“Well, she is reading that to me. She likes it herself, I do not understand it all; but what I do understand, I like very much. It is good poetry. It must have been a grand thing to write such poetry as that,” and the old man laid down his knife and his stick, and took off his cap, as if in involuntary homage to the author of “Dushenka,” which is one of the standard poems in Russian literature.
“You were not a gardener when you were a young man, were you, Nicolai Petrovitch?” asked Martin.
“O no! But long before you were born I became a gardener. When I was a young man I had a good many different employments. Being a serf, I paid a yearly sum to my master, and then I went where I pleased. Sometimes I was well off, and sometimes I was badly off. I have been out on the lonely steppes in winter, often only three or four of us together, with our horses and carts, when the snow came down so fast, and the wind blew so fiercely, that we could scarcely make our way through the storm; and even the colts that were following us could hardly keep their feet in the deep drifts. Sometimes, we would lose our way in these storms,—when we could see nothing a hundred feet from us,—and then we should have wandered about until we died, if we had not given up everything to the horses. They could always find their way home, even in the worst storms. And then,” said old Nicolai, knocking from the rake a tooth that was cracked (for the new one was finished and hammered in), “I used to drive a sledge on a post-road. That was harder, perhaps, than plunging through the snow-storms on the steppes, for I used to have to drive sometimes by day and sometimes by night, in the coldest weather; and a wind that is cold enough when you are standing still, or going along the same road that it is taking, is fifty times worse when you are driving, as fast as you can, right into the teeth of it. I used to be glad enough when we reached a post-house and I could crowd myself up against the great brick stove and try and get some little feeling into my stiffened fingers. The winter that I drove a sledge was the worst winter I have ever known. I did not care to try this hard life another season, so I went to Moscow, and there I became servant to a young fellow who was the greatest fool I ever knew.”
“What did he do?” asked Martin. “Why was he a fool?”
“Oh! he was a boy without sense—the only Russian boy I ever knew who had no sense at all. If he had belonged to some other nation, I should not have wondered so much. This fellow was about fifteen or sixteen, and ought to have known something of the world, but he knew nothing. He was going to the university when I was with him, but you might have thought he was a pupil at a mad-house. Whatever came into his cracked brain, came out of his mouth; and whatever he wanted to do, he did, without waiting to think whether it would be proper or not. The biggest fool could cheat him; and when anybody did cheat him, and his friends found it out and wanted to punish the rascal, this little fool of mine would come, with tears in his eyes, to beg for the poor wretch, who must feel already such remorse and such shame at being found out! Bah! I can hardly bear to think of him. Why, there was once a house afire, in a neighborhood where one of his friends lived, and what does this young fool do but jump out of his bed, in the middle of a stormy night, and run to this fire, with nothing but his night-clothes on!”
“This is very curious,” said Martin, laughing. “Nicolai Petrovitch, do you know——”
“Well, as I was going on to tell you,” said the old man, who seemed thoroughly wrapped up in his subject, “I couldn’t stand any such folly as that, and so I soon left him and went to live with Colonel Rasteryaieff. I stayed there a long, long time. There I became a gardener, and there I learned almost all the poetry that I know. The colonel had a daughter, who was a little child when I went there; but when she grew old enough, she became a girl of great sense, and she liked poetry, and used to come and read to me, out of the books she had. I always tried to get at some work which would let me listen to her, during the hour that she would come to me in the afternoon. She read better than my little Axinia. I used to wish I was a poet, so that I could hear her read some of my songs.”
“But, Nicolai Petrovitch,” cried Martin, his eyes fairly sparkling with a discovery he had made, “do you know that I believe that that fool of a boy you lived with was the poet who wrote the songs and the poetry that you like best—that he wrote the ‘Dushenka,’ which Axinia Nicolaievna is reading to you?”
“What!” said the old gardener, laying down his knife and the piece of wood he was cutting.
“I mean what I say,” said Martin. “Wasn’t his name Bogdanovitch?”