A Russian Gentleman

by S. T. Aksakov

So things went on till the time that Sofya Nikolayevna became a mother. Though she was often troubled in mind, her health improved during the last two months, and she was safely delivered of a daughter. She herself, and her husband still more, would have preferred a son; but, when the mother pressed the child to her heart, she thought no more of any distinction between boy and girl. A passion of maternal love filled her heart and mind and whole being. Alexyéi Stepanitch thanked God for his wife's safety, rejoiced at her relief, and soon reconciled himself to the fact that his child was a girl.

But at Bagrovo it was quite another story! Stepan Mihailovitch was so confident that he was to have a grandson to carry on the line of the Bagroffs, that he would not believe at first in the birth of a grand-daughter. When at last he read through his son's letter with his own eyes and was convinced that there was no doubt about it, he was seriously annoyed. He put off the entertainment planned for his labourers, and refused to write himself to the parents; he would only send a message of congratulation to the young mother, with instructions that the infant was to be christened Praskovya, in compliment to his cousin and favourite, Praskovya Ivanovna Kurolyessova. His vexation over this disappointment was a touching and amusing sight. Even his womankind derived a little secret amusement from it. His good sense told him that he had no business to be angry with any one, but for a few days he could not control his feelings—so hard was it for him to give up the hope, or rather the certainty, that a grandson would be born, to continue the famous line of Shimon. In the expectation of the happy news, he had kept his family tree on his bed, ready any day to enter his grandson's name; but now he ordered this document to be hidden out of sight. He would not allow his daughter Aksinya to travel to Ufa in order to stand godmother to the babe; he said impatiently, "Take that journey for a girl's christening? Nonsense! If she brings a girl every year, you would have travelling enough!" Time did its work, however, and the frown, never a formidable frown this time, vanished from the brow of Stepan Mihailovitch, as he consoled himself with the thought that he might have a grandson before a year was out. Then he wrote a kind and playful letter to his daughter-in-law, pretending to scold her for her mistake and bidding her present him with a grandson within a twelvemonth.

Sofya Nikolayevna was so entirely absorbed by the revelation of maternity and by devotion to her child, that she did not even notice the signs of the old man's displeasure, and was quite unaffected by Aksinya's absence from the christening. It proved difficult to keep her in bed for nine days after her confinement. She felt so well and strong that she could have danced on the fourth day. But she had no wish to dance; she wanted to be on her feet day and night, attending to her little Parasha. The infant was feeble and sickly; the mother's constant distress of body and mind had probably affected the child. The doctor would not allow her to nurse the child herself. Andréi Avenarius was the name of this doctor; he was a very clever, cultivated, and amiable man, an intimate friend of the young people and a daily visitor at their house. As soon as possible Sofya Nikolayevna took her baby to her father's house, hoping that it would please the invalid to see this mite, and that he would find in it a resemblance to his first wife. This resemblance was probably imaginary; for, in my opinion, it is impossible for an infant to be like a grown-up person; but Sofya Nikolayevna never failed to assert that her first child was the very image of its grandmother. Old M. Zubin was approaching the end of his earthly career; both body and mind were breaking fast. He looked at the baby with little interest, and had hardly strength to sign it with the Cross. All he said was, "I congratulate you, Sonitchka." Sofya Nikolayevna was distressed by her father's critical condition—it was more than a month since she had seen him—and also by his indifference to her little angel, Parasha.

But soon the young mother forgot all the world around her, as she hung over her daughter's cradle. All other interests and attachments grew pale in comparison, and she surrendered herself with a kind of frenzy to this new sensation. No hands but hers might touch the child. She handed it herself to the foster-mother and held it at the breast, and it was pain to her to watch it drawing life, not from its mother, but from a stranger. It is hard to believe, but it is true, and Sofya Nikolayevna admitted it herself later, that, if the child sucked too long, she used to take it away before it was satisfied, and rock it herself in her arms or in the cradle, and sing it to sleep. She saw nothing of her friends, not even of her dear Mme. Chichagoff. Naturally they all thought her eccentric or absurd and her chief intimates were vexed by her conduct. She paid a hasty visit every day to her father, and returned every day with fear in her heart that she would find the child ill. She left her husband perfectly free to spend his time as he liked. For some days he stopped at home; but his wife never stirred from the cradle and took no notice of him, except to turn him out of the little nursery, because she feared that twice-breathed air might hurt the baby. After this, he began to go out alone, till at last he went to some party every day; and he began to play cards to relieve his boredom. The Ufa ladies were amused at the sight of the deserted husband, and some of them flirted with him, saying that it was a charity to console the widower, and that Sofya Nikolayevna would thank them for it when she recovered from her maternal passion and reappeared in society. Sofya Nikolayevna did not hear of these good Samaritans till later; when she did, she was vexed. Mme. Cheprunoff, who came often to the house, watched Sofya Nikolayevna with astonishment, pity, and displeasure. She was a tender mother herself to her little boy with the one eye, but this devotion to one object and disregard of everything else seemed to her to border on insanity. With groans and sighs she struck her fists against her own body—this was a regular trick of hers—and said that such love was a mortal sin which God would punish. Sofya Nikolayevna resented this so much that she kept Mme. Cheprunoff out of the nursery in future. No one but Dr. Avenarius was admitted there, and he came pretty often. The mother was constantly discovering symptoms of different diseases in the child; for these she began by consulting Buchan's Domestic Medicine, and then, when that did not answer, she called in Avenarius. He found it impossible to argue her out of her beliefs: all he could do was to prescribe harmless medicines. Yet the child was really feeble, and at times he was obliged to prescribe for it in real earnest.

It is difficult to say what would have been the upshot of all this; but, by the inscrutable designs of Providence, a thunderbolt burst over the head of Sofya Nikolayevna: her adored child died suddenly. The cause of death was uncertain: it may have been too much care, or too much medicine, or too feeble a constitution; at any rate, the child succumbed, when four months old, to a very slight attack of a common childish ailment. Sofya Nikolayevna was sitting by the cradle when she saw the infant start and a spasm pass over the little face; she caught it up and found that it was dead.

Sofya Nikolayevna must have had a marvellous constitution to support this blow. For some days she knew no one and the doctors feared for her reason; there were three of them, Avenarius, Zanden, and Klauss; all three were much attached to their patient, and one of them was always with her. But, by God's blessing and thanks to her youth and strength, that terrible time passed by. The unhappy mother recovered her senses, and her love for her husband, whose own distress was great, asserted itself for the time and saved her. On the fourth day she became conscious of her surroundings; she recognised Alexyéi Stepanitch, so changed by grief that he was hard to recognise, and her bosom friend, Mme. Chichagoff; a terrible cry burst from her lips and a healing flood of tears gushed from the eyes which had been dry till then. She silently embraced her husband and sobbed for long on his breast, while he sobbed himself like a child. The danger of insanity was past, but the exhaustion of her bodily strength was still alarming. For four days and nights she had neither eaten nor drunk, and now she could swallow no food nor medicine nor even water. Her condition was so critical that the doctors did not oppose her wish to make her confession and receive the sacraments. The performance of this Christian duty was beneficial to the patient: she slept for the first time, and, when she woke after two hours looking bright and happy, she told her husband that she had seen in her sleep a vision of Our Lady of Iberia, exactly as she was represented on the ikon of their parish church; and she believed that, if she could put her lips to this ikon, the Mother of God would surely have mercy on her. The image was brought from the church, and the priest read the service for the Visitation of the Sick. When the choir sang, "O mighty Mother of God, look down in mercy on my sore bodily suffering!"—all present fell on their knees and repeated the words of the prayer. Alexyéi Stepanitch sobbed aloud; and the sufferer too shed tears throughout the service and pressed her lips to the image. When it was over, she felt so much relief that she was able to drink some water; and from that time she began to take food and medicine. Her two dear friends, Mme. Chichagoff and Mme. Cheprunoff, were with her constantly; she was soon pronounced out of danger, and her husband's troubled heart had rest. The doctors set to work with fresh zeal to restore her strength, and their great anxiety was in a way dangerous to their patient; for one of them found traces of consumption, another of marasmus, and the third was apprehensive of an aneurysm. But fortunately they were unanimous on one point: the patient should go at once to the country, to enjoy pure air and, preferably, forest air, and take a course of koumiss. At the beginning of June it was not too late to drink mare's milk, as the grass on the steppes was still fresh and in full growth.

Stepan Mihailovitch took the news of his grand-daughter's death very coolly: he even said, "No reason to tear one's hair over that! There will be plenty more girls." But when he heard later of the dangerous illness of Sofya Nikolayevna, the old man was much disturbed. When a third message came, that she was out of immediate danger but very ill, and that the doctors were baffled and prescribed a course of koumiss, he was exceedingly angry with the doctors: "Those bunglers murder our bodies," he said, "and defile our souls by making us swallow the drink of heathens. If a Russian is forbidden by his Church to eat horseflesh, then he has no business to drink the milk of the unclean animal." Then he added with a heavy sigh and a gesture of disgust: "I don't like it at all: her life may perhaps be saved, but she will never be right again, and there will be no children." Stepan Mihailovitch was deeply grieved and remained for a long time in a state of depression.

Twenty-nine versts to the south-west of Ufa, on the road to Kazan, where the Uza falls into that noble river, the Dyoma, there lay in a rich valley a little Tatar village called by the Russians Alkino, surrounded by forests. The houses nestled in picturesque disorder at the foot of a hill called Bairam-Tau[⁴⁹] which gave them shelter from the north; and another hill, Zein-Tau,[⁵⁰] rose on the west. The Uza, fringed with bushes, flowed to the south-west; the forest-glades were fragrant with grasses and flowers; and, all round, oaks and limes and maples cleft the air and imparted to it an invigorating virtue. To this charming spot Alexyéi Stepanitch brought his wife, weak and pale and thin, a mere shadow of her old self; Avenarius, their friend and doctor, came with them, and they had some difficulty in getting the patient to the end of the journey. The owner of the village received them with cordial hospitality; he had a comfortable house, but Sofya Nikolayevna was unwilling to install herself there, and one of the outbuildings was cleared out for her occupation. The family were only too kind in their attentions to her, so that the doctor was obliged to forbid their visits for a time. They spoke Russian fairly well, though they professed the Mohammedan creed; and, though their dress and habits were then partly Russian and partly Tatar, koumiss was their invariable drink from morning till night. For Sofya Nikolayevna, the health-giving beverage was prepared in a cleanly, civilised manner: the mare's milk was fermented in a clean, new wooden bucket and not in the usual bag of raw horse-hide. The natives declared that koumiss made in their fashion tasted better, and was more effective; but Sofya Nikolayevna felt an unconquerable aversion to the horse-hide bag. When the doctor had laid down rules for the cure, he went back to Ufa, leaving Alexyéi Stepanitch, with Parasha and Annushka, in charge of the invalid. The air and the koumiss, of which small doses were taken at first; the daily drives with Alexyéi Stepanitch through the forest which surrounded the village—Yevséitch, who was now a favourite with Sofya Nikolayevna, acted as coachman; the woods, where the patient lay for whole hours in the cool shade on a leather mattress with pillows, breathing the fragrant air into her lungs, listening sometimes to an entertaining book, and often sinking into refreshing sleep—the whole life was so beneficial to Sofya Nikolayevna that in a fortnight she was able to get up and could walk about. When Avenarius came again he was delighted by the effect of the koumiss, and increased the doses; but, as the patient could not endure it in large quantities, he thought it necessary to prescribe vigorous exercise in the form of riding on horseback. For a Russian lady to ride was in those days a startling novelty: Alexyéi Stepanitch did not like it, and Sofya Nikolayevna herself was shocked by the notion. Their host's daughters presented an instructive example, for they constantly rode far and wide over the country on their Bashkir ponies; but Sofya Nikolayevna turned a deaf ear for long to all persuasions, and even to the entreaties of her husband, whom the doctor had speedily and completely convinced of the necessity of the exercise. At last the Chichagoffs came on a visit to Alkino, and Sofya Nikolayevna's resistance was overcome by a joint effort. What appealed to her most strongly was the example of Mme. Chichagoff, who, in the spirit of true friendship, sacrificed her own prejudices and began to ride, at first alone, and then with the patient. This hard exercise required a change of diet; and fat mutton, which Sofya Nikolayevna did not like either, was prescribed. Avenarius probably took a hint from the habits of the Bashkirs and Tatars, who, while moving from place to place throughout the summer, drink koumiss and eat hardly anything but fat mutton, not even bread; and they ride all day long over the broad steppes, until the prairie grass turns from green to grey and veils itself with a soft, silvery down. The treatment answered admirably. They sometimes rode out in a large party with the sons and daughters of their host. There was a potash factory which they sometimes visited, about two versts from Alkino, situated in the depth of the forest and on the bank of a stream; and Sofya Nikolayevna looked with interest at the iron cauldrons full of burning wood-ash, the wooden troughs in which the dross was deposited, and the furnaces in which the product was refined and converted into porous white lumps of the vegetable salt called "potash." She admired the rapidity with which the work was carried on, and the activity of the Tatars, whose skull-caps were a novelty to her, and also the long shirts which came down to their feet and yet left them free command of their limbs. In general her hosts were very kind, and tried to amuse their guest by making the natives sing and dance before her, or wrestle, or run races on horseback.

At first Alexyéi Stepanitch was always present at these expeditions and entertainments; but, when he ceased to feel anxious about his wife's health, and saw her surrounded by troops of attentive friends, he began by degrees to find some time on his hands. Country life and country air, with the beauty of that landscape, roused in him a desire for his old amusements. He made fishing-lines and began to angle for the wily trout in the clear mountain streams round Alkino; and he went out sometimes to catch quails with a net. Theodore, Parasha's young husband, was a capital hand at this sport and could make pipes to decoy the birds. With sportsmen in general, netting for quails does not rank high; but really I do not know why they despise it. To lie on the fragrant meadow grass with your net hanging in front of you on the tall stalks; to hear the quails calling beside you and at a distance; to imitate their low, sweet note on the pipe; to hear the excited birds reply and watch them run, or even fly, from all sides towards you; to watch their curious antics, and to get excited yourself over the success or failure of your strategy—all this gave me much pleasure at one time, and even now I cannot recall it with indifference. But it was impossible to make this pleasure intelligible to Sofya Nikolayevna.

In two months she was well on the way to recovery: her face filled out, and a bright colour began to play again upon her cheeks. When Avenarius paid a third visit, he was entirely satisfied; and he had a perfect right to triumph; for he was the first to prescribe koumiss and directed the treatment himself. He had always been attached to his patient; and now that he had succeeded in saving her life, he loved her like a daughter.