Flashman at the Charge

clerk.

'… effrontery, to seek to thrust yourself between me and my people!' Pencherjevsky was roaring. 'Merciful God, how do I keep my hands from you? Have you no souls to cure, you priest fellow, and you, Blank, no pen- pushing or pimping to occupy you? Ah, but no—you have your agitating, have you not, you seditious scum! Well, agitate elsewhere, before I have my Cossacks take their whips to you! Get out of my sight and off my land—both of you!'

He was grotesque in his rage, towering like some bearded old-world god—I'd have been in the next county before him, but these two stood their ground, jeopardizing their health.

'We are no serfs of yours!' cries the fellow Blank. 'You do not order us,' and Pencherjevsky gave a strangled roar and started forward, but the priest came between.

'Lord Count! A moment!' He was game, that one.

'Hear me, I implore. You are a just man, and surely it is little enough to ask. The woman is old, and if she cannot pay the soul-tax on her grandsons, you know what will happen. The officials will block her stove, and she will be driven out—to what? To die in the cold, or to starve, and the little ones with her. It is a matter of only one hundred and seventy silver kopecks—I do not ask you to pay for her, but let me find the money, and my friend here. We will be glad to pay! Surely you will let us—be merciful!'

'Look you,' says Pencherjevsky, holding himself in. 'Do I care for a handful of kopecks? No! Not if it was a hundred and seventy thousand roubles, either! But you come to me with a pitiful tale of this old crone, who cannot pay the tax on her brats—do I not know her son—worthless bastard!—is a koulak*(*A peasant with money, a usurer.) in Odessa, and could pay it for her, fifty times over! Well, let him! But if he will not, then it is for the government to enforce the law—no man hindering! No, not even me! Suppose I pay, or permit you to pay, on her behalf, what would happen then? I shall tell you. Next year, and every year thereafter, you would have all the moujiks from here to Rostov bawling at my door: 'We cannot pay the soul-tax,³⁰ batiushka; pay for us, as you paid for so-and-so.' And where does that end?'

'But -' the priest was beginning, but Pencherjevsky cut him short.

'You would tell me that you will pay for them all? Aye, Master Blank there would pay—with the filthy money sent by his Communist friends in Germany! So that he could creep among my moujiks, sowing sedition, preaching revolution! I know him! So get him hence, priest, out of my sight, before I forget myself!'

'And the old woman, then? Have a little pity, Count!'

'I have explained!' roars Pencherjevsky. 'By God, as though I owe you that much! Get out, both of you!'

He advanced, hands clenched, and the two of them went scuttling down the steps. But the fellow Blank³¹ had to have a last word:

'You filthy tyrant! You dig your own grave! You and your kind think you can live forever, by oppression and torture and theft—you sow dragon's teeth with your cruelty, and they will grow to tear you! You will see, you fiend!'

Pencherjevsky went mad. He flung his cap on the ground, foaming, and then ran bawling for his whip, his Cossacks, his sabre, while the two malcontents scampered off for their lives, Blank screaming threats and abuse over his shoulder. I listened with interest as the Count raved and stormed:

'After them! I'll have that filthy creature knouted, God help me! Run him down, and don't leave an inch of hide on his carcase!'

Within a few moments a group of his Cossacks were in the saddle and thundering out of the gate, while he stormed about the hall, raging still:

'The dog! The insolent garbage! To beard me, at my own door! The priest's a meddling fool—but that Blank! Anarchist swine! He'll be less impudent when my fellows have cut the buttocks off him!'

He stalked away, finally, still cursing, and about an hour later the Cossacks came back, and their leader stumped up the steps to report. Pencherjevsky had simmered down a good deal by this time; he had ordered a brew of punch, and invited East and myself to join him, and we were sipping at the scalding stuff by the hall fire when the Cossack came in, an old, stout, white-whiskered scoundrel with his belt at the last hole.³²He was grinning, and had his nagaika in his hand.

'Well?' growled Pencherjevsky. 'Did you catch that brute and teach him manners?'

'Aye, batiushka,' says the Cossack, well pleased. 'He's dead. Thirty cuts—and, pouf? He was a weakling, though.'

'Dead, you say?' Pencherjevsky set down his cup abruptly, frowning. Then he shrugged: 'Well, good riddance! No one'll mourn his loss. One anarchist more or less will not trouble the prefect.'

'The fellow Blank escaped,' continued the Cossack. 'I'm sorry, batiushka -'

'Blank escaped!' Pencherjevsky's voice came out in a hoarse scream, his eyes dilating. 'You mean—it was the priest you killed! The holy man!' He stared in disbelief, crossing himself. 'Slava Bogu!*(*Glory to God!) The priest!'

'Priest? Do I know?' says the Cossack. 'Was it wrong, batiushka?'

'Wrong, animal? A priest! And you … you flogged him to death!' The Count looked as though he would have a seizure. He gulped, and clawed at his beard, and then he blundered past the Cossack, up the stairs, and we heard his door crash behind him.

'My God!' says East. The Cossack looked at us in wonder, and then shrugged, as his kind will, and stalked off. We just stood, looking at each other.

'What will this mean?' says East.

'Search me,' I said. 'They butcher each other so easily in this place—I don't know. I'd think flogging a priest to death is a trifle over the score, though—even for Russia. Old man Pencherjevsky'll have some explaining to do, I'd say—shouldn't wonder if they kick him out of the Moscow Carlton Club.'

'My God, Flashman!' says East again. 'What a country!'

We didn't see the Count at dinner, nor Valla, and Aunt Sara was uncommunicative. But you could see in her face, and the servants', and feel in the very air of the house, that Starotorsk was a place appalled. For once East forgot to talk about escaping, and we went to bed early, saying good-night in whispers.

I didn't rest too easy, though. My stove was leaking, and making the room stuffy, and the general depression must have infected me, for when I dozed I dreamed badly. I got my old nightmare of drowning in the pipe at Jotunberg, probably with the stove fumes,³³ and then it changed to that underground cell in Afghanistan, where my old flame, Narreeman, was trying to qualify me for the Harem Handicap, and then someone started shooting outside the cell, and shrieking, and suddenly I was awake, lathered with sweat, and the shooting was real, and from beneath me in the house there was an appalling crash and the roar of Pencherjevsky's voice, and a pattering of feet, and by that time I was out of bed and into my breeches, struggling with my boots as I threw open the door.

East was in the passage, half-dressed like myself, running for the landing. I reached it on his very heels, crying: 'What's happening? What the devil is it?', when there was a terrible shriek from Valla's passage, and Pencherjevsky was bounding up the stairs, bawling over his shoulder to the Cossacks whom I could see in the hall below:

'Hold them there! Hold the door! My child, Valentina! Where are you?'

'Here, father!' And she came hurrying in her night-gown, hair all disordered, eyes starting with terror. 'Father, they are everywhere—in the garden! I saw them—oh!'

There was a crash of musket-fire from beyond the front door, splinters flew in the hall, and one of the Cossacks sang out and staggered, clutching his leg. The others were at the hall windows, there was a smashing of glass, and the sound of baying, screaming voices from outside. Pencherjevsky swore, clasped Valla to him with one enormous arm, saw us, and bawled above the shooting:

'That damned priest! They have risen—the serfs have risen! They're attacking the house!'

I've been in a good few sieges in my time, from full-dress affairs like Cawnpore, Lucknow, and the Pekin nonsense a few years ago, to more domestic squabbles such as the Kabul residency in '41. But I can't think of one worse managed than the moujiks' attack on Starotorsk. I gathered afterwards that several thousand of them,