Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories Page 5

  through which it runs, there stood not long ago a roomy inn, very well

  known to the drivers of troikas, peasants with trains of waggons,

  merchants, clerks, pedlars and the numerous travellers of all sorts

  who journey upon our roads at all times of the year. Everyone used to

  call at the inn; only perhaps a landowner's coach, drawn by six

  home-bred horses, would roll majestically by, which did not prevent

  either the coachman or the groom on the footboard from looking with

  peculiar feeling and attention at the little porch so familiar to them;

  or some poor devil in a wretched little cart and with three five-kopeck

  pieces in the bag in his bosom would urge on his weary nag when he

  reached the prosperous inn, and would hasten on to some night's lodging

  in the hamlets that lie by the high road in a peasant's hut, where he

  would find nothing but bread and hay, but, on the other hand, would not

  have to pay an extra kopeck. Apart from its favourable situation, the

  inn with which our story deals had many attractions: excellent water in

  two deep wells with creaking wheels and iron buckets on a chain; a

  spacious yard with a tiled roof on posts; abundant stores of oats in

  the cellar; a warm outer room with a very huge Russian stove with long

  horizontal flues attached that looked like titanic shoulders, and

  lastly two fairly clean rooms with the walls covered with reddish

  lilac paper somewhat frayed at the lower edge with a painted wooden

  sofa, chairs to match and two pots of geraniums in the windows, which

  were, however, never cleaned--and were dingy with the dust of years.

  The inn had other advantages: the blacksmith's was close by, the mill

  was just at hand; and, lastly, one could get a good meal in it, thanks

  to the cook, a fat and red-faced peasant woman, who prepared rich and

  appetizing dishes and dealt out provisions without stint; the nearest

  tavern was reckoned not half a mile away; the host kept snuff which

  though mixed with wood-ash, was extremely pungent and pleasantly

  irritated the nose; in fact there were many reasons why visitors of

  all sorts were never lacking in that inn. It was liked by those who

  used it--and that is the chief thing; without which nothing, of course,

  would succeed and it was liked principally as it was said in the

  district, because the host himself was very fortunate and successful

  in all his undertakings, though he did not much deserve his good

  fortune; but it seems if a man is lucky, he is lucky.

  The innkeeper was a man of the working class called Naum Ivanov. He

  was a man of middle height with broad, stooping shoulders; he had a

  big round head and curly hair already grey, though he did not look

  more than forty; a full and fresh face, a low but white and smooth

  forehead and little bright blue eyes, out of which he looked in a very

  queer way from under his brows and yet with an insolent expression, a

  combination not often met with. He always held his head down and

  seemed to turn it with difficulty, perhaps because his neck was very

  short. He walked at a trot and did not swing his arms, but slowly

  moved them with his fists clenched as he walked. When he smiled, and

  he smiled often without laughing, as it were smiling to himself, his

  thick lips parted unpleasantly and displayed a row of close-set,

  brilliant teeth. He spoke jerkily and with a surly note in his voice.

  He shaved his beard, but dressed in Russian style. His costume

  consisted of a long, always threadbare, full coat, full breeches and

  shoes on his bare feet. He was often away from home on business and he

  had a great deal of business--he was a horse-dealer, he rented land,

  had a market garden, bought up orchards and traded in various ways--but

  his absences never lasted long; like a kite, to which he had

  considerable resemblance, especially in the expression of his eyes, he

  used to return to his nest. He knew how to keep that nest in order. He

  was everywhere, he listened to everything and gave orders, served out

  stores, sent things out and made up his accounts himself, and never

  knocked off a farthing from anyone's account, but never asked more

  than his due.

  The visitors did not talk to him, and, indeed, he did not care to

  waste words. "I want your money and you want my victuals," he used to

  say, as it were, jerking out each word: "We have not met for a

  christening; the traveller has eaten, has fed his beasts, no need to

  sit on. If he is tired, let him sleep without chattering." The

  labourers he kept were healthy grown-up men, but docile and well

  broken in; they were very much afraid of him. He never touched

  intoxicating liquor and he used to give his men ten kopecks for vodka

  on the great holidays; they did not dare to drink on other days.

  People like Naum quickly get rich ... but to the magnificent position

  in which he found himself--and he was believed to be worth forty or

  fifty thousand roubles--Naum Ivanov had not arrived by the strait

  path....

  The inn had existed on the same spot on the high road twenty years

  before the time from which we date the beginning of our story. It is

  true that it had not then the dark red shingle roof which made Naum

  Ivanov's inn look like a gentleman's house; it was inferior in

  construction and had thatched roofs in the courtyard, and a humble

  fence instead of a wall of logs; nor had it been distinguished by the

  triangular Greek pediment on carved posts; but all the same it had

  been a capital inn--roomy, solid and warm--and travellers were glad to

  frequent it. The innkeeper at that time was not Naum Ivanov, but a

  certain Akim Semyonitch, a serf belonging to a neighbouring lady,

  Lizaveta Prohorovna Kuntse, the widow of a staff officer. This Akim

  was a shrewd trading peasant who, having left home in his youth with

  two wretched nags to work as a carrier, had returned a year later with

  three decent horses and had spent almost all the rest of his life on

  the high roads; he used to go to Kazan and Odessa, to Orenburg and to

  Warsaw and abroad to Leipsic and used in the end to travel with two

  teams, each of three stout, sturdy stallions, harnessed to two huge

  carts. Whether it was that he was sick of his life of homeless

  wandering, whether it was that he wanted to rear a family (his wife

  had died in one of his absences and what children she had borne him

  were dead also), anyway, he made up his mind at last to abandon his

  old calling and to open an inn. With the permission of his mistress,

  he settled on the high road, bought in her name about an acre and a

  half of land and built an inn upon it. The undertaking prospered. He

  had more than enough money to furnish and stock it. The experience he

  had gained in the course of his years of travelling from one end of

  Russia to another was of great advantage to him; he knew how to please

  his visitors, especially his former mates, the drivers of troikas,

  many of whom he knew personally and whose good-will is particularly

  valued by innkeepers, as they need so much food for themselves and

  their powerful beasts. Akim's inn became c
elebrated for hundreds of

  miles round. People were even readier to stay with him than with his

  successor, Naum, though Akim could not be compared with Naum as a

  manager. Under Akim everything was in the old-fashioned style, snug,

  but not over clean; and his oats were apt to be light, or musty; the

  cooking, too, was somewhat indifferent: dishes were sometimes put on

  the table which would better have been left in the oven and it was not

  that he was stingy with the provisions, but just that the cook had not

  looked after them. On the other hand, he was ready to knock off

  something from the price and did not refuse to trust a man's word for

  payment--he was a good man and a genial host. In talking, in

  entertaining, he was lavish, too; he would sometimes chatter away over

  the samovar till his listeners pricked up their ears, especially when

  he began telling them about Petersburg, about the Circassian steppes,

  or even about foreign parts; and he liked getting a little drunk with

  a good companion, but not disgracefully so, more for the sake of

  company, as his guests used to say of him. He was a great favourite

  with merchants and with all people of what is called the old school,

  who do not set off for a journey without tightening up their belts and

  never go into a room without making the sign of the cross, and never

  enter into conversation with a man without first wishing him good

  health. Even Akim's appearance disposed people in his favour: he was

  tall, rather thin, but graceful even at his advanced years; he had a

  long face, with fine-looking regular features, a high and open brow, a

  straight and delicate nose and a small mouth. His brown and prominent

  eyes positively shone with friendly gentleness, his soft, scanty hair

  curled in little rings about his neck; he had very little left on the

  top of his head. Akim's voice was very pleasant, though weak; in his

  youth he had been a good singer, but continual travelling in the open

  air in the winter had affected his chest. But he talked very smoothly

  and sweetly. When he laughed wrinkles like rays that were very

  charming came round his eyes:--such wrinkles are only to be seen in

  kind-hearted people. Akim's movements were for the most part

  deliberate and not without a certain confidence and dignified courtesy

  befitting a man of experience who had seen a great deal in his day.

  In fact, Akim--or Akim Semyonitch as he was called even in his

  mistress's house, to which he often went and invariably on Sundays

  after mass--would have been excellent in all respects--if he had not

  had one weakness which has been the ruin of many men on earth, and was

  in the end the ruin of him, too--a weakness for the fair sex. Akim's

  susceptibility was extreme, his heart could never resist a woman's

  glance: he melted before it like the first snow of autumn in the

  sun ... and dearly he had to pay for his excessive sensibility.

  For the first year after he had set up on the high road Akim was so

  busy with building his yard, stocking the place, and all the business

  inseparable from moving into a new house that he had absolutely no

  time to think of women and if any sinful thought came into his mind he

  immediately drove it away by reading various devotional works for

  which he cherished a profound respect (he had learned to read when

  first he left home), singing the psalms in a low voice or some other

  pious occupation. Besides, he was then in his forty-sixth year and at

  that time of life every passion grows perceptibly calmer and cooler

  and the time for marrying was past. Akim himself began to think that,

  as he expressed it, this foolishness was over and done with ... But

  evidently there is no escaping one's fate.

  Akim's former mistress, Lizaveta Prohorovna Kuntse, the widow of an

  officer of German extraction, was herself a native of Mittau, where

  she had spent the first years of her childhood and where she had

  numerous poor relations, about whom she concerned herself very little,

  especially after a casual visit from one of her brothers, an infantry

  officer of the line. On the day after his arrival he had made a great

  disturbance and almost beaten the lady of the house, calling her "du

  lumpenmamselle," though only the evening before he had called her in

  broken Russian: "sister and benefactor." Lizaveta Prohorovna lived

  almost permanently on her pretty estate which had been won by the

  labours of her husband who had been an architect. She managed it

  herself and managed it very well. Lizaveta Prohorovna never let slip

  the slightest advantage; she turned everything into profit for

  herself; and this, as well as her extraordinary capacity for making a

  farthing do the work of a halfpenny, betrayed her German origin; in

  everything else she had become very Russian. She kept a considerable

  number of house serfs, especially many maids, who earned their salt,

  however: from morning to night their backs were bent over their work.

  She liked driving out in her carriage with grooms in livery on the

  footboard. She liked listening to gossip and scandal and was a clever

  scandal-monger herself; she liked to lavish favours upon someone, then

  suddenly crush him with her displeasure, in fact, Lizaveta Prohorovna

  behaved exactly like a lady. Akim was in her good graces; he paid her

  punctually every year a very considerable sum in lieu of service; she

  talked graciously to him and even, in jest, invited him as a guest...

  but it was precisely in his mistress's house that trouble was in store

  for Akim.

  Among Lizaveta Prohorovna's maidservants was an orphan girl of twenty

  called Dunyasha. She was good-looking, graceful and neat-handed;

  though her features were irregular, they were pleasing; her fresh

  complexion, her thick flaxen hair, her lively grey eyes, her

  little round nose, her rosy lips and above all her half-mocking,

  half-provocative expression--were all rather charming in their way. At

  the same time, in spite of her forlorn position, she was strict, almost

  haughty in her deportment. She came of a long line of house serfs. Her

  father, Arefy, had been a butler for thirty years, while her

  grandfather, Stepan had been valet to a prince and officer of the

  Guards long since dead. She dressed neatly and was vain over her

  hands, which were certainly very beautiful. Dunyasha made a show of

  great disdain for all her admirers; she listened to their compliments

  with a self-complacent little smile and if she answered them at all it

  was usually some exclamation such as: "Yes! Likely! As though I

  should! What next!" These exclamations were always on her lips.

  Dunyasha had spent about three years being trained in Moscow where she

  had picked up the peculiar airs and graces which distinguish

  maidservants who have been in Moscow or Petersburg. She was spoken of