—How stupid! Why am I asking him?—No, that’s not true, there’s nothing stupid about it: you have an urge to talk, to make contact with people, because you are in a cheerful mood. So why am I cheerful? If I had got into the sledge at any time in the past half-hour I would not have started chatting. It is because you spoke really rather well before taking your leave, and because her husband came out to see you off and said ‘When shall we be seeing one another again?’ And because as soon as the footman caught sight of you he immediately roused himself, and for all that his breath smelt strongly of parsley, he attended to you with such enthusiasm. I once gave him fifty copecks. In all our memories the central part gets lost, but the first and last impressions remain, especially the last. Hence the delightful custom whereby the master of the house sees a guest to the door where, generally standing there with his legs twined together in semi-embarrassment, he cannot avoid saying something kind to his guest: no matter how short the acquaintance may have been, this rule cannot be neglected. Thus, for example, ‘When shall we be seeing each other again?’ means nothing, but the guest out of self-esteem translates it so:
‘If he hasn’t gone clean out of his wits!… De-evil take him!…’
Dmitry and I had been driving very gently and very carefully along some boulevard or other, keeping to the thin covering of ice on the right-hand side of the carriageway, when some ‘wood demon’ (as Dmitry afterwards referred to him) with a carriage and pair had run into us. We extricated ourselves, and when we were already a dozen or so paces safely distant from them Dmitry said: ‘See there, the wood demon doesn’t know his right from his left!’
Do not assume that Dmitry was a timid fellow or slow to respond. No, quite the reverse: although short in stature and beardless (but still with a moustache) he was deeply conscious of his own worth, and scrupulous in carrying out his duties. The cause of his apparent weakness in this instance was twofold. First, Dmitry was accustomed to driving carriages which inspired respect, whereas now we were travelling in an insignificant little sledge behind a small horse in extremely long shafts, so that even with the length of the whip it was quite hard to reach the animal, and the horse in question was pathetically unsteady in the hind legs and liable to call forth ridicule from passers-by who saw it: so that this incident was particularly awkward for Dmitry, sufficiently so to cancel out his customary feeling of dignity. Second, my question ‘Is it freezing?’ probably reminded him of the same sort of question I would ask when going out with him on hunting trips in the autumn. He is a sportsman, and a sportsman has plenty of material for daydreaming – which may even make him forget to curse appropriately a driver who does not keep to the right. Among coachmen as with everyone else, that man is in the right who shouts at the other driver first and with the greater conviction. There are exceptions: for example, a poor droshky-driver cannot possibly shout at a carriage, and a man on his own, even if he is a bit of a dandy, is hard put to it to shout at a team of four horses; in fact everything turns on the nature of the particular circumstances, and chiefly on the personality of the coachman and the direction he is travelling in. In Tula I once witnessed a striking example of the effect one man can produce on others by sheer audacity.
