‘A merry fellow!’ observed Filofey when
we had driven nearly fifty yards from the tavern.
We got into Tula at last: I bought shot, and
while I was about it, tea and spirits, and even got
a horse from the horse-dealer.
At mid-day we set off home again. As we drove
by the place where we first heard the rattle of the
cart behind us, Filofey, who, having had something
to drink at Tula, turned out to be very talkative—he
even began telling me fairy-tales—as he
passed the place, suddenly burst out laughing.
’Do you remember, master, how I kept saying
to you, “A rattle... a rattle of wheels,”
I said!’
He waved his hand several times. This expression
struck him as most amusing. The same evening
we got back to his village.
I related the adventure that had befallen us to Yermolai.
Being sober, he expressed no sympathy; he only gave
a grunt—whether of approval or reproach,
I imagine he did not know himself. But two days
later he informed me, with great satisfaction, that
the very night Filofey and I had been driving to Tula,
and on the very road, a merchant had been robbed and
murdered. I did not at first put much faith in
this, but later on I was obliged to believe it:
it was confirmed by the police captain, who came galloping
over in consequence.
Was not that perhaps the ‘wedding’ our
brave spirits were returning from?—wasn’t
that the ‘fine fellow’ they had ‘put
to bed,’ in the words of the jocose giant?
I stayed five days longer in Filofey’s village.
Whenever I meet him I always say to him: ‘A
rattle of wheels? Eh?’
‘A merry fellow!’ he always answers, and
bursts out laughing.
THE FOREST AND THE STEPPE
’And slowly something began to draw
him,
Back to the country, to the garden
dark,
Where lime-trees are so huge, so
full of shade,
And lilies of the valley, sweet
as maids,
Where rounded willows o’er
the water’s edge
Lean from the dyke in rows, and
where the oak
Sturdily grows above the sturdy
field,
Amid the smell of hemp and nettles
rank...
There, there, in meadows stretching
wide,
Where rich and black as velvet is
the earth,
Where the sweet rye, far as the
eye can see,
Moves noiselessly in tender, billowing
waves,
And where the heavy golden light
is shed
From out of rounded, white, transparent
clouds:
There it is good....’
(From a poem, devoted to the
flames.)
The reader is, very likely, already weary of my sketches;
I hasten to reassure him by promising to confine myself
to the fragments already printed; but I cannot refrain
from saying a few words at parting about a sportman’s
life.
Hunting with a dog and a gun is delightful in itself,
fuer sich, as they used to say in old days;
but let us suppose you were not born a sportsman,
but are fond of nature all the same; you cannot then
help envying us sportsmen.... Listen.
