Thoma Grigorovitch had a very strange sort of eccentricity: to the day
of his death he never liked to tell the same thing twice. There were
times when, if you asked him to relate a thing afresh, behold, he would
interpolate new matter, or alter it so that it was impossible to
recognize it. Once on a time, one of those gentlemen (it is hard for us
simple people to put a name to them, to say whether they are scribblers
or not scribblers: but it is just the same thing as the usurers at our
yearly fairs; they clutch and beg and steal every sort of frippery, and
issue mean little volumes, no thicker than an ABC book, every month, or
even every week),--one of these gentlemen wormed this same story out of
Thoma Grigorovitch, and he completely forgot about it. But that same
young gentleman in the pea-green caftan, whom I have mentioned, and one
of whose Tales you have already read, I think, came from Poltava, bringing with him a little book, and, opening it in the middle, shows it to us. Thoma Grigorovitch was on the point of setting his spectacles astride of his nose, but recollected that he had forgotten to wind thread about them, and stick them together with wax, so he passed it over to me. As I understand something about reading and writing, and do not wear spectacles, I undertook to read it. I had not turned two leaves, when all at once he caught me by the hand, and stopped me.
"Stop! tell me first what you are reading."
I confess that I was a trifle stunned by such a question.
"What! what am I reading, Thoma Grigorovitch? These were your very
words."
"Who told you that they were my words?"
"Why, what more would you have? Here it is printed: RELATED BY SUCH AND
SUCH A SACRISTAN."
"Spit on the head of the man who printed that! He lies, the dog of a
Moscow pedler! Did I say that? 'TWAS JUST THE SAME AS THOUGH ONE HADN'T
HIS WITS ABOUT HIM. Listen. I'll tell it to you on the spot."
We moved up to the table, and he began.
My grandfather (the kingdom of heaven be his! may he eat only wheaten
rolls and makovniki with honey in the other world!) could tell a story
wonderfully well. When he used to begin on a tale, you wouldn't stir
from the spot all day, but keep on listening. He was no match for the
story-teller of the present day, when he begins to lie, with a tongue as
though he had had nothing to eat for three days, so that you snatch your
cap and flee from the house. As I now recall it,--my old mother was
alive then,--in the long winter evenings when the frost was crackling
out of doors, and had so sealed up hermetically the narrow panes of our
cottage, she used to sit before the hackling-comb, drawing out a long
thread in her hand, rocking the cradle with her foot, and humming a
song, which I seem to hear even now.
The fat-lamp, quivering and flaring up as though in fear of something, lighted us within our cottage; the spindle hummed; and all of us children, collected in a cluster, listened to grandfather, who had not crawled off the oven for more than five years, owing to his great age. But the wondrous tales of the incursions of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, the Poles, the bold deeds of Podkova, of Poltor-Kozhukh, and Sagaidatchnii, did not interest us so much as the stories about some deed of old which always sent a shiver through our frames, and made our hair rise upright on our heads. Sometimes such terror took possession of us in consequence of them, that, from that evening on, Heaven knows what a marvel everything seemed to us. If you chance to go out of the cottage after nightfall for anything, you imagine that a visitor from the other world has lain down to sleep in your bed; and I should not be able to tell this a second time were it not that I had often taken my own smock, at a distance, as it lay at the head of the bed, for the Evil One rolled up in a ball! But the chief thing about grandfather's stories was, that he never had lied in all his life; and whatever he said was so, was so.