It was a Shrove Tuesday and everyone was out driving: sledges and pairs, four-in-hands, carriages, trotters, ladies in silk coats – all parading in a row along Kiev Street – hordes of pedestrians too. Suddenly there was a shout from a street which crossed the main one at right-angles: ‘Hey, hold him there, hold that horse back! Hey, give way there!’ in a thoroughly self-confident tone. Involuntarily the pedestrians stood aside and the fours all reined in. What do you think? A ragged cabman standing upright on a ramshackle sledge drawn by a wretched jade and brandishing the reins above his head, was forcing his way through by dint of shouting, to the opposite side of the street, while nobody realized what was going on. Even the policemen on duty were bursting out laughing when they saw it.
Although Dmitry is a man ready to take a chance and one who enjoys a bit of cursing, he has a good heart and is kind to animals. He uses the whip not as a means of compulsion, but of correction, that is to say, he does not urge the horse on with the whip: for him this would be quite incompatible with the dignity of a city coachman; but if a trotter should refuse to stand at a house entrance, he will ‘give him a touch or two’. I had occasion to see this presently: turning out of one street into another, our little horse was having difficulty in pulling us round, and from the agitated movements of Dmitry’s back and arms and the smacking noises he was making with his lips, it was clear to me that he was in a difficult position. Would he resort to the whip? It was against his habit to do so. But what if the horse should just stop still? He could not tolerate that, even though here there was no cause to worry about some joker who might say ‘Suppose you tried giving him something to eat?’ This seems to me a demonstration of the fact that Dmitry acts more from an awareness of principle than from vanity.
I reflected further on the great variety of relations between coachmen themselves, their mentality, their resourcefulness and their pride. No doubt when many coachmen are gathered together in one place they recognize one another, including those drivers they have been in collisions with, and they progress from hostile to peaceable relations. All human beings in this world are of interest, and particularly fascinating are the attitudes and relationships of those classes to which we do not ourselves belong.
When the two carriages involved in an incident are travelling in the same direction, any disagreement is usually more protracted: the man who has given offence tries to drive off or to drop back, and the other driver may manage to show that the first driver was in the wrong, and to gain the upper hand; however, when both parties are travelling the same way the advantage is on the side of the driver whose horses are swifter. All these attitudes are readily applicable to the relations one encounters in everyday life as a whole. I am equally intrigued by the attitudes of gentlemen to one another and to coachmen, in encounters of this sort.—‘Where d’you think you’re rushing off to, you load of rubbish?’ When this condemnation is addressed to the whole carriage, the passenger cannot help trying to appear serious, or merry, or carefree – in a word, to appear different from what he was the moment before: he would plainly be only too pleased if the whole thing had happened the other way round. I have observed that gentlemen with moustaches are particularly sensitive to insults hurled at their own carriages.—
—‘Who goes there?’
