To this day I cannot forget an old couple from times past, who, alas, are no more, yet my soul is still filled with pity and my feelings are strangely wrung when I imagine myself coming again some day to their former, now-deserted dwelling and seeing a cluster of tumbledown cottages, an untended pond, an overgrown ditch in the place where the little low house used to stand-and nothing more. Sad! I feel sad beforehand! But let us turn to the story.
Afanasy Ivanovich Tovstogub and Pulkheria Ivanovna, the Tov-stogub wife, as the neighboring peasants called her, were the old folk I was beginning to tell about. If I were a painter and wanted to portray Philemon and Baucis 1 on canvas, I would never choose any other original than them. Afanasy Ivanovich was sixty years old, Pulkheria Ivanovna fifty-five. Afanasy Ivanovich was tall, always went about in a sheepskin coat covered with camlet, sat hunched over, and almost always smiled, whether talking or merely listening. Pulkheria Ivanovna was rather serious, she hardly ever laughed, but there was so much kindness written in her face and eyes, so much readiness to treat you to the best of everything they had, that you would surely have found a smile much too sugary on her kind face. The pattern of light wrinkles on their faces was so pleasant that an artist would surely have stolen it. By it one seemed able to read their whole life, the serene, calm life led by old, native-born, simple-hearted and yet wealthy families, who are always such a contrast to those low Little Russians who push their way up from tar-makers and dealers, fill the courts and government offices like locusts, rip the last kopeck out of their own compatriots, flood Petersburg with pettifoggers, finally make some fortune, and to their last name, which ends in o, solemnly add the letter v. 2 No, like all the ancient and native-born families of Little Russia, they bore no resemblance to these despicable and pathetic creatures.
It was impossible to look at their mutual love without sympathy. They never spoke to each other informally but always with respect, as Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulkheria Ivanovna. "Was it you who went through the seat of the chair, Afanasy Ivanovich?" "No matter, don't be angry, Pulkheria Ivanovna, it was me." They never had children, and therefore all their affection was focused on themselves. Once, when he was young, Afanasy Ivanovich had served in the volunteer cavalry, later he became a staff major, but that was very long ago, a bygone thing, Afanasy Ivanovich himself hardly ever recalled it. Afanasy Ivanovich had married at the age of thirty, when he was a fine fellow and wore an embroidered uniform; he had even abducted Pulkheria Ivanovna rather adroitly when her relations refused to give her to him; but of that, too, he remembered very little, or at least never spoke.
All these long-past, extraordinary events were replaced by a quiet and solitary life, by those drowsy and at the same time harmonious reveries which you experience sitting on a village bal- cony overlooking the garden, when a wonderful rain makes a luxuriant splashing on the leaves, pouring down in bubbling streams and casting a drowsy spell over your limbs, and meanwhile a rainbow steals from behind the trees and like a half-ruined arch shines with its seven muted colors in the sky. Or when you are rocked by a carriage bobbing between green shrubs, and a steppe quail throbs, and fragrant grass together with wildflowers and ears of wheat poke through the doors of the carriage, striking you pleasantly on the hands and face.
He always listened with a pleasant smile to the guests who came to see him, and sometimes spoke himself, but mainly to ask questions. He was not one of those old people who make a nuisance of themselves, eternally praising the old days or denouncing the new. On the contrary, in questioning you, he showed great curiosity and concern for the circumstances of your own life, its successes and failures, which always interest all kindly old men, though it somewhat resembled the curiosity of a child who, while talking to you, studies your watch fob. In those moments his face, one might say, breathed kindness.
The rooms of the house in which our old folk lived were small, low, such as one meets among old world people. In each room there was an enormous stove that took up almost a third of it. These rooms were terribly warm, because Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulkheria Ivanovna were both very fond of warmth. The fireboxes were all in the front hall, which was always filled nearly to the ceiling with the straw customarily used instead of wood in Little Russia. The crackling of this burning straw and its light made the front hall very pleasant on a winter evening, when ardent youths, chilled in the pursuit of some swarthy beauty, came running in clapping their hands. The walls of the rooms were adorned with several paintings, big and small, in old-fashioned narrow frames. I'm certain that the hosts themselves had long forgotten their content, and if some had been taken away, they surely would not have noticed it. There were two large oil portraits. One of them represented some bishop, the other Peter III. 3 The Duchess of La Valliиre, 4 stained by flies, looked out from a narrow frame.
Around the windows and over the door there were many small pictures, such as one somehow gets used to regarding as spots on the wall and therefore simply does not look at. The floors in almost all the rooms were of clay, but it was beaten down so neatly and kept so clean, as surely no parquet is kept in any rich house where a drowsy gendeman in livery lazily does the sweeping.
Pulkheria Ivanovna's room was all filled with chests, boxes, little boxes, and little chests. A multitude of little bundles and bags with flower, vegetable, and watermelon seeds hung on the walls. A multitude of balls of yarn of various colors, of scraps from old dresses made in the course of half a century, was tucked into the corners of the chests and between them. Pulkheria Ivanovna was a great manager and collected everything, sometimes without knowing of what use it would be later.
But the most remarkable thing in the house was the singing doors. As soon as morning came, the singing of the doors sounded throughout the house. I'm unable to say why they sang-whether it was the fault of rusty hinges, or the workman who made them concealed some secret in them-but the remarkable thing was that each door had its own special voice: the door to the bedroom sang in the highest treble, the dining room door in a hoarse bass, while the one in the front hall produced some strange cracked and at the same time moaning sound, so that, listening attentively, one could finally hear quite clearly: "My, oh, my, how cold I am!" I know that many people dislike this sound very much; but I have a great love for it, and if I happen now to hear the occasional creaking of a door, it immediately smells of the village to me, of the low little room lit by a candle in an old-fashioned candlestick, of supper already set on the table, of the dark May night gazing at the laid table through the open window from the garden, of the nightingale showering the garden, the house, and the distant river with his trills, of the fright and rustling of the branches… and, God, what a long string of memories comes to me then!
The chairs in the room were wooden, massive, as is usual with old-time things; they all had high, carved backs, natural, with no varnish or paint; they were not even upholstered, and somewhat resembled the chairs on which bishops sit to this day. Triangular tables in the corners, a rectangular one in front of the sofa, and a mirror in a narrow gilt frame with carved leaves, which flies had covered with black specks, a rug in front of the sofa with birds looking like flowers and flowers looking like birds-these were about all the furnishings in the unpretentious house where my old couple lived.