Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls

Nozdryov flushed and came up to Chichikov so close that he retreated a couple of steps.

"I'll make you play! Never mind that you've mixed up the pieces, I remember all the moves. We'll put them back the way they were."

"No, brother, the matter's ended, I won't play with you."

"So you don't want to play?"

"You can see for yourself that it's impossible to play with you."

"No, tell me straight out that you don't want to play," Nozdryov said, stepping still closer.

"I don't!" said Chichikov, bringing both hands closer to his face anyhow, just in case, for things were indeed getting heated.

This precaution was quite appropriate, because Nozdryov swung his arm . . . and it might very well have happened that one of our hero's pleasant and plump cheeks was covered in indelible dishonor; but, successfully warding off the blow, he seized Nozdryov by his two eager arms and held him fast.

"Porfiry Pavlushka!" Nozdryov shouted in rage, trying to tear himself free.

Hearing these words, Chichikov, not wishing to have household serfs witness this tempting scene, and at the same time feeling that it was useless to hold Nozdryov, let go of his arms. At the same time, in came Porfiry and with him Pavlushka, a stalwart fellow, to deal with whom would have been altogether unprofitable.

"So you don't want to finish the game?" Nozdryov said. "Answer me straight out!"

"It is impossible to finish the game," Chichikov said and peeked out the window. He saw his britzka standing all ready, and Selifan seemed to be waiting for a sign to drive up to the porch, but it was impossible to get out of the room: in the doorway stood two stalwart bonded fools.

"So you don't want to finish the game?" Nozdryov repeated, his face burning as if it were on fire.

"If you played as befits an honest man. But now I can't."

"Ah! so you can't, scoundrel! You saw the game was going against you, so now you can't! Beat him!" he shouted frenziedly, turning to Porfiry and Pavlushka, and himself seizing hold of his cherrywood chibouk. Chichikov turned pale as a sheet. He wanted to say something, but felt that his lips were moving soundlessly.

"Beat him!" shouted Nozdryov, charging forward with his cherrywood chibouk, all hot and sweaty, as if he were assaulting an impregnable fortress. "Beat him!" he shouted in the same voice in which some desperate lieutenant, during a major assault, shouts "Forward, boys!" to his detachment, his extravagant valor already of such renown that a special order has been issued to hold him by the arms when things get hot. But the lieutenant has already caught the feeling of martial fervor, his head is all in a whirl; Suvorov [17] Alexander Suvorov (1729-1800), the greatest Russian general of his time, successfully led Russian forces against the Turks at Iz-mayil, put down the Polish insurrection in 1794, and led the opposition to the French revolutionary armies until he was stopped by Maréchal Masséna at Zurich in 1799. hovers before his eyes, he pushes on towards a great deed. "Forward, boys!" he shouts, charging, not thinking of how he is damaging the already worked-out plan for the general assault, of the millions of gun barrels thrust through the embrasures of the fortress walls, impregnable, soaring beyond the clouds, of how his powerless detachment will be blown into the air like swansdown, or of the fatal bullet already whistling and about to slam shut his clamorous gullet. But if Nozdryov himself represented the desperate, lost, fortress-assaulting lieutenant, the fortress he was attacking in no way resembled an impregnable one. On the contrary, the fortress was so afraid that its heart sank right into its shoes. Already the chair with which he had thought to defend himself had been torn from his hands by the serfs, already, with eyes shut, more dead than alive, he was preparing to get a taste of his host's Circassian chibouk, and God knows what was going to happen to him; but it pleased the fates to spare the ribs, the shoulders, and all the polite parts of our hero. Unexpectedly, there suddenly came a clinking, as if from the clouds, a jingling sound of bells, there was a rattle of wheels as a cart flew up to the porch, and even into the room itself came the heavy snorting and heavy breathing from the overheated horses of the stopped troika. Everyone involuntarily glanced at the window: someone, with a mustache, in a half-military frock coat, was getting out of the cart. After making inquiries in the front hall, he entered at the very moment when Chichikov, having not yet managed to collect himself after his fear, was in the most pitiful position a mortal had ever been in.

"May I know which of you here is Mr. Nozdryov?" said the stranger, looking in some perplexity at Nozdryov, who was standing with the chibouk in his hand, and at Chichikov, who was barely beginning to recover from his unprofitable position.

"May I first know to whom I have the honor of speaking?" said Nozdryov, going up closer to him.

"The district captain of police."

"And what would you like?"

"I have come to announce to you the notification which has been communicated to me that you are under arrest until the decision of your case is concluded."

"Nonsense, what case?" said Nozdryov.

"You have been implicated in an episode on the occasion of the inflicting of a personal offense upon the landowner Maximov with birch rods in a drunken state."

"You're lying! I've never laid eyes on any landowner Maximov!" "My dear sir! Allow me to report to you that I am an officer.

You may say that to your servant, but not to me!"

Here Chichikov, without waiting for Nozdryov's response to that, quickly took hat in hand, and behind the police captain's back, slipped out to the porch, got into his britzka, and told Selifan to whip up the horses to full speed.

Our hero, however, had turned quite properly chicken. Though the britzka was racing along like wildfire, and Nozdryov's estate had long since rushed from sight, covered by fields, slopes, and hummocks, he still kept looking back in fear, as if he expected at any moment to be swooped upon by the pursuit. He had difficulty catching his breath, and when he tried putting his hand to his heart, he felt it fluttering like a quail in a cage. "Eh, what a hot time he gave me! just look at him!" Here all sorts of unholy and strong wishes were vowed upon Nozdryov; occasionally even in not very nice words. No help for it! A Russian man, and in a temper besides! Moreover, it was by no means a laughing matter. "Say what you like," he said to himself, "if the police captain hadn't shown up, I might not have been granted another look at God's world! I'd have vanished like a bubble on water, without a trace, leaving no posterity, providing my future children with neither fortune nor an honest name!" Our hero was very much concerned with his posterity.

"What a bad master!" Selifan was thinking to himself. "I've never yet seen such a master. I mean, spit on him for that! Better not give a man food to eat, but a horse must be fed, because a horse likes oats. It's his victuals: what provender is to us, for instance, oats is to him, it's his victuals."

The horses' notions of Nozdryov also seemed to be unadvantageous: not only the bay and Assessor, but even the dapple-gray was out of spirits. Though it always fell to his lot to get the worst oats, and Selifan never poured them into his trough without first saying: "Eh, you scoundrel!"—still they were oats and not mere hay, he chewed them with pleasure and often shoved his long muzzle into his comrades' troughs to have a taste of what they got for vittles, especially when Selifan was not in the stable, but now just hay—that was not nice; everyone was displeased.

But soon all the displeased were interrupted amid their outpourings in a sudden and quite unexpected way. Everyone, not excluding the coachman himself, recollected and recovered themselves only when a coach and six came galloping down on them and they heard, almost over their heads, the cries of the ladies sitting in the coach, the curses and threats of the other coachman: "Ah, you knave, didn't I shout out to you: keep right, gawker! Are you drunk, or what?" Selifan felt himself at fault, but since a Russian man does not like to admit before another that he is to blame, he at once uttered, assuming a dignified air: "And what are you a-galloping like that for? Pawned your eyes in a pot-house?" After which he started backing the britzka up, so as to free it from the other's harness, but nothing doing, it all got into a tangle. The dapple-gray sniffed curiously at his new friends, who ended up on either side of him. Meanwhile, the ladies sitting in the coach looked at it all with an expression of fear on their faces. One was an old lady, the other a young girl, a sixteen-year-old, with golden hair quite artfully and prettily smoothed back on her small head. Her lovely face was rounded like a fresh egg, and resembled one when, white with a sort of transparent whiteness, fresh, only just laid, it is held up by the housekeeper's dark-skinned hand to be checked in the light and the rays of the shining sun pass through it; her thin little ears were also transparent, aglow with the warm light coming through them. That, and the fright on her parted, motionless lips, and the tears in her eyes—it was all so pretty in her that our hero gazed at her for several minutes, paying no attention to the tumult that was going on among the horses and coachmen. "Back off, will you, you Nizhni-Novgorod gawk!" the other coachman was shouting. Selifan pulled at the reins, the other coachman did the same, the horses backed up a little, then lurched into each other again, having stepped over the traces. In these circumstances, the dapple-gray took such a liking to his new acquaintance that he did not want at all to leave the rut to which the unforeseen fates had brought him, and, resting his muzzle on the neck of his new friend, seemed to be whispering right into his ear, probably some terrible nonsense, because the other horse was ceaselessly twitching his ears.