"Do come, dear Granddaddy," Vanka went on. "For Christ's sake, I beg you, take me away from here. Have pity on me, an unhappy orphan, here everyone beats me, and I am terribly hungry, and I am so blue, I can't tell you how, I keep crying. And the other day the master hit me on the head with a last, so that I fell down and it was a long time before I came to. My life is miserable, worse than a dog's— I also send greetings to Alyona, one-eyed Yegorka and the coachman, and don't give my harmonica to anyone. I remain, your grandson, Ivan Zhukov, dear Granddaddy, do come."
Vanka twice folded the sheet covered with writing and put it into an envelope he had bought for a kopeck the previous day. He reflected a while, then dipped the pen into the ink and wrote the address:
To Grandfather in the village
Then he scratched himself, thought a little, and added: Konstantin Makarych. Glad that no one had interrupted him at his writing, he put on his cap and, without slip- ping on his coat, ran out into the street with nothing over his shirt.
The clerks at the butchers' whom he had questioned the day before had told him that letters were dropped into letter boxes and from the boxes they were carried all over the world in troikas with ringing bells and drunken drivers. Vanka ran to the nearest letter box and thrust the precious letter into the slit.
An hour later, lulled by sweet hopes, he was fast asleep. In his dream he saw the stove. On the stove sat grandfather, his bare legs hanging down, and read the letter to the cooks. Near the stove was Wriggles, wag- ging his tail.
1886
Tlu Privy Councilor
T THE beginning of April in 1870 my mother,
Klavdia Arhipovna, the widow of a lieutenant, received from her brother Ivan, a privy councilor who lived in Petersburg, a letter in which, among other things, this passage occurred: "My liver trouble forces me to spend every summer abroad, and as I have not at the moment the money in hand for a bip to Marien- bad, it is very possible, dear sister, that I may spend this summer with you at Kochuevko. . . ."
On reading the letter my mother turned pale and be- gan trembling all over; then an expression of mingled tears and laughter came into her face. She began crying and laughing. This conflict of tears and laughter always reminds me of the flickering and spluttering of a brightly burning candle when one sprinkles it with water. Hav- ing reread the letter, mother called together all the house- hold, and in a voice broken with emotion began explain- ing to us that there had been four Gundasov brothers: one Gundasov had died as a baby; another had gone into the anny, and he, too, was dead; the third, without offence to him be it said, was an actor; the fourth—
"The fourth has risen far above us," my mother brought out tearfully. "My own brother, we grew up to- gether; and I am all of a tremble, all of a tremble! . . . A privy councilor, a General! How shall I meet him, my angel brother? What can I, a foolish, uneducated woman, talk to him about? It's fifteen years since I've seen him! Andryushenka," my mother turned to me, "you must rejoice, little stupid! It's a piece of luck for you that God is sending him to us!"
After we had heard a detailed history of the Gun- dasovs, there followed a fuss and bustle in the place such as I had been accustomed to see only before Christ- mas. The sky above and the water in the river were all that escaped; everything else was subjected to a merci- less cleansing, scrubbing, painting. If the sky had been lower and smaller and the river had not flowed so swiftly, they would have scoured them, too, with brick dust and rubbed them, too, with tow. Our walls were as white as snow, but they were whitewashed; the floors were bright and shining, but they were washed every day. The cat Bobtail (as a small child I had cut off a good quarter of his tail with the knife used for chopping sugar, and that was why he was called Bobtail) was car- ried off to the kitchen and put in care of Anisya; Fedka was told that if any of the dogs came near the front-door "God would punish him." But no one was treated so roughly as the poor sofas, easy-chairs, and rugs! They had never before been so violently beaten as on this oc- casion in preparation for our visitor. My pigeons took fright at the loud thud of the sticks, and were continu- ally soaring into the sky.
The tailor Spiridon, the only tailor in the whole dis- trict who ventured to work for the genby, came over from Novostroevka. He was a hard-working, capable man who did not drink and was not without a certain fancy and feeling for form, but was nevertheless an atrocious tailor. His work was ruined by hesitation. . . The idea that his cut was not fashionable enough made him alter everything half a dozen times, walk all the way to the town simply to study the dandies, and in the end dress us in suits that even a caricaturist would have called outre and grotesque. We cut a dash in impossibly tight trousers and in such short jackets that we always felt quite abashed in the presence of young ladies.
This Spiridon spent a long time taking my measure. He measured me all over lengthways and crossways, as though he meant to put hoops round me like a barrel; then he spent a long time noting down my measure- ments with a thick pencil on a bit of paper, and ticked off all the measurements with triangular signs. When he had finished with me he set to work on my tutor, Yegor Alexeyevich Pobedimsky. My unforgettable tutor was then at the stage when young men watch the growth of their mustache and are critical of their clothes, and so you can imagine the religious awe with which Spiridon approached him! Yegor Alexeyevich had to throw back his head, straddle his legs like an inverted V, lift up his arms, let them fall. Spiridon measured him several times, walking round him during the process like a lovesick dove round its mate, going down on one knee, bending double. . . . My mother, weary, exhausted by her exertions and headachey from ironing, watched these lengthy proceedings, and said:
"Mind now, Spiridon, you will have to answer for it to God if you spoil the cloth! And you wiU never have any luck if the clothes don't fit!"
Mother's words threw Spiridon first into a fever, then into a perspiration, for he was convinced that the clothes wouldn't fit. He received one ruble twenty kopecks for making my suit, and for Pobedimsky's two rubles, we providing the cloth, the lining, and the buttons. The price cannot be considered excessive, as Novostroevka was about six miles from us, and the tailor came to fit us four times. When he came to try the things on and we squeezed ourselvĉs into the tight trousers and jackets full of basting threads, mother always frowned con- temptuously and expressed her surprise:
"Goodness knows what the fashions are coming to nowadays! I am positively ashamed to look at them. If brother were not used to Petersburg I would not get you fashionable clothes!"
Spiridon, relieved that the blame was thrown on the fashions and not on him, shrugged his shoulders and sighed, as though to say:
"Theres no help for it; it's the spirit of the age!" The excitement with which we awaited the arrival of our guest can only be compared to the strained suspense with which spiritualists await from minute to minute the appearance of a ghost. Mother went about with a sick headache, and was continually melting into tears. I lost my appetite, slept badly, and did not do my lessons. Even in my dreams I was haunted by an impatient long- ing to see a General—that is, a man with shoulder- straps and an embroidered collar sticking up to his ears, and with a naked sword in his hands, exactly like the one who hung over the sofa in our drawing room and glared with terrible black eyes at everybody who dared to look at him. Pobedimsky was the only one who felt himself in his element. He was neither terrified nor de- lighted, and merely from time to time, when he heard the history of the Gundasov family, said: