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Updated: June 1, 2025
I could hear their laughter as I waited at the bottom of the stairs for the Dvornik to let me out. But when I was in the street the world was breathlessly still. I walked up the Prospect no soul was in sight, only the scattered lamps, the pale snow, and the houses. At the end of the Canal I stopped. The silence was intense.
The dvornik and the istvostchik, it seemed, had laughed loudly and significantly as Waters went by, and he had turned to inquire into the joke. "Because, y'see, Mr. Selby, them Russians just don't laugh in a general way, except they're wantin' to start something. An' I heard 'em say 'Amerikanetz' just as plain as I can see you settin' there. So, a' course, I knowed it was me they was pickin' on."
We were twice on our beam ends and nearly overturned, and on several occasions stuck in the snow. By good luck we managed to arrive at Kazan about 2 A. M. On reaching the hotel, we were confronted by what I thought a snow statue, but which proved to be the dvornik, or watchman. Our baggage was taken up stairs, while we shook the snow from our furs.
I thought of nothing, I did not try to remember anything. I heard a stifled noise of steps, a movement of objects and of tapestries, then the arrival of a person, and then the arrival of another person. Then I saw Gregor bring into my room the baggage from the railway; as if any one needed it! "'Have you heard what has happened? I asked him. 'Have you told the dvornik to inform the police?
The scoundrels and the fools are murdering my intelligence." He lost all hope of saving his future, which depended on the free use of his intelligence. He reached the doorway of his house in a state of mental discouragement which enabled him to receive with apparent indifference an official-looking envelope from the dirty hand of the dvornik. "A gendarme brought it," said the man.
So I tried to remember your address. But look here it was a piece of luck. Your dvornik was away from the gate talking to a sleigh-driver on the other side of the street. I met no one on the stairs, not a soul. As I came up to your floor I caught sight of your landlady coming out of your rooms. But she did not see me. She crossed the landing to her own side, and then I slipped in.
"What did you talk about?" I asked him. "Oh, about anything! Theatres and her home, when she was a girl and England.... Awful, every minute of it!" There was a moment towards the end of the meal, when the good lady nearly broke down. The bell in the hall rang and there was a step; she thought it was her husband and half rose. It was, however, the Dvornik with a message of no importance.
But the firing had had its intended effect of bringing every dvornik to his gate, and there was nothing for it but to run on. He heard the chase round the corner behind him and the policeman's 'repeated shout; the skin of his back crawled in momentary expectation of another shot that might not go wild; and then, with the next corner yet twenty yards away, came the idea.
He was smiling as he went forth through the long hollow of the arch to the dim street; the huddled dvornik with his swiveling eyes saw him, his face lifted to the light of the numbered house-lamp, still with the shape of a smile inhabiting his lips.
My mother kept a cook and a nursemaid, and a dvornik, or outdoor man, to take care of the horses, the cow, and the woodpile. All the year round we kept open house, as I remember. Cousins and aunts were always about, and on holidays friends of all degrees gathered in numbers.
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