’The hare beneath the bush lies
still,
The hunters vainly scour the hill;
The hare lies hid and holds his breath,
His ears pricked up, he lies there still
Waiting
for death.
O hunters! what harm have I done,
To vex or injure you? Although
Among the cabbages I run,
One leaf I nibble—only one,
And that’s
not yours!
Oh,
no!’
Cucumber went on with ever-increasing energy:
’Into the forest dark he fled,
His tail he let the hunters see;
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” says
he,
“That so I turn my back on you—
I am not
yours!"’
Cucumber was not singing now ... he was bellowing:
’The hunters hunted day and
night,
And still the hare was out of sight.
So, talking over his misdeeds,
They ended by disputing quite—
Alas, the hare is not for us!
The squint-eye is too sharp for us!’
The first two lines of each stanza Cucumber sang with
each syllable drawn out; the other three, on the contrary,
very briskly, and accompanied them with little hops
and shuffles of his feet; at the conclusion of each
verse he cut a caper, in which he kicked himself with
his own heels. As he shouted at the top of his
voice: ’The squint-eye is too sharp for
us!’ he turned a somersault.... His expectations
were fulfilled. The brigadier suddenly went off
into a thin, tearful little chuckle, and laughed so
heartily that he could not go on, and stayed still
in a half-sitting posture, helplessly slapping his
knees with his hands. I looked at his face, flushed
crimson, and convulsively working, and felt very sorry
for him at that instant especially. Encouraged
by his success, Cucumber fell to capering about in
a squatting position, singing the refrain of:
‘Shildi-budildi!’ and ‘Natchiki-tchikaldi!’
He stumbled at last with his nose in the dust....
The brigadier suddenly ceased laughing and hobbled
on.
We went on another quarter of a mile. A little
village came into sight on the edge of a not very
deep ravine; on one side stood the ‘lodge,’
with a half-ruined roof and a solitary chimney; in
one of the two rooms of this lodge lived the brigadier.
The owner of the village, who always resided in Petersburg,
the widow of the civil councillor Lomov, had—so
I learned later—bestowed this little nook
upon the brigadier. She had given orders that
he should receive a monthly pension, and had also
assigned for his service a half-witted serf-girl living
in the same village, who, though she barely understood
human speech, was yet capable, in the lady’s
opinion, of sweeping a floor and cooking cabbage-soup.
At the door of the lodge the brigadier again addressed
me with the same eighteenth-century smile: would
I be pleased to walk into his ‘apartement’?
We went into this ‘apartement.’ Everything
in it was exceedingly filthy and poor, so filthy and
