Virgin Soil (Garnett)/Volume 2/Chapter 3

by Ivan Turgenev

PART II

XXIII

Dawn was already beginning in the sky on the night after Golushkin's dinner, when Solomin, after about four miles of brisk walking, knocked at the gate in the high fence surrounding the factory. The watchman let him in at once, and, followed by three house-dogs, vigorously wagging their shaggy tails, he led him with respectful solicitude to his little lodge. He was obviously delighted at his chief's successful return home.

'How is it you're here to-night, Vassily Fedotitch? we didn't expect you till to-morrow.'

'Oh, it 's all right, Gavrila; it 's nice walking at night.' Excellent, though rather exceptional, relations existed between Solomin and his work-people; they respected him as a superior and behaved with him as an equal, as one of themselves; only in their eyes he was a wonderful scholar! 'What Vassily Fedotitch says,' they used to repeat, 'is always right! for there's no sort of study he hasn't been through, and there isn't an Anglisher he's not a match for!' Some distinguished English manufacturer had once, as a fact, visited the factory; and either because Solomin spoke English to him, or that he really was impressed by his knowledge of his business, he kept clapping him on the shoulder, and laughing, and inviting him to come to Liverpool to see him; and he declared to the workpeople in his broken Russian, 'Oh, she's very good man, yours here! Oh! very good!' at which the workpeople in their turn laughed heartily, but with some pride; feeling, 'So our man's all that! One of us!'

And he really was one of them, and theirs.

Early the next morning Solomin's favourite, Pavel, came into his room; waked him, poured him water to wash with, told him some piece of news, and asked him some question. Then they had some tea together hurriedly, and Solomin, pulling on his greasy, grey working pea-jacket, went into the factory, and his life began to turn round again, like a huge fly-wheel.

But a fresh break was in store for it.

Five days after Solomin's return to his work, a handsome little phaeton, with four splendid horses harnessed abreast, drove into the factory yard, and a groom in pale pea-green livery was conducted by Pavel to the lodge, and solemnly handed Solomin a letter, sealed with an armorial crest, from 'His Excellency Boris Andreevitch Sipyagin.' In this letter, which was redolent, not of scent, oh, no! but of a sort of peculiarly distinguished and disgusting English odour, and was written in the third person, not by a secretary but by his Excellency himself, the enlightened owner of the Arzhano estate first apologised for addressing a person with whom he was not personally acquainted, but of whom he, Sipyagin, had heard such flattering accounts. Then he 'ventured' to invite Mr. Solomin to his country seat, as his advice might be of the utmost service to him, Sipyagin, in an industrial undertaking of some magnitude; and in the hope of Mr. Solomin's kindly consenting to do so, he, Sipyagin, was sending his carriage for him. In case it should be impossible for Mr. Solomin to get away that day, he, Sipyagin, most earnestly begged Mr. Solomin to appoint him any other day convenient to him, and he, Sipyagin, would gladly place the same carriage at his, Mr. Solomin's, disposal. There followed the usual civilities, and at the end of the letter was a postscript in the first person, 'I hope you will not refuse to dine with me quite simply—not evening dress.' (The words 'quite simply' were underlined.) Together with this letter the pea-green footman, with a certain show of embarrassment, gave Solomin a simple note, simply stuck up without a seal, from Nezhdanov, which contained only a few words, 'Please come, you are greatly needed here and may be of great service; I need hardly say, not to Mr. Sipyagin.'

On reading Sipyagin's letter, Solomin thought: 'Quite simply! how else should I go? I never had an evening suit in my life.. . . And why the devil should I go trailing out there? . . . it's simple waste of time!' but after a glance at Nezhdanov's note, he scratched his head, and walked to the window, irresolute.

'What answer are you graciously pleased to send?' the pea-green footman questioned sedately.

Solomin stood a moment longer at the window, and at last, shaking back his hair and passing his hand over his forehead, he said, 'I will come. Let me have time to dress.'

The footman with well-bred discretion withdrew, and Solomin sent for Pavel, had some talk with him, ran over once more to the factory, and, putting on a black coat with a very long waist, made him by a provincial tailor, and a rather rusty top-hat, which at once gave a wooden expression to his face, he seated himself in the phaeton, then suddenly remembered he had taken no gloves, and called the ubiquitous Pavel, who brought him a pair of white chamois-leather gloves, recently washed, every finger of which had stretched at the tip and looked like a finger-biscuit. Solomin stuffed the gloves into his pocket, and said they could drive on. Then the footman with a sudden, quite unnecessary swiftness leaped on to the box, the well-trained coachman gave a shrill whistle, and the horses went off at a trot.

While they were gradually carrying Solomin to Sipyagin's estate, that statesman was sitting in his drawing-room with a half-cut political pamphlet on his knee, talking about him to his wife. He confided to her that he had really written to him with the object of trying whether he couldn't entice him away from the merchant's factory to his own, as it was in a very bad way indeed, and radical reforms were needed! The idea that Solomin would refuse to come, or even fix another day, Sipyagin could not entertain for an instant; though he had himself offered Solomin a choice of days in his letter.

'But ours are paper-mills, not cotton-spinning, you know,' observed Valentina Mihalovna.

'It's all the same, my love; there's machinery in the one and machinery in the other . . . and he's a mechanician.'

'But perhaps he's a specialist, you know!'

'My love—in the first place, there are no specialists in Russia; and, secondly, I repeat he's a mechanician!'

Valentina Mihalovna smiled.

'Take care, my dear; you've been unlucky once already with young men; mind you don't make a second mistake!'

'You mean Nezhdanov? But I consider I attained my object any way; he's an excellent teacher for Kolya. And besides, you know, non bis in idem! Pardon my pedantry, please. . . . That means, facts don't repeat themselves.'

'You think not? But I think everything in the world repeats itself . . . especially what's in the nature of things . . . and especially with young people.'

'Que voulez-vous dire?' asked Sipyagin, flinging the pamphlet on the table with a graceful gesture.

'Ouvrez les yeux, et vous verrez!' Madame Sipyagin answered him; they spoke French, of course, to one another.

'H'm!' commented Sipyagin. 'Are you alluding to the student fellow?'

'To Monsieur le student—yes'

'H'm! has he got . . .' (he moved his hand about his forehead . . .) 'anything afoot here? Eh?'

'Open your eyes!'

'Marianna? Eh?' (The second 'eh?' was decidedly more nasal than the first.)

'Open your eyes, I tell you!'

Sipyagin frowned.

'Well, we will go into all that later on. Just now I only wanted to say one thing.. . . This fellow will probably be rather uncomfortable . . . of course, that's natural enough, he's not used to society. So we shall have to be rather friendly with him . . . so as not to alarm him. I don't mean that for you; you're a perfect treasure, and you can captivate any one in no time, if you choose to. J'en sais quelque chose, Madame! I mention it in regard to other people; for instance, our friend there.'

He pointed to a fashionable grey hat lying on a whatnot; the hat belonged to Mr. Kallomyetsev, who happened to be at Arzhano early that morning.

'Il est très cassant, you know; he has such an intense contempt for the people, a thing of which I deeply disapprove! I've noticed in him, too, for some time past, a certain irritability and quarrelsomeness. . . . Is his little affair in that quarter' (Sipyagin nodded his head in some undefined direction, but his wife understood him) 'not getting on well? Eh?'

'Open your eyes! I tell you again.'

Sipyagin got up.

'Eh?' (This 'eh? ' was of an utterly different character, and in a different tone . . . much lower.) 'You don't say so! I may open them too wide; they 'd better be careful.'

'That's for you to say; but as to your new young man, if only he comes to-day you needn't worry yourself—every precaution shall be taken.'

And after all, it turned out that no precaution was at all needed. Solomin was not in the least uncomfortable or alarmed. When the servant announced his arrival, Sipyagin at once got up, called out loudly so that it could be heard in the hall, 'Ask him up, of course, ask him up!' went to the drawing-room door and stood right in front of it. Solomin was scarcely through the doorway when Sipyagin, whom he almost knocked up against, held out both hands to him, and, smiling affably and nodding his head, said cordially, 'This is indeed good . . . on your part! . . . how grateful I am!' and led him up to Valentina Mihalovna.

'This is my good wife,' he said, softly pressing his hand against Solomin's back, and, as it were, impelling him towards Valentina Mihalovna; 'here, my dear, is our leading mechanician and manufacturer, Vassily. . . Fedosyevitch Solomin.'

Madame Sipyagin rose and, with a beautiful upward quiver of her exquisite eyelashes, first smiled to him—simply—as to a friend; then held out her little hand, palm uppermost, her elbow pressed against her waist, and her head bent in the direction of her hand . . . in the attitude of a suppliant. Solomin let both husband and wife play off their little tricks upon him, shook hands with both, and took a seat at the first invitation to do so. Sipyagin began to fuss about him: 'Wouldn't he take something?' But Solomin replied that he did not want anything, wasn't in the least fatigued with the journey, and was completely at his disposal.

'You mean I may ask you to visit the factory?' cried Sipyagin, as though quite overcome, and not daring to believe in such condescension on the part of his guest.

'At once,' answered Solomin.

'Ah, how good you are! Shall I order the carriage? or perhaps you would prefer to walk? . . .'

'Why, it's not far from here, I suppose, your factory?'

'Half a mile, not more.'

'Then why order the carriage?'

'Ah, that's delightful, then! Boy, my hat, my stick, at once! And you, little missis, bestir yourself, and have a good dinner ready for us. My hat!'

Sipyagin was far more perturbed than his visitor. Repeating once more, 'But where's my hat?' he, the great dignitary, bustled out of the room like a frolicsome schoolboy. While he was talking to Solomin, Valentina Mihalovna was looking stealthily but intently at this 'new young man.' He was sitting calmly in his easy-chair, with his bare hands (he had not, after all, put on the gloves) lying on his knees, and calmly, though with curiosity, looking about at the furniture and the pictures. 'How is it?' she thought; 'he is a plebeian . . . an unmistakable plebeian . . . but how naturally he behaves!'

Solomin did certainly behave very naturally, and not as some do, who are simple indeed, but with a sort of intensity, as though to say, 'Look at me, understand what sort of a man I am,' but like a man whose feelings and ideas are strong without being complex. Madam Sipyagin wanted to enter into conversation with him, but, to her amazement, could not at once find anything suitable to say.

'Good heavens!' she thought,'can I be impressed by this workman?'

'Boris Andreitch ought to be very grateful to you,' she said at last, 'for consenting to devote part of your valuable time to him.. . .'

'It's not so valuable as all that, madam,' answered Solomin; 'and I'm not come to you for very long.'

'Voilà où l'ours a montré sa patte,' she thought in French, but at that instant her husband appeared in the open doorway, with his hat on and his stick in his hand.

Turning half round, he cried with a free and easy air: 'Vassily Fedosyevitch! Ready to start?'

Solomin got up, bowed to Valentina Mihalovna, and walked out behind Sipyagin.

'Follow me, this way, this way, Vassily Fedosyevitch!' Sipyagin called, just as though he were going through a forest and Solomin needed a guide. 'This way! there are steps here, Vassily Fedosyevitch.'

'When you are pleased to call me by my father's name,' Solomin observed deliberately, . . . 'I'm not Fedosyevitch, but Fedotitch.'

Sipyagin looked back at him over his shoulder, almost in affright.

'Ah! I beg your pardon, indeed, Vassily Fedotitch.'

'Not at all; no occasion.'

They went into the courtyard. They happened to meet Kallomyetsev.

'Where are you off to?' he inquired, looking askance at Solomin; 'to the factory? C'est là l'individu en question?'

Sipyagin opened his eyes wide and slightly shook his head by way of warning.

'Yes, to the factory . . . to show my sins and transgressions to this gentleman—the mechanician. Let me introduce you: Mr. Kallomyetsev, our neighbour here; Mr. Solomin.. . .'

Kallomyetsev nodded his head twice, hardly perceptibly, not at all in Solomin's direction, without looking at him. But he looked at Kallomyetsev, and there was a gleam of something in his half-closed eyes.

'May I join you?' asked Kallomyetsev. 'You know I like instruction.'

'Of course you may.'

They went out of the courtyard into the road, and had not gone twenty steps when they saw the parish priest in a cassock, hitched up into the belt, making his way home to the so-called 'pope's quarter.' Kallomyetsev promptly left his two companions, and with long, resolute strides approached the priest, who was not at all expecting this and was rather disconcerted, asked his blessing, deposited a sounding kiss on his moist red hand, and, turning to Solomin, flung him a challenging glance. He obviously knew 'a fact or two' about him, and wanted to show off and to display his contempt for this learned rascal.

'C'est une manifestation, mon cher?' Sipyagin muttered through his teeth.

Kallomyetsev gave a snort.

'Oui, mon cher, une manifestation necessaire par le temps qui court!'

They went into the factory. They were met by a Little Russian with an immense beard and false teeth, who had succeeded the former superintendent, the German, when Sipyagin finally dismissed him. This Little Russian was a temporary substitute; he obviously knew nothing of the business, and could do nothing but sigh and incessantly repeat 'Maybe' . . . and 'Just so.'

The inspection of the establishment began. Some of the factory hands knew Solomin by sight and bowed to him . . . and to one of them he even said, 'Hullo, Grigory! you here?' He soon saw that the business was badly managed. Money had been laid out profusely but injudiciously. The machines turned out to be of poor quality; many were unnecessary and useless; many that were needed were lacking. Sipyagin kept constantly looking at Solomin's face to guess his opinion, put some timid questions, wished to know if he were pleased, at any rate, with the discipline.

'The system's all right,' answered Solomin, 'but can it give any return? I doubt it.'

Not Sipyagin only, but even Kallomyetsev, felt that Solomin was, as it were, at home in the factory, that everything in it was thoroughly familiar to him and understood to the smallest detail—that here he was master. He laid his hand on a machine as a driver lays his hand on a horse's neck; he poked his fingers into a wheel and it stopped moving or began going round; he scooped up in his hand out of the vat a little of the pulp of which the paper was made, and at once it revealed all its defects. Solomin said little, and did not even look at the Little Russian at all; in silence, too, he walked out of the factory. Sipyagin and Kallomyetsev followed him.

Sipyagin did not tell any one to accompany him . . . he positively stamped and gnashed his teeth. He was very much disturbed.

'I see by your face,' he said, addressing Solomin, 'that you're not pleased with my factory, and I know myself that it's in an unsatisfactory state and unprofitable; however, . . . please don't scruple to speak out . . . what are really its most important shortcomings? And what is to be done to improve it?'

'Paper-making's not in my line,' answered Solomin, 'but one thing I can tell you—industrial undertakings aren't the thing for gentlemen.'

'You regard such pursuits as degrading for gentlemen?' interposed Kallomyetsev.

Solomin smiled his broad smile.

'Oh, no! What an idea! What is there degrading about it? And even if there were, the gentry aren't squeamish as to that, you know.'

'Eh? What's that?'

'I only meant,' Solomin resumed tranquilly, 'that gentlemen aren't used to that sort of business. Commercial foresight is needed for that; everything has to be put on a different footing; you need training for it. The gentry don't understand that. We see them right and left founding cloth factories, wool factories, and all sorts, but in the long-run all these factories fall into the hands of merchants. It's a pity, for the merchant's just as much of a blood-sucker; but there's no help for it.'

'To listen to you,' cried Kallomyetsev, 'one would suppose financial questions were beyond our nobility!'

'Oh, quite the contrary! the gentry are first-rate hands at that. For getting concessions for railroads, founding banks, begging some tax-exemption for themselves, or anything of that sort, none are a match for the gentry. They accumulate great capitals. I hinted at that just now, when you were pleased to take offence at it. But I was thinking of regular industrial enterprises. I say regular, because founding private taverns and petty truck-shops and lending the peasants wheat or money at a hundred and a hundred and fifty per cent, as so many of our landowning gentry are doing now—operations like that I can't regard as genuine commercial business.'

Kallomyetsev made no reply. He belonged to just that new species of money-lending land-owner whom Markelov had referred to in his last talk with Nezhdanov, and he was the more inhuman in his extortions that he never had any personal dealings with the peasants; he did not admit them into his perfumed European study, but did business with them through an agent. As he listened to Solomin's deliberate, as it were, impartial speech, he was raging inwardly . . . but he was silent this time, and only the working of the muscles of his face betrayed what was passing within him.

'But, Vassily Fedotitch, allow me—allow me,' began Sipyagin. 'All that you are expressing was a perfectly just criticism in former days, when the nobility enjoyed . . . totally different privileges, and were altogether in another position. But nowadays, after all the beneficial reforms . . . in our industrial age, why cannot the nobility turn their energies and abilities into such enterprises? Why should they be unable to understand what is understood by the simple, often unlettered, merchant? They don't suffer from lack of education, and one may even claim with confidence that they are in some sense the representatives of enlightenment and progress.'

Boris Andreevitch spoke very well; his fluency would have had great effect in Petersburg—in his department—or even in higher quarters, but on Solomin it produced no impression whatever.

'The gentry cannot manage these things,' he repeated.

'And why not? why?' Kallomyetsev almost shouted.

'Because they will always remain mere officials.'

'Officials?' Kallomyetsev laughed malignantly. 'You don't quite realise what you are saying, I fancy, Mr. Solomin.' Solomin still smiled as before.

'What makes you fancy that, Mr. Kolomentsev?' (Kallomyetsev positively shuddered at such a "mutilation" of his surname.) 'No, I always fully realise what I am saying.'

'Then explain what you meant by your last expression.'

'Certainly; in my idea, every official is an outsider, and has always been so, and the gentry have now become outsiders.'

Kallomyetsev laughed still more.

'I beg your pardon, my dear sir; that I can't make head or tail of!'

'So much the worse for you. Make a great effort . . . perhaps you will understand it.'

'Sir!'

'Gentlemen, gentlemen,' Sipyagin interposed hurriedly with an air of searching earnestly about him for some one. 'If you please, if you please . . . Kallomyetsev, je vous prie de vous calmer. And dinner will be ready soon, to be sure. Pray, gentlemen, follow me!'

'Valentina Mihalovna!' whined Kallomyetsev, running into her boudoir five minutes later, 'it's really beyond everything what your husband is doing! One Nihilist installed here among you already, and now he's bringing in another! And this one's the worst!'

'How so?'

'Upon my word, he's advocating the deuce knows what; and besides—observe one thing: he has been talking to your husband for a whole hour, and never once, not once, did he say, Your Excellency! Le vagabond!'