Dead Souls

But the affair was obscure; the local police force was found on the road, the uniform or frock coat on the local police force was worse than a rag, and his physiognomy was utterly beyond recognition. The case went through the courts and finally came to the chancellery, where the intimate deliberations took the following line: since it was not known precisely who among the peasants had participated, and there were many of them, and since Drobyazhkin was a dead man, meaning that it would not be much use to him even if he did win the case, while the muzhiks were still alive, meaning that for them it was quite important that the decision be in their favor, it was therefore decided thus: the assessor Drobyazhkin was himself the cause, having unjustly oppressed the peasants of Lousy Arrogance and alias-Cockyville, and he had died of apoplexy while returning home in a sleigh. The case, it seemed, had been handled squarely, but the officials, for some unknown reason, began to think that these were the dead souls now in question. It also happened, as if by design, that just when the gentlemen officials were in a difficult position to begin with, two documents came to the governor simultaneously. The content of one was that, according to evidence and reports received, there was in their province a maker of forged banknotes, hiding under various names, and that the strictest investigation should immediately be undertaken. The second document contained a request from the governor of a neighboring province concerning a robber fleeing legal prosecution, that if any suspicious man were to turn up in their province, unable to produce any certificates or passports, he should be detained without delay. These two documents simply stunned everyone. Former conclusions and surmises were completely confounded. Of course, it was quite impossible to suppose that anything here referred to Chichikov; nevertheless, once they reflected, each for his own part, once they recalled that they still did not know who in fact Chichikov was, that he himself had given a rather vague account concerning his own person—true, he said he had suffered for the truth in the service, but this was all somehow vague—and when they also remembered that, as he had even said himself, he had many adversaries who had made attempts on his life, they pondered still more: so his life was in danger, so he was being pursued, so he must have done something or other . . . but who in fact could he be? Of course, it was impossible to think of him as a maker of forged bills, still less as a robber: his appearance was trustworthy; but still, for all that, who in fact could he be? And so the gentlemen officials now asked themselves the question they ought to have asked themselves in the beginning—that is, in the first chapter of our poem. It was decided to make a few more inquiries of those from whom the souls had been bought, in order to find out at least what sort of purchases they were, and what precisely these dead souls could mean, and whether he had somehow explained to anyone, be it only by chance, in passing, his true intentions, and had told anyone who he was. First of all they addressed themselves to Korobochka, but there they gleaned little: he bought fifteen roubles' worth, she said, and was also buying bird feathers, and promised to buy a lot of everything, and also supplied the state with lard, and therefore was undoubtedly a crook, for there had already been one like him who used to buy bird feathers and supplied the state with lard, and then he deceived everybody and took the archpriest's wife for more than a hundred roubles. Whatever she said beyond that was a repetition of one and the same thing, and the officials saw only that Korobochka was simply a stupid old woman. Manilov answered that he was always ready to vouch for Pavel Ivanovich as for his own self, that he would sacrifice all he owned to have a hundredth part of Pavel Ivanovich's qualities, and in general spoke of him in the most flattering terms, appending a few thoughts about friendship, with his eyes now tightly shut. These thoughts, of course, explained satisfactorily the tender impulse of his heart, but they did not explain to the officials the truth of the matter. Sobakevich answered that Chichikov was, in his opinion, a good man, and that he had sold him some choice peasants, folk alive in all respects; but that he could not vouch for what would happen later on, that if they died off a bit during the difficulties of resettlement, on the road, he was not to blame, since that was in God's power, and there were not a few fevers and various deadly diseases in the world, and there were examples when whole villages had died out. The gentlemen officials resorted to yet another method, not altogether noble, but which nevertheless is sometimes employed—that is, making inquiries in a roundabout way, through various lackey acquaintances, of Chichikov's servants, whether they knew any details concerning their master's former life and circumstances, but again they heard little. From Petrushka they got only the smell of living quarters, and from Selifan that he had been in the goverman's service and once worked in customs, and nothing else. This class of people has a very strange habit. If you ask one of them directly about anything, he will never remember, nothing will come to his head, and he will even say he simply does not know, but if you ask about something else, then he will spin his yarn and tell such details as you would not even want to know. The whole search carried out by the officials revealed to them only that they did not know for certain what Chichikov was, and that all the same Chichikov must certainly be something. They resolved finally to have a final discussion of the subject and decide at least what they were to do and how, and what measures to take, and what he was precisely: the sort of man to be detained and arrested as untrustworthy, or else the sort of man who might himself detain and arrest all of them as untrustworthy. To do all this it was proposed that they gather specially at the house of the police chief, known to the reader already as the father and benefactor of the town.