Here let me add something which may enable the reader to perceive just what the Collegiate Assessor was like. Of course, it goes without saying that Collegiate Assessors who acquire the title with the help of academic diplomas cannot be compared with Collegiate Assessors who become Collegiate Assessors through service in the Caucasus, for the two species are wholly distinct, they are —— Stay, though. Russia is so strange a country that, let one but say anything about any one Collegiate Assessor, and the rest, from Riga to Kamchatka, at once apply the remark to themselves — for all titles and all ranks it means the same thing. Now, Kovalev was a “Caucasian” Collegiate Assessor, and had, as yet, borne the title for two years only. Hence, unable ever to forget it, he sought the more to give himself dignity and weight by calling himself, in addition to “Collegiate Assessor,” “Major.”
“Look here, good woman,” once he said to a shirts’ vendor whom he met in the street, “come and see me at my home. I have my flat in Sadovaia Street. Ask merely, ‘Is this where Major Kovalev lives?’ Anyone will show you.” Or, on meeting fashionable ladies, he would say: “My dear madam, ask for Major Kovalev’s flat.” So we too will call the Collegiate Assessor “Major.”
Major Kovalev had a habit of daily promenading the Nevsky Prospekt in an extremely clean and well-starched shirt and collar, and in whiskers of the sort still observable on provincial surveyors, architects, regimental doctors, other officials, and all men who have round, red cheeks, and play a good hand at “Boston.” Such whiskers run across the exact centre of the cheek — then head straight for the nose. Again, Major Kovalev always had on him a quantity of seals, both of seals engraved with coats of arms, and of seals inscribed “Wednesday,” “Thursday,” “Monday,” and the rest. And, finally, Major Kovalev had come to live in St. Petersburg because of necessity. That is to say, he had come to live in St. Petersburg because he wished to obtain a post befitting his new title — whether a Vice–Governorship or, failing that, an Administratorship in a leading department. Nor was Major Kovalev altogether set against marriage. Merely he required that his bride should possess not less than two hundred thousand rubles in capital. The reader, therefore, can now judge how the Major was situated when he perceived that instead of a not unpresentable nose there was figuring on his face an extremely uncouth, and perfectly smooth and uniform patch.
Ill luck prescribed, that morning, that not a cab was visible throughout the street’s whole length; so, huddling himself up in his cloak, and covering his face with a handkerchief (to make things look as though his nose were bleeding), he had to start upon his way on foot only.
“Perhaps this is only imagination?” he reflected. Presently he turned aside towards a restaurant (for he wished yet again to get a sight of himself in a mirror). “The nose can’t have removed itself of sheer idiocy.”
Luckily no customers were present in the restaurant — merely some waiters were sweeping out the rooms, and rearranging the chairs, and others, sleepy-eyed fellows, were setting forth trayfuls of hot pastries. On chairs and tables last night’s newspapers, coffee-stained, were strewn.
“Thank God that no one is here!” the Major reflected. “Now I can look at myself again.”
He approached a mirror in some trepidation, and peeped therein. Then he spat.
“The devil only knows what this vileness means!” he muttered. “If even there had been something to take the nose’s place! But, as it is, there’s nothing there at all.”
He bit his lips with vexation, and hurried out of the restaurant. No; as he went along he must look at no one, and smile at no one. Then he halted as though riveted to earth. For in front of the doors of a mansion he saw occur a phenomenon of which, simply, no explanation was possible. Before that mansion there stopped a carriage. And then a door of the carriage opened, and there leapt thence, huddling himself up, a uniformed gentleman, and that uniformed gentleman ran headlong up the mansion’s entrance-steps, and disappeared within. And oh, Kovalev’s horror and astonishment to perceive that the gentleman was none other than — his own nose! The unlooked-for spectacle made everything swim before his eyes. Scarcely, for a moment, could he even stand. Then, deciding that at all costs he must await the gentleman’s return to the carriage, he remained where he was, shaking as though with fever. Sure enough, the Nose did return, two minutes later. It was clad in a gold-braided, high-collared uniform, buckskin breeches, and cockaded hat. And slung beside it there was a sword, and from the cockade on the hat it could be inferred that the Nose was purporting to pass for a State Councillor. It seemed now to be going to pay another visit somewhere. At all events it glanced about it, and then, shouting to the coachman, “Drive up here,” re-entered the vehicle, and set forth.
Poor Kovalev felt almost demented. The astounding event left him utterly at a loss. For how could the nose which had been on his face but yesterday, and able then neither to drive nor to walk independently, now be going about in uniform? — He started in pursuit of the carriage, which, luckily, did not go far, and soon halted before the Gostiny Dvor.1
1 Formerly the “Whiteley’s” of St. Petersburg.
Kovalev too hastened to the building, pushed through the line of old beggar-women with bandaged faces and apertures for eyes whom he had so often scorned, and entered. Only a few customers were present, but Kovalev felt so upset that for a while he could decide upon no course of action save to scan every corner in the gentleman’s pursuit. At last he sighted him again, standing before a counter, and, with face hidden altogether behind the uniform’s stand-up collar, inspecting with absorbed attention some wares.
“How, even so, am I to approach it?” Kovalev reflected. “Everything about it, uniform, hat, and all, seems to show that it is a State Councillor now. Only the devil knows what is to be done!”
He started to cough in the Nose’s vicinity, but the Nose did not change its position for a single moment.
“My good sir,” at length Kovalev said, compelling himself to boldness, “my good sir, I——”
“What do you want?” And the Nose did then turn round.
“My good sir, I am in a difficulty. Yet somehow, I think, I think, that — well, I think that you ought to know your proper place better. All at once, you see, I find you — where? Do you not feel as I do about it?”
“Pardon me, but I cannot apprehend your meaning. Pray explain further.”
“Yes, but how, I should like to know?” Kovalev thought to himself. Then, again taking courage, he went: on:
“I am, you see — well, in point of fact, you see, I am a Major. Hence you will realise how unbecoming it is for me to have to walk about without a nose. Of course, a peddler of oranges on the Vozkresensky Bridge could sit there noseless well enough, but I myself am hoping soon to receive a —— Hm, yes. Also, I have amongst my acquaintances several ladies of good houses (Madame Chektareva, wife of the State Councillor, for example), and you may judge for yourself what that alone signifies. Good sir”— Major Kovalev gave his shoulders a shrug —“I do not know whether you yourself (pardon me) consider conduct of this sort to be altogether in accordance with the rules of duty and honour, but at least you can understand that ——”
“I understand nothing at all,” the Nose broke in. “Explain yourself more satisfactorily.”
“Good sir,” Kovalev went on with a heightened sense of dignity, “the one who is at a loss to understand the other is I. But at least the immediate point should be plain, unless you are determined to have it otherwise. Merely — you are my own nose.”
The Nose regarded the Major, and contracted its brows a little.
“My dear sir, you speak in error,” was its reply. “I am just myself — myself separately. And in any case there cannot ever have existed a close relation between us, for, judging from the buttons of your undress uniform, your service is being performed in another department than my own.”
And the Nose definitely turned away.
Kovalev stood dumbfounded. What to do, even what to think, he had not a notion.
Presently the agreeable swish of ladies’ dresses began to be heard. Yes, an elderly, lace-bedecked dame was approaching, and, with her, a slender maiden in a white frock which outlined delightfully a trim figure, and, above it, a straw hat of a lightness as of pastry. Behind them there came, stopping every now and then to open a snuffbox, a tall, whiskered beau in quite a twelve-fold collar.
Kovalev moved a little nearer, pulled up the collar of his shirt, straightened the seals on his gold watch-chain, smiled, and directed special attention towards the slender lady as, swaying like a floweret in spring, she kept raising to her brows a little white hand with fingers almost of transparency. And Kovalev’s smiles became broader still when peeping from under the hat he saw there to be an alabaster, rounded little chin, and part of a cheek flushed like an early rose. But all at once he recoiled as though scorched, for all at once he had remembered that he had not a nose on him, but nothing at all. So, with tears forcing themselves upwards, he wheeled about to tell the uniformed gentleman that he, the uniformed gentleman, was no State Councillor, but an impostor and a knave and a villain and the Major’s own nose. But the Nose, behold, was gone! That very moment had it driven away to, presumably, pay another visit.
This drove Kovalev to the last pitch of desperation. He went back to the mansion, and stationed himself under its portico, in the hope that, by peering hither and thither, hither and thither, he might once more see the Nose appear. But, well though he remembered the Nose’s cockaded hat and gold-braided uniform, he had failed at the time to note also its cloak, the colour of its horses, the make of its carriage, the look of the lackey seated behind, and the pattern of the lackey’s livery. Besides, so many carriages were moving swiftly up and down the street that it would have been impossible to note them all, and equally so to have stopped any one of them. Meanwhile, as the day was fine and sunny, the Prospekt was thronged with pedestrians also — a whole kaleidoscopic stream of ladies was flowing along the pavements, from Police Headquarters to the Anitchkin Bridge. There one could descry an Aulic Councillor whom Kovalev knew well. A gentleman he was whom Kovalev always addressed as “Lieutenant–Colonel,” and especially in the presence of others. And there there went Yaryzhkin, Chief Clerk to the Senate, a crony who always rendered forfeit at “Boston” on playing an eight. And, lastly, a like “Major” with Kovalev, a like “Major” with an Assessorship acquired through Caucasian service, started to beckon to Kovalev with a finger!
“The devil take him!” was Kovalev’s muttered comment. “Hi, cabman! Drive to the Police Commissioner’s direct.”
But just when he was entering the drozhki he added:
“No. Go by Ivanovskaia Street.”
“Is the Commissioner in?” he asked on crossing the threshold.
“He is not,” was the doorkeeper’s reply. “He’s gone this very moment.”
“There’s luck for you!”
“Aye,” the doorkeeper went on. “Only just a moment ago he was off. If you’d been a bare half-minute sooner you’d have found him at home, maybe.”
Still holding the handkerchief to his face, Kovalev returned to the cab, and cried wildly:
“Drive on!”
“Where to, though?” the cabman inquired.
“Oh, straight ahead!”
“‘Straight ahead’? But the street divides here. To right, or to left?”
The question caused Kovalov to pause and recollect himself. In his situation he ought to make his next step an application to the Board of Discipline — not because the Board was directly connected with the police, but because its dispositions would be executed more speedily than in other departments. To seek satisfaction of the the actual department in which the Nose had declared itself to be serving would be sheerly unwise, since from the Nose’s very replies it was clear that it was the sort of individual who held nothing sacred, and, in that event, might lie as unconscionably as it had lied in asserting itself never to have figured in its proprietor’s company. Kovalev, therefore, decided to seek the Board of Discipline. But just as he was on the point of being driven thither there occurred to him the thought that the impostor and knave who had behaved so shamelessly during the late encounter might even now be using the time to get out of the city, and that in that case all further pursuit of the rogue would become vain, or at all events last for, God preserve us! a full month. So at last, left only to the guidance of Providence, the Major resolved to make for a newspaper office, and publish a circumstantial description of the Nose in such good time that anyone meeting with the truant might at once be able either to restore it to him or to give information as to its whereabouts. So he not only directed the cabman to the newspaper office, but, all the way thither, prodded him in the back, and shouted: “Hurry up, you rascal! Hurry up, you rogue!” whilst the cabman intermittently responded: “Aye, barin,” and nodded, and plucked at the reins of a steed as shaggy as a spaniel.
The moment that the drozhki halted Kovalev dashed, breathless, into a small reception-office. There, seated at a table, a grey-headed clerk in ancient jacket and pair of spectacles was, with pen tucked between lips, counting sums received in copper.
“Who here takes the advertisements?” Kovalev exclaimed as he entered. “A-ah! Good day to you.”
“And my respects,” the grey-headed clerk replied, raising his eyes for an instant, and then lowering them again to the spread out copper heaps.
“I want you to publish ——”
“Pardon — one moment.” And the clerk with one hand committed to paper a figure, and with a finger of the other hand shifted two accounts markers. Standing beside him with an advertisement in his hands, a footman in a laced coat, and sufficiently smart to seem to be in service in an aristocratic mansion, now thought well to display some knowingness.
“Sir,” he said to the clerk, “I do assure you that the puppy is not worth eight grivni even. At all events I wouldn’t give that much for it. Yet the countess loves it — yes, just loves it, by God! Anyone wanting it of her will have to pay a hundred rubles. Well, to tell the truth between you and me, people’s tastes differ. Of course, if one’s a sportsman one keeps a setter or a spaniel. And in that case don’t you spare five hundred rubles, or even give a thousand, if the dog is a good one.”
The worthy clerk listened with gravity, yet none the less accomplished a calculation of the number of letters in the advertisement brought. On either side there was a group of charwomen, shop assistants, doorkeepers, and the like. All had similar advertisements in their hands, with one of the documents to notify that a coachman of good character was about to be disengaged, and another one to advertise a koliaska imported from Paris in 1814, and only slightly used since, and another one a maid-servant of nineteen experienced in laundry work, but prepared also for other jobs, and another one a sound drozhki save that a spring was lacking, and another one a grey-dappled, spirited horse of the age of seventeen, and another one some turnip and radish seed just received from London, and another one a country house with every amenity, stabling for two horses, and sufficient space for the laying out of a fine birch or spruce plantation, and another one some second-hand footwear, with, added, an invitation to attend the daily auction sale from eight o’clock to three. The room where the company thus stood gathered together was small, and its atmosphere confined; but this closeness, of course, Collegiate Assessor Kovalev never perceived, for, in addition to his face being muffled in a handkerchief, his nose was gone, and God only knew its present habitat!
“My dear sir,” at last he said impatiently, “allow me to ask you something: it is a pressing matter.”
“One moment, one moment! Two rubles, forty-three kopeks. Yes, presently. Sixty rubles, four kopeks.”
With which the clerk threw the two advertisements concerned towards the group of charwomen and the rest, and turned to Kovalev.
“Well?” he said. “What do you want?”
“Your pardon,” replied Kovalev, “but fraud and knavery has been done. I still cannot understand the affair, but wish to announce that anyone returning me the rascal shall receive an adequate reward.”
“Your name, if you would be so good?”
“No, no. What can my name matter? I cannot tell it you. I know many acquaintances such as Madame Chektareva (wife of the State Councillor) and Pelagea Grigorievna Podtochina (wife of the Staff–Officer), and, the Lord preserve us, they would learn of the affair at once. So say just ‘a Collegiate Assessor,’ or, better, ‘a gentleman ranking as Major.’”
“Has a household serf of yours absconded, then?”
“A household serf of mine? As though even a household serf would perpetrate such a crime as the present one! No, indeed! It is my nose that has absconded from me.”
“Gospodin Nossov, Gospoding Nossov? Indeed a strange name, that!2 Then has this Gospodin Nossov robbed you of some money?”
2 Nose is noss in Russian, and Gospodin equivalent to the English “Mr.”
“I said nose, not Nossov. You are making a mistake. There has disappeared, goodness knows whither, my nose, my own actual nose. Presumably it is trying to make a fool of me.”
“But how could it so disappear? The matter has something about it which I do not fully understand.”
“I cannot tell you the exact how. The point is that now the nose is driving about the city, and giving itself out for a State Councillor — wherefore I beg you to announce that anyone apprehending any such nose ought at once, in the shortest possible space of time, to return it to myself. Surely you can judge what it is for me meanwhile to be lacking such a conspicuous portion of my frame? For a nose is not like a toe which one can keep inside a boot, and hide the absence of if it is not there. Besides, every Thurdsay I am due to call upon Madame Chektareva (wife of the State Councillor): whilst Pelagea Grigorievna Podtochina (wife of the Staff–Officer, mother of a pretty daughter) also is one of my closest acquaintances. So, again, judge for yourself how I am situated at present. In such a condition as this I could not possibly present myself before the ladies named.”
Upon that the clerk became thoughtful: the fact was clear from his tightly compressed lips alone.
“No,” he said at length. “Insert such an announcement I cannot.”
“But why not?”
“Because, you see, it might injure the paper’s reputation. Imagine if everyone were to start proclaiming a disappearance of his nose! People would begin to say that, that — well, that we printed absurdities and false tales.”
“But how is this matter a false tale? Nothing of the sort has it got about it.”
“You think not; but only last week a similar case occurred. One day a chinovnik brought us an advertisement as you have done. The cost would have been only two rubles, seventy-three kopeks, for all that it seemed to signify was the running away of a poodle. Yet what was it, do you think, in reality? Why, the thing turned out to be a libel, and the ‘poodle’ in question a cashier — of what department precisely I do not know.”
“Yes, but here am I advertising not about a poodle, but about my own nose, which, surely, is, for all intents and purposes, myself?”
“All the same, I cannot insert the advertisement.”
“Even when actually I have lost my own nose!”
“The fact that your nose is gone is a matter for a doctor. There are doctors, I have heard, who can fit one out with any sort of nose one likes. I take it that by nature you are a wag, and like playing jokes in public.”
“That is not so. I swear it as God is holy. In fact, as things have gone so far, I will let you see for yourself.”
“Why trouble?” Here the clerk took some snuff before adding with, nevertheless, a certain movement of curiosity: “However, if it really won’t trouble you at all, a sight of the spot would gratify me.”
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