Thus the matter would drag on till the Prince left the province; and that would be the end of it. The mayor did what he was told, and the merchant was placed in the hospital at Vyatka.
At last the Prince arrived. He greeted the Governor coldly and took no further notice of him, and he sent his own physician at once to examine the merchant. He knew all about it by this time.
For the widow had presented her petition at Orlov, and then the merchants and shop people had told the whole story. The Governor grew more and more crest-fallen. The affair looked bad. The mayor had said plainly that he acted throughout on the written orders of the Governor.
When the physician came back, he reported that the merchant was perfectly sane. That was a finishing stroke for the Governor.
At eight in the evening the Prince visited the exhibition with his suite. The Governor conducted him ; but he made a terrible hash of his explanations, till two of the suite, Zhukovsky 2 and z. The famous man of letters (1783-18 )2) who acted as tutor to Alexander. Arsenev undertook the scientific side of the Prince's education.
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Arsenev, seeing that things were not going well, invited m e to do the honours ; and I took the party round.
The young Prince had not the stern expression of his father; his features suggested rather good nature and indolence. Though he was only about twenty, he was beginning to grow stout. The few words he addressed to me were friendly, and he had not the hoarse abrupt utterance of his uncle Constantine.
When the Prince left the exhibition, Zhukovsky asked me what had brought me to Vyatka ; he was surprised to :find in such a place an official who could speak like a gentleman. He offered at once to speak to the Prince about me ; and he actually did all that he could. The Prince suggested to his father that I should be allowed to return to Petersburg ; the Emperor said that this would be unfair to the other exiles, but, owing to the Prince's intercession, he ordered that I should be transferred to Vladimir. This was an improvement in point of position, as Vladimir is 700
versts nearer Moscow. But of this I shall speak later.
5
In the evening there was a ball at the assembly-rooms. The musicians, who had been summoned for the occasion from one of the factories of the province, arrived in the town helplessly drunk.
The Governor rose to the emergency : the performers were all shut up in prison twenty-four hours before the ball, marched straight from prison to the orchestra, and kept there till the ball was over.
The ball was a dull, ill-arranged affair, both mean and motley, as balls always are in small towns on great occasions. The policeofficers bustled up and down; the officials, in full uniform, squeezed up against the walls ; the ladies crowded round the Prince, just as savages mob a traveller from Europe.
Apropos of the ladies, I may tell a · story. One of the towns offered a 'collation' after their exhibition. The Prince partook of nothing but a single peach ; when he had eaten it, he threw the stone out of the window. Suddenly a tall :figure emerged from the crowd of officials standing outside the building ; it was a certain rural judge, well known for his irregular habits ; he walked deliberately up to the window, picked up the stone, and put it in his pocket. When the collation was over, he went up to one of the important ladies and offered her the stone; she was
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charmed to get such a treasure. Then he went to several other ladies and made them happy in the same way. He had bought five peaches and cut out the stones. Not one of the six ladies could ever be sure of the authenticity of her prize.
6
When the Prince had gone, the Governor prepared with a heavy heart to exchange his satrapy for a place on the bench of the Supreme Court at home ; but he was not so fortunate as that.
Three weeks later the post brought documents from Petersburg addressed to 'The Acting Governor of the Province'. Our office was a scene of confusion ; officials came and went; we heard that an edict had been received, but the Governor pretended illness and kept his house.
An hour later we heard that Tyufyayev had been dismissed from his office ; and that was all that the edict said about him.
The whole town rejoiced over his fall. While he ruled, the atmosphere was impure, stale, and stifling ; now one could breathe more freely. And yet it was hateful to see the triumph of his subordinates. Asses in plenty raised their heels against this stricken wild boar. To compare small things with great, the meanness of mankind was shown as clearly then as when Napoleon fell. Between Tyufyayev and me there had been an open breach for a long time; and if he had not been turned out himself, he would certainly have sent me to some frontier town like Kay. I had therefore no reason to change my behaviour towards him ; but others, who only the day before had pulled off their hats at the sight of his carriage and run at his nod, who had smiled at his spaniel and offered their snuffboxes to his valet - these same men now would hardly salute him and made the whole town ring with their protests against the irregularities which he had committed and they had shared in. All this is an old story and repeats itself so regularly from age to age, in all places, that we must accept this form of baseness as a universal trait of human nature, and, at all events, not be surprised by it.
7
His successor, Kornilov, soon made his appearance. He was a very different sort of person - a man of about fifty, tall and stout, rather flabby in appearance, but with an agreeable smile and
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gentlemanly manners. H e formed all h is sentences with strict grammatical accuracy and used a great number of words ; in fact, he spoke with a clearness which was capable, by its copiousness, of obscuring the simplest topic. He had been at school with Pushkin and had served in the Guards; he bought all the new French books, liked to talk on serious topics, and gave me a copy of Tocqueville's 3 Democracy in America the day after he arrived at Vyatka.
It was a startling change. The same rooms, the same furniture, but, instead of the Tatar tax-collector with the face of an Eskimo and the habits of a Siberian, a theorist with a tincture of pedantry but a gentleman none the less. Our new Governor had intelligence, but his intellect seemed to give light only and no warmth, like a bright day in winter which ripens no fruit though it is pleasant enough. He was a terrible formalist too, though not of the red-tape variety ; it is not easy to describe the type, but it was just as tiresome as all varieties of formalism are.
As the new Governor had a real wife, the offictal residence lost its ultra-bachelor characteristics ; it became monogamous. As a consequence of this, the members of the Council became quite domestic characters : these bald old gentlemen, instead of boasting over their conquests, now spoke with tender affection of their lawful wives, although these ladies were past their prime and either angular and bony, or so fat that it was impossible for a surgeon to draw blood from them.
8
Some years before he came to us, Kornilov, being then a colonel in the Guards, was appointed Civil Governor of a provindal town, and entered at once upon business of which he knew nothing.