Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/43

Rh seventh positively itches to maintain discipline everywhere and to enforce his views on station-masters and cabmen. In short every one has some peculiarity, but Manilov had nothing. At home he spoke very little, and for the most part confined himself to meditation and thought, but what he thought about, that too, God only knows. It could not be said that he busied himself in looking after his land, he never even drove out into the fields; the estate looked after itself somehow. When the steward said, 'It would be a good thing to do this or that, sir,' 'Yes, it would not be amiss,' he would usually reply, smoking his pipe, a habit he had taken to while he was in the army, in which he was considered a most modest, refined, and highly-cultured officer. 'Yes, it certainly would not be amiss,' he would repeat. When a peasant came to him and, scratching the back of his head, said, 'Master, give me leave of absence to earn money for my taxes,' 'You can go,' he would say, smoking his pipe, and it would never enter his head that the peasant was going for a drinking-bout. Sometimes, looking from the steps into the yard or at the pond, he would say how nice it would be to make an underground passage from the house, or build a bridge over the pond with stalls on each side of it and shopmen sitting in them, selling all sorts of small articles of use to the peasants. And as he did so, his eyes would become extraordinarily sugary, and an expression of the greatest satisfaction would come into his face. All these projects