Many of her old friends have given up going to Tatyana
Borissovna’s.
DEATH
I have a neighbour, a young landowner and a young
sportsman. One fine July morning I rode over
to him with a proposition that we should go out grouse-shooting
together. He agreed. ‘Only let’s
go,’ he said, ’to my underwoods at Zusha;
I can seize the opportunity to have a look at Tchapligino;
you know my oakwood; they’re felling timber there.’
’By all means.’ He ordered his horse
to be saddled, put on a green coat with bronze buttons,
stamped with a boar’s head, a game-bag embroidered
in crewels, and a silver flask, slung a new-fangled
French gun over his shoulder, turned himself about
with some satisfaction before the looking-glass, and
called his dog, Hope, a gift from his cousin, an old
maid with an excellent heart, but no hair on her head.
We started. My neighbour took with him the village
constable, Arhip, a stout, squat peasant with a square
face and jaws of antediluvian proportions, and an
overseer he had recently hired from the Baltic provinces,
a youth of nineteen, thin, flaxen-haired, and short-sighted,
with sloping shoulders and a long neck, Herr Gottlieb
von der Kock. My neighbour had himself only recently
come into the property. It had come to him by
inheritance from an aunt, the widow of a councillor
of state, Madame Kardon-Kataev, an excessively stout
woman, who did nothing but lie in her bed, sighing
and groaning. We reached the underwoods.
’You wait for me here at the clearing,’
said Ardalion Mihalitch (my neighbour) addressing his
companions. The German bowed, got off his horse,
pulled a book out of his pocket—a novel
of Johanna Schopenhauer’s, I fancy—and
sat down under a bush; Arhip remained in the sun without
stirring a muscle for an hour. We beat about
among the bushes, but did not come on a single covey.
Ardalion Mihalitch announced his intention of going
on to the wood. I myself had no faith, somehow,
in our luck that day; I, too, sauntered after him.
We got back to the clearing. The German noted
the page, got up, put the book in his pocket, and
with some difficulty mounted his bob-tailed, broken-winded
mare, who neighed and kicked at the slightest touch;
Arhip shook himself, gave a tug at both reins at once,
swung his legs, and at last succeeded in starting his
torpid and dejected nag. We set off.
I had been familiar with Ardalion Mihalitch’s
wood from my childhood. I had often strolled
in Tchapligino with my French tutor, Monsieur Desire
Fleury, the kindest of men (who had, however, almost
ruined my constitution for life by dosing me with
Leroux’s mixture every evening). The whole
wood consisted of some two or three hundred immense
oaks and ash-trees. Their stately, powerful trunks
were magnificently black against the transparent golden
green of the nut bushes and mountain-ashes; higher
up, their wide knotted branches stood out in graceful
