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The precentor, being accustomed to sounds of all sorts, did not give way but dropped the music-copying and turned to me with the following absurdity:
'And then, too, there is something for clothes. I am quite threadbare.'
'But do you mean to tell me that Yury Nikolayevich undertook to clothe you, as well as to give you about £50 a year salary?'
'No, sir; but in old days the prince always did sometimes give me things, but now, I am ashamed to say it, I have come to going about without socks.'
'I am going about without s-s-socks myself,' roared the prince, and folding his arms across his chest he looked haughtily and contemptuously at the precentor. This outburst I had not expected, and I looked into his face with surprise; but, seeing that he did not intend to continue, and that the precentor certainly did, I said very gravely to the predatory singer:
'You came to me this morning to ask for my mediation: so you trusted me?'
'We know you very well, we have no doubt of you at all, you will not let us be wronged.'
'Excellent. ·well, this is how I settle the matter: sign the receipt at once or give me back the money, and I shall give it back to the prince and at the same time decline to meddle any further.'
The precentor had no inclination to hand the money to the prince; he signed the receipt and thanked me.
I shall leave out of my tale how he converted his reckoning into roubles. I could not din into him that the rouble was not worth the same on the exchange as it had been when he left Russia.
'If you think that I ,...-ant to cheat you of 30 shillings, this is what you had better do: go to our priest and ask him to reckon it for you.' He agreed to do so.
It seemed as though all was over, and Golitsyn's breast no longer heaved with such stormy menace; but as fate would have it the finale recalled our fatherland as the beginning had.
The precentor hesitated and hesitated, and suddenly, a s though nothing had happened between them, turned t o Golitsyn with the words:
'Your Excellency, since the steamer does not go from Hull for five days, be so gracious as to allow me to remain with you meanwhile.'
My Lablache will give it him, I thought, self-sacrificingly preparing myself for the shock of the sound.
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'Of course you can stay. Where the devil could you go?'
The precentor thanked the prince and went away. Golitsyn said to me by \vay of explanation:
'You see he is a very good fellow; it is that b-b-blackguard, that thief, that vile pettifogger has put him up to it.'
Let Savigny and Mittermeyer do their best to formulate and classify the juridical concepts developed in our Orthodox fatherland between the stables where the house-serfs vvere flogged and the master's study where the peasants were fleeced.
The second cause celebre, the one with the pettifogger aforesaid, was not successful. Golitsyn came in, and he suddenly shouted so loud, and the secretary shouted so loud, and after that there was nothing left but for them to go for each other, and then the prince, of course, \vould have smashed the stinking clerk. Since, however, everything in that household followed the laws of a peculiar logic, it was not the prince who fought with the secretary, but the secretary who fought with the door.
Brimming over \vith spite and refreshed by another noggin of gin, he aimed a blow with his fist as he \vent out a t the big glass
\vindow in the door, and broke it to bits. These windows are half an inch thick.
'Police! ' roared Golitsyn. 'Burglary! Police!' and going into the drmving-room he fell fainting on the sofa. When he had recover('d a littl(', he explained to me among other things what the ingratitude of the secretary consisted of. The man had been his brother's agent and had swindled him-1 do not remember how-and must without fail have been brought to trial. Golitsyn was sorry for him; he put himself, as i t were, so thoroughly in his place that he pawned his last watch to buy him off. And th('n, ha,·ing complete proof that he was a rogue, he took him on as his steward!
There can be no doubt whatever tha t he had cheated Golitsyn at every turn.
I went away. A man v..-!10 could smash a glass door with his fist could find justice and punishment for himself. Moreover, he told me afterwards himself, when he was asking me to get him a passport to return to Russia, that he had proudly offered Golitsyn a pistol and suggested casting lots which should fire.
If this was so, the pistol was certainly not loaded.
The princP spent his last penny in pacifying the Revolt of Spartacus, and none the less ended, as might have been expected, by bPing i mprisoned for debt. Anyone else would have been clapped in prison, and that vvould have been the end of it; but
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even that could not hapFen to Golitsyn simply m the common way.
A policeman used to conduct him between seven and eight o'clock every evening to Cremorne Gardens; there he used to conduct a concert for the pleasure of the lorettes of all London, and with the last wave of his ivory sceptre a policeman, till then unobserved, would spring up out of the earth and escort the prince to the cab which took the captive in his black swallowtail and white gloves to prison. There were tears in his eyes as he said 'Good-bye' to me in the Gardens. Poor prince! Another man might have laughed at it, but he to0k his incarceration to heart. His relations eventually redeemed him ; then the government permitted him to return to Russia, and at first directed him to Yaroslavl to live, where he could conduct religious concerts, together with Felinski, the Bishop of Warsaw. The government was kinder to him than his father; as black a sheep as his son, he advised the latter to go into a monastery. The father knew the son well ; and yet he was himself so good a musician that Beethoven dedicated a symphony15 to him.
Next after the exuberant figure of the Assyrian god, of the fleshy ox-Apollo, a series of other Russian oddities must not be forgotten.
I am not speaking of flitting shades like the colonel rioos, but of those who, stranded by various vicissitudes of fate, have lingered for a long time in London ; such as the clerk in the War Office who, having got into a mess with his files and debts, threw himself into the Neva, was drowned . . . and popped up in London, an c.rile, in a fur cap and a fur-lined coat, which he never abandoned, regardless of the muggy warmth of a London winter.
Or such as my friend Ivan Ivanovich Savich, whom the English called Savage and who, with antecedents and future and all, with raw skin on his head where there should have been hair, clamours for a place in my gallery of Russian rarities.1 6 A retired officer of the Pavlovsky regiment of Life Guards, he lived 15 The three string quartets, in E flat major, A minor and B major, were commissioned by Nikolay Borisovich Golitsyn. and were written in 1 823.
(A .S. )
1 6 Savich, a retired officer, went abroad in 1 8+4 for treatment. He became a permanent emigrant for fear of the police aftpr the arrest of his brother, N. I. Savich, a member of the Cyril ;md Methodius secret society.
I. I. Savich took no part in politics either at home or abroad. (R.)