A family of noblemen

by Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov

"Oh, uncle, how boring it is here."

This time Porfiry Vladimirych was truly offended and became silent. For a long time they both paced up and down the dining room. Anninka yawned, Porfiry Vladimirych crossed himself at every step. At last the carriage was announced and the usual comedy of seeing relations off began. Golovliov put on his fur coat, went out on the porch, kissed Anninka and shouted to the servants, "Her feet! Wrap up her feet well!" and "What about the blankets, have you taken the blankets along? See you don't forget them!" all the while making signs of the cross in the air.

Anninka visited her grandmother's grave, asked the priest to say the mass, and when the choir began to chant the "Eternal memory," she cried a bit. The background of the ceremony was rather sad. The church near which Arina Petrovna had been buried was of the poorest kind. In some places the plaster had fallen off its walls and exposed large patches of brick. The sound of the bells was feeble and hollow, the priest's robe was threadbare. The cemetery was snowed under, so that the path to the grave had to be shovelled clear. No monument had yet been placed. Nothing but a plain white cross, even without an inscription, marked the grave. The cemetery was in a lonely spot removed from any dwelling. Not far from the church stood the houses of the priest and the church officials and all around the cheerless, snow-covered plains stretched as far as the eye could reach. Here and there one could see brushwood jutting out from the snow. A sharp March wind was sweeping over the churchyard, wafting away the chanting of the churchmen and lashing the priest's robe.

"Who would have thought, madam, that the richest landlady in the district would rest here under this modest cross in our poor parish?" said the priest when he was through with the requiem.

At these words Anninka cried again. She recalled the poet's line: "Where feasts once reigned a hearse now stands!" And the tears kept streaming down her cheeks. Then she went to the priest's house, had tea there, and talked with his wife. Another line came back to her: "And pallid death on all doth stare," and again she wept, long and bitterly.

Nobody had notified the people at Pogorelka that the young lady was coming, so that the rooms were not even heated. Anninka, with her fur coat on, walked through all the rooms, remaining a moment in grandmother's bedroom and the ikon room. In the former she found a bedstead with a heap of soiled, greasy pillows, some without pillow-cases. Scraps of paper lay on the desk in disorder, the floor had not been swept and a thick coat of dust covered everything. Anninka sat down in the easy-chair where her grandmother used to sit, and became lost in thought. At first came up reminiscences of the past; then they were crowded out by images of the present. The former came in the shape of fleeting patches and fragments, pausing in her mind for no more than a moment; the latter were more persistent. It was but a brief while ago that she had longed to flee from Pogorelka and it had seemed a hateful place. Now her heart suddenly filled with a morbid desire to live there again.

"It is quiet here, it is not cozy, and it is unsightly; but it is quiet, so quiet, as if everything around were dead. There is much air and much room."

She looked out over the endless fields and felt a desire to dash straight across them, without aim or purpose, just to breathe fast and feel a pain in her chest. And there, in the half-nomadic life from which she had just escaped and to which she must return—what awaited her there? What had she gained by it? Nothing but recollections of hotels permeated with stench, of an everlasting din coming from the dining and billiard rooms, of unkempt porters, of rehearsals on the stage in the twilight and among the scenes of painted linen, the feel of which was abominable, in the draught and in the dampness. And then, army officers, lawyers, obscene language, and the eternal uproar! What hadn't the men told her! With what obscenity hadn't they touched her! Especially the one with the mustache, with a voice hoarse from drink, inflamed eyes, and a perpetual smell of the stable about him. Lord, what he had told her! Anninka shivered at the very recollection and shut her eyes. Then she came to, sighed, and went into the ikon room. There were now only a few ikons in the image-case, only those which had unquestionably belonged to her mother. The rest of them, her grandmother's, Yudushka, as the legitimate heir, had removed to Golovliovo. The empty spaces where they had stood stared like the hollow eye-sockets in a deathshead. Nor were there any ikon lamps. Yudushka had taken all of them. Only one yellow bit of wax candle stood out, orphan-like, from a miniature tin candlestick that had been forgotten.

"His Excellency wanted to take the image case, too. He was trying to make sure if it really was a part of madam's dowry," reported Afimyushka.

"Well, he could have taken it. Tell me, Afimyushka, did grandma suffer much before she died?"