This respectable old man was constantly out of temper or half-drunk, or both together. He idealised the duties of his office and attributed to them a solemn importance. He could lower the steps of a carriage with a peculiarly loud rattle; when he banged a carriage-door he made more noise than the report of a gun. He stood on the rumble surly and straight, and, every time that a hole in the road gave him a jolt, he called out to the coachman, “Easy there!” in a deep voice of displeasure, though the hole was by that time five yards behind the carriage.
His chief occupation, other than going out with the carriage, was self-imposed. It consisted in training the pantry-boys in the standard of manners demanded by the servants’ hall. As long as he was sober, this went well enough; but when he was affected by liquor, he was severe and exacting beyond belief. I sometimes tried to protect my young friends, but my authority had little weight with the Roman firmness of Bakai: he would open the door that led to the drawing-room, with the words: “This is not your place. I beg you will go, or I shall carry you out.” Not a movement, not a word, on the part of the boys, did he let pass unrebuked; and he often accompanied his words with a smack on the head, or a painful fillip, which he inflicted by an ingenious and spring-like manipulation of his finger and thumb.
When he had at last driven the boys from the room and was left alone, he transferred his attentions to his only friend, a large Newfoundland dog called Macbeth, whom he fed and brushed and petted and loved. After sitting alone for a few minutes, he would go down to the court-yard and invite Macbeth to join him in the pantry. Then he began to talk to his friend: “Foolish brute! What makes you sit outside in the frost, when there’s warmth in here? Well, what are you staring at? Can’t you answer?” and the questions were generally followed by a smack on the head. Macbeth occasionally growled at his benefactor; and then Bakai reproved him, with no weak fondness: “Do what you like for a dog, a dog it still remains: it shows its teeth at you, with never a thought of who you are. But for me, the fleas would eat you up!” And then, hurt by his friend’s ingratitude, he would take snuff angrily and throw what was left on his fingers at Macbeth’s nose. The dog would sneeze, make incredibly awkward attempts to get the snuff out of his eyes with his paw, rise in high dudgeon from the bench, and begin scratching at the door. Bakai opened the door and dismissed the dog with a kick and a final word of reproach. At this point the pantry-boys generally came back, and the sound of his knuckles on their heads began again.
We had another dog before Macbeth, a setter called Bertha. When she became very ill, Bakai put her on his bed and nursed her for some weeks. Early one morning I went into the servants’ hall. Bakai tried to say something, but his voice broke and a large tear rolled down his cheek—the dog was dead. There is another fact for the student of human nature. I don’t at all suppose that he hated the pantry-boys either; but he had a surly temper which was made worse by drinking bad spirits and unconsciously affected by his surroundings.
§7
Such men as Bakai hugged their chains, but there were others: there passes through my memory a sad procession of hopeless sufferers and martyrs. My uncle had a cook of remarkable skill in his business, a hard-working and sober man who made his way upwards. The Tsar had a famous French chef at the time and my uncle contrived to secure for his servant admission to the imperial kitchens. After this instruction, the man was engaged by the English Club at Moscow, made money, married, and lived like a gentleman; but, with the noose of serfdom still round his neck, he could never sleep easy or enjoy his position.
Alexyéi—that was his name—at last plucked up courage, had prayers said to Our Lady of Iberia, and called on my uncle and offered 5,000 roubles for his freedom. But his master was proud of the cook as his property—he was proud of another man, a painter, for just the same reason—and therefore he refused the money, promising the cook to give him his freedom in his will, without any payment.
This was a frightful blow to the man. He became depressed; the expression of his features changed; his hair turned grey; and, being a Russian, he took to the bottle. He became careless about his work, and the English Club dismissed him. Then he was engaged by the Princess Trubetskoi, and she persecuted him by her petty meanness. Alexyéi was a lover of fine phrases; and once, when he was insulted by her beyond bearing, he drew himself up and said in his nasal voice, “What a stormy soul inhabits Your Serene Highness’s body!” The Princess was furious: she dismissed the man and wrote, as a Russian great lady would, to my uncle to complain of his servant. My uncle would rather have done nothing, but, out of politeness to the lady, he sent for the cook and scolded him, and told him to go and beg pardon of the Princess.
But, instead of going there, he went to the public-house. Within a year he was utterly ruined: all the money he had saved for his freedom was gone, and even his last kitchen-apron. He fought with his wife, and she with him, till at last she went into service as a nurse away from Moscow. Nothing was heard of him for a long time. At last a policeman brought him to our house, a wild and ragged figure. He had no place of abode and wandered from one drink-shop to another. The police had picked him up in the street and demanded that his master should take him in hand. My uncle was vexed and, perhaps, repentant: he received the man kindly enough and gave him a room to live in. Alexyéi went on drinking; when he was drunk, he was noisy and fancied he was writing poetry; and he really had some imaginative gift but no control over it. We were in the country at the time, and my uncle sent the man to us, fancying that my father would have some control over him. But the man was too far gone. His case revealed to me the concentrated ill-feeling and hatred which a serf cherishes in his heart against his masters: he gnashed his teeth as he spoke, and used gestures which, especially as coming from a cook, were ominous. My presence did not prevent him from speaking freely; he was fond of me, and often patted my shoulder as he said, “This is a sound branch of a rotten tree!”
When my uncle died, my father gave Alexyéi his freedom at once. But this was too late: it only meant washing our hands of him, and he simply vanished from sight.