Dead Souls

He stepped into the dark, wide front hall, from which cold air blew as from a cellar. From the hall he got into a room, also dark, faintly illumined by light coming through a wide crack under a door. Opening this door, he at last found himself in the light and was struck by the disorder that confronted him. It looked as if they were washing the floors in the house, and all the furniture had for the time being been piled up here. On one table there even stood a broken chair, and next to it a clock with a stopped pendulum to which a spider had already attached its web. Near it, leaning its side against the wall, stood a cupboard with old silver, decanters, and Chinese porcelain. On the bureau, inlaid with mother-of-pearl mosaic, which in places had fallen out and left only yellow grooves filled with glue, lay a various multitude of things: a stack of papers written all over in a small hand, covered by a marble paperweight, gone green, with a little egg on top of it, some ancient book in a leather binding with red edges, a completely dried-up lemon no bigger than a hazelnut, the broken-off arm of an armchair, a glass with some sort of liquid and three flies in it, covered by a letter, a little piece of sealing wax, a little piece of rag picked up somewhere, two ink-stained pens, dried up as if with consumption, a toothpick, turned completely yellow, with which the master had probably picked his teeth even before the invasion of Moscow by the French.[26]

On the walls, hung quite close together and haphazardly, were a number of pictures: a long, yellowed engraving of some battle, with enormous drums, shouting soldiers in three-cornered hats, and drowning horses, without glass, in a mahogany frame with thin bronze strips and bronze rounds at the corners. Next to it, half the wall was taken up by an enormous, blackened oil painting portraying flowers, fruit, a sliced watermelon, a boar's head, and a duck hanging upside down. From the middle of the ceiling hung a chandelier in a hempen sack, which the dust made to resemble a silk cocoon with a worm sitting inside it. On the floor in the corner of the room was heaped a pile of whatever was more crude and unworthy of lying on the tables. Precisely what was in this pile it was hard to tell, for there was such an abundance of dust on it that the hands of anyone who touched it resembled gloves; most conspicuously, there stuck out from it a broken-off piece of a wooden shovel and an old boot sole. One would never have known that the room was inhabited by a living being, were its presence not announced by an old, worn nightcap lying on the table. While he was examining all these strange adornments, a side door opened and in came the same housekeeper he had met in the yard. But here he perceived that the housekeeper was a man, rather than a woman; a woman, in any case, does not shave, while this one, on the contrary, did shave, though apparently not very often, because his whole chin along with the lower part of his cheeks resembled a currycomb made of iron wire, used in stables for grooming horses. Chichikov, giving his face an inquisitive expression, waited impatiently for what the housekeeper wanted to say to him. The housekeeper, for his part, also waited for what Chichikov wanted to say to him. Finally the latter, astonished at such strange perplexity, decided to ask:

"About the master? Is he in, or what?"

"The master's here," said the housekeeper.

"But where?" Chichikov reiterated.

"What, my dear, are you blind or something?" said the housekeeper. "Egad! But I am the master!"