waste words. 'I want your money and you want my victuals,' he used to
say, as it were, jerking out each word: 'We have not met for a
christening; the traveller has eaten, has fed his beasts, no need to
sit on. If he is tired, let him sleep without chattering.' The
labourers he kept were healthy grown-up men, but docile and well
broken in; they were very much afraid of him. He never touched
intoxicating liquor and he used to give his men ten kopecks for vodka
on the great holidays; they did not dare to drink on other days.
People like Naum quickly get rich ... but to the magnificent position
in which he found himself--and he was believed to be worth forty or
fifty thousand roubles--Naum Ivanov had not arrived by the strait
path....
The inn had existed on the same spot on the high road twenty years
before the time from which we date the beginning of our story. It is
true that it had not then the dark red shingle roof which made Naum
Ivanov's inn look like a gentleman's house; it was inferior in
construction and had thatched roofs in the courtyard, and a humble
fence instead of a wall of logs; nor had it been distinguished by the
triangular Greek pediment on carved posts; but all the same it had
been a capital inn--roomy, solid and warm--and travellers were glad to
frequent it. The innkeeper at that time was not Naum Ivanov, but a
certain Akim Semyonitch, a serf belonging to a neighbouring lady,
Lizaveta Prohorovna Kuntse, the widow of a staff officer. This Akim
was a shrewd trading peasant who, having left home in his youth with
two wretched nags to work as a carrier, had returned a year later with
three decent horses and had spent almost all the rest of his life on
the high roads; he used to go to Kazan and Odessa, to Orenburg and to
Warsaw and abroad to Leipsic and used in the end to travel with two
teams, each of three stout, sturdy stallions, harnessed to two huge
carts. Whether it was that he was sick of his life of homeless
wandering, whether it was that he wanted to rear a family (his wife
had died in one of his absences and what children she had borne him
were dead also), anyway, he made up his mind at last to abandon his
old calling and to open an inn. With the permission of his mistress,
he settled on the high road, bought in her name about an acre and a
half of land and built an inn upon it. The undertaking prospered. He
had more than enough money to furnish and stock it. The experience he
had gained in the course of his years of travelling from one end of
Russia to another was of great advantage to him; he knew how to please
his visitors, especially his former mates, the drivers of troikas,
many of whom he knew personally and whose good-will is particularly
valued by innkeepers, as they need so much food for themselves and
their powerful beasts. Akim's inn became celebrated for hundreds of
miles round. People were even readier to stay with him than with his
successor, Naum, though Akim could not be compared with Naum as a
manager. Under Akim everything was in the old-fashioned style, snug,
but not over clean; and his oats were apt to be light, or musty; the
cooking, too, was somewhat indifferent: dishes were sometimes put on
the table which would better have been left in the oven and it was not
that he was stingy with the provisions, but just that the cook had not
