially in the brigadier's abode: a large officer's cross of St. George in a black frame, under glass, with an inscription in an old-fashioned handwriting: 'Received by the Colonel of the Tchernigov regiment, Vassily Guskov, for the storming of Prague in the year 1794'; and secondly, a half-length portrait in oils of a handsome, black-eyed woman with a long, dark face, hair turned up high and powdered, with postiches on the temple and chin, in a flowered, low-cut bodice, with blue frills, the style of 1780. The portrait was badly painted, but was probably a good likeness; there was a wonderful look of life and will, something extraordinarily living and resolute, about the face. It was not looking at the spectator; it was, as it were, turning away and not smiling; the curve of the thin nose, the regular but flat lips, the almost unbroken straight line of the thick eyebrows, all showed an imperious, haughty, fiery temper. No great effort was needed to picture that face glowing with passion or with rage. Just below the portrait on a little pedestal stood a half-withered bunch of simple wild flowers in a thick glass jar. The brigadier went up to the pedestal, stuck the pinks he was carrying into the jar, and turning to me, and lifting his hand in the direction of the portrait, he observed: 'Agrippina Ivanovna Teliegin, by birth Lomov.' The words of Narkiz came back to my mind; and I looked with redoubled interest at the expressive and evil face of the woman for whose sake the brigadier had lost all his fortune.
'You took part, I see, sir, in the storming of Prague,' I began, pointing to the St. George cross, 'and won a sign of distinction, rare at any time, but particularly so then; you must remember Suvorov?'
'Alexander Vassilitch?' the brigadier answered, after a brief silence, in which he seemed to be pulling his thoughts together; 'to be sure, I remember him; he was a little, brisk old man. Before one could stir a finger, he'd be here and there and everywhere (the brigadier chuckled). He rode into Warsaw on a Cossack horse; he was all in diamonds, and he says to the Poles: "I've no watch, I forgot it in Petersburg—no watch!" and they shouted and huzzaed for him. Queer chaps! Hey! Cucumber! lad!' he added suddenly, changing and raising his voice (the deacon-buffoon had remained standing at the door), 'where's the rolls, eh? And tell Grunka … to bring some kvas!'
'Directly, your honour,' I heard Cucumber's voice reply. He handed the brigadier the bundle of rolls, and, going out of the lodge, approached a dishevelled creature in rags—the half-witted girl, Grunka, I suppose—and as far as I could make out through the dusty little window, proceeded to demand kvas from her—at least, he several times raised one hand like a funnel to his mouth, and waved the other in our direction.
XII
I made another attempt to get into conversation with the brigadier; but he was evidently tired: he sank, sighing and groaning, on the little couch, and moaning, 'Oy, oy, my poor bones, my poor bones,' untied his garters. I remember I wondered at the time how a man came to be wearing garters. I did not realise that in former days every one wore them. The brigadier began yawning with prolonged, unconcealed yawns, not taking his drowsy eyes off me all the time; so very little children yawn. The poor old man did not even seem quite to understand my question…. And he had taken Prague! He, sword in hand, in the smoke and the dust—at the head of Suvorov's soldiers, the bullet-pierced flag waving above him, the hideous corpses under his feet…. He … he! Wasn't it wonderful! But yet I could not help fancying that there had been events more extraordinary in the brigadier's life. Cucumber brought white kvas in an iron jug; the brigadier drank greedily—his hands shook. Cucumber supported the bottom of the jug. The old man carefully wiped his toothless mouth with both hands—and again staring at me, fell to chewing and munching his lips. I saw how it was, bowed, and went out of the room.
'Now he'll have a nap,' observed Cucumber, coming out behind me. 'He's terribly knocked up to-day—he went to the grave early this morning.'
'To whose grave?'
'To Agrafena Ivanovna's, to pay his devotions…. She is buried in our parish cemetery here; it'll be four miles from here. Vassily Fomitch visits it every week without fail. Indeed, it was he who buried her and put the fence up at his own expense.'