“Drive, drive, Andrei, I’m coming!” Mitya exclaimed as if in fever.
“They’re not asleep!” Andrei said again, pointing with his whip to Plastunov’s inn, which stood just at the entrance and in which all six street windows were brightly lit.
“Not asleep!” Mitya echoed happily. “Make it rattle, Andrei, gallop, ring the bells, drive up with a clatter. Let everybody know who’s come! I’m coming! Me! Here I come!” Mitya kept exclaiming frenziedly.
Andrei put the exhausted troika to a gallop, and indeed drove up to the high porch with a clatter and reined in his steaming, half-suffocated horses. Mitya jumped from the cart just as the innkeeper, who was in fact on his way to bed, peered out from the porch, curious who could just have driven up like that.
“Is it you, Trifon Borisich?”
The innkeeper bent forward, peered, ran headlong down the steps, and rushed up to his guest in servile rapture.
“My dear Dmitri Fyodorovich! Do we meet again?”
This Trifon Borisich was a thickset and robust man of medium height, with a somewhat fleshy face, of stern and implacable appearance, especially with the Mokroye peasants, but endowed with the ability to change his expression to one of the utmost servility whenever he smelled a profit. He went about dressed in Russian style, in a peasant blouse and a long, full-skirted coat, had quite a bit of money, but also constantly dreamed of a higher role. He had more than half of the peasants in his clutches, everyone was in debt to him. He rented land from the landowners, and had also bought some himself, and the peasants worked this land for him in return for their debts, which they could never pay back. He was a widower and had four grown-up daughters; one was already a widow and lived with him with her two little ones, his granddaughters, working for him as a charwoman. Another of his peasant daughters was married to an official, who had risen from being a petty clerk, and one could see on the wall in one of the rooms of the inn, among the family photographs, also a miniature photograph of this little official in his uniform and official epaulettes. The two younger daughters, on feast days or when going visiting, would put on light blue or green dresses of fashionable cut, tight-fitting behind and with three feet of train, but the very next morning, as on any other day, they would get up at dawn, sweep the rooms with birch brooms in their hands, take the garbage out, and clear away the trash left by the lodgers. Despite the thousands he had already made, Trifon Borisich took great pleasure in fleecing a lodger on a spree, and, recalling that not quite a month ago he had profited from Dmitri Fyodorovich in one day, during his spree with Grushenka, to the tune of more than two hundred roubles, if not three, he now greeted him joyfully and eagerly, scenting his prey again just by the way Mitya drove up to the porch.
“My dear Dmitri Fyodorovich, will you be our guest again?”
“Wait, Trifon Borisich,” Mitya began, “first things first: where is she?”
“Agrafena Alexandrovna?” the innkeeper understood at once, peering alertly into Mitya’s face. “She’s here, too ... staying...”
“With whom? With whom?”
“Some visitors passing through, sir ... One is an official, must be a Pole from the way he talks, it was he who sent horses for her from here; the other one is a friend of his, or a fellow traveler, who can tell? They’re both in civilian clothes ...”
“What, are they on a spree? Are they rich?”
“Spree, nothing! They’re small fry, Dmitri Fyodorovich.”
“Small? And the others?”
“They’re from town, two gentlemen ... They were on their way back from Cherny and stopped here. One of them, the young one, must be a relative of Mr. Miusov’s, only I forget his name ... and the other one you know, too, I suppose: the landowner Maximov; he went on a pilgrimage to your monastery, he says, and now he’s going around with this young relative of Mr. Miusov’s ...”
“And that’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Stop, listen, Trifon Borisich, now tell me the most important thing: what about her, how is she?”
“She just arrived, and now she’s sitting with them.”
“Happy? Laughing?”
“No, she doesn’t seem to be laughing much. She’s sitting there quite bored; she was combing the young man’s hair.”
“The Pole’s? The officer’s?”
“He’s no young man, and no officer either, not at all; no, sir, not his but this nephew of Miusov’s, the young man ... I just can’t remember his name.”
“Kalganov?”
“Exactly—Kalganov.”
“Good, I’ll see for myself. Are they playing cards?”
“They played for a while, then they stopped and had tea. The official ordered liqueurs.”
“Stop, Trifon Borisich, stop, my dear soul, I’ll see for myself. Now answer the most important thing: are there any gypsies around?” “There’s been no word of gypsies at all lately, Dmitri Fyodorovich, the authorities chased them away, but there are Jews hereabouts, in Rozhdestvenskaya, they play cymbals and fiddles, you can send for them even now. They’ll come.”
