The Subotchevs were less disturbed than their servants, although the eruption of four full-sized men into their drawing-room, spacious though it was, did in fact surprise them somewhat. But Paklin soon reassured them, introducing Nejdanov, Solomin, and Markelov in turn, as good quiet people, not “governmental.”
Fomishka and Fimishka had a horror of governmental, that is to say, official people.
Snandulia, who appeared at her brother’s request, was far more disturbed and agitated than the old couple.
They asked, both together and in exactly the same words, if their guests would be pleased to partake of some tea, chocolate, or an effervescent drink with jam, but learning that they did not require anything, having just lunched with the merchant Golushkin and that they were returning there to dinner, they ceased pressing them, and, folding their arms in exactly the same manner across their stomachs, they entered into conversation. It was a little slow at first, but soon grew livelier.
Paklin amused them very much by relating the well known Gogol anecdote about a superintendent of police, who managed to push his way into a church already so packed with people that a pin could scarcely drop, and about a pie which turned out to be no other than this same superintendent himself. The old people laughed till the tears rolled down their cheeks. They had exactly the same shrill laugh and both went red in the face from the effort. Paklin noticed that people of the Subotchev type usually went into fits of laughter over quotations from Gogol, but as his object at the present moment was not so much in amusing them as in showing them off to his friends, he changed his tactics and soon managed to put them in an excellent humour.
Fomishka produced a very ancient carved wooden snuff-box and showed it to the visitors with great pride. At one time one could have discerned about thirty-six little human figures in various attitudes carved on its lid, but they were so erased as to be scarcely visible now. Fomishka, however, still saw them and could even count them. He would point to one and say, “Just look! this one is staring out of the window.... He has thrust his head out!” but the place indicated by his fat little finger with the nail raised was just as smooth as the rest of the box. He then turned their attention to an oil painting hanging on the wall just above his head. It represented a hunter in profile, galloping at full speed on a bay horse, also in profile, over a snow plain. The hunter was clad in a tall white sheepskin hat with a pale blue point, a tunic of camel’s hair edged with velvet, and a girdle wrought in gold. A glove embroidered in silk was gracefully tucked into the girdle, and a dagger chased in black and silver hung at the side. In one hand the plump, youthful hunter carried an enormous horn, ornamented with red tassels, and the reins and whip in the other. The horse’s four legs were all suspended in the air, and on every one of them the artist had carefully painted a horseshoe and even indicated the nails. “Look,” Fomishka observed, pointing with the same fat little finger to four semi-circular spots on the white ground, close to the horse’s legs, “he has even put the snow prints in!” Why there were only four of these prints and not any to be seen further back, on this point Fomishka was silent.
“This was I!” he added after a pause, with a modest smile.
“Really!” Nejdanov exclaimed, “were you ever a hunting man?”
“Yes. I was for a time. Once the horse threw me at full gallop and I injured my kurpey. Fimishka got frightened and forbade me; so I have given it up since then.”
“What did you injure?” Nejdanov asked.