Since then I have heard no more of Musa.
PARIS, 1874.
About thirty miles from our village there lived, many
years ago, a distant cousin of my mother’s,
a retired officer of the Guards, and rather wealthy
landowner, Alexey Sergeitch Teliegin. He lived
on his estate and birth-place, Suhodol, did not go
out anywhere, and so did not visit us; but I used
to be sent, twice a year, to pay him my respects—at
first with my tutor, but later on alone. Alexey
Sergeitch always gave me a very cordial reception,
and I used to stay three or four days at a time with
him. He was an old man even when I first made
his acquaintance; I was twelve, I remember, on my first
visit, and he was then over seventy. He was born
in the days of the Empress Elisabeth—in
the last year of her reign. He lived alone with
his wife, Malania Pavlovna; she was ten years younger
than he. They had two daughters; but their daughters
had been long married, and rarely visited Suhodol;
they were not on the best of terms with their parents,
and Alexey Sergeitch hardly ever mentioned their names.
I see, even now, the old-fashioned house, a typical
manor-house of the steppes. One story in height,
with immense attics, it was built at the beginning
of this century, of amazingly thick beams of pine,—such
beams came in plenty in those days from the Zhizdrinsky
pine-forests; they have passed out of memory now!
It was very spacious, and contained a great number
of rooms, rather low-pitched and dark, it is true;
the windows in the walls had been made small for the
sake of greater warmth. In the usual fashion
(I ought rather to say, in what was then the usual
fashion), the offices and house-serfs’ huts surrounded
the manorial house on all sides, and the garden was
close to it—a small garden, but containing
fine fruit-trees, juicy apples, and pipless pears.
The flat steppe of rich, black earth stretched for
ten miles round. No lofty object for the eye;
not a tree, nor even a belfry; somewhere, maybe, jutting
up, a windmill, with rents in its sails; truly, well-named
Suhodol, or Dry-flat! Inside the house the rooms
were filled with ordinary, simple furniture; somewhat
unusual was the milestone-post that stood in the window
of the drawing-room, with the following inscription:—’If
you walk sixty-eight times round this drawing-room
you will have gone a mile; if you walk eighty-seven
times from the furthest corner of the parlour to the
right-hand corner of the billiard-room, you will have
gone a mile,’ and so on. But what most of
all impressed a guest at the house for the first time
was the immense collection of pictures hanging on
the walls, for the most part works of the so-called
Italian masters: all old-fashioned landscapes
of a sort, or mythological and religious subjects.
But all these pictures were very dark, and even cracked
with age;—in one, all that met the eye was
some patches of flesh-colour; in another, undulating
