“Dear, dear! how changed he is! I really believe it is drinking too much that ages them so fast. What does he do now?”
“He drives fire-wood.”
My father made a face as if he were suffering severe pain. “Drives wood? What do you mean? Wood is not driven, it is conveyed in a cart. Thirty years might have taught you to speak better.... Well, Danilo, God in His mercy has permitted me to meet you yet another year. I pardon you all your offences throughout the year, your waste of my oats and your neglect of my horses; and you must pardon me. Go on with your work while strength lasts; and now that Lent is beginning, I advise you to take rather less spirits: at our years it is bad for the health, and the Church forbids it.” This was the kind of way in which he spoke to them all on this occasion.
§12
We dined at four: the dinner lasted a long time and was very tiresome. Spiridon was an excellent cook; but his parsimony as well as my father’s made the meal rather unsatisfying, though there were a number of courses. My father used to put bits for the dogs in a red jar that stood beside his place; he also fed them off his fork, a proceeding which was deeply resented by the servants and therefore by myself also; but I do not know why.
Visitors, rare in general, were especially rare at dinner. I only remember one, whose appearance at the table had power at times to smoothe the frown from my father’s face, General Nikolai Bakhmétyev. He had given up active service long ago; but he and my father had been gay young subalterns together in the Guards, in the time of Catherine; and, while her son was on the throne, both had been court-martialled, Bakhmétyev for fighting a duel, and my father for acting as a second. Later, the one had gone off to foreign parts as a tourist, the other to Ufá as Governor. Bakhmétyev was a big man, healthy and handsome even in old age: he enjoyed his dinner and his glass of wine, he enjoyed cheerful conversation, and other things as well. He boasted that in his day he had eaten a hundred meat patties at a sitting; and, at sixty, he could eat a dozen buckwheat cakes swimming in a pool of butter, with no fear of consequences. I witnessed his feats of this kind more than once.
He had some faint influence over my father and could control him to some extent. When he saw that his friend was in too bad a temper, he would put on his hat and march away. “I’m off for the present,” he would say; “you’re not well, and dull to-night. I meant to dine with you but I can’t stand sour faces at my dinner. Gehorsamer Diener!” Then my father would say to me, by way of explanation: “What life there is in that old man yet! He may thank God for his good health; he can’t feel for poor sufferers like me; in this awful frost he rushes about in his sledge and thinks nothing of it, at this season; but I thank my Creator every morning for waking up with the breath still in my body. There is truth in the proverb—it’s ill talking between a full man and a fasting.” More indulgence than this it was impossible to expect from my father.
Family dinners were given occasionally to near relations, but these entertainments proceeded rather from deep design than from mere warmth of heart. Thus my uncle, the Senator, was always invited to a party at our house for his birthday, February 20, and we were invited by him for St. John’s Day, June 24, which was my father’s birthday; this arrangement not only set an edifying example of brotherly love, but also saved each of them from giving a much larger entertainment at his own house.
There were some regular guests as well. Sonnenberg appeared at dinner ex officio; he had prepared himself by a bumper of brandy and a sardine eaten beforehand, and declined the tiny glass of stale brandy offered him. My last French tutor was an occasional guest—an old miser and scandal-monger, with an impudent face. M. Thirié constantly made the mistake of filling his glass with wine instead of beer. My father would say to him, “If you remember that the wine is on your right, you will not make the mistake in future”: and Thirié crammed a great pinch of snuff into his large and crooked nose, and spilt the snuff over his plate.