Chapter 33

OUR NEIGHBOURS

ON the first day after our arrival, I had been greatly astonished
that Papa should speak of our neighbours, the Epifanovs, as "nice
people," and still more so that he should go to call upon them.
The fact was that we had long been at law over some land with
this family. When a child, I had more than once heard Papa raging
over the litigation, abusing the Epifanovs, and warning people
(so I understood him) against them. Likewise, I had heard Jakoff
speak of them as "our enemies" and "black people" and could
remember Mamma requesting that their names should never be
mentioned in her presence, nor, indeed, in the house at all.

From these data I, as a child, had arrived at the clear and assured
conviction that the Epifanovs were foemen of ours who would at
any time stab or strangle both Papa and his sons if they should
ever come across them, as well as that they were "black people",
in the literal sense of the term. Consequently, when, in the year
that Mamma died, I chanced to catch sight of Avdotia ("La Belle
Flamande") on the occasion of a visit which she paid to my
mother, I found it hard to believe that she did not come of a
family of negroes. All the same, I had the lowest possible
opinion of the family, and, for all that we saw much of them that
summer, continued to be strongly prejudiced against them. As a
matter of fact, their household only consisted of the mother (a
widow of fifty, but a very well-preserved, cheery old woman), a
beautiful daughter named Avdotia, and a son, Peter, who was a
stammerer, unmarried, and of very serious disposition.

For the last twenty years before her husband's death, Madame
Epifanov had lived apart from him--sometimes in St. Petersburg,
where she had relatives, but more frequently at her village of
Mitishtchi, which stood some three versts from ours. Yet the
neighbourhood had taken to circulating such horrible tales
concerning her mode of life that Messalina was, by comparison, a
blameless child: which was why my mother had requested her name
never to be mentioned. As a matter of fact, not one-tenth part of
the most cruel of all gossip--the gossip of country-houses--is
worthy of credence; and although, when I first made Madame's
acquaintance, she had living with her in the house a clerk named
Mitusha, who had been promoted from a serf, and who, curled,
pomaded, and dressed in a frockcoat of Circassian pattern, always
stood behind his mistress's chair at luncheon, while from time to
time she invited her guests to admire his handsome eyes and
mouth, there was nothing for gossip to take hold of. I believe,
too, that since the time--ten years earlier--when she had recalled
her