Chapter XIII. Cooking a Dinner for Ten

My lodging on the Novinka cost but a shilling a week, and the terms were inclusive. I had tables, chairs, a bed; the samovar was brought in to me whenever I wanted it; I had the use of the stove when I cooked dinner for ten. Add to that, my hostess brought me in a plate of sour milk cakes whenever there was a festival, and it will be seen that a shilling goes a long way in these parts.

Indeed, money is extremely scarce. The peasants are rich, but it is in their stock. They have plenty of things that are worth money, but no one has any money to buy them. They have houses of two storeys, cows, sheep, furs, embroidery, hand-made furniture, but these goods merely accumulate upon their hands. It would often be difficult to rake together a sovereign's worth in coin if one emptied the purses of the whole village.

So I got my room for a shilling — money to be paid to the old woman, the mother-in-law, and not to the man, who might at once adjourn to the vodka shop. Husband and wife lived under the tyranny of the wife's mother, who ruled the household with a rod of iron.

She would have ruled over me also, especially in the matter of cooking the dinner, but she found me somewhat intractable. She wakened me at three in the morning, without any "by your leave," coming straight into my room and shaking the ricketty bedstead.

"Time to put the stew on," she said.

"Time to go out and buy eggs."

"You silly old woman!" I said. "Go away. Leave me in peace."

"But it's time to go out and find some cooking butter; if you're not early, it'll all be gone."

"All right, all right, all right," I said.

She went out and I lay where I was. Presently I heard her voice outside my window calling the cows.

"Pooky, pooky, pooky."

She was taking them out to pasture. The next thing I heard was the clank of the samovar upon my table. I had dozed off again. It was steaming and buzzing and spluttering in a sort of delirious excitement to make tea. The samovar is a tea urn, in the centre of which is a closed charcoal stove; when the fire is large, the boiling water emits great quantities of steam, and even lifts the lid of the urn. By means of the burning charcoal the water can be kept boiling for hours.

I had to get up now, and so I made my coffee, and ate rye bread and butter with it, and fed alternately the crows and the doves at my window. Then, under pretext of going to the village shop, I went down to the river to bathe.

Alexey Sergeitch's young brother met me — he was not an exile, but was spending his summer vacation at Liavlia, just for the fun of the thing. He was "game" for anything. Of course we vaulted over all the gates we came to — no one except a peasant ever takes the trouble to unbar a gate. We rushed through the barley fields, and along the high clay cliffs of the Dwina river, then down a by-path, jumping from tuft to tuft along the weed-grown slopes, and reached the only really pleasant bathing place on our side of the Dwina River. The others generally crossed to the Dwina island, landing the women at one point and the men at another, a hundred yards down the shore.

How cold it was! But the water was warm. The water of the Dwina is always warmer than the air. It is deep, and waves like the waves of the sea come rolling over the surface, lifting one up or taking one down. The bottom is sand or clay or quaking tundra, and where dark shadows stand fixed all day upon the clear water there are treacherous pits. Vsevo, my boy-companion, was very careful not to slip out of his depth.

As we had come out without towels, and as it was far too cold to wait about till we dried, we just threw our clothes on, and dried as we could. As a matter of fact, we promptly forgot that we were wet directly we had donned our garments.

In two minutes we were clambering up the cliff again and looking for strawberries to make a third course at my dinner. Nature was supposed to produce strawberries on these sunny slopes at this time of the year, but the total number we found was, I think, seven. Nature did not come up to the mark.

Hundreds of sand martins flew to and fro above our heads, chirping and twittering, mostly new-fledged. The cliff was honeycombed with their holes. Birds flew out and birds flew in. We stood level with the nests and tried to put our big hands into the little holes; and over our fingers, at the very burrow we were playing with, one, two, three little martins would fly out one after another. Vsevo was under a spell: he must catch martins for the rest of the morning.

So I left him, for I had a dinner for ten on my conscience. After all, it was only nine o'clock, there was plenty of time. I went into the little shop to see what I could buy. I looked over the whole stock-in-trade whilst the woman tried sorrowfully to wrap up a pound and a half of rice in two loose sheets of an exercise book.

"What is this?" said I, looking at some packets labelled" Dry fruit-berry wine powder."

"That," she replied," is instead of tea. Very old grandmothers, poor old women, drink that. It costs a penny a packet."

"Ah! And what is this stuff?"

"Dried vegetables, barin, dried cabbage, dried carrot, bits of dried turnip, dried leek, dried celery, dried dandelion, dried cauliflower. It's for soup. You see it's all cut up small. Vegetables don't grow here very well; the earth is too poor, too sandy, and the frost nips them."

"Give me half a pound."

She put me up half a pound in another sheet of an exercise book, scrawled over with addition sums.

"Where did you get that paper?" I asked.

"From the wholesale merchant, who comes once a year," was her amusing reply. "He also brings me a hundred pounds of baranka biscuits all on ropes like onions, and I keep them in the cellar."

"Half a pound of semolina; half a pound of flour," I added, and she proceeded to weigh them out in the same way.

"A quarter pound of sultanas. Have you any eggs?"

"No, barin. But there was a man brought eggs down in a barge yesterday from Archangel. Perhaps he is down there by the riverside still."

No one keeps any fowls in Archangel Province — it is probably because the winter is so severe.

"Give me half a pound of salt, and a pound and a half of soft sugar. What are these leaves for?"

"They are bay leaves for flavouring."

"Give me a farthing's worth."

She gave me three.

"Anything more?"

"No more."

She proceeded to count up what I owed her by the help of an abacus. I had given her a big order, and she felt quite bewildered. Three times she had a shot at her little sum, and failed absurdly. She proposed to deprive herself of twenty copecks. I put her right.

Then came a problem worse than that of money, the taking home of this collection of spilling packages. The rice remained a dreadful failure, and the sugar kept pouring into little cones of waste upon the counter. The semolina was fragile, and had to be lifted as daintily as one would take a cat's cradle from a girl's fingers.

The woman was dismayed, but exclaimed suddenly, "Slava Tebye Gospody!" "Glory be to Thee, 0 God!" She had found a large bag in the corner of the shop.

"I'll lend you this," she said. "But you must bring it back."

We put the ill-disciplined rice at the bottom of the bag, and on top of it the gentle semolina, then the threatening flour and the sifting sugar. Sultanas crowned these.

"Thanks," I said. "I'll put the salt in my pocket, and the bay leaves in my card case. Good-bye! I'll certainly bring the bag back."

"God bless you!"

So I departed, and put my purchases into my room through the open window. I feared to face the tyrannical old babushka, after having been so long absent on my errand, I had potatoes to buy. For these I had to go from door to door. Butter also I wanted, but all the old dames said, "Go back and fetch a plate to put it on."

I procured two pennyworth of potatoes, all the size of marbles, given me in a birch bark basket. I also obtained half a dozen eggs from the old man who had come down in his barge, hawking town products from village to village.

When I returned the babushka was out. I set to work at once to wash the rice. That done, I filled an earthenware pot half full of milk, added half a pound of sugar and and put the rice in, covered it over with a stone lid, and put it in die recess of the old mother's great bread oven.

Then I took the potatoes in hand, and pared them with the only knife in the family. Such a business it was I. I wondered when the exiles were coming round to help me. They had all been proffering help the day before.

The babushka came in and gave me such a "blowing-up."

"Where have you been? You don't expect to get the dinner cooked in time now! What's this rubbish — rice? It's burning; you ought to stir it all the time." I filled up the pot again with milk, and resumed my potato peeling. "Here, put these in the soup pot," said I, giving her the dried vegetables.

"Meat first!" said the old woman scornfully.

"There is no meat."

"Wha-at?"

"No. No meat."

"You can't make soup without meat."

"You can make soup from a nail," said I," if you only add salt and flour and one or two other things."

She stood blinking at me a few moments, and then went out in silence.

Fortunately there was boiling water. I filled the exiles' large communal pot, and put the potatoes in one by one, also the dried vegetables, the bay leaves, the semolina, a spoonful of flour and another of salt.

The babushka stood by, holding up both her hands in horror.

Presently a girl-student came in with some mushrooms and we put these in also. The rice had swollen, and so I added again more milk. I went to wash the sultanas. Such filthy, sticky sultanas they were that the English reader can hardly imagine them. After five minutes' struggle, bathing each raisin separately and removing the stalk, I gave it up for the time being, and went out for half a pound of butter, taking a plate this time. When I came back, the babushka was struggling to stir my pudding. I put in more milk, and added a quarter pound of butter. The other quarter pound went to the soup. Then one after another I broke the six eggs, beat them up in a cup with the one family fork, and poured them into the rice. The old woman gasped. She never put eggs with Kasha. It would only spoil everything. And when I began to put sultanas in, she said, "That's Koutia, and we only eat it on Remembrance Days with the dead."

"No," I said. "This is only the English way of making rice pudding. You never put in eggs or butter or sugar or fruit, that's all the difference, and ours tastes better, you'll see."

She didn't understand, for I overheard her tell her son-in-law that I was making rice Kasha in the Chinese way.

I finished the washing of the raisins, and put them into the pudding. The oven was cooking so slowly now that the rice had ceased boiling, and was gently baking. I replaced the stone lid, and lifted the pot, by the aid of a long holder, into the depths of the stove.

All was going well. I cleared up the litter on my floor, brought the table into the middle of the room, covered it with two sheets of the Novoe Vremya, and two of the Daily News, the only copy of an English newspaper that I received during my Northern vagabondage. These served for table-cloth. The babushka had three plates and a basin. I put these down; she had also six wooden spoons; I commandeered these also. I put some sugar in a coffee-tin lid, and some salt in an old envelope, brought in two forms to seat my company, and arranged all the literature I could find to entertain them while they were waiting for dinner. Then I had to scour the village for plates and spoons. Alexey Sergeitch gave me a dozen paper serviettes and another couple of spoons, and among the other exiles I raked together enough utensils to go round. Meanwhile the soup and the rice cooked.

Coming back, I found half the company assembled, and Nikolai Georgitch had brought me four pounds of the exiles' communal black bread; which was very fortunate because I had forgotten to provide bread. The babushka was asked to produce two measures of milk and half a pound of sour curds — Russians like Metchnikoff's sour milk with their soups.

Then they all sat and waited whilst I brought in the first course.

Suspense! Then I took off the lid and looked. The soup had a fragrance that astonished the company. I asked one of the ladies, Sophie, to ladle it out, and gave into her hands the exiles' big communal ladle, an emblem of socialism.

"Oh my!" said Garbage. "It's thick."

Thick it was, almost stiff, and amazingly rich. The exiles laughed and applauded, and the girls exclaimed: "Oh Meester!" and went off into giggles. Everyone was guessing what was in the soup and what not. No one thought of the semolina — it was that that had swollen and thickened the soup, that had nade a hash of it, so to speak. I watched Karl, the Lithuanian, considering two bay leaves which had come to him adventitiously, and Varvara Sergievna trying to decide whether a piece of mushroom was fish or vegetable.

But they all ate well, and one or two even had second helpings. I lay low, knowing that my second course was a triumph of the culinary art.

It had been a profound secret, but after repeated questions I announced "Angleesky pudding," and there was a flutter of excitement. Everyone was saying "puddin-g," "puddin-g," pronouncing the final "g" as if it had a spring in it.

In it came, held high, like the boar's head, and was planked down in the middle of the table. On the top was a seductive yellow crust with sultanas lying in it like gems, and, like the King's daughter, it was all beautiful within.

Most beautiful — and tasty beyond words, and I had made an enormous quantity of it. Two helpings all rounti with milk and sugar; first helping with cream! Everyone professed to admire me, and Alexey said I had lalmost converted him to vegetarianism.

The samovar was brought in and tea went round, and several of the exiles begged the babushka to allow them to sleep for a little while on the hay in her barn. Vsevo let five martins go all at once from his blouse and they filled the room with wing movement. I gave the old woman a helping of the rice pudding, and she said she would put it away till the morrow as she wasn't hungry.

With the remains of the soup we fed the hungry village dogs, and the crows came down, dancing and hopping in front of us, trying to steal bits.

I gave them some scraps. "Don't feed the crows," said Mikhail Gregoritch." They are wicked birds, black hundreders. Feed the doves; they are gentle."

"I suppose the Dove is the kind you would like to perpetuate," said 1.

"The Dove is a type of the Christian," said Mikhail.

"Well, I think you can't get good Christians without strong devils side by side," said I, and I could not help thinking of that phrase of the philosopher" gregarious desirability." But this was beside the mark, especially after dinner, and we did not prolong the argument, but fed the birds — he doves, and I crows, according to our inclinations.

Varvara wished to stay with me to wash the dishes, but the babushka took that unpleasant job right out of our hands. It was another little item covered by my shilling a week rent.

Varvara complimented me. "You did splendidly," she said.

"All the same," I replied. "It's woman's work, and it's absurd for men to be playing about in the kitchen. Man in the kitchen and woman in parliament, I suppose that lies in the bad future."

Varvara laughed. "If the women do as well as the men . . ." said she. I felt she had said something that was irresistible.

"I'll tell you what I mean," said I. "When a woman gives one food, she bids one live. From a man's hands food is but bread arid wine, but from a woman's, it is already the flesh and blood of life."

This Varvara did not trouble her little head about, and a good thing too. She evaded my remarks and hurried on to say, "Wasn't I going to the wedding procession in the evening — up near Vassily Vassilievitch's lodging?"

I thought that I was.