Short Fiction - Nikolai Gogol (best selling autobiographies TXT) 📗

Potemkin remained silent, and, with an unconcerned air, was brushing the diamonds which sparkled on his fingers.

“What do you ask for, then?” demanded Catherine, in a solicitous tone of voice.

The Zaporoghians looked knowingly at one another.

“Now’s the time! the Czarina asks what we want!” thought the blacksmith, and suddenly down he went on his knees. “Imperial Majesty! Do not show me thy anger, show me thy mercy! Let me know (and let not my question bring the wrath of thy Majesty’s worship upon me!) of what stuff are made the boots that thou wearest on thy feet? I think there is no bootmaker in any country in the world who ever will be able to make such pretty ones. Gracious Lord! if ever my wife had such boots to wear!”

The empress laughed; the courtiers laughed too. Potemkin frowned and smiled at the same time. The Zaporoghians pushed the blacksmith, thinking he had gone mad.

“Stand up!” said the empress, kindly. “If thou wishest to have such shoes, thy wish may be easily fulfilled. Let him have directly my richest gold embroidered shoes. This artlessness pleases me exceedingly.” Then, turning towards a gentleman with a round pale face, who stood a little apart from the rest, and whose plain dress, with mother-of-pearl buttons, showed at once that he was not a courtier: “There you have,” continued she, “a subject worthy of your witty pen.”

“Your Imperial Majesty is too gracious! It would require a pen no less able than that of a Lafontaine!” answered with a bow, the gentleman in the plain dress.

“Upon my honour! I tell you I am still under the impression of your Brigadier.25 You read exceedingly well!” Then, speaking once more to the Zaporoghians, she said, “I was told that you never married at your Ssiecha?”

“How could that be, mother? Thou knowest well, by thyself, that no man could ever do without a woman,” answered the same Zaporoghian who had conversed with the blacksmith; and the blacksmith was astonished to hear one so well acquainted with polished language speak to the Czarina, as if on purpose, in the coarsest accent used among peasants.

“A cunning people,” thought he to himself; “he does it certainly for some reason.”

“We are no monks,” continued the speaker, “we are sinful men. Every one of us is as much inclined to forbidden fruit as a good Christian can be. There are not a few among us who have wives, only their wives do not live in the Ssiecha. Many have their wives in Poland; others have wives in Ukraine;26 there are some, too, who have wives in Turkey.”

At this moment the shoes were brought to the blacksmith.

“Gracious Lord! what ornaments!” cried he, overpowered with joy, grasping the shoes. “Imperial Majesty! if thou dost wear such shoes upon thy feet (and thy Honour, I dare say, does use them even for walking in the snow and the mud), what, then, must thy feet be like?⁠—whiter than sugar, at the least, I should think!”

The empress, who really had charming feet of an exquisite shape, could not refrain from smiling at such a compliment from a simple-minded blacksmith, who, notwithstanding his sunburnt features must have been accounted a handsome lad in his Zaporoghian dress.

The blacksmith, encouraged by the condescension of the Czarina, was already on the point of asking her some questions about all sorts of things, whether it was true that sovereigns fed upon nothing but honey and lard, and so on; but feeling the Zaporoghians pull the skirts of his coat, he resolved to keep silent; and when the empress turned to the older Cossacks, and began to ask them about their way of living, and their manners in the Ssiecha, he stepped a little back, bent his head towards his pocket, and said in a low voice: “Quick, carry me hence, away!” and in no time he had left the town gate far behind.

“He is drowned! I’ll swear to it, he’s drowned! May I never leave this spot alive, if he is not drowned!” said the fat weaver’s wife, standing in the middle of the street, amidst a group of the villagers’ wives.

“Then I am a liar? Did I ever steal anything? Did I ever cast an evil-eye upon anyone? that I am no longer worthy of belief?” shrieked a hag wearing a Cossack’s dress, and with a violet-coloured nose, brandishing her hands in the most violent manner: “May I never have another drink of water if old Pereperchenko’s wife did not see with her own eyes, how that the blacksmith has hanged himself!”

“The blacksmith hanged himself? what is this I hear?” said the elder, stepping out of Choop’s cottage; and he pushed his way nearer to the talking women.

“Say rather, mayest thou never wish to drink brandy again, old drunkard!” answered the weaver’s wife. “One must be as mad as thou art to hang one’s self. He is drowned! drowned in the ice hole! This I know as well as that thou just now didst come from the brandy-shop!”

“Shameless creature! what meanest thou to reproach me with?” angrily retorted the hag with the violet-coloured nose, “thou hadst better hold thy tongue, good-for-nothing woman! Don’t I know that the clerk comes every evening to thee?”

The weaver’s wife became red in the face. “What does the clerk do? to whom does the clerk come? What lie art thou telling?”

“The clerk?” cried, in shrill voice, the clerk’s wife, who, dressed in a hare-skin cloak covered with blue nankeen, pushed her way towards the quarrelling ones; “I will let you know about the clerk! Who is talking here about the clerk?

“There is she to whom the clerk pays his visits!” said the violet-nosed woman, pointing to the weaver’s wife.

“So, thou art the witch,” continued the clerk’s wife stepping nearer the weaver’s wife; “thou art the witch who sends him out of his senses and gives him a charmed beverage in order to bewitch