Interrupted Stories

He kept an endless number of household servants; he had boys used solely during the day to clean nightingale cages, and at night to walk around the courtyard so the dogs would not bark near the master's house. He had girls whose entire purpose consisted of wiping water off the window frames in winter, and in summer carrying coals and basins for jam. It cannot be said that such a quantity of servants brought him into particularly significant expenses; everything, starting from the very items themselves, was homemade; rye and buckwheat, peas and cabbage, and not just feed... if a cow died, they would process the leather, a shoemaker would sew the tailor boots while the tailor cut him a jacket from homespun fabric of the color "marengo-clair" a dark, brownish-grey color and wide trousers from unbleached linen, with which the working women were outfitted. Moreover, Lev Stepanovich had an inalienable talent for training his household servants, a talent completely lost in our time; he instilled such fear from a young age that even his favorite and part-time spy,

the valet Tit Trofimovich, the terror of all the house servants who did not always pay attention to the mistress's orders, confessed in moments of frankness and heartfelt outpourings that he never entered the master's bedroom without a special feeling of fear, especially in the morning, not knowing in what disposition Lev Stepanovich might be. There is nothing to be surprised at. The benefits and honors of the master's favor were not earned by Tit for nothing, especially because he often fell under the master's gaze. Lev Stepanovich was a characterful man, he did not consider it necessary to restrain himself, and when he came out for tea in the morning with red eyes, Marya Petrovna herself did not dare start a conversation for a long time. In these "characterful" moments, Tit would take the brunt of it—he would beat him, then send him to the mistress: "Go, tell her, show her your face and say: 'This is how they teach fools, making men out of animals.'" For Marya Petrovna, in her boring and monotonous life, such incidents served as entertainment; she even found a kind of pleasure in the humiliation of the proud and arrogant Tit.

Indeed, there were few entertainments in her life, especially worldly ones. God did not give them children. She tried to perform divination, and cast spells, and drink all sorts of rubbish, and she went to the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra on foot, and sent Tit's sister to the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, from where she brought her a little ring from the relics of Saint Barbara the Martyr, but there were still no children. It cannot