your tongue, serf!’ he grumbled. ‘One-eyed vermin! Say what you please, but don’t talk about respectable people!’
‘I’m not speaking of you, Pëtr Egorych,’ Kuz’ma said imperturbably.
‘I’m not talking about myself, blockhead! Besides… Forgive me, your Excellency,’ the bailiff turned to the Count, ‘forgive me for making a scene, but I would beg your Excellency to forbid your Leporello, as you were pleased to call him, to extend his zeal to persons who are worthy of all respect!’
‘I don’t understand…’ the Count lisped naively. ‘He has said nothing very offensive.’
Insulted and excited to a degree, Urbenin went away from the table and stood with his side towards us. With his arms crossed on his breast and his eyes blinking, hiding his purple face from us behind the branches of the bushes, he stood plunged in thought.
Had not this man a presentiment that in the near future his moral feelings would have to suffer offences a thousand times more bitter?
‘I don’t understand what has offended him!’ the Count whispered in my ear. ‘What a caution! There was nothing offensive in what was said.’
After two years of sober living, the glass of vodka acted on me in a slightly intoxicating manner. A feeling of lightness, of pleasure, was diffused in my brain and through my whole body. Added to this, I began to feel the coolness of evening, which little by little was supplanting the sultriness of the day. I proposed to take a stroll. The Count and his new Polish friend had their coats brought from the house, and we set off. Urbenin followed us.
CHAPTER III
The Count’s gardens in which we were walking demand special description for their lushness and splendour. From a botanical or an economical point of view, and in many other ways, they are richer and grander than any other gardens I have ever seen. Besides the avenue already mentioned with its green vaults, you found in them everything that capricious indulgence can demand from pleasure gardens. You found here every variety of indigenous and foreign fruit tree, beginning with the wild cherry and plum and finishing with apricots that were the size of a goose’s egg. You came across mulberry trees, barberry bushes, and even olive trees at every step… Here there were half-ruined, moss-grown grottoes, fountains, little ponds destined for goldfish and tame carp, hillocks, pavilions and costly conservatories… And all this rare luxury which had been collected by the hands of grandfathers and fathers, all this wealth of large, full roses, poetical grottoes and endless avenues had been barbarously abandoned, given over to thieves who attacked the trees with their axes, and to the rooks who unceremoniously built their ugly nests on the branches of rare trees! The lawful possessor of all this wealth walked beside me, and the muscles of his lean, satiated face were no more moved by the sight of this neglect, this crying human slovenliness, than if he had not been the owner of these gardens. Once only, by way of making some remark, he said to his bailiff that it would not be a bad thing if the paths were sanded. He noticed the absence of the sand that troubled nobody else, but not the bare trees that had been frozen in the hard winters, or the cows that were walking about in the garden. In reply to his remark, Urbenin said it would require ten men to keep the garden in order, and as his Excellency was not pleased to reside on his estate, the outlay on the garden would be a useless and unproductive luxury. The Count, of course, agreed with this argument.
‘Besides, I must confess I have no time for it!’ Urbenin said with a wave of the hand. ‘All the summer in the fields, and in winter selling the corn in town… There’s no time for gardens here!’
The charm of the principal, the so-called ‘main avenue’, consisted in its old broad-spreading limes, and in the masses of tulips that stretched out in two variegated borders at each side of its length and finished at the end in a yellow stone pavilion, which at one time had contained a refreshment room, billiards, skittles and other games. We wandered, somewhat aimlessly, towards this pavilion. At its door we were confronted by a reptile whose appearance somewhat unsettled the nerves of my companion, who was never very courageous.
‘A snake!’ the Count shrieked, seizing me by the hand and turning pale. ‘Look!’
The Pole stepped back, and then stood stock still with his arms outstretched as if he wanted to bar the way for the apparition. On the upper step of the crumbling stone stair there lay a young snake of our ordinary Russian species. When it saw us it raised its head and moved. The Count shrieked again and hid behind me.
‘Don’t be afraid, your Excellency…’ Urbenin said lazily as he placed his foot on the first step.
‘But if it bites?’
‘It won’t bite. Besides, the danger from the bite of these snakes is much exaggerated. I was once bitten by an old snake, and, as you see, I didn’t die. A man’s sting is worse than a snake’s!’ Urbenin said with a sigh, wishing to point a moral.
Indeed, the bailiff had not had time to mount two or three steps before the snake stretched out to its full length, and with the speed of lightning vanished into a crevice between two stones. When we entered the pavilion we were confronted by another creature. Lying on the torn and faded cloth of the old billiard table was an elderly man of middle height in a blue jacket, striped trousers, and a jockey cap. He was sleeping sweetly and quietly. Around his toothless gaping mouth and on his pointed nose flies were making themselves at home. Thin as a skeleton, with an open mouth, lying there immovable, he looked like a corpse that had only just been brought in from the mortuary to be dissected.
‘Franz!’ said Urbenin, poking him. ‘Franz!’
After being poked five or six times, Franz shut his mouth, sat up, looked round at us, and lay down again. A minute later his mouth was again open and the flies that were walking about his nose were again disturbed by the slight vibration of his snores.
‘He’s asleep, the dirty pig!’ Urbenin sighed.
‘Isn’t that our gardener, Tricher?’ the Count asked.
‘The very same… That’s how he is every day… He sleeps like a dead man all day and plays cards all night. I was told he gambled last night till six in the morning.’
‘What do they play?’
‘Games of hazard… Chiefly stukolka.’
‘Well, such gentlemen work badly. They draw their wages for nothing!’
‘It was not to complain, your Excellency,’ Urbenin hastened to say, ‘that I told you this, or to express my dissatisfaction; it was only… I am only sorry that so capable a man is a slave to his passions. He really is a hardworking man, capable too… He does not receive wages for nothing.’
We glanced again at the gambler Franz and left the pavilion. We then turned towards the garden gate and went into the fields.
There are few novels in which the garden gate does not play an important part. If you have not noticed this, you have only to inquire of my man Polycarp, who in his lifetime has swallowed multitudes of dreadful and not so dreadful novels, and he will doubtless confirm this insignificant but characteristic fact.
My novel has also not escaped the inevitable garden gate. But my gate is different from others in this, that my pen will have to lead through it many unfortunate and scarcely any happy people;
