“She’s mad! Give her ten; that’s more than enough.”
“It’s but little, master,” said the old woman. However, she took the money gratefully, and hastily went to open the door for them. She had lost nothing, as she had asked four times the worth of the vodka.
The travellers took their seats. Tchitchikoff’s britchka drove alongside the one in which Nozdreff and his brother-in-law sat, and thus they could all three of them converse freely on the way. Behind them followed Nozdreff’s little calash, which was always dropping in the rear, with its bony peasants’ horses. In this vehicle rode Porfiriy and the puppy.
While the travellers are journeying on, suppose we say something about Nozdreff, who may, perhaps, play a not unimportant part in our drama.
Nozdreff’s person is probably already somewhat known to the reader. It has fallen to the lot of everyone to meet a few men like him. They are called lively young fellows, even in childhood, and at school they have the reputation of being good comrades. A certain amount of frankness, straightforwardness, and boldness are visible on their countenances. They make acquaintances quickly, and before you have time to look about you they call you “thou.” They apparently strike up a friendship for ever; but it almost always happens that the person whose friendship they wish to cultivate quarrels with them that same evening over a friendly drinking-bout. Nozdreff, at thirty-five, was precisely the same as he had been at eighteen and twenty years of age—a great lover of carousing. Marriage had effected no change in him, especially as his wife had soon departed to the other world, leaving him two small children who were decidedly in his way, although a very pretty nurse looked after them. He never could stay at home more than a day at a time. His sensitive nose scented out a fair with all sorts of assemblies and balls at a distance of ten versts away. In the twinkling of an eye he was there, disputing and raising a tumult at the card tables, for, like all men of his description, he had a passion for cards. He did not play in quite an irreproachable style or quite honestly, as we have seen in the first chapter, for he knew several ways of turning up false cards, and other things besides, so that the game very frequently ended by his coming to grief; he was either kicked out, or else he returned home with only one whisker left him, and that rather scanty. However, his full, healthy cheeks were so well provided with vegetative force that his whiskers soon grew afresh, and even stronger than before. And what was strangest of all—the thing can only happen in Russia—was that after a time he again met the friends who had pummelled him, and met them as though nothing had taken place. And he was not the worse for it, as the saying goes, nor they either.
When Nozdreff was in society he would either drink himself full in such a manner that he could only laugh, or else he would lie and lie in the most terrible way. Indeed he lied absolutely without any need to do so; all of a sudden he would tell a story about some horse he had owned with a blue or pink mane, and such-like nonsense, so that his hearers finally walked off in mingled amazement and disgust.
While we have been describing Nozdreff the three equipages have driven up to the porch of his house. In the house no preparations had been made for their reception. In the middle of the dining-room stood two wooden trestles, and mounted upon them were two moujiks whitening the walls, and droning out an interminable song, while the floor was all bespattered with whitewash. Nozdreff at once ordered the moujiks and the trestles off, and ran out into an adjoining room to give his orders. His guests heard him giving the cook directions about dinner, and on reflection, Tchitchikoff, who already began to feel some appetite, realised that they would not sit down to table before five o’clock. When Nozdreff returned he took his guests to inspect his village; and in a little over two hours he had shown them absolutely everything worthy of exhibition. First of all they went to inspect the stables, where they saw two mares—one a dapple-grey and the other a chestnut—and then a brown stallion, not very handsome to look at, but for which Nozdreff swore that he had paid ten thousand roubles.
“Oh! no, you did not give ten thousand for him surely,” remarked his brother-in-law. “He isn’t worth even one.”