Dead Souls

As the carriage drove into the yard, the gentleman was met by a tavern servant, or floorboy, as they are called in Russian taverns, lively and fidgety to such a degree that it was even impossible to tell what sort of face he had. He ran outnimbly, a napkin in his hand, all long himself and in a long half-cotton frock coat with its back almost up to his nape, tossed his hair, and nimbly led the gentleman up along the entire wooden gallery to show him his God-sent chambers. The chambers were of a familiar kind, for the inn was also of a familiar kind, that is, precisely one of those inns in provincial towns where for two roubles a day the traveler is given a comfortable room, with cockroaches peeking like prunes from every corner, and the door to the adjoining quarters always blocked by a chest of drawers, where a neighbor settles, a taciturn and quiet man, yet an extremely curious one, interested in knowing every little detail about the traveler. The external façade of the inn answered to its inside: it was very long, of two stories; the lower had not been stuccoed and was left in dark red little bricks, darkened still more by evil changes of weather, and a bit dirty anyway; the upper was painted with eternal yellow paint; below there were shops selling horse collars, ropes, and pretzels. In the corner shop, or, better, in its window, sat a seller of hot punch with a red copper samovar and a face as red as the samovar, so that from a distance one might have thought there were two samovars in the window, if one samovar had not had a pitch-black beard.

While the visiting gentleman was examining his room, his belongings were brought in: first of all a white leather trunk, somewhat worn, indicating that this was not its first time on the road. The trunk was brought in by the coachman Selifan, a short man in a sheepskin coat, and the lackey Petrushka, a fellow of about thirty in a roomy secondhand frock coat, evidently from his master's back, a somewhat stern fellow by the look of him, with a very large nose and lips. After the trunk, a small mahogany chest inlaid with Karelian birch was brought in, a boot-tree, and a roast chicken wrapped in blue paper. When all this had been brought in, the coachman Selifan went to the stables to potter with the horses, while the lackey Petrushka began to settle himself in a small anteroom, a very dark closet, where he had already managed to drag his overcoat and with it a certain smell of his own, which had also been imparted to the sack of various lackey toiletries brought in after it. In this closet, he fixed a narrow, three-legged bed to the wall and covered it with a small semblance of a mattress, beaten down and flat as a pancake, and perhaps as greasy as a pancake, which he had managed to extort from the innkeeper.