desk; I think you know it well: it's the one in the corner as you come in… Ah, I forgot, you've never been to my place. My old woman, whom I've lived with for some thirty years now, never learned to read in all her born days- may as well admit it. So I noticed she was baking pirozhki 1 on some paper. Her pirozhki, my gentle readers, are amazingly good; you won't eat better pirozhki anywhere. I looked at the underside of one and saw some writing. My heart as if knew it. I went to the desk-not even half a notebook left! The rest of the pages she'd torn out for her pies! What could I do? you can't start fighting in old age!
Last year I happened to pass through Gadyach. Before we reached the town, I purposely tied a knot so that I wouldn't forget to ask Stepan Ivanovich about it. Not only that, but I made myself a promise-as soon as I sneezed in town, I'd remember him. All in vain. I passed through the town, and I sneezed, and I blew my nose in my handkerchief, yet I forgot everything; and I remembered only when I was some six miles beyond the town gates. Nothing to be done, I had to publish it without the end. However, if anyone really wishes to know what happened further on in the story, he need only go on purpose to Gadyach and ask Stepan Ivanovich. He'll tell it again with great pleasure, maybe even from beginning to end. He lives not far from the stone church. There's a little lane right there: you just turn down the lane and it's the second or third gate. Or better still: when you see a tall striped pole in the yard, and a fat woman in a green skirt comes out to meet you (he leads a bachelor's life, there's no harm in saying), then it's his yard. Or else you may meet him in the market, where he spends every morning till nine o'clock choosing fish and vegetables for his table and talking with Father Antip or the Jew tax farmer. 2 You'll recognize him at once, because nobody but he has printed duck trousers and a yellow nankeen frock coat. Here's another token for you: he always waves his arms as he walks. The local assessor, the late Denis Petro-vich, always used to say when he saw him in the distance: 'Look, look, there goes the windmill.'
I
Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka
It's four years now that Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka has been retired and living on his farmstead in Vytrebenki. When he was still Vaniusha, he studied at the Gadyach regional high school, and, it must be said, he was a most well-behaved and diligent boy. The teacher of Russian grammar, Nikifor Timofeevich Participle, used to say that if everyone in the class was as diligent as Shponka, he wouldn't have to bring in the maple ruler, with which, as he con-lessed himself, he was weary of rapping lazybones and pranksters on the knuckles. His notebook was always clean, neatly ruled, never a blot anywhere. He always sat placidly, his arms folded and his eyes fixed on the teacher, and he never hung scraps of paper on the back of the comrade in front of him, never carved on the bench or played squash your granny before the teacher came. Whenever anyone needed a penknife to sharpen his pen, he immediately turned to Ivan Fyodorovich, knowing that he always had a penknife with him; and Ivan Fyodorovich, then simply Vaniusha, would take it from the little leather case tied to the buttonhole of his gray frock coat, and asked only that they not scrape the pen with the sharp edge, assuring them that the dull edge was meant for that. Such good behavior soon attracted the attention of the Latin teacher himself, whose mere cough in the front hall, which preceded the thrusting of his frieze overcoat and pockmark-adorned face through the doorway, inspired fear in the whole class. This terrible teacher, who always had two bundles of birch switches on the lectern and half his auditors on their knees, made Ivan Fyodorovich his monitor, though there were many in the class of much greater ability.
Here we cannot omit one occasion which influenced his entire life. One of the students he had charge of as monitor, in order to incline him to put down a scit 3 on his record, though he didn't know a scrap of the lesson, brought a buttered pancake to class wrapped in paper. Ivan Fyodorovich, though he had a bent for justice, was hungry just then and unable to resist temptation: he took the pancake, stood a book in front of him, and began to eat. And he was so occupied with it that he didn't even notice the deathly silence that suddenly fell over the class. He came to his senses with horror only when the dreaded hand, reaching out from the frieze overcoat, seized him by the ear and dragged him into the middle of the classroom. 'Give the pancake here! Give it here, I tell you, scoundrel!' said the terrible teacher. Then he seized the buttery pancake with his fingers and flung it out the window, strictly forbidding the boys running around in the yard to pick it up. After which he beat Ivan Fyodorovich most painfully on the hands. And rightly so: it was the fault of the hands, they and not any other part of the body had done the taking. Be that as it may, the timidity inseparable from him to begin with increased still more. Perhaps this very event was the reason why he never had any wish to enter the civil service, seeing from experience that it was not always possible to keep the lid on things.
He was approaching fifteen when he passed into the second class, where, instead of the short catechism and the four rules of arithmetic, he started on the full-length one, the book on the duties of man, and fractions. But seeing that the further into the forest, the thicker grow the trees, and receiving news that his papa had bid the world farewell, he stayed on for another two years and then, with his mother's consent, joined the P- infantry regiment.
The P-infantry regiment was not at all of the sort to which many infantry regiments belong; and, even though it was mostly quartered in villages, it was nevertheless on such a footing that it would not yield to certain cavalry regiments. The majority of the officers drank vymorozki 4 and knew how to pull Jews by their sidelocks no worse than the hussars; several of them even danced the mazurka, and the colonel of the P-regiment never missed an opportunity of mentioning it when talking with someone in society. 'I have many,' he used to say, patting himself on the belly after each word, 'who dance the mazurka, sir. A good many, sir. A great many.' To better show readers the cultivation of the P- infantry regiment, we shall add that two of the officers gambled terribly at faro and would lose uniform, visored cap, greatcoat, sword knot, and underwear to boot-something not always found even among cavalrymen.
The company of such comrades, however, by no means diminished Ivan Fyodorovich's timidity. And since he did not drink vymorozki, preferring a glass of vodka before dinner and supper, and did not dance the mazurka or play faro, he naturally always had to stay alone. And so, while the others would go in hired carriages to visit small landowners, he sat at home and exercised himself in occupations dear only to a meek and kindly soul: polishing his buttons, reading a fortune-telling book, setting mousetraps in the corners of his room, and, finally, taking off his uniform and lying in bed. On the other hand, there was no one in the regiment more disciplined than Ivan Fyodorovich. And he commanded his platoon so well that the company commander always held him up as an example. For that, in a short time, eleven years after being made ensign, he was promoted to sub-lieutenant.
In the course of that time, he received the news that his mother had died; and his aunt, his mother's sister, whom he knew only because she used to bring him dried pears and her own very tasty homemade gingerbreads when he was a child, and even sent them to Gadyach (she was on bad terms with his mother and therefore Ivan Fyodorovich had not seen her later)-this aunt, out of the goodness of her heart, undertook to manage his small estate, of which she duly informed him in a letter. Ivan Fyodorovich, being fully confident of his aunt's reasonableness, began to carry on with his service as before. Another in his place, on receiving such rank, would have grown very proud; but pride was completely unknown to him, and having become a sub-lieutenant, he was the very same Ivan Fyodorovich that he had been in the rank of ensign. Staying on for four years after this event so remarkable for him, he was preparing to set out from Mogilev province for Great Russia with his regiment when he received a letter with the following content:
My gentle nephew, Ivan Fyodorovich,
I am sending you underwear-five pairs of cotton socks and four shirts of fine linen-and I also want to discuss business with you: since you are already of a not unimportant rank, which I think you know yourself, and are already of such age that it is time you took up the management of your estate, there is no longer any need for you to serve
