After another lawsuit he succeeded by extraordinary efforts in winning a wall ,vhich was common to two houses, the possession of which was of no use to him whatever. Being himself on the retired list, he used, on reading in the newspapers of the promotions of his fellow-soldiers, to buy such orders as had been given to them, and lay them on his table as a mournful reminder of the decorations he might have received !
His brothers and sisters were afraid of him and had nothing to do wi{h him; our servants would go a long v,-ay round to avoid his house for fear of meeting him, and would turn pale at the sight of him ; women went in terror of his impudent persecution; the house-serfs paid for special Sf'rvices of prayer that they might not come into his possession.
So this was the terrible man who was to visit us. Extraordinary excitement prevailed throughout the house from early morning; I had never seen this legendary 'enemy-brother,'
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though I was born i n his house, where my father stayed when h e came back from foreign parts; I longed t o see him and at the same time I was frightened-! do not know why, but I was terribly frightened.
Two hours before his arrival, my father's eldest nephew, two intimate acquaintances and a good-natured stout and flabby official who was in charge of the legal business arrived, They were all sitting in silent expectation, when suddenly the butler came in, and, in a voice unlike his own, announced that the brother 'had graciously pleased to arrive.'
'Show him up,' said the Senator, with perceptible agitation,
\vhile my father began taking snuff, the nephe\'\' straightened his cravat, and the official hawked and coughed. I had been ordered to go upstairs but, trembling all over, I stayed in the next room.
Slowly and majestically the 'brother' advanced, and the Senator and my father went to meet him. He was holding an ikon with both hands before his chest, as people do at weddings and funerals, and in a drawling voice, a little through his nose, he addressed his brothers in the following words:
'vVith this ikon our father blessed me before his end, charging me and our late brother Petr to watch over you and to be a father to you in his place . . . if our father knew of your conduct to your elder brother! . . .'
'Come, man chcr frerc,' observed my father in his studiously indifferent voice, 'you have carried out our father's last wish well indeed. It would be better to forget these memories, painful to vou as well as to us.'
'How? vVhat?' shouted the devout brother. 'Is this what you have summoned me for? . . .' and he. flung down the ikon, so that the silv!'r setting gave a metallic clink. At this point the Senator shouted in a voice still more terrifying. I rushed headlong upstairs and only had time to see the official and the nephew, no less scared, retreating to the balcony.
V\'bat was done and how it was done, I cannot say; the frightened servants huddled into corners out of sight, no one knew anything of what happened, and neither the Senator nor my father ever spoke of this scene before me. Little by little the noise subsic!Nl and the partition of the estate was carried out, whether then or on another day I do not remember.
My father received Vasilevskoye, a big estate in the Ruzsky district, near Moscow. \Ve spent the whole summer there the following year; meanwhile the Senator bought himself a house on the Arhat, and we went to live alone in our great house,
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deserted and deathlike. Soon afterwards my father too bought a house in Old Konyushennaya Street.
With the Senator there departed first Calot, and secondly the source of all animation in our house. The Senator alone had prevented the hypochondriacal disposition of my father from prevailing; now it had full sway. The new house was gloomy; it suggested a prison or a hospital; the ground floor was vaulted and the thick walls made the windows look like the embrasures of a fortress. The house was surrounded on all sides by a courtyard unnecessarily large.
To tell the truth, it is more of a wonder that the Senator managed to live so long under the same roof as my father than that they parted. I have rarely sPen two men so complete a contrast as they were.
The Senator was of a kindly disposition, and fond of amusements; he had spent his whole life in the world of artificial light and of official diplomacy, the world that surrounded the court, without a notion that there was another more serious world, although he had been not merely in contact with but intimately connected with all the great events from 1 789 to 1815. Count Vorontsov had sent him to Lord Grenville17 to find out what General Bonaparte was going to undertake after abandoning the Egyptian army. He had been in Paris at the coronation of Napoleon. In 1 8 1 1 Napoleon had ordered him to be detained in Cassel, where he was ambassador 'at the court of King Jerome,'18
as my father used to say in moments of vexation. In fact, he took part in all the great events of his time, but in a queer way, irregularly.
When a captain in the Life Guards of the Izmaylovsky regiment, he was sent on a mission to London; Paul, seeing this in the muster-roll, ordered him to return at once to Petersburg. The soldier-diplomat set off by the first ship and appeared on parade.
'Do you want to remain in London?' Paul asked in his hoarse voice.
'If it should please your Majesty to permit me,' answered the captain-diplomat.
'Go back and lose no time,' said Paul in his hoarse voice, and he did go back, without even seeing his relations, who lived in Moscow.
17 British Foreign Secretary in 1 791, and Prime Minister, 1806 and 1 807, when the Act for the abolition of the slave trad!' was passed. ( Tr.) I B f.e., of Jerome Bonaparte, King of VVestphalia from 1 807 to 1 8 1 3.
( Tr.)
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While diplomatic questions were being settled by bayonets and grape-shot, he was an ambassador and concluded his diplomatic career at the time of the Congress of Vienna, that bright festival of all the diplomats. Returning to Russia he was appointed court chamberlain in Moscow, where there is no court.
Though he knew nothing of Russian law and legal procedure, he got into the Senate, became a member of the Council of Guardians, a director of the Mariinsky Hospital, and of the Alexandriinsky Institute, and he performed all his duties with a zeal that was hardly necessary, with a censoriousness that only did harm and with an honesty that no one noticed.
He was never at home, he tired out two teams of four strong horses in the course of the day, one set in the morning, the other after dinner. Besides the Senate, the sittings of which he never neglected, and the Council of Guardians, which he attended twice a week, besides the Hospital and the Institute, he hardly missed a single French play, and visited the English Club three times a week. He had no time to be bored: he was always busy and i nterested. He was always going somewhere, and his life rolled lightly on good springs through a world of official papers and red tape.