Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy | ||
XXVIII
Perhaps peasant to him means merely — bad smell. He always feels it, and involuntarily has to talk of it.
Last night I told him of my battle with General Kornet's wife; he laughed until he cried and he got a pain in his side and groaned and kept on crying out in a thin scream:
"With the shovel! On the bottom with the shovel, eh? Right on the bottom! Was it a broad shovel?"
Then, after a pause, he said seriously: "It was generous in you to strike her like that; any other man would have struck her
"I don't remember. I hardly think that I can have understood."
"Well now! But it's obvious. Of course she wanted you."
"I did not live for that then."
"Whatever you may live for, it's all the same. You are evidently not much of a lady's man. Any one else in your place would have made his fortune out of the situation, would have become a landed proprietor and have ended by making one of a pair of drunkards."
After a silence: "You are funny — don't be offended — very funny. And it's very strange that you should still be good-natured when you might well be spiteful. . . . Yes, you might well be spiteful. . . . You're strong . . . that's good. . . ."
And after another silence, he added thoughtfully: "Your mind I don't understand — it's a very tangled mind — but your heart is sensible . . . yes, a sensible heart."
When I lived in Kazan, I entered the service
"Pauline, give me something."
"Something" always meant the same thing — a glass of wine with ice in it.
In the basement of her house there lived three young ladies, the princesses D. G., whose mother was dead and whose father, a commissariat General, had gone off elsewhere. General Kornet's widow took a dislike to the girls and tried to get rid of them by doing every kind of offensive thing to them. She spoke Russian badly, but swore superbly, like an expert drayman. I very much disliked her attitude towards these harmless girls — they looked so sad, frightened, and defenceless.
"You, I know you! You get through their window at night."
I was angry, and, taking her by the shoulders, pushed her away from the gate; but she broke away and, facing me, quickly undid her dress, lifted up her chemise, and shouted:
"I'm nicer than those rats."
Then I lost my temper. I took her by the neck, turned her round, and struck her with my shovel below the back, so that she skipped out of the gate and ran across the yard, crying out three times in great surprise: "O! O! O!"
After that, I got my passport from her confidante, Pauline — also a drunken but very wily woman — took my bundle under my arm, and left the place; and the General's widow, standing at the window with a red shawl in her hand, shouted: —
"I won't call the police — it's all right — listen — come back — don't be afraid."
Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy | ||