Dead Souls

The horses' notions of Nozdryov also seemed to be unadvantageous: not only the bay and Assessor, but even the dapple-gray was out of spirits. Though it always fell to his lot to get the worst oats, and Selifan never poured them into his trough without first saying: "Eh, you scoundrel!"—still they were oats and not mere hay, he chewed them with pleasure and often shoved his long muzzle into his comrades' troughs to have a taste of what they got for vittles, especially when Selifan was not in the stable, but now just hay—that was not nice; everyone was displeased.

But soon all the displeased were interrupted amid their outpourings in a sudden and quite unexpected way. Everyone, not excluding the coachman himself, recollected and recovered themselves only when a coach and six came galloping down on them and they heard, almost over their heads, the cries of the ladies sitting in the coach, the curses and threats of the other coachman: "Ah, you knave, didn't I shout out to you: keep right, gawker! Are you drunk, or what?" Selifan felt himself at fault, but since a Russian man does not like to admit before another that he is to blame, he at once uttered, assuming a dignified air: "And what are you a-galloping like that for? Pawned your eyes in a pot-house?" After which he started backing the britzka up, so as to free it from the other's harness, but nothing doing, it all got into a tangle. The dapple-gray sniffed curiously at his new friends, who ended up on either side of him. Meanwhile, the ladies sitting in the coach looked at it all with an expression of fear on their faces. One was an old lady, the other a young girl, a sixteen-year-old, with golden hair quite artfully and prettily smoothed back on her small head. Her lovely face was rounded like a fresh egg, and resembled one when, white with a sort of transparent whiteness, fresh, only just laid, it is held up by the housekeeper's dark-skinned hand to be checked in the light and the rays of the shining sun pass through it; her thin little ears were also transparent, aglow with the warm light coming through them. That, and the fright on her parted, motionless lips, and the tears in her eyes—it was all so pretty in her that our hero gazed at her for several minutes, paying no attention to the tumult that was going on among the horses and coachmen. "Back off, will you, you Nizhni-Novgorod gawk!" the other coachman was shouting. Selifan pulled at the reins, the other coachman did the same, the horses backed up a little, then lurched into each other again, having stepped over the traces. In these circumstances, the dapple-gray took such a liking to his new acquaintance that he did not want at all to leave the rut to which the unforeseen fates had brought him, and, resting his muzzle on the neck of his new friend, seemed to be whispering right into his ear, probably some terrible nonsense, because the other horse was ceaselessly twitching his ears.