In this style he conducted the whole inspection.
\Ve used to dine b('tween three and four o'clock. The dinner lasted a long time and \vas very boring. Spiridon was an excellent cook, but my father's economy on the one hand, and his own on the other, rendered the dinner somewhat meagre, in spite of the fact that there were a great many dishes. Beside my father stood a red clay bowl into \vhich he himself put various bits of food for the dogs; mot·eover, he used to feed them from his own fork, which gave fearful offence to the servants and consequently to me. Why? It is hard to say . . . .
Visitors on the whole seldom called upon us and dined more rarely still . I rem<>mbcr out of all those who visi ted us one man whose arrival to dinner would sometimes smooth the wrinkles out of my father's face, N. N. Bakhmetev. He was the brother of the lame general of that name and was himself a general also, though long on tlw retired list. My father and he had been friends as long before as the time when both had been officers in
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the lzmaylovsky regiment. They had indulged themselves together in the days of Catherine, and in the reign of Paul had both been court-martialled, Bakhmetev for having fought a duel with someone and my father for having been his second; then one of them had gone away to foreign lands as a tourist, and the other to Ufa as Governor. There was no likeness between them.
Bakhmetev, a stout, healthy and handsome old man, liked a meal and getting a little drunk after it; was fond of lively conversation and many other things. He used to boast that he had eaten as many as a hundred sour-dough pies at a time; and when he was about sixty he could, with complete impunity, make away with up to a dozen buckwheat pancakes drowned in a pool of butter. These experiments I have witnessed more than once.
Bakhmetev had some shade of influence over my father, or at any rate did keep him in check. When Bakhmetev noticed that my father's ill-humour was beyond bounds, he would put on his hat and say with a military scrape:
'Good-bye-you are ill and stupid to-day; I meant to stay to dinner, but I cannot endure sour faces at table! Gehorsamer Diener!'
And my father by way of explanation would say to me: 'The impresario! What a lively fellow N. N. still is! Thank God, he's a healthy man and cannot understand a suffering Job like me; there are twenty degrees of frost, but he dashes here all the way from Pokrovka in his sledge as though it were nothing . . .
while I thank the Creator every morning that I have woken up alive, that I am still breathing. Oh . . . oh . . . ough . . . ! it's a true proverb; the well-fed don't understand the hungry!'
This was the utmost indulgence that could be expected from him.
From time to time there were family dinners at which the Senator, the Golokhvastovs and others were present, and these dinners were not given casually, nor for the sake of any pleasure to be derived from them, but were due to profound considerations of economy and policy. Thus on the 20th February, the Senator's name-day, there was a dinner at our house, and on the 24th June, my father's name-day, the dinner was at the Senator's, an arrangement which, besides setting a moral example of brotherly love, saved each of them from giving a much bigger dinner at home.
Then there were various habitues; Sonnenberg would appear ex officio, and having just before dinner swallowed a glass of vodka and had a bite of Reval anch..,vy at home he would refuse a minute glass of some specially infused vodka ; sometimes my
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last French tutor would come, a miserly old fellow with saucy phiz, fond of talking scandal. Monsieur Thirie so often made mistakes, pouring wine into his tumbler instead of beer and drinking it off apologetically, that at last my father would say to him,
'The vin de Graves stands on your right side, so you won't make a mistake again,' and Thiric, stuffing a huge pinch of snuff into his broad nose tha t turned up on one side, would spill snuff on his plate.
But the real souf]rc-douleurs at dinner were various old women, the needy, nomadic hangers-on of Princess :\1. A. Khovansky, my father's sister. For the sake of a change, and also partly to find out how everything was going on in our house, \vhether there had been any qua rrPls in the family, whether the cook had not had a fight with his wife, and whetlwr tlw master had not found out tha t Palashka or Clyasha was with child, they would sometimes come on hol idays to spend a whole day. I t must be noted that these widows had forty or fifty years before, when they
\H're still lmmarriPd. bPt•n dPJlPlHh•nts in th<' housPl10ld of my father's aunt, old Princt:>ss ::VIeshchPrsky, and a fterwards in that of lwr daughtPr, all<] had kno\Yl! my father since those days ; that in this intPrval bctwet•n thPir unsPttlPd youth and the nomadic lif<' of their old age they had spent somP twenty years qua rrelli ng \\· ith thei1· husbands, restraining them from drunkenness, looking aftPr them when they \\"Crt' paralysPd, a nd taking them to the dmrchvard. Some had been trail ing from one place to another in BPssa rabia with a garl"ison officer and an armful of children : otlwrs had spent years with a criminal charge hanging over their husb; mds; and all these experiences of life had left upon them the marks of government offices and provincial towns, a d read of the powers of this world, a spirit of abasement and a sort of dull-witted bigotry.
Amazing scenes took place with them.
··why is this, Anna YakimoYna ; are you ill that you don't cat anything?' my father would ask.
Shriuking togdlwr, tht· \Yidow of some inspPctor in KrPmenchug, a wre tclwd old woman with a \vorn, faded face, who a lways srrwlt strongly of sticking plaster, would answer vvith cringing eyes and dep,·ecatiug fingers:
'Forgi,·e me, Ivan Alexeyevich, sir, I am rPally ashamed, but
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there, it is my old-fashioned ways, su. Ha, ha, ha, it's the fast before the Assumption now.'
'Oh, how tiresome! You are always so pious! It's not what goes into the mouth, dear lady, that defiles, but what comes out of it; whether you eat one thing or another, it all goes the same way; now what comes out of the mouth, you must watch over . . .
your judgments of your neighbours. Come, you had better dine at home on such days, or we shall have a Turk coming next asking for pilau ; I don't keep a restaurant a la carte.'