The Cathedral Clergy: A Chronicle

Chapter 6

Chapter 6 Now, like it or not, we must bow to unavoidable circumstances in the course of our chronicle, leave Old Town’s archpriest and the marshal of the nobility for the moment, and become acquainted with a completely different social circle. We must enter the home of Bizyukin, the tax officer , where the long-awaited visitors from Petersburg have just arrived: Prince Bornovolokov, an old university chum of the tax collector and now a fairly prominent St. Petersburg bureaucrat who travels from place to place for the purpose of making inspections and instituting changes, and his secretary, Termosesov, who at one time was also acquainted with Bizyukin and shared his views. We enter precisely at that moment before the midday meal when the mail coach bringing the visitors from the capital to Old Town has stopped in front of his house. The tax collector himself was not at home then, and the domestic element was represented solely by his wife, the young lady about whom we have already learned a thing or two from Deacon Achilles, the old wafer baker, and the teacher, Prepotensky. That interesting lady waited alone for the honored guests, of whom Termosesov especially intrigued her, for she knew him to be a highly influential political activist. She had heard a good deal from her husband about the excellent qualities and importance of that personage, and thus, being a political animal herself, she awaited his arrival with a certain inner trepidation. Wishing to present herself in the very best light, one most advantageous to her reputation, Mrs. Bizyukina had been worrying all morning about how to arrange her house so that even its outward appearance would produce the proper impression on the new arrivals at the very first glance. Early that morning the tax collector’s wife had walked through all the rooms several times and found that nothing would do. Stopping in the middle of her tidy, well-furnished parlor, she exclaimed in despair: “What the devil is this, anyway! It looks exactly like the Porokhontsevs ’ parlor, and the Daryanovs’, and the postmaster’s. In short, it’s just like everybody else’s, only, I dare say, a whole lot better! The Porokhontsevs , for instance, don’t have a clock on their fireplace mantle—in fact, they don’t even have a fireplace at all. But I suppose the fireplace is all right since it’s a matter of hygiene. But why these wall lamps, why these figurines, and finally why this clock when there’s a clock in the sitting room?… And the sitting room? Good Lord! It’s got a piano, and music… No, I just can’t leave things like this—I don’t want the new people to 160 PART II look down on me because of these trifles. I don’t want to give Termosesov any reason to write to me the way that clever Masha in that clever novel The Living Soul14 wrote to her suitor, who lived in a fine house and drank tea from a silver samovar. That clever girl wrote to him bluntly that, as she said, ‘after what I’ve seen at your house, it’s all over between us.’ No, I don’t want that. I know how to receive political activists! But it’s so annoying that I don’t know what things are really like in Petersburg… It’s all probably pretty awful there, that is, I mean wonderful … oops, I mean awful… Oh, who the devil knows? Yes! But what in the world should I do with all this stuff? Should I actually drag everything outside? But what a pity—it would get ruined. And it all costs money, and besides, what’s the point of getting rid of things when all around, wherever you look … lace curtains over yonder in the bedroom, for instance… All right, they’re in a bedroom where the guests won’t see them… But what if they look in there?… That would be a horrible dirty trick. And also the children are so nicely dressed!… Well, then, I’ll keep them out of sight: let them stay right where they are. But still … it’s a pity to get rid of everything! No, I’d better just fix up my husband’s room instead.” And with that the tax collector’s young wife called her servants and ordered them to immediately take all the things she considered superfluous out of her husband’s study and...