On a side table stood pots and pans and dishes containing fish under vinegar and salted gherkins, also some jams and jellies and a few fine spoons of silver gilt; flies and mosquitoes buzzed over everything; all was dirty; the floor and the stove filthy with dropped grease and spillings of food.
A Tartar servant with a flat yellow face was watching the cooking; he wore a soiled blue blouse and trousers; his throat and chest were bare and the perspiration rolled from under his oily hair.
He regarded the newcomer with a look of complete stupidity and turned his gaze again to his cooking.
He appeared to be no more impressed by the gentleman’s brilliancy than the gentleman was by his dirt and disorder. Only, as that person was leaving the kitchen, the taciturn servant vouchsafed a warning.
“If you come with unpleasant news, Danilovitch Mentchikoff, you had better keep them for a while.”
“He is in a bad humor?” asked the Prince quickly.
“He was drinking all night,” replied the Tartar. “And now he seems to be in a melancholy. What am I to do about the dinner, Danilovitch Mentchikoff? He will not bear me in the room--and as for you, he will beat you like a dog.”
“Well, when he has beaten me, we will have dinner,” replied the Prince, and he turned away and went upstairs.
He entered the front bedroom which was that with the balcony over the door; a good-sized chamber very plainly furnished with a low bed, a table, a few chairs, and one or two half-open boxes filled with clothes.
The pale melancholy light streamed in uninterrupted through the curtainless window and lit every crevice of the apartment.
Above the bed was an ikon of the Saviour, very dark and indistinct and adorned with plates of silver; two candles in sticks of violet jasper stood on a shelf beneath this; on the stove was the unfinished model of a ship in wood; these were the only remarkable objects that the room contained.
The one occupant was a young man who sat in a low chair by the stove, and who was intent on carving with a small knife a large fir cone.
Peter Alexievitch, Emperor of Muscovy and Czar of all the Russias, was at this time twenty-eight years of age, and it was not long since he had been recalled by rebellion at home from that extraordinary journey in disguise round Europe whereby he had sought to learn the various means by which nations secure prosperity and greatness, that he might instruct his subjects; he had since gained some glory by a victory over the Turks, but his present league with Poland and Denmark against Sweden was his first real entry into war and politics, the first attempt to put into practise the schemes by which he sought to render his vast Empire secure and mighty.