A family of noblemen

by Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov

Ulita was also called into the council. First matters of real importance were taken up; whether an injection was to be made or whether the abdomen was to be massaged with quicksilver salve. Then they turned to the favorite theme and figured on their fingers again—it came out on a Lenten day! Yevpraksia turned as red as a peony and did not deny it, but pleaded her subordinate position.

"What could I do?" she said. "I must do what he wants me to do. If the master orders us to do something, we, poor devils, can't help but obey."

"Look at her playing the goody-goody. I'll bet, you yourself—-" jested Arina Petrovna.

The woman fairly revelled in the affair. Arina Petrovna recalled a number of incidents from her past, and did not fail to narrate them. First she told of her own pregnancies, what tortures she had had to stand from Simple Simon; how, while carrying Pavel Vladimirych, she travelled by post to Moscow, changing horses at every stage so as not to miss the Dubrovino auction, and as a result nearly departed to the better world, etc., etc. All her deliveries had been remarkable for something or other. Yudushka's was the only one that had come easy.

"I didn't feel the least bit of heaviness," she said. "I would sit and think, 'Lord, am I really pregnant?' And when the time came I just lay down to rest for a few minutes and I don't know how it happened—I gave birth to him. He was the easiest son to me, the very, very easiest."

Then followed stories about domestics, how she herself "caught some of them in the act," how others were spied upon by her trusties, Ulita being generally the leader. Her old woman's memory faithfully guarded these remarkably distinct recollections. In all her drab past—always devoted to hoarding on both a petty and a large scale, the tracking of lust-stricken domestics was the only romantic element that touched a living chord in her.

It was as if in a dull magazine where the reader expects to find treatises on dry fogs and Ovid's grave, he suddenly comes upon "See the troika, gaily dashing," or some such spirited song of gaiety or sadness. The dénouement of these simple love affairs of the maids' room was generally drastic and even cruel. The woman was married off into a remote village, by all means to a widower with a large family, the male culprit was degraded to the position of a cattle tender or even pressed into military service. Arina Petrovna's recollection of the closing chapters of such romances had faded (cultured people have a memory indulgent of their own past), but the spying out of the amorous intrigues passed before her eyes in all its vividness. And no wonder. In those days there was the same absorbing interest in spying of that sort as there is nowadays in the serial "evening story," in which the author, instead of at once crowning the mutual longing of the hero and the heroine, breaks off at the most pathetic place and writes, "to be continued."

"Those girls gave me no end of trouble. Some would keep up the pretense to the last minute, and would feign and sham in the hope of eluding me. But no, my dear, you can't fool me. I am an old hand at it myself," she added almost sternly, as if threatening some one.

Finally came the stories of diplomatic pregnancies, so to speak, in which Arina Petrovna had figured not as the chastiser, but as the accomplice and concealer.

For example, her father Piotr Ivanych, when he was an old, tottering man of seventy, had also had a "mistress," who had also been discovered with an "increment"; and for higher considerations it had been necessary to conceal the "increment" from the old man. As ill luck would have it, Arina Petrovna was then at odds with her brother Piotr Petrovich who, also for some diplomatic reasons, had wanted to spy upon the pregnancy and leave his father in no doubt as to his lady-love's position.