was ordered by him from Moscow; but the agent recommended
to him, conceiving that connoisseurs in sculpture
were not often to be met with in the provinces, sent
him, instead of an angel, a goddess Flora, which had
for many years adorned one of those neglected gardens
near Moscow, laid out in the days of Catherine.
He had an excellent reason for doing so, since this
statue, though highly artistic, in the rococo style,
with plump little arms, tossing curls, a wreath of
roses round the bare bosom, and a serpentine figure,
was obtained by him, the agent, for nothing. And
so to this day the mythological goddess stands, with
one foot elegantly lifted, above the tomb of Tihon
Ivanovitch, and with a genuinely Pompadour simper,
gazes at the calves and sheep, those invariable visitors
of our village graveyards, as they stray about her.
III
On the loss of his faithful friend, Tchertop-hanov
again took to drink, and this time far more seriously.
Everything went utterly to the bad with him.
He had no money left for sport; the last of his meagre
fortune was spent; the last of his few servants ran
away. Panteley Eremyitch’s isolation became
complete: he had no one to speak a word to even,
far less to open his heart to. His pride alone
had suffered no diminution. On the contrary,
the worse his surroundings became, the more haughty
and lofty and inaccessible he was himself. He
became a complete misanthrope in the end. One
distraction, one delight, was left him: a superb
grey horse, of the Don breed, named by him Malek-Adel,
a really wonderful animal.
This horse came into his possession in this fashion.
As he was riding one day through a neighbouring village,
Tchertop-hanov heard a crowd of peasants shouting
and hooting before a tavern. In the middle of
the crowd stalwart arms were continually rising and
falling in exactly the same place.
‘What is happening there?’ he asked, in
the peremptory tone peculiar to him, of an old peasant
woman who was standing on the threshold of her hut.
Leaning against the doorpost as though dozing, the
old woman stared in the direction of the tavern.
A white-headed urchin in a print smock, with a cypress-wood
cross on his little bare breast, was sitting with
little outstretched legs, and little clenched fists
between her bast slippers; a chicken close by was
chipping at a stale crust of rye-bread.
‘The Lord knows, your honour,’ answered
the old woman. Bending forward, she laid her
wrinkled brown hand on the child’s head.
’They say our lads are beating a Jew.’
‘A Jew? What Jew?’
’The Lord knows, your honour. A Jew came
among us; and where he’s come from—who
knows? Vassya, come to your mammy, sir; sh, sh,
nasty brute!’
The old woman drove away the chicken, while Vassya
clung to her petticoat.
‘So, you see, they’re beating him, sir.’
‘Why beating him? What for?’
Copyrights
A Sportsman's Sketches, Volume 2 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
