Dead Souls

"But condolence can't be put in the pocket," said Plyushkin. "There's this captain in the neighborhood, devil knows where he came from, says he's my relative—'Uncle! Uncle!' and kisses my hand—and once he starts his condoling, hold your ears, he sets up such a howl. He's all red in the face: keeps a deathly grip on the home brew, I expect. Must have blown all his cash serving as an officer, or else some theater actress lured it out of him, so now he's here condoling!"

Chichikov tried to explain that his condolence was not at all of the same sort as the captain's, and he was ready to prove it, not with empty words, but with deeds, and, not putting the matter off any longer, without beating around the bush, he straightaway expressed his readiness to take upon himself the duty of paying taxes on all the peasants who had died through such unfortunate occasions. The offer, it seemed, utterly astounded Plyushkin. He stared pop-eyed at him for a long time, and finally asked:

"You, my dear, were never in military service?"

"No," Chichikov replied rather slyly, "I was in the civil service."

"In the civil service?" Plyushkin repeated, and he began munching his lips as if he were eating something. "But how can it be? Won't you yourself come out the loser?"

"For your pleasure I am even ready to come out the loser."

"Ah, my dear! ah, my benefactor!" Plyushkin cried, not noticing in his joy that snuff was peeking quite unpicturesquely from his nose, after the manner of thick coffee, and the skirts of his robe had opened revealing garments none too fit for inspection. "What a boon for an old man! Ah, my Lord! Ah, saints alive! ..." Further Plyushkin could not even speak. But before a minute passed, this joy, which had appeared so instantaneously on his wooden face, just as instantaneously left, as if it had never been, and his face again assumed a worried expression. He even wiped it with a handkerchief, which he then bunched into a ball and began dragging over his upper lip.

"So then, with your permission, not wishing to anger you, are you undertaking to pay the tax on them each year? and will you give the money to me or to the treasury?"

"Here's what we'll do: we'll make out a deed of purchase, as if they were alive and as if you were selling them to me."

"Yes, a deed of purchase . . . ," Plyushkin said, lapsed into thought, and began chewing with his lips again. "This deed of purchase, you see—it all costs money. The clerks are such a shameless lot! Before, you used to get off with fifty coppers and a sack of flour, but now you must send them a whole cartload of grain, and a red banknote[29] on top of it—such cupidity! I don't know how it is the priests don't pay attention to it; they should read some sort of lesson: say what you like, no one can stand against the word of God."

"But you'd stand, I imagine!" Chichikov thought to himself, and straightaway said that, out of respect for him, he was even ready to take upon himself the costs of the deed.

Hearing that he would even take the costs of the deed upon himself, Plyushkin concluded that the visitor must be completely stupid and was only pretending he had been in the civil service, but had really been an officer and dangled after actresses. For all that, however, he was unable to conceal his joy and wished all kinds of boons not only upon him, but even upon his children, without asking whether he had any or not. Going to the window, he rapped on it with his fingers and shouted: "Hey, Proshka!" A minute later someone could be heard running into the front hall in a flurry, pottering about there and thumping with his boots for a long time, then the door finally opened and in came Proshka, a boy of about thirteen, in such big boots that he almost walked out of them as he stepped. Why Proshka had such big boots can be learned at once: Plyushkin had for all his domestics, however many there were in the house, only one pair of boots, which had always to be kept in the front hall. Anyone summoned to the squire's quarters would usually do a barefoot dance across the whole yard, but, on coming into the front hall, would put on the boots and in that manner enter the room. On leaving the room, he would put the boots back in the front hall and set off again on his own soles. Someone looking out the window in the fall, especially when there begins to be a little frost in the mornings, would see all the domestics making such leaps as the most nimble dancer in the theater is scarcely able to bring off.