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Smoke

by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev · English · Gutenberg #40813 · 397,230 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Smoke

Author: Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

Translator: Constance Garnett


        
Release date: September 21, 2012 [eBook #40813]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40813

Credits: Produced by Jana Srna, Jennifer Linklater, Bryan Ness and
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SMOKE ***




Produced by Jana Srna, Jennifer Linklater, Bryan Ness and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive/American
Libraries.)






[Illustration: _The Tables at Baden Baden._]


  THE NOVELS OF IVAN TURGENEV
  ILLUSTRATED EDITION




  SMOKE

  _TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN

  By

  CONSTANCE GARNETT_


  NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
  MCMVI

  _Printed in England_




ILLUSTRATIONS


  THE TABLES AT BADEN-BADEN,              _Frontispiece_

  MRS. BEECHER STOWE,                 _to face page_  26

  HEIDELBERG,                             „    „     298




INTRODUCTION


‘Smoke’ was first published in 1867, several years after Turgenev had
fixed his home in Baden, with his friends the Viardots. Baden at this
date was a favourite resort for all circles of Russian society, and
Turgenev was able to study at his leisure his countrymen as they
appeared to foreign critical eyes. The novel is therefore the most
cosmopolitan of all Turgenev’s works. On a veiled background of the
great world of European society, little groups of representative
Russians, members of the aristocratic and the Young Russia parties, are
etched with an incisive, unfaltering hand. _Smoke_, as an historical
study, though it yields in importance to _Fathers and Children_ and
_Virgin Soil_, is of great significance to Russians. It might with truth
have been named _Transition_, for the generation it paints was then
midway between the early philosophical Nihilism of the sixties and the
active political Nihilism of the seventies.

Markedly transitional, however, as was the Russian mind of the days of
_Smoke_, Turgenev, with the faculty that distinguishes the great artist
from the artist of second rank, the faculty of seeking out and stamping
the essential under confused and fleeting forms, has once and for ever
laid bare the fundamental weakness of the Slav nature, its weakness of
will. _Smoke_ is an attack, a deserved attack, not merely on the Young
Russia Party, but on all the Parties; not on the old ideas or the new
ideas, but on the proneness of the Slav nature to fall a prey to a
consuming weakness, a moral stagnation, a feverish _ennui_, the Slav
nature that analyses everything with force and brilliancy, and ends, so
often, by doing nothing. _Smoke_ is the attack, bitter yet sympathetic,
of a man who, with growing despair, has watched the weakness of his
countrymen, while he loves his country all the more for the bitterness
their sins have brought upon it. _Smoke_ is the scourging of a babbling
generation, by a man who, grown sick to death of the chatter of
reformers and reactionists, is visiting the sins of the fathers on the
children, with a contempt out of patience for the hereditary vice in
the Slav blood. And this time the author cannot be accused of
partisanship by any blunderer. ‘A plague o’ both your houses,’ is his
message equally to the Bureaucrats and the Revolutionists. And so
skilfully does he wield the thong, that every lash falls on the back of
both parties. An exquisite piece of political satire is _Smoke_; for
this reason alone it would stand unique among novels.

The success of _Smoke_ was immediate and great; but the hue-and-cry that
assailed it was even greater. The publication of the book marks the
final rupture between Turgenev and the party of Young Russia. The
younger generation never forgave him for drawing Gubaryov and Bambaev,
Voroshilov and Madame Suhantchikov--types, indeed, in which all
revolutionary or unorthodox parties are painfully rich. Or, perhaps,
Turgenev was forgiven for it when he was in his grave, a spot where
forgiveness flowers to a late perfection. And yet the fault was not
Turgenev’s. No, his last novel, _Virgin Soil_, bears splendid witness
that it was Young Russia that was one-eyed.

Let the plain truth here be set down. _Smoke_ is not a complete picture
of the Young Russia of the day; it was not yet time for that picture;
and that being so, Turgenev did the next best thing in attacking the
windbags, the charlatans and their crowd of shallow, chattering
followers, as well as the empty formulas of the _laissez-faire_ party.
It was inevitable that the attack should bring on him the anger of all
young enthusiasts working for ‘the Cause’; it was inevitable that ‘the
Cause’ of reform in Russia should be mixed up with the Gubaryovs, just
as reforms in France a few years ago were mixed up with Boulanger; and
that Turgenev’s waning popularity for the last twenty years of his life
should be directly caused by his honesty and clear-sightedness in regard
to Russian Liberalism, was inevitable also. To be crucified by those you
have benefited is the cross of honour of all great, single-hearted men.

But though the bitterness of political life flavours _Smoke_, although
its points of departure and arrival are wrapped in the atmosphere of
Russia’s dark and insoluble problems, nevertheless the two central
figures of the book, Litvinov and Irina, are not political figures.
Luckily for them, in Gubaryov’s words, they belong ‘to the
undeveloped.’ Litvinov himself may be dismissed in a sentence. He is
Turgenev’s favourite type of man, a character much akin to his own
nature, gentle, deep, and sympathetic. Turgenev often drew such a
character; Lavretsky, for example, in _A House of Gentlefolk_, is a
first cousin to Litvinov, an older and a sadder man.

But Irina--Irina is unique; for Turgenev has in her perfected her type
till she reaches a destroying witchery of fascination and subtlety.
Irina will stand for ever in the long gallery of great creations,
smiling with that enigmatical smile which took from Litvinov in a glance
half his life, and his love for Tatyana. The special triumph of her
creation is that she combines that exact balance between good and evil
which makes good women seem insipid beside her and bad women unnatural.
And, by nature irresistible, she is made doubly so to the imagination by
the situation which she recreates between Litvinov and herself. She
ardently desires to become nobler, to possess all that the ideal of love
means for the heart of woman; but she has only the power given to her of
enervating the man she loves. Can she become a Tatyana to him? No, to
no man. She is born to corrupt, yet never to be corrupted. She rises
mistress of herself after the first measure of fatal delight. And, never
giving her whole heart absolutely to her lover, she, nevertheless,
remains ever to be desired.

Further, her wit, her scorn, her beauty preserve her from all the
influences of evil she does not deliberately employ. Such a woman is as
old and as rare a type as Helen of Troy. It is most often found among
the great mistresses of princes, and it was from a mistress of Alexander
II. that Turgenev modelled Irina.

Of the minor characters, Tatyana is an astonishing instance of
Turgenev’s skill in drawing a complete character with half-a-dozen
strokes of the pen. The reader seems to have known her intimately all
his life: her family life, her girlhood, her goodness and individual
ways to the smallest detail; yet she only speaks on two or three
occasions. Potugin is but a weary shadow of Litvinov, but it is
difficult to say how much this is a telling refinement of art. The
shadow of this prematurely exhausted man is cast beforehand by Irina
across Litvinov’s future. For Turgenev to have drawn Potugin as an
ordinary individual would have vulgarised the novel and robbed it of its
skilful proportions, for Potugin is one of those shadowy figures which
supply the chiaroscuro to a brilliant etching.

As a triumphant example of consummate technical skill, _Smoke_ will
repay the most exact scrutiny. There are a lightness and a grace about
the novel that conceal its actual strength. The political argument
glides with such ease in and out of the love story, that the hostile
critic is absolutely baffled; and while the most intricate steps are
executed in the face of a crowd of angry enemies, the performer lands
smiling and in safety. The art by which Irina’s disastrous fascination
results in falsity, and Litvinov’s desperate striving after sincerity
ends in rehabilitation,--the art by which these two threads are spun,
till their meaning colours the faint political message of the book, is
so delicate that, like the silken webs which gleam only for the first
fresh hours in the forest, it leaves no trace, but becomes a dream in
the memory. And yet this book, which has the freshness of windy rain and
the whirling of autumn leaves, is a story of ignominious weakness, of
the passion that kills, that degrades, that renders life despicable, as
Turgenev himself says. _Smoke_ is the finest example in literature of a
subjective psychological study of passion rendered clearly and
objectively in terms of French art. Its character, we will not say its
superiority, lies in the extraordinary clearness with which the most
obscure mental phenomena are analysed in relation to the ordinary values
of daily life. At the precise point of psychological analysis where
Tolstoi wanders and does not convince the reader, and at the precise
point where Dostoievsky’s analysis seems exaggerated and obscure, like a
figure looming through the mist, Turgenev throws a ray of light from the
outer to the inner world of man, and the two worlds are revealed in the
natural depths of their connection. It is in fact difficult to find
among the great modern artists men whose natural balance of intellect
can be said to equalise their special genius. The Greeks alone present
to the world a spectacle of a triumphant harmony in the critical and
creative mind of man, and this is their great pre-eminence. But _Smoke_
presents the curious feature of a novel (Slav in virtue of its modern
psychological genius) which is classical in its treatment and expression
throughout: the balance of Turgenev’s intellect reigns ever supreme over
the natural morbidity of his subject.

And thus _Smoke_ in every sense of the word is a classic for all time.

                                                  EDWARD GARNETT.

  _January 1896._




THE NAMES OF THE CHARACTERS IN THE BOOK


  Grigóry [_Grísha_] Mihálovitch Litvínov.
  Tat-yána [_Tánya_] Petróvna Shestóv.
  Kapitolína Márkovna.
  Rostisláv Bambáev.
  Semyón Yákovlevitch Voroshílov.
  Stepán Nikoláevitch Gubar-yóv.
  Matróna Semyónovna Suhántchikov.
  Tit Bindásov.
  Pish-tchálkin.
  Sozónt Ivánitch Potúgin.
  Irína Pávlovna Osínin.
  Valerián Vladímirovitch Ratmírov.


In transcribing the Russian names into English--

  _a_ has the sound of _a_ in _father_.

  _e_   „       „      _a_ in _pane_.

  _i_   „       „      _ee_.

  _u_   „       „      _oo_.

  _y_ is always consonantal except when
      it is the last letter of the word.

  _g_ is always hard.




I


On the 10th of August 1862, at four o’clock in the afternoon, a great
number of people were thronging before the well-known _Konversation_ in
Baden-Baden. The weather was lovely; everything around--the green trees,
the bright houses of the gay city, and the undulating outline of the
mountains--everything was in holiday mood, basking in the rays of the
kindly sunshine; everything seemed smiling with a sort of blind,
confiding delight; and the same glad, vague smile strayed over the human
faces too, old and young, ugly and beautiful alike. Even the blackened
and whitened visages of the Parisian demi-monde could not destroy the
general impression of bright content and elation, while their
many-coloured ribbons and feathers and the sparks of gold and steel on
their hats and veils involuntarily recalled the intensified brilliance
and light fluttering of birds in spring, with their rainbow-tinted
wings. But the dry, guttural snapping of the French jargon, heard on
all sides could not equal the song of birds, nor be compared with it.

Everything, however, was going on in its accustomed way. The orchestra
in the Pavilion played first a medley from the Traviata, then one of
Strauss’s waltzes, then ‘Tell her,’ a Russian song, adapted for
instruments by an obliging conductor. In the gambling saloons, round the
green tables, crowded the same familiar figures, with the same dull,
greedy, half-stupefied, half-exasperated, wholly rapacious expression,
which the gambling fever lends to all, even the most aristocratic,
features. The same well-fed and ultra-fashionably dressed Russian
landowner from Tambov with wide staring eyes leaned over the table, and
with uncomprehending haste, heedless of the cold smiles of the croupiers
themselves, at the very instant of the cry ‘_rien ne va plus_,’ laid
with perspiring hand golden rings of _louis d’or_ on all the four
corners of the roulette, depriving himself by so doing of every
possibility of gaining anything, even in case of success. This did not
in the least prevent him the same evening from affirming the contrary
with disinterested indignation to Prince Kokó, one of the well-known
leaders of the aristocratic opposition, the Prince Kokó, who in Paris at
the salon of the Princess Mathilde, so happily remarked in the presence
of the Emperor: ‘_Madame, le principe de la propriété est profondément
ébranlé en Russie_.’ At the Russian tree, _à l’arbre Russe_, our dear
fellow-countrymen and countrywomen were assembled after their wont. They
approached haughtily and carelessly in fashionable style, greeted each
other with dignity and elegant ease, as befits beings who find
themselves at the topmost pinnacle of contemporary culture. But when
they had met and sat down together, they were absolutely at a loss for
anything to say to one another, and had to be content with a pitiful
interchange of inanities, or with the exceedingly indecent and
exceedingly insipid old jokes of a hopelessly stale French wit, once a
journalist, a chattering buffoon with Jewish shoes on his paltry little
legs, and a contemptible little beard on his mean little visage. He
retailed to them, _à ces princes russes_, all the sweet absurdities from
the old comic almanacs _Charivari_ and _Tintamarre_, and they, _ces
princes russes_, burst into grateful laughter, as though forced in spite
of themselves to recognise the crushing superiority of foreign wit, and
their own hopeless incapacity to invent anything amusing. Yet here were
almost all the ‘_fine fleur_’ of our society, ‘all the high-life and
mirrors of fashion.’ Here was Count X., our incomparable dilettante, a
profoundly musical nature, who so divinely recites songs on the piano,
but cannot in fact take two notes correctly without fumbling at random
on the keys, and sings in a style something between that of a poor gypsy
singer and a Parisian hairdresser. Here was our enchanting Baron Q., a
master in every line: literature, administration, oratory, and
card-sharping. Here, too, was Prince Y., the friend of religion and the
people, who in the blissful epoch when the spirit-trade was a monopoly,
had made himself betimes a huge fortune by the sale of vodka adulterated
with belladonna; and the brilliant General O. O., who had achieved the
subjugation of something, and the pacification of something else, and
who is nevertheless still a nonentity, and does not know what to do with
himself. And R. R. the amusing fat man, who regards himself as a great
invalid and a great wit, though he is, in fact, as strong as a bull, and
as dull as a post.... This R. R. is almost the only man in our day who
has preserved the traditions of the dandies of the forties, of the epoch
of the ‘Hero of our Times,’ and the Countess Vorotinsky. He has
preserved, too, the special gait with the swing on the heels, and _le
culte de la pose_ (it cannot even be put into words in Russian), the
unnatural deliberation of movement, the sleepy dignity of expression,
the immovable, offended-looking countenance, and the habit of
interrupting other people’s remarks with a yawn, gazing at his own
finger-nails, laughing through his nose, suddenly shifting his hat from
the back of his head on to his eyebrows, etc. Here, too, were people in
government circles, diplomats, big-wigs with European names, men of
wisdom and intellect, who imagine that the Golden Bull was an edict of
the Pope, and that the English poor-tax is a tax levied on the poor. And
here, too, were the hot-blooded, though tongue-tied, devotees of the
_dames aux camellias_, young society dandies, with superb partings down
the back of their heads, and splendid drooping whiskers, dressed in real
London costumes, young bucks whom one would fancy there was nothing to
hinder from becoming as vulgar as the illustrious French wit above
mentioned. But no! our home products are not in fashion it seems; and
Countess S., the celebrated arbitress of fashion and _grand genre_, by
spiteful tongues nicknamed ‘Queen of the Wasps,’ and ‘Medusa in a
mob-cap,’ prefers, in the absence of the French wit, to consort with the
Italians, Moldavians, American spiritualists, smart secretaries of
foreign embassies, and Germans of effeminate, but prematurely
circumspect, physiognomy, of whom the place is full. The example of the
Countess is followed by the Princess Babette, she in whose arms Chopin
died (the ladies in Europe in whose arms he expired are to be reckoned
by thousands); and the Princess Annette, who would have been perfectly
captivating, if the simple village washerwoman had not suddenly peeped
out in her at times, like a smell of cabbage wafted across the most
delicate perfume; and Princess Pachette, to whom the following mischance
had occurred: her husband had fallen into a good berth, and all at once,
_Dieu sait pourquoi_, he had thrashed the provost and stolen 20,000
roubles of public money; and the laughing Princess Zizi; and the tearful
Princess Zozo. They all left their compatriots on one side, and were
merciless in their treatment of them. Let us too leave them on one side,
these charming ladies, and walk away from the renowned tree near which
they sit in such costly but somewhat tasteless costumes, and God grant
them relief from the boredom consuming them!




II


A few paces from the ‘Russian tree,’ at a little table in front of
Weber’s coffee-house, there was sitting a good-looking man, about
thirty, of medium height, thin and dark, with a manly and pleasant face.
He sat bending forward with both arms leaning on his stick, with the
calm and simple air of a man to whom the idea had not occurred that any
one would notice him or pay any attention to him. His large expressive
golden-brown eyes were gazing deliberately about him, sometimes screwed
up to keep the sunshine out of them, and then watching fixedly some
eccentric figure that passed by him while a childlike smile faintly
stirred his fine moustache and lips, and his prominent short chin. He
wore a roomy coat of German cut, and a soft grey hat hid half of his
high forehead. At the first glance he made the impression of an honest,
sensible, rather self-confident young man such as there are many in the
world. He seemed to be resting from prolonged labours and to be
deriving all the more simple-minded amusement from the scene spread out
before him because his thoughts were far away, and because they moved
too, those thoughts, in a world utterly unlike that which surrounded him
at the moment. He was a Russian; his name was Grigory Mihalovitch
Litvinov.

We have to make his acquaintance, and so it will be well to relate in a
few words his past, which presents little of much interest or
complexity.

He was the son of an honest retired official of plebeian extraction, but
he was educated, not as one would naturally expect, in the town, but in
the country. His mother was of noble family, and had been educated in a
government school. She was a good-natured and very enthusiastic
creature, not devoid of character, however. Though she was twenty years
younger than her husband, she remodelled him, as far as she could, drew
him out of the petty official groove into the landowner’s way of life,
and softened and refined his harsh and stubborn character. Thanks to
her, he began to dress with neatness, and to behave with decorum; he
came to respect learned men and learning, though, of course, he never
took a single book in his hand; he gave up swearing, and tried in every
way not to demean himself. He even arrived at walking more quietly and
speaking in a subdued voice, mostly of elevated subjects, which cost him
no small effort. ‘Ah! they ought to be flogged, and that’s all about
it!’ he sometimes thought to himself, but aloud he pronounced: ‘Yes,
yes, that’s so ... of course; it is a great question.’ Litvinov’s mother
set her household too upon a European footing; she addressed the
servants by the plural ‘you’ instead of the familiar ‘thou,’ and never
allowed any one to gorge himself into a state of lethargy at her table.
As regards the property belonging to her, neither she nor her husband
was capable of looking after it at all. It had been long allowed to run
to waste, but there was plenty of land, with all sorts of useful
appurtenances, forest-lands and a lake, on which there had once stood a
factory, which had been founded by a zealous but unsystematic owner, and
had flourished in the hands of a scoundrelly merchant, and gone utterly
to ruin under the superintendence of a conscientious German manager.
Madame Litvinov was contented so long as she did not dissipate her
fortune or contract debts. Unluckily she could not boast of good health,
and she died of consumption in the very year that her son entered the
Moscow university. He did not complete his course there owing to
circumstances of which the reader will hear more later on, and went
back to his provincial home, where he idled away some time without work
and without ties, almost without acquaintances. Thanks to the
disinclination for active service of the local gentry, who were,
however, not so much penetrated by the Western theory of the evils of
‘absenteeism,’ as by the home-grown conviction that ‘one’s own shirt is
the nearest to one’s skin,’ he was drawn for military service in 1855,
and almost died of typhus in the Crimea, where he spent six months in a
mud-hut on the shore of the Putrid Sea, without ever seeing a single
ally. After that, he served, not of course without unpleasant
experiences, on the councils of the nobility, and after being a little
time in the country, acquired a passion for farming. He realised that
his mother’s property, under the indolent and feeble management of his
infirm old father, did not yield a tenth of the revenue it might yield,
and that in experienced and skilful hands it might be converted into a
perfect gold mine. But he realised, too, that experience and skill were
just what he lacked--and he went abroad to study agriculture and
technology--to learn them from the first rudiments. More than four years
he had spent in Mecklenburg, in Silesia, and in Carlsruhe, and he had
travelled in Belgium and in England. He had worked conscientiously and
accumulated information; he had not acquired it easily; but he had
persevered through his difficulties to the end, and now with confidence
in himself, in his future, and in his usefulness to his neighbours,
perhaps even to the whole countryside, he was preparing to return home,
where he was summoned with despairing prayers and entreaties in every
letter from his father, now completely bewildered by the emancipation,
the re-division of lands, and the terms of redemption--by the new régime
in short. But why was he in Baden?

Well, he was in Baden because he was from day to day expecting the
arrival there of his cousin and betrothed, Tatyana Petrovna Shestov. He
had known her almost from childhood, and had spent the spring and summer
with her at Dresden, where she was living with her aunt. He felt sincere
love and profound respect for his young kinswoman, and on the conclusion
of his dull preparatory labours, when he was preparing to enter on a new
field, to begin real, unofficial duties, he proposed to her as a woman
dearly loved, a comrade and a friend, to unite her life with his--for
happiness and for sorrow, for labour and for rest, ‘for better, for
worse’ as the English say. She had consented, and he had returned to
Carlsruhe, where his books, papers and properties had been left.... But
why was he at Baden, you ask again?

Well, he was at Baden, because Tatyana’s aunt, who had brought her up,
Kapitolina Markovna Shestov, an old unmarried lady of fifty-five, a most
good-natured, honest, eccentric soul, a free thinker, all aglow with the
fire of self-sacrifice and abnegation, an _esprit fort_ (she read
Strauss, it is true she concealed the fact from her niece) and a
democrat, sworn opponent of aristocracy and fashionable society, could
not resist the temptation of gazing for once on this aristocratic
society in such a fashionable place as Baden.... Kapitolina Markovna
wore no crinoline and had her white hair cut in a round crop, but luxury
and splendour had a secret fascination for her, and it was her favourite
pastime to rail at them and express her contempt of them. How could one
refuse to gratify the good old lady? But Litvinov was so quiet and
simple, he gazed so self-confidently about him, because his life lay so
clearly mapped out before him, because his career was defined, and
because he was proud of this career, and rejoiced in it as the work of
his own hands.




III


‘Hullo! hullo! here he is!’ he suddenly heard a squeaky voice just above
his ear, and a plump hand slapped him on the shoulder. He lifted his
head, and perceived one of his few Moscow acquaintances, a certain
Bambaev, a good-natured but good-for-nothing fellow. He was no longer
young, he had a flabby nose and soft cheeks, that looked as if they had
been boiled, dishevelled greasy locks, and a fat squat person.
Everlastingly short of cash, and everlastingly in raptures over
something, Rostislav Bambaev wandered, aimless but exclamatory, over the
face of our long-suffering mother-earth.

‘Well, this is something like a meeting!’ he repeated, opening wide his
sunken eyes, and drawing down his thick lips, over which the straggling
dyed moustaches seemed strangely out of place. ‘Ah, Baden! All the world
runs here like black-beetles! How did you come here, Grisha?’

There was positively no one in the world Bambaev did not address by his
Christian name.

‘I came here three days ago.’

‘From where?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Why indeed? But stop, stop a minute, Grisha. You are, perhaps, not
aware who has just arrived here! Gubaryov himself, in person! That’s
who’s here! He came yesterday from Heidelberg. You know him of course?’

‘I have heard of him.’

‘Is that all? Upon my word! At once, this very minute we will haul you
along to him. Not know a man like that! And by the way here’s
Voroshilov.... Stop a minute, Grisha, perhaps you don’t know him either?
I have the honour to present you to one another. Both learned men! He’s
a phœnix indeed! Kiss each other!’

And uttering these words, Bambaev turned to a good-looking young man
standing near him with a fresh and rosy, but prematurely demure face.
Litvinov got up, and, it need hardly be said, did not kiss him, but
exchanged a cursory bow with the phœnix, who, to judge from the severity
of his demeanour, was not overpleased at this unexpected introduction.

‘I said a phœnix, and I will not go back from my word,’ continued
Bambaev; ‘go to Petersburg, to the military school, and look at the
golden board; whose name stands first there? The name of Voroshilov,
Semyon Yakovlevitch! But, Gubaryov, Gubaryov, my dear fellow! It’s to
him we must fly! I absolutely worship that man! And I’m not alone, every
one’s at his feet! Ah, what a work he is writing, O--O--O!...’

‘What is his work about?’ inquired Litvinov.

‘About everything, my dear boy, after the style of Buckle, you know ...
but more profound, more profound.... Everything will be solved and made
clear in it.’

‘And have you read this work yourself?’

‘No, I have not read it, and indeed it’s a secret, which must not be
spread about; but from Gubaryov one may expect everything, everything!
Yes!’ Bambaev sighed and clasped his hands. ‘Ah, if we had two or three
intellects like that growing up in Russia, ah, what mightn’t we see
then, my God! I tell you one thing, Grisha; whatever pursuit you may
have been engaged in in these latter days--and I don’t even know what
your pursuits are in general--whatever your convictions may be--I don’t
know them either--from him, Gubaryov, you will find something to learn.
Unluckily, he is not here for long. We must make the most of him; we
must go. To him, to him!’

A passing dandy with reddish curls and a blue ribbon on his low hat,
turned round and stared through his eyeglass with a sarcastic smile at
Bambaev. Litvinov felt irritated.

‘What are you shouting for?’ he said; ‘one would think you were
hallooing dogs on at a hunt! I have not had dinner yet.’

‘Well, think of that! we can go at once to Weber’s ... the three of us
... capital! You have the cash to pay for me?’ he added in an undertone.

‘Yes, yes; only, I really don’t know----’

‘Leave off, please; you will thank me for it, and he will be delighted.
Ah, heavens!’ Bambaev interrupted himself. ‘It’s the finale from Ernani
they’re playing. How delicious!... _A som ... mo Carlo...._ What a
fellow I am, though! In tears in a minute. Well, Semyon Yakovlevitch!
Voroshilov! shall we go, eh?’

Voroshilov, who had remained all the while standing with immovable
propriety, still maintaining his former haughty dignity of demeanour,
dropped his eyes expressively, frowned, and muttered something between
his teeth ... But he did not refuse; and Litvinov thought, ‘Well, we may
as well do it, as I’ve plenty of time on my hands.’ Bambaev took his
arm, but before turning towards the café he beckoned to Isabelle the
renowned flower-girl of the Jockey Club: he had conceived the idea of
buying a bunch of flowers of her. But the aristocratic flower-girl did
not stir; and, indeed, what should induce her to approach a gentleman
without gloves, in a soiled fustian jacket, streaky cravat, and boots
trodden down at heel, whom she had not even seen in Paris? Then
Voroshilov in his turn beckoned to her. To him she responded, and he,
taking a tiny bunch of violets from her basket, flung her a florin. He
thought to astonish her by his munificence, but not an eyelash on her
face quivered, and when he had turned away, she pursed up her mouth
contemptuously. Voroshilov was dressed very fashionably, even
exquisitely, but the experienced eye of the Parisian girl noted at once
in his get-up and in his bearing, in his very walk, which showed traces
of premature military drill, the absence of genuine, pure-blooded
‘chic.’

When they had taken their seats in the principal dining-hall at Weber’s,
and ordered dinner, our friends fell into conversation. Bambaev
discoursed loudly and hotly upon the immense importance of Gubaryov, but
soon he ceased speaking, and, gasping and chewing noisily, drained off
glass after glass. Voroshilov ate and drank little, and as it were
reluctantly, and after questioning Litvinov as to the nature of his
interests, fell to giving expression to his own opinions--not so much on
those interests, as on questions of various kinds in general.... All at
once he warmed up, and set off at a gallop like a spirited horse, boldly
and decisively assigning to every syllable, every letter, its due
weight, like a confident cadet going up for his ‘final’ examination,
with vehement, but inappropriate gestures. At every instant, since no
one interrupted him, he became more eloquent, more emphatic; it seemed
as though he were reading a dissertation or lecture. The names of the
most recent scientific authorities--with the addition of the dates of
the birth or death of each of them--the titles of pamphlets that had
only just appeared, and names, names, names ... fell in showers together
from his tongue, affording himself intense satisfaction, reflected in
his glowing eyes. Voroshilov, seemingly, despised everything old, and
attached value only to the cream of culture, the latest, most advanced
points of science; to mention, however inappropriately, a book of some
Doctor Zauerbengel on Pennsylvanian prisons, or yesterday’s articles in
the _Asiatic Journal_ on the Vedas and Puranas (he pronounced it
_Journal_ in the English fashion, though he certainly did not know
English) was for him a real joy, a felicity. Litvinov listened and
listened to him, and could not make out what could be his special line.
At one moment his talk was of the part played by the Celtic race in
history; then he was carried away to the ancient world, and discoursed
upon the Æginetan marbles, harangued with great warmth on the sculptor
living earlier than Phidias, Onetas, who was, however, transformed by
him into Jonathan, which lent his whole discourse a half-Biblical,
half-American flavour; then he suddenly bounded away to political
economy and called Bastiat a fool or a blockhead, ‘as bad as Adam Smith
and all the physiocrats.’ ‘Physiocrats,’ murmured Bambaev after him ...
‘aristocrats?’ Among other things Voroshilov called forth an expression
of bewilderment on Bambaev’s face by a criticism, dropped casually in
passing, of Macaulay, as an old-fashioned writer, superseded by modern
historical science; as for Gneist, he declared he need scarcely refer to
him, and he shrugged his shoulders. Bambaev shrugged his shoulders too.
‘And all this at once, without any inducement, before strangers, in a
café’--Litvinov reflected, looking at the fair hair, clear eyes, and
white teeth of his new acquaintance (he was specially embarrassed by
those large sugar-white teeth, and those hands with their inappropriate
gesticulations), ‘and he doesn’t once smile; and with it all, he would
seem to be a nice lad, and absolutely inexperienced.’ Voroshilov began
to calm down at last, his voice, youthfully resonant and shrill as a
young cock’s, broke a little.... Bambaev seized the opportunity to
declaim verses and again nearly burst into tears, which scandalised one
table near them, round which was seated an English family, and set
another tittering; two Parisian _cocottes_ were dining at this second
table with a creature who resembled an ancient baby in a wig. The waiter
brought the bill; the friends paid it.

‘Well,’ cried Bambaev, getting heavily up from his chair, ‘now for a cup
of coffee, and quick march. There she is, our Russia,’ he added,
stopping in the doorway, and pointing almost rapturously with his soft
red hand to Voroshilov and Litvinov.... ‘What do you think of her?...’

‘Russia, indeed,’ thought Litvinov; and Voroshilov, whose face had by
now regained its concentrated expression, again smiled condescendingly,
and gave a little tap with his heels.

Within five minutes they were all three mounting the stairs of the hotel
where Stepan Nikolaitch Gubaryov was staying.... A tall slender lady, in
a hat with a short black veil, was coming quickly down the same
staircase. Catching sight of Litvinov she turned suddenly round to him,
and stopped still as though struck by amazement. Her face flushed
instantaneously, and then as quickly grew pale under its thick lace
veil; but Litvinov did not observe her, and the lady ran down the wide
steps more quickly than before.




IV


‘Grigory Litvinov, a brick, a true Russian heart. I commend him to you,’
cried Bambaev, conducting Litvinov up to a short man of the figure of a
country gentleman, with an unbuttoned collar, in a short jacket, grey
morning trousers and slippers, standing in the middle of a light, and
very well-furnished room; ‘and this,’ he added, addressing himself to
Litvinov, ‘is he, the man himself, do you understand? Gubaryov, then, in
a word.’

Litvinov stared with curiosity at ‘the man himself.’ He did not at first
sight find in him anything out of the common. He saw before him a
gentleman of respectable, somewhat dull exterior, with a broad forehead,
large eyes, full lips, a big beard, and a thick neck, with a fixed gaze,
bent sidelong and downwards. This gentleman simpered, and said, ‘Mmm ...
ah ... very pleased,...’ raised his hand to his own face, and at once
turning his back on Litvinov, took a few paces upon the carpet, with a
slow and peculiar shuffle, as though he were trying to slink along
unseen. Gubaryov had the habit of continually walking up and down, and
constantly plucking and combing his beard with the tips of his long hard
nails. Besides Gubaryov, there was also in the room a lady of about
fifty, in a shabby silk dress, with an excessively mobile face almost as
yellow as a lemon, a little black moustache on her upper lip, and eyes
which moved so quickly that they seemed as though they were jumping out
of her head; there was too a broad-shouldered man sitting bent up in a
corner.

‘Well, honoured Matrona Semyonovna,’ began Gubaryov, turning to the
lady, and apparently not considering it necessary to introduce Litvinov
to her, ‘what was it you were beginning to tell us?’

The lady (her name was Matrona Semyonovna Suhantchikov--she was a widow,
childless, and not rich, and had been travelling from country to country
for two years past) began with peculiar exasperated vehemence:

‘Well, so he appears before the prince and says to him: “Your
Excellency,” he says, “in such an office and such a position as yours,
what will it cost you to alleviate my lot? You,” he says, “cannot but
respect the purity of my ideas! And is it possible,” he says, “in these
days to persecute a man for his ideas?” And what do you suppose the
prince did, that cultivated dignitary in that exalted position?’

‘Why, what did he do?’ observed Gubaryov, lighting a cigarette with a
meditative air.

The lady drew herself up and held out her bony right hand, with the
first finger separated from the rest.

‘He called his groom and said to him, “Take off that man’s coat at once,
and keep it yourself. I make you a present of that coat!”’

‘And did the groom take it?’ asked Bambaev, throwing up his arms.

‘He took it and kept it. And that was done by Prince Barnaulov, the
well-known rich grandee, invested with special powers, the
representative of the government. What is one to expect after that!’

The whole frail person of Madame Suhantchikov was shaking with
indignation, spasms passed over her face, her withered bosom was heaving
convulsively under her flat corset; of her eyes it is needless to speak,
they were fairly leaping out of her head. But then they were always
leaping, whatever she might be talking about.

‘A crying shame, a crying shame!’ cried Bambaev. ‘No punishment could be
bad enough!’

‘Mmm.... Mmm.... From top to bottom it’s all rotten,’ observed Gubaryov,
without raising his voice, however. ‘In that case punishment is not ...
that needs ... other measures.’

‘But is it really true?’ commented Litvinov.

‘Is it true?’ broke in Madame Suhantchikov. ‘Why, that one can’t even
dream of doubting ... can’t even d-d-d-ream of it.’ She pronounced these
words with such energy that she was fairly shaking with the effort. ‘I
was told of that by a very trustworthy man. And you, Stepan Nikolaitch,
know him--Elistratov, Kapiton. He heard it himself from eyewitnesses,
spectators of this disgraceful scene.’

‘What Elistratov?’ inquired Gubaryov. ‘The one who was in Kazan?’

‘Yes. I know, Stepan Nikolaitch, a rumour was spread about him that he
took bribes there from some contractors or distillers. But then who is
it says so? Pelikanov! And how can one believe Pelikanov, when every one
knows he is simply--a spy!’

‘No, with your permission, Matrona Semyonovna,’ interposed Bambaev, ‘I
am friends with Pelikanov, he is not a spy at all.’

‘Yes, yes, that’s just what he is, a spy!’

‘But wait a minute, kindly----’

‘A spy, a spy!’ shrieked Madame Suhantchikov.

‘No, no, one minute, I tell you what,’ shrieked Bambaev in his turn.

‘A spy, a spy,’ persisted Madame Suhantchikov.

‘No, no! There’s Tentelyev now, that’s a different matter,’ roared
Bambaev with all the force of his lungs.

Madame Suhantchikov was silent for a moment.

‘I know for a fact about that gentleman,’ he continued in his ordinary
voice, ‘that when he was summoned before the secret police, he grovelled
at the feet of the Countess Blazenkrampff and kept whining, “Save me,
intercede for me!” But Pelikanov never demeaned himself to baseness like
that.’

‘Mm ... Tentelyev ...’ muttered Gubaryov, ‘that ... that ought to be
noted.’

Madame Suhantchikov shrugged her shoulders contemptuously.

‘They’re one worse than another,’ she said, ‘but I know a still better
story about Tentelyev. He was, as every one knows, a most horrible
despot with his serfs, though he gave himself out for an emancipator.
Well, he was once at some friend’s house in Paris, and suddenly in comes
Madame Beecher Stowe--you know, _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. Tentelyev, who’s an
awfully pushing fellow, began asking the host to present him; but
directly she heard his name. “What?” she said, “he presumes to be
introduced to the author of _Uncle Tom_?” And she gave him a slap on the
cheek! “Go away!” she says, “at once!” And what do you think? Tentelyev
took his hat and slunk away, pretty crestfallen.’

[Illustration: _Mrs. Beecher Stowe._]

‘Come, I think that’s exaggerated,’ observed Bambaev. ‘“Go away” she
certainly did say, that’s a fact, but she didn’t give him a smack!’

‘She did, she did!’ repeated Madam Suhantchikov with convulsive
intensity: ‘I am not talking idle gossip. And you are friends with men
like that!’

‘Excuse me, excuse me, Matrona Semyonovna, I never spoke of Tentelyev as
a friend of mine; I was speaking of Pelikanov.’

‘Well, if it’s not Tentelyev, it’s another. Mihnyov, for example.’

‘What did he do then?’ asked Bambaev, already showing signs of alarm.

‘What? Is it possible you don’t know? He exclaimed on the Poznesensky
Prospect in the hearing of all the world that all the liberals ought to
be in prison; and what’s more, an old schoolfellow came to him, a poor
man of course, and said, “Can I come to dinner with you?” And this was
his answer. “No, impossible; I have two counts dining with me to-day ...
get along with you!”’

‘But that’s slander, upon my word!’ vociferated Bambaev.

‘Slander? ... slander? In the first place, Prince Vahrushkin, who was
also dining at your Mihnyov’s----’

‘Prince Vahrushkin,’ Gubaryov interpolated severely, ‘is my cousin; but
I don’t allow him to enter my house.... So there is no need to mention
him even.’

‘In the second place,’ continued Madame Suhantchikov, with a submissive
nod in Gubaryov’s direction, ‘Praskovya Yakovlovna told me so herself.’

‘You have hit on a fine authority to quote! Why, she and Sarkizov are
the greatest scandal-mongers going.’

‘I beg your pardon, Sarkizov is a liar, certainly. He filched the very
pall of brocade off his dead father’s coffin. I will never dispute that;
but Praskovya Yakovlovna--there’s no comparison! Remember how
magnanimously she parted from her husband! But you, I know, are always
ready----’

‘Come, enough, enough, Matrona Semyonovna,’ said Bambaev, interrupting
her, ‘let us give up this tittle-tattle, and take a loftier flight. I am
not new to the work, you know. Have you read _Mlle. de la Quintinie_?
That’s something charming now! And quite in accord with your principles
at the same time!’

‘I never read novels now,’ was Madame Suhantchikov’s dry and sharp
reply.

‘Why?’

‘Because I have not the time now; I have no thoughts now but for one
thing, sewing machines.’

‘What machines?’ inquired Litvinov.

‘Sewing, sewing; all women ought to provide themselves with
sewing-machines, and form societies; in that way they will all be
enabled to earn their living, and will become independent at once. In no
other way can they ever be emancipated. That is an important, most
important social question. I had such an argument about it with Boleslav
Stadnitsky. Boleslav Stadnitsky is a marvellous nature, but he looks at
these things in an awfully frivolous spirit. He does nothing but laugh.
Idiot!’

‘All will in their due time be called to account, from all it will be
exacted,’ pronounced Gubaryov deliberately, in a tone half-professorial,
half-prophetic.

‘Yes, yes,’ repeated Bambaev, ‘it will be exacted, precisely so, it will
be exacted. But, Stepan Nikolaitch,’ he added, dropping his voice, ‘how
goes the great work?’

‘I am collecting materials,’ replied Gubaryov, knitting his brows; and,
turning to Litvinov, whose head began to swim from the medley of
unfamiliar names, and the frenzy of backbiting, he asked him what
subjects he was interested in.

Litvinov satisfied his curiosity.

‘Ah! to be sure, the natural sciences. That is useful, as training; as
training, not as an end in itself. The end at present should be ... mm
... should be ... different. Allow me to ask what views do you hold?’

‘What views?’

‘Yes, that is, more accurately speaking, what are your political views?’

Litvinov smiled.

‘Strictly speaking, I have no political views.’

The broad-shouldered man sitting in the corner raised his head quickly
at these words and looked attentively at Litvinov.

‘How is that?’ observed Gubaryov with peculiar gentleness. ‘Have you not
yet reflected on the subject, or have you grown weary of it?’

‘How shall I say? It seems to me that for us Russians, it is too early
yet to have political views or to imagine that we have them. Observe
that I attribute to the word “political” the meaning which belongs to it
by right, and that----’

‘Aha! he belongs to the undeveloped,’ Gubaryov interrupted him, with the
same gentleness, and going up to Voroshilov, he asked him: ‘Had he read
the pamphlet he had given him?’

Voroshilov, to Litvinov’s astonishment, had not uttered a word ever
since his entrance, but had only knitted his brows and rolled his eyes
(as a rule he was either speechifying or else perfectly dumb). He now
expanded his chest in soldierly fashion, and with a tap of his heels,
nodded assent.

‘Well, and how was it? Did you like it?’

‘As regards the fundamental principles, I liked it; but I did not agree
with the inferences.’

‘Mmm ... Andrei Ivanitch praised that pamphlet, however. You must expand
your doubts to me later.’

‘You desire it in writing?’

Gubaryov was obviously surprised; he had not expected this; however,
after a moment’s thought, he replied:

‘Yes, in writing. By the way, I will ask you to explain to me your views
also ... in regard to ... in regard to associations.’

‘Associations on Lassalle’s system, do you desire, or on the system of
Schulze-Delitzsch?’

‘Mmm ... on both. For us Russians, you understand, the financial aspect
of the matter is specially important. Yes, and the _artel_ ... as the
germ.... All that, one must take note of. One must go deeply into it.
And the question, too, of the land to be apportioned to the
peasants....’

‘And you, Stepan Nikolaitch, what is your view as to the number of acres
suitable?’ inquired Voroshilov, with reverential delicacy in his voice.

‘Mmm ... and the commune?’ articulated Gubaryov, deep in thought, and
biting a tuft of his beard he stared at the table-leg. ‘The commune!...
Do you understand. That is a grand word! Then what is the significance
of these conflagrations? these ... these government measures against
Sunday-schools, reading-rooms, journals? And the refusal of the peasants
to sign the charters regulating their position in the future? And
finally, what of what is happening in Poland? Don’t you see that ... mmm
... that we ... we have to unite with the people ... find out ... find
out their views----’ Suddenly a heavy, almost a wrathful emotion seemed
to take possession of Gubaryov; he even grew black in the face and
breathed heavily, but still did not raise his eyes, and continued to
gnaw at his beard. ‘Can’t you see----’

‘Yevseyev is a wretch!’ Madame Suhantchikov burst out noisily all of a
sudden. Bambaev had been relating something to her in a voice lowered
out of respect for their host. Gubaryov turned round swiftly on his
heels, and again began limping about the room.

Fresh guests began to arrive; towards the end of the evening a good many
people were assembled. Among them came, too, Mr. Yevseyev whom Madame
Suhantchikov had vilified so cruelly. She entered into conversation with
him very cordially, and asked him to escort her home; there arrived too
a certain Pishtchalkin, an ideal mediator, one of those men of precisely
whom perhaps Russia stands in need--a man, that is, narrow, of little
information, and no great gifts, but conscientious, patient, and honest;
the peasants of his district almost worshipped him, and he regarded
himself very respectfully as a creature genuinely deserving of esteem. A
few officers, too, were there, escaped for a brief furlough to Europe,
and rejoicing--though of course warily, and ever mindful of their
colonel in the background of their brains--in the opportunity of
dallying a little with intellectual--even rather dangerous--people; two
lanky students from Heidelberg came hurrying in, one looked about him
very contemptuously, the other giggled spasmodically ... both were very
ill at ease; after them a Frenchman--a so-called _petit jeune
homme_--poked his nose in; a nasty, silly, pitiful little creature, ...
who enjoyed some repute among his fellow _commis-voyageurs_ on the
theory that Russian countesses had fallen in love with him; for his own
part, his reflections were centred more upon getting a supper gratis;
the last to appear was Tit Bindasov, in appearance a rollicking German
student, in reality a skinflint, in words a terrorist, by vocation a
police-officer, a friend of Russian merchants’ wives and Parisian
_cocottes_; bald, toothless, and drunken; he arrived very red and
sodden, affirming that he had lost his last farthing to that blackguard
Benazet; in reality, he had won sixteen guldens.... In short, there were
a number of people. Remarkable--really remarkable--was the respect with
which all these people treated Gubaryov as a preceptor or chief; they
laid their ideas before him, and submitted them to his judgment; and he
replied by muttering, plucking at his beard, averting his eyes, or by
some disconnected, meaningless words, which were at once seized upon as
the utterances of the loftiest wisdom. Gubaryov himself seldom
interposed in the discussions; but the others strained their lungs to
the utmost to make up for it. It happened more than once that three or
four were shouting for ten minutes together, and all were content and
understood. The conversation lasted till after midnight, and was as
usual distinguished by the number and variety of the subjects discussed.
Madame Suhantchikov talked about Garibaldi, about a certain Karl
Ivanovitch, who had been flogged by the serfs of his own household,
about Napoleon III., about women’s work, about a merchant, Pleskatchov,
who had designedly caused the death of twelve work-women, and had
received a medal for it with the inscription ‘for public services’;
about the proletariat, about the Georgian Prince Tchuktcheulidzov, who
had shot his wife with a cannon, and about the future of Russia.
Pishtchalkin, too, talked of the future of Russia, and of the spirit
monopoly, and of the significance of nationalities, and of how he hated
above everything what was vulgar. There was an outburst all of a sudden
from Voroshilov; in a single breath, almost choking himself, he
mentioned Draper, Virchow, Shelgunov, Bichat, Helmholtz, Star, St.
Raymund, Johann Müller the physiologist, and Johann Müller the
historian--obviously confounding them--Taine, Renan, Shtchapov; and then
Thomas Nash, Peele, Greene.... ‘What sort of queer fish may they be?’
Bambaev muttered bewildered, Shakespeare’s predecessors having the same
relation to him as the ranges of the Alps to Mont Blanc. Voroshilov
replied cuttingly, and he too touched on the future of Russia. Bambaev
also spoke of the future of Russia, and even depicted it in glowing
colours: but he was thrown into special raptures over the thought of
Russian music, in which he saw something. ‘Ah! great indeed!’ and in
confirmation he began humming a song of Varlamov’s, but was soon
interrupted by a general shout, ‘He is singing the _Miserere_ from the
_Trovatore_, and singing it excruciatingly too.’ One little officer was
reviling Russian literature in the midst of the hubbub; another was
quoting verses from _Sparks_; but Tit Bindasov went even further; he
declared that all these swindlers ought to have their teeth knocked out,
... and that’s all about it, but he did not particularise who were the
swindlers alluded to. The smoke from the cigars became stifling; all
were hot and exhausted, every one was hoarse, all eyes were growing dim,
and the perspiration stood out in drops on every face. Bottles of iced
beer were brought in and drunk off instantaneously. ‘What was I saying?’
remarked one; ‘and with whom was I disputing, and about what?’ inquired
another. And among all the uproar and the smoke, Gubaryov walked
indefatigably up and down as before, swaying from side to side and
twitching at his beard; now listening, turning an ear to some
controversy, now putting in a word of his own; and every one was forced
to feel that he, Gubaryov, was the source of it all, that he was the
master here, and the most eminent personality....

Litvinov, towards ten o’clock, began to have a terrible headache, and,
taking advantage of a louder outburst of general excitement, went off
quietly unobserved. Madame Suhantchikov had recollected a fresh act of
injustice of Prince Barnaulov; he had all but given orders to have some
one’s ears bitten off.

The fresh night air enfolded Litvinov’s flushed face caressingly, the
fragrant breeze breathed on his parched lips. ‘What is it,’ he thought
as he went along the dark avenue, ‘that I have been present at? Why were
they met together? What were they shouting, scolding, and making such a
pother about? What was it all for?’ Litvinov shrugged his shoulders, and
turning into Weber’s, he picked up a newspaper and asked for an ice. The
newspaper was taken up with a discussion on the Roman question, and the
ice turned out to be very nasty. He was already preparing to go home,
when suddenly an unknown person in a wide-brimmed hat drew near, and
saying in Russian: ‘I hope I am not in your way?’ sat down at his table.
Only then, after a closer glance at the stranger, Litvinov recognised
him as the broad-shouldered gentleman hidden away in a corner at
Gubaryov’s, who had stared at him with such attention when the
conversation had turned on political views. During the whole evening
this gentleman had not once opened his mouth, and now, sitting down near
Litvinov, and taking off his hat, he looked at him with an expression of
friendliness and some embarrassment.




V


‘Mr. Gubaryov, at whose rooms I had the pleasure of meeting you to-day,’
he began, ‘did not introduce me to you; so that, with your leave, I will
now introduce myself--Potugin, retired councillor. I was in the
department of finances in St. Petersburg. I hope you do not think it
strange.... I am not in the habit as a rule of making friends so
abruptly ... but with you....’

Potugin grew rather mixed, and he asked the waiter to bring him a little
glass of kirsch-wasser. ‘To give me courage,’ he added with a smile.

Litvinov looked with redoubled interest at the last of all the new
persons with whom it had been his lot to be brought into contact that
day. His thought was at once, ‘He is not the same as those.’

Certainly he was not. There sat before him, drumming with delicate
fingers on the edge of the table, a broad-shouldered man, with an ample
frame on short legs, a downcast head of curly hair, with very
intelligent and very mournful eyes under bushy brows, a thick well-cut
mouth, bad teeth, and that purely Russian nose to which is assigned the
epithet ‘potato’; a man of awkward, even odd exterior; at least, he was
certainly not of a common type. He was carelessly dressed; his
old-fashioned coat hung on him like a sack, and his cravat was twisted
awry. His sudden friendliness, far from striking Litvinov as intrusive,
secretly flattered him; it was impossible not to see that it was not a
common practice with this man to attach himself to strangers. He made a
curious impression on Litvinov; he awakened in him respect and liking,
and a kind of involuntary compassion.

‘I am not in your way then?’ he repeated in a soft, rather languid and
faint voice, which was marvellously in keeping with his whole
personality.

‘No, indeed,’ replied Litvinov; ‘quite the contrary, I am very glad.’

‘Really? Well, then, I am glad too. I have heard a great deal about you;
I know what you are engaged in, and what your plans are. It’s a good
work. That’s why you were silent this evening.’

‘Yes; you too said very little, I fancy,’ observed Litvinov.

Potugin sighed. ‘The others said enough and to spare. I listened. Well,’
he added, after a moment’s pause, raising his eyebrows with a rather
humorous expression, ‘did you like our building of the Tower of Babel?’

‘That’s just what it was. You have expressed it capitally. I kept
wanting to ask those gentlemen what they were in such a fuss about.’

Potugin sighed again.

‘That’s the whole point of it, that they don’t know that themselves. In
former days the expression used about them would have been: “they are
the blind instruments of higher ends”; well, nowadays we make use of
sharper epithets. And take note that I am not in the least intending to
blame them; I will say more, they are all ... that is, almost all,
excellent people. Of Madame Suhantchikov, for instance, I know for
certain much that is good; she gave away the last of her fortune to two
poor nieces. Even admitting that the desire of doing something
picturesque, of showing herself off, was not without its influence on
her, still you will agree that it was a remarkable act of self-sacrifice
in a woman not herself well-off! Of Mr. Pishtchalkin there is no need to
speak even; the peasants of his district will certainly in time present
him with a silver bowl like a pumpkin, and perhaps even a holy picture
representing his patron saint, and though he will tell them in his
speech of thanks that he does not deserve such an honour, he won’t tell
the truth there; he does deserve it. Mr. Bambaev, your friend, has a
wonderfully good heart; it’s true that it’s with him as with the poet
Yazikov, who they say used to sing the praises of Bacchic revelry,
sitting over a book and sipping water; his enthusiasm is completely
without a special object, still it is enthusiasm; and Mr. Voroshilov,
too, is the most good-natured fellow; like all his sort, all men who’ve
taken the first prizes at school, he’s an _aide-de-camp_ of the
sciences, and he even holds his tongue sententiously, but then he is so
young. Yes, yes, they are all excellent people, and when you come to
results, there’s nothing to show for it; the ingredients are all
first-rate, but the dish is not worth eating.’

Litvinov listened to Potugin with growing astonishment: every phrase,
every turn of his slow but self-confident speech betrayed both the power
of speaking and the desire to speak.

Potugin did, in fact, like speaking, and could speak well; but, as a man
in whom life had succeeded in wearing away vanity, he waited with
philosophic calm for a good opportunity, a meeting with a kindred
spirit.

‘Yes, yes,’ he began again, with the special dejected but not peevish
humour peculiar to him, ‘it is all very strange. And there is something
else I want you to note. Let a dozen Englishmen, for example, come
together, and they will at once begin to talk of the sub-marine
telegraph, or the tax on paper, or a method of tanning rats’ skins,--of
something, that’s to say, practical and definite; a dozen Germans, and
of course Schleswig-Holstein and the unity of Germany will be brought on
the scene; given a dozen Frenchmen, and the conversation will infallibly
turn upon amorous adventures, however much you try to divert them from
the subject; but let a dozen Russians meet together, and instantly there
springs up the question--you had an opportunity of being convinced of
the fact this evening--the question of the significance and the future
of Russia, and in terms so general, beginning with creation, without
facts or conclusions. They worry and worry away at that unlucky subject,
as children chew away at a bit of india-rubber--neither for pleasure nor
profit, as the saying is. Well, then, of course the rotten West comes in
for its share. It’s a curious thing, it beats us at every point, this
West--but yet we declare that it’s rotten! And if only we had a genuine
contempt for it,’ pursued Potugin, ‘but that’s really all cant and
humbug. We can do well enough as far as abuse goes, but the opinion of
the West is the only thing we value, the opinion, that’s to say, of the
Parisian loafers.... I know a man--a good fellow, I fancy--the father of
a family, and no longer young; he was thrown into deep dejection for
some days because in a Parisian restaurant he had asked for _une portion
de biftek aux pommes de terre_, and a real Frenchman thereupon shouted:
_Garçon! biftek pommes!_ My friend was ready to die with shame, and
after that he shouted everywhere, _Biftek pommes!_ and taught others to
do the same. The very _cocottes_ are surprised at the reverential
trepidation with which our young barbarians enter their shameful
drawing-rooms. “Good God!” they are thinking, “is this really where I
am, with no less a person than Anna Deslions herself!”’

‘Tell me, pray,’ continued Litvinov, ‘to what do you ascribe the
influence Gubaryov undoubtedly has over all about him? Is it his talent,
his abilities?’

‘No, no; there is nothing of that sort about him....’

‘His personal character is it, then?’

‘Not that either, but he has a strong will. We Slavs, for the most part,
as we all know, are badly off for that commodity, and we grovel before
it. It is Mr. Gubaryov’s will to be a ruler, and every one has
recognised him as a ruler. What would you have? The government has freed
us from the dependence of serfdom--and many thanks to it! but the habits
of slavery are too deeply ingrained in us; we cannot easily be rid of
them. We want a master in everything and everywhere; as a rule this
master is a living person, sometimes it is some so-called tendency which
gains authority over us.... At present, for instance, we are all the
bondslaves of natural science.... Why, owing to what causes, we take
this bondage upon us, that is a matter difficult to see into; but such
seemingly is our nature. But the great thing is, that we should have a
master. Well, here he is amongst us; that means he is ours, and we can
afford to despise everything else! Simply slaves! And our pride is
slavish, and slavish too is our humility. If a new master arises--it’s
all over with the old one. Then it was Yakov, and now it is Sidor; we
box Yakov’s ears and kneel to Sidor! Call to mind how many tricks of
that sort have been played amongst us! We talk of scepticism as our
special characteristic; but even in our scepticism we are not like a
free man fighting with a sword, but like a lackey hitting out with his
fist, and very likely he is doing even that at his master’s bidding.
Then, we are a soft people too; it’s not difficult to keep the curb on
us. So that’s the way Mr. Gubaryov has become a power among us; he has
chipped and chipped away at one point, till he has chipped himself into
success. People see that he is a man who has a great opinion of himself,
who believes in himself, and commands. That’s the great thing, that he
can command; it follows that he must be right, and we ought to obey him.
All our sects, our Onuphrists and Akulinists, were founded exactly in
that way. He who holds the rod is the corporal.’

Potugin’s cheeks were flushed and his eyes grew dim; but, strange to
say, his speech, cruel and even malicious as it was, had no touch of
bitterness, but rather of sorrow, genuine and sincere sorrow.

‘How did you come to know Gubaryov?’ asked Litvinov.

‘I have known him a long while. And observe, another peculiarity among
us; a certain writer, for example, spent his whole life in inveighing in
prose and verse against drunkenness, and attacking the system of the
drink monopoly, and lo and behold! he went and bought two spirit
distilleries and opened a hundred drink-shops--and it made no
difference! Any other man might have been wiped off the face of the
earth, but he was not even reproached for it. And here is Mr. Gubaryov;
he is a Slavophil and a democrat and a socialist and anything you like,
but his property has been and is still managed by his brother, a master
of the old style, one of those who were famous for their fists. And the
very Madame Suhantchikov, who makes Mrs. Beecher Stowe box Tentelyev’s
ears, is positively in the dust before Gubaryov’s feet. And you know the
only thing he has to back him is that he reads clever books, and always
gets at the pith of them. You could see for yourself to-day what sort of
gift he has for expression; and thank God, too, that he does talk
little, and keeps in his shell. For when he is in good spirits, and lets
himself go, then it’s more than even I, patient as I am, can stand. He
begins by coarse joking and telling filthy anecdotes ... yes, really,
our majestic Mr. Gubaryov tells filthy anecdotes, and guffaws so
revoltingly over them all the time.’

‘Are you so patient?’ observed Litvinov. ‘I should have supposed the
contrary. But let me ask your name and your father’s name?’

Potugin sipped a little kirsch-wasser.

‘My name is Sozont.... Sozont Ivanitch. They gave me that magnificent
name in honour of a kinsman, an archimandrite, to whom I am indebted
for nothing else. I am, if I may venture so to express myself, of most
reverend stock. And as for your doubts about my patience, they are quite
groundless: I am very patient. I served for twenty-two years under the
authority of my own uncle, an actual councillor of state, Irinarh
Potugin. You don’t know him?’

‘No.’

‘I congratulate you. No, I am patient. “But let us return to our first
head,” as my esteemed colleague, who was burned alive some centuries
ago, the protopope Avvakum, used to say. I am amazed, my dear sir, at my
fellow-countrymen. They are all depressed, they all walk with downcast
heads, and at the same time they are all filled with hope, and on the
smallest excuse they lose their heads and fly off into ecstasies. Look
at the Slavophils even, among whom Mr. Gubaryov reckons himself: they
are most excellent people, but there is the same mixture of despair and
exultation, they too live in the future tense. Everything will be, will
be, if you please. In reality there is nothing done, and Russia for ten
whole centuries has created nothing of its own, either in government, in
law, in science, in art, or even in handicraft.... But wait a little,
have patience; it is all coming. And why is it coming; give us leave to
inquire? Why, because we, to be sure, the cultured classes are all
worthless; but the people.... Oh, the great people! You see that
peasant’s smock? That is the source that everything is to come from. All
the other idols have broken down; let us have faith in the smock-frock.
Well, but suppose the smock-frock fails us? No, it will not fail. Read
Kohanovsky, and cast your eyes up to heaven! Really, if I were a
painter, I would paint a picture of this sort: a cultivated man standing
before a peasant, doing him homage: heal me, dear master-peasant, I am
perishing of disease; and a peasant doing homage in his turn to the
cultivated man: teach me, dear master-gentleman, I am perishing from
ignorance. Well, and of course, both are standing still. But what we
ought to do is to feel really humble for a little--not only in
words--and to borrow from our elder brothers what they have invented
already before us and better than us! Waiter, _noch ein Gläschen
Kirsch_! You mustn’t think I’m a drunkard, but alcohol loosens my
tongue.’

‘After what you have just said,’ observed Litvinov with a smile, ‘I need
not even inquire to which party you belong, and what is your opinion
about Europe. But let me make one observation to you. You say that we
ought to borrow from our elder brothers: but how can we borrow without
consideration of the conditions of climate and of soil, the local and
national peculiarities? My father, I recollect, ordered from Butenop a
cast-iron thrashing machine highly recommended; the machine was very
good, certainly--but what happened? For five long years it remained
useless in the barn, till it was replaced by a wooden American one--far
more suitable to our ways and habits, as the American machines are as a
rule. One cannot borrow at random, Sozont Ivanitch.’

Potugin lifted his head.

‘I did not expect such a criticism as that from you, excellent Grigory
Mihalovitch,’ he began, after a moment’s pause. ‘Who wants to make you
borrow at random? Of course you steal what belongs to another man, not
because it is some one else’s, but because it suits you; so it follows
that you consider, you make a selection. And as for results, pray don’t
let us be unjust to ourselves; there will be originality enough in them
by virtue of those very local, climatic, and other conditions which you
mention. Only lay good food before it, and the natural stomach will
digest it in its own way; and in time, as the organism gains in vigour,
it will give it a sauce of its own. Take our language even as an
instance. Peter the Great deluged it with thousands of foreign words,
Dutch, French, and German; those words expressed ideas with which the
Russian people had to be familiarised; without scruple or ceremony Peter
poured them wholesale by bucketsful into us. At first, of course, the
result was something of a monstrous product; but later there began
precisely that process of digestion to which I have alluded. The ideas
had been introduced and assimilated; the foreign forms evaporated
gradually, and the language found substitutes for them from within
itself; and now your humble servant, the most mediocre stylist, will
undertake to translate any page you like out of Hegel--yes, indeed, out
of Hegel--without making use of a single word not Slavonic. What has
happened with the language, one must hope will happen in other
departments. It all turns on the question: is it a nature of strong
vitality? and our nature--well, it will stand the test; it has gone
through greater trials than that. Only nations in a state of nervous
debility, feeble nations, need fear for their health and their
independence, just as it is only weak-minded people who are capable of
falling into triumphant rhapsodies over the fact that we are Russians. I
am very careful over my health, but I don’t go into ecstasies over it: I
should be ashamed.’

‘That is all very true, Sozont Ivanitch,’ observed Litvinov in his turn;
‘but why inevitably expose ourselves to such tests? You say yourself
that at first the result was monstrous! Well, what if that monstrous
product had persisted? Indeed it has persisted, as you know yourself.’

‘Only not in the language--and that means a great deal! And it is our
people, not I, who have done it; I am not to blame because they are
destined to go through a discipline of this kind. “The Germans have
developed in a normal way,” cry the Slavophils, “let us too have a
normal development!” But how are you to get it when the very first
historical step taken by our race--the summoning of a prince from over
the sea to rule over them--is an irregularity, an abnormality, which is
repeated in every one of us down to the present day; each of us, at
least once in his life, has certainly said to something foreign, not
Russian: “Come, rule and reign over me!” I am ready, of course, to agree
that when we put a foreign substance into our own body we cannot tell
for certain what it is we are putting there, bread or poison; yet it is
a well-known thing that you can never get from bad to good through what
is better, but always through a worse state of transition, and poison
too is useful in medicine. It is only fit for fools or knaves to point
with triumph to the poverty of the peasants after the emancipation, and
the increase of drunkenness since the abolition of the farming of the
spirit-tax.... Through worse to better!’

Potugin passed his hand over his face. ‘You asked me what was my opinion
of Europe,’ he began again: ‘I admire her, and am devoted to her
principles to the last degree, and don’t in the least think it necessary
to conceal the fact. I have long--no, not long--for some time ceased to
be afraid to give full expression to my convictions--and I saw that you
too had no hesitation in informing Mr. Gubaryov of your own way of
thinking. Thank God I have given up paying attention to the ideas and
points of view and habits of the man I am conversing with. Really, I
know of nothing worse than that quite superfluous cowardice, that
cringing desire to be agreeable, by virtue of which you may see an
important dignitary among us trying to ingratiate himself with some
little student who is quite insignificant in his eyes, positively
playing down to him, with all sorts of tricks and devices. Even if we
admit that the dignitary may do it out of desire for popularity, what
induces us common folk to shuffle and degrade ourselves. Yes, yes, I am
a Westerner, I am devoted to Europe: that’s to say, speaking more
accurately, I am devoted to culture--the culture at which they make fun
so wittily among us just now--and to civilisation--yes, yes, that is a
better word--and I love it with my whole heart and believe in it, and I
have no other belief, and never shall have. That word, ci-vi-li-sa-tion
(Potugin pronounced each syllable with full stress and emphasis), is
intelligible, and pure, and holy, and all the other ideals, nationality,
glory, or what you like--they smell of blood.... Away with them!’

‘Well, but Russia, Sozont Ivanitch, your country--you love it?’

Potugin passed his hand over his face. ‘I love her passionately and
passionately hate her.’

Litvinov shrugged his shoulders.

‘That’s stale, Sozont Ivanitch, that’s a commonplace.’

‘And what of it? So that’s what you’re afraid of! A commonplace! I know
many excellent commonplaces. Here, for example, Law and Liberty is a
well-known commonplace. Why, do you consider it’s better as it is with
us, lawlessness and bureaucratic tyranny? And, besides, all those
phrases by which so many young heads are turned: vile bourgeoisie,
_souveraineté du peuple_, right to labour, aren’t they commonplaces too?
And as for love, inseparable from hate....’

‘Byronism,’ interposed Litvinov, ‘the romanticism of the thirties.’

‘Excuse me, you’re mistaken; such a mingling of emotions was first
mentioned by Catullus, the Roman poet Catullus,[1] two thousand years
ago. I have read that, for I know a little Latin, thanks to my clerical
origin, if so I may venture to express myself. Yes, indeed, I both love
and hate my Russia, my strange, sweet, nasty, precious country. I have
left her just now. I want a little fresh air after sitting for twenty
years on a clerk’s high stool in a government office; I have left
Russia, and I am happy and contented here; but I shall soon go back
again: I feel that. It’s a beautiful land of gardens--but our wild
berries will not grow here.’

  Footnote 1: Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
  Nescio: sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.--CATULL. lxxxvi.

‘You are happy and contented, and I too like the place,’ said Litvinov,
‘and I came here to study; but that does not prevent me from seeing
things like that.’

He pointed to two _cocottes_ who passed by, attended by a little group
of members of the Jockey Club, grimacing and lisping, and to the
gambling saloon, full to overflowing in spite of the lateness of the
hour.

‘And who told you I am blind to that?’ Potugin broke in. ‘But pardon my
saying it, your remark reminds me of the triumphant allusions made by
our unhappy journalists at the time of the Crimean war, to the defects
in the English War Department, exposed in the _Times_. I am not an
optimist myself, and all humanity, all our life, all this comedy with
tragic issues presents itself to me in no roseate colours: but why
fasten upon the West what is perhaps ingrained in our very human nature?
That gambling hall is disgusting, certainly; but is our home-bred
card-sharping any lovelier, think you? No, my dear Grigory Mihalovitch,
let us be more humble, more retiring. A good pupil sees his master’s
faults, but he keeps a respectful silence about them; these very faults
are of use to him, and set him on the right path. But if nothing will
satisfy you but sharpening your teeth on the unlucky West, there goes
Prince Kokó at a gallop, he will most likely lose in a quarter of an
hour over the green table the hardly earned rent wrung from a hundred
and fifty families; his nerves are upset, for I saw him at Marx’s to-day
turning over a pamphlet of Vaillot.... He will be a capital person for
you to talk to!’

‘But, please, please,’ said Litvinov hurriedly, seeing that Potugin was
getting up from his place, ‘I know Prince Kokó very little, and besides,
of course, I greatly prefer talking to you.’

‘Thanks very much,’ Potugin interrupted him, getting up and making a
bow; ‘but I have already had a good deal of conversation with you;
that’s to say, really, I have talked alone, and you have probably
noticed yourself that a man is always as it were ashamed and awkward
when he has done all the talking, especially so on a first meeting, as
if to show what a fine fellow one is. Good-bye for the present. And I
repeat I am very glad to have made your acquaintance.’

‘But wait a minute, Sozont Ivanitch, tell me at least where you live,
and whether you intend to remain here long.’

Potugin seemed a little put out.

‘I shall remain about a week in Baden. We can meet here though, at
Weber’s or at Marx’s, or else I will come to you.’

‘Still I must know your address.’

‘Yes. But you see I am not alone.’

‘You are married?’ asked Litvinov suddenly.

‘No, good heavens! ... what an absurd idea! But I have a girl with
me.’...

‘Oh!’ articulated Litvinov, with a face of studied politeness, as though
he would ask pardon, and he dropped his eyes.

‘She is only six years old,’ pursued Potugin. ‘She’s an orphan ... the
daughter of a lady ... a good friend of mine. So we had better meet
here. Good-bye.’

He pulled his hat over his curly head, and disappeared quickly. Twice
there was a glimpse of him under the gas-lamps in the rather meanly
lighted road that leads into the Lichtenthaler Allee.




VI


‘A strange man!’ thought Litvinov, as he turned into the hotel where he
was staying; ‘a strange man! I must see more of him!’ He went into his
room; a letter on the table caught his eye. ‘Ah! from Tanya!’ he
thought, and was overjoyed at once; but the letter was from his country
place, from his father. Litvinov broke the thick heraldic seal, and was
just setting to work to read it ... when he was struck by a strong, very
agreeable, and familiar fragrance, and saw in the window a great bunch
of fresh heliotrope in a glass of water. Litvinov bent over them not
without amazement, touched them, and smelt them.... Something seemed to
stir in his memory, something very remote ... but what, precisely, he
could not discover. He rang for the servant and asked him where these
flowers had come from. The man replied that they had been brought by a
lady who would not give her name, but said that ‘Herr Zlitenhov’ would
be sure to guess who she was by the flowers. Again something stirred in
Litvinov’s memory. He asked the man what the lady looked like, and the
servant informed him that she was tall and grandly dressed and had a
veil over her face. ‘A Russian countess most likely,’ he added.

‘What makes you think that?’ asked Litvinov.

‘She gave me two guldens,’ responded the servant with a grin.

Litvinov dismissed him, and for a long while after he stood in deep
thought before the window; at last, however, with a wave of his hand, he
began again upon the letter from the country. His father poured out to
him his usual complaints, asserting that no one would take their corn,
even for nothing, that the people had got quite out of all habits of
obedience, and that probably the end of the world was coming soon.
‘Fancy,’ he wrote, among other things, ‘my last coachman, the Kalmuck
boy, do you remember him? has been bewitched, and the fellow would
certainly have died, and I should have had none to drive me, but, thank
goodness, some kind folks suggested and advised to send the sick man to
Ryazan, to a priest, well-known as a master against witchcraft: and his
cure has actually succeeded as well as possible, in confirmation of
which I lay before you the letter of the good father as a document.’
Litvinov ran through this document with curiosity. In it was set forth:
‘that the serving-man Nicanor Dmitriev was beset with a malady which
could not be touched by the medical faculty; and this malady was the
work of wicked people; but he himself, Nicanor, was the cause of it,
since he had not fulfilled his promise to a certain girl, and therefore
by the aid of others she had made him unfit for anything, and if I had
not appeared to aid him in these circumstances, he would surely have
perished utterly, like a worm; but I, trusting in the All-seeing Eye,
have become a stay to him in his life; and how I accomplished it, that
is a mystery; I beg your excellency not to countenance a girl who has
such wicked arts, and even to chide her would be no harm, or she may
again work him a mischief.’

Litvinov fell to musing over this document; it brought him a whiff of
the desert, of the steppes, of the blind darkness of the life mouldering
there, and it seemed a marvellous thing that he should be reading such a
letter in Baden, of all places. Meanwhile it had long struck midnight;
Litvinov went to bed and put out his light. But he could not get to
sleep; the faces he had seen, the talk he had heard, kept coming back
and revolving, strangely interwoven and entangled in his burning head,
which ached from the fumes of tobacco. Now he seemed to hear Gubaryov’s
muttering, and fancied his eyes with their dull, persistent stare
fastened on the floor; then suddenly those eyes began to glow and leap,
and he recognised Madame Suhantchikov, and listened to her shrill voice,
and involuntarily repeated after her in a whisper, ‘she did, she did,
slap his face.’ Then the clumsy figure of Potugin passed before him; and
for the tenth, and the twentieth time he went over every word he had
uttered; then, like a jack in the box, Voroshilov jumped up in his trim
coat, which fitted him like a new uniform; and Pishtchalkin gravely and
sagaciously nodded his well-cut and truly well-intentioned head; and
then Bindasov bawled and swore, and Bambaev fell into tearful
transports.... And above all--this scent, this persistent, sweet, heavy
scent gave him no rest, and grew more and more powerful in the darkness,
and more and more importunately it reminded him of something which still
eluded his grasp.... The idea occurred to Litvinov that the scent of
flowers at night in a bedroom was injurious, and he got up, and groping
his way to the nosegay, carried it into the next room; but even from
there the oppressive fragrance penetrated to him on his pillow and
under the counterpane, and he tossed in misery from side to side. A
slight delirium had already begun to creep over him; already the priest,
‘the master against witchcraft’ had twice run across his road in the
guise of a very playful hare with a beard and a pig-tail, and Voroshilov
was trilling before him, sitting in a huge general’s plumed cock-hat
like a nightingale in a bush.... When suddenly he jumped up in bed, and
clasping his hands, cried, ‘Can it be she? it can’t be!’

But to explain this exclamation of Litvinov’s we must beg the indulgent
reader to go back a few years with us.




VII


Early in the fifties, there was living in Moscow, in very straitened
circumstances, almost in poverty, the numerous family of the Princes
Osinin. These were real princes--not Tartar-Georgians, but pure-blooded
descendants of Rurik. Their name is often to be met with in our
chronicles under the first grand princes of Moscow, who created a united
Russia. They possessed wide acres and many domains. Many a time they
were rewarded for ‘service and blood and disablement.’ They sat in the
Council of Boyars. One of them even rose to a very high position. But
they fell under the ban of the empire through the plots of enemies ‘on a
charge of witchcraft and evil philtres,’ and they were ruined ‘terribly
and beyond recall.’ They were deprived of their rank, and banished to
remote parts; the Osinins fell and had never risen again, had never
attained to power again. The ban was taken off in time, and they were
even reinstated in their Moscow house and belongings, but it was of no
avail. Their family was impoverished, ‘run to seed’; it did not revive
under Peter, nor under Catherine; and constantly dwindling and growing
humbler, it had by now reckoned private stewards, managers of
wine-shops, and ward police-inspectors among its members. The family of
Osinins, of whom we have made mention, consisted of a husband and wife
and five children. It was living near the Dogs’ Place, in a one-storied
little wooden house, with a striped portico looking on to the street,
green lions on the gates, and all the other pretensions of nobility,
though it could hardly make both ends meet, was constantly in debt at
the green-grocer’s, and often sitting without firewood or candles in the
winter. The prince himself was a dull, indolent man, who had once been a
handsome dandy, but had gone to seed completely. More from regard for
his wife, who had been a maid-of-honour, than from respect for his name,
he had been presented with one of those old-fashioned Moscow posts that
have a small salary, a queer-sounding name, and absolutely no duties
attached. He never meddled in anything, and did nothing but smoke from
morning till night, breathing heavily, and always wrapped in a
dressing-gown. His wife was a sickly irritable woman, for ever worried
over domestic trifles--over getting her children placed in government
schools, and keeping up her Petersburg connections; she could never
accustom herself to her position and her remoteness from the Court.

Litvinov’s father had made acquaintance with the Osinins during his
residence at Moscow, had had occasion to do them some services, and had
once lent them three hundred roubles; and his son often visited them
while he was a student; his lodging happened to be at no great distance
from their house. But he was not drawn to them simply as near
neighbours, nor tempted by their comfortless way of living. He began to
be a frequent visitor at their house after he had fallen in love with
their eldest daughter Irina.

She had then completed her seventeenth year; she had only just left
school, from which her mother withdrew her through a disagreement with
the principal. This disagreement arose from the fact that Irina was to
have delivered at a public function some verses in French, complimentary
to the curator, and just before the performance her place was filled by
another girl, the daughter of a very rich spirit-contractor. The
princess could not stomach this affront; and indeed Irina herself never
forgave the principal for this act of injustice; she had been dreaming
beforehand of how she would rise before the eyes of every one,
attracting universal attention, and would deliver her speech, and how
Moscow would talk about her afterwards!... And, indeed, Moscow would
have talked about her afterwards. She was a tall, slim girl, with a
somewhat hollow chest and narrow unformed shoulders, with a skin of a
dead-white, rare at her age, and pure and smooth as china, with thick
fair hair; there were darker tresses mingled in a very original way with
the light ones. Her features--exquisitely, almost too perfectly,
correct--had not yet quite lost the innocent expression that belongs to
childhood; the languid curves of her lovely neck, and her
smile--half-indifferent, half-weary--betrayed the nervous temperament of
a delicate girl; but in the lines of those fine, faintly-smiling lips,
of that small, falcon, slightly-narrow nose, there was something wilful
and passionate, something dangerous for herself and others. Astounding,
really astounding were her eyes, dark grey with greenish lights,
languishing, almond-shaped as an Egyptian goddess’s, with shining lashes
and bold sweep of eyebrow. There was a strange look in those eyes; they
seemed looking out intently and thoughtfully--looking out from some
unknown depth and distance. At school, Irina had been reputed one of the
best pupils for intelligence and abilities, but of uneven temper, fond
of power, and headstrong; one class-mistress prophesied that her
passions would be her ruin--‘_vos passions vous perdront_’, on the other
hand, another class-mistress censured her for coldness and want of
feeling, and called her ‘_une jeune fille sans cœur_.’ Irina’s
companions thought her proud and reserved: her brothers and sisters
stood a little in awe of her: her mother had no confidence in her: and
her father felt ill at ease when she fastened her mysterious eyes upon
him. But she inspired a feeling of involuntary respect in both her
father and her mother, not so much through her qualities, as from a
peculiar, vague sense of expectations which she had, in some undefined
way, awakened in them.

‘You will see, Praskovya Danilovna,’ said the old prince one day, taking
his pipe out of his mouth, ‘our chit of an Irina will give us all a lift
in the world yet.’

The princess got angry, and told her husband that he made use of ‘_des
expressions insupportables_’; afterwards, however, she fell to musing
over his words, and repeated through her teeth:

‘Well ... and it would be a good thing if we did get a lift.’

Irina enjoyed almost unlimited freedom in her parents’ house; they did
not spoil her, they even avoided her a little, but they did not thwart
her, and that was all she wanted.... Sometimes--during some too
humiliating scene--when some tradesman would come and keep shouting, to
be heard over the whole court, that he was sick of coming after his
money, or their own servants would begin abusing their masters to their
face, with ‘fine princes you are, to be sure; you may whistle for your
supper, and go hungry to bed’--Irina would not stir a muscle; she would
sit unmoved, an evil smile on her dark face; and her smile alone was
more bitter to her parents than any reproaches, and they felt themselves
guilty--guilty, though guiltless--towards this being on whom had been
bestowed, as it seemed, from her very birth, the right to wealth, to
luxury, and to homage.

Litvinov fell in love with Irina from the moment he saw her (he was only
three years older than she was), but for a long while he failed to
obtain not only a response, but even a hearing. Her manner to him was
even overcast with a shade of something like hostility; he did in fact
wound her pride, and she concealed the wound, and could never forgive
it. He was too young and too modest at that time to understand what
might be concealed under this hostile, almost contemptuous severity.
Often, forgetful of lectures and exercises, he would sit and sit in the
Osinins’ cheerless drawing-room, stealthily watching Irina, his heart
slowly and painfully throbbing and suffocating him; and she would seem
angry or bored, would get up and walk about the room, look coldly at him
as though he were a table or chair, shrug her shoulders, and fold her
arms. Or for a whole evening, even when talking with Litvinov, she would
purposely avoid looking at him, as though denying him even that grace.
Or she would at last take up a book and stare at it, not reading, but
frowning and biting her lips. Or else she would suddenly ask her father
or brother aloud: ‘What’s the German for patience?’ He tried to tear
himself away from the enchanted circle in which he suffered and
struggled impotently like a bird in a trap; he went away from Moscow for
a week. He nearly went out of his mind with misery and dulness; he
returned quite thin and ill to the Osinins’.... Strange to say, Irina
too had grown perceptibly thinner during those days; her face had grown
pale, her cheeks were wan.... But she met him with still greater
coldness, with almost malignant indifference; as though he had
intensified that secret wound he had dealt at her pride.... She tortured
him in this way for two months. Then everything was transformed in one
day. It was as though love had broken into flame with the heat, or had
dropped down from a storm-cloud. One day--long will he remember that
day--he was once more sitting in the Osinins’ drawing-room at the
window, and was looking mechanically into the street. There was vexation
and weariness in his heart, he despised himself, and yet he could not
move from his place.... He thought that if a river ran there under the
window, he would throw himself in, with a shudder of fear, but without a
regret. Irina placed herself not far from him, and was somehow strangely
silent and motionless. For some days now she had not talked to him at
all, or to any one else; she kept sitting, leaning on her elbows, as
though she were in perplexity, and only rarely she looked slowly round.
This cold torture was at last more than Litvinov could bear; he got up,
and without saying good-bye, he began to look for his hat. ‘Stay,’
sounded suddenly, in a soft whisper. Litvinov’s heart throbbed, he did
not at once recognise Irina’s voice; in that one word, there was a ring
of something that had never been in it before. He lifted his head and
was stupefied; Irina was looking fondly--yes, fondly at him. ‘Stay,’ she
repeated; ‘don’t go. I want to be with you.’ Her voice sank still lower.
‘Don’t go.... I wish it.’ Understanding nothing, not fully conscious
what he was doing, he drew near her, stretched out his hands.... She
gave him both of hers at once, then smiling, flushing hotly, she turned
away, and still smiling, went out of the room. She came back a few
minutes later with her youngest sister, looked at him again with the
same prolonged tender gaze, and made him sit near her.... At first she
could say nothing; she only sighed and blushed; then she began, timidly
as it were, to question him about his pursuits, a thing she had never
done before. In the evening of the same day, she tried several times to
beg his forgiveness for not having done him justice before, assured him
she had now become quite different, astonished him by a sudden outburst
of republicanism (he had at that time a positive hero-worship for
Robespierre, and did not presume to criticise Marat aloud), and only a
week later he knew that she loved him. Yes; he long remembered that
first day ... but he did not forget those that came after either--those
days, when still forcing himself to doubt, afraid to believe in it, he
saw clearly, with transports of rapture, almost of dread, bliss un-hoped
for coming to life, growing, irresistibly carrying everything before it,
reaching him at last. Then followed the radiant moments of first
love--moments which are not destined to be, and could not fittingly be,
repeated in the same life. Irina became all at once as docile as a
lamb, as soft as silk, and boundlessly kind; she began giving lessons to
her younger sisters--not on the piano, she was no musician, but in
French and English; she read their school-books with them, and looked
after the housekeeping; everything was amusing and interesting to her;
she would sometimes chatter incessantly, and sometimes sink into
speechless tenderness; she made all sorts of plans, and was lost in
endless anticipations of what she would do when she was married to
Litvinov (they never doubted that their marriage would come to pass),
and how together they would ... ‘Work?’ prompted Litvinov.... ‘Yes;
work,’ repeated Irina, ‘and read ... but travel before all things.’ She
particularly wanted to leave Moscow as soon as possible, and when
Litvinov reminded her that he had not yet finished his course of study
at the university, she always replied, after a moment’s thought, that it
was quite possible to finish his studies at Berlin or ... somewhere or
other. Irina was very little reserved in the expression of her feelings,
and so her relations with Litvinov did not long remain a secret from the
prince and princess. Rejoice they could not; but, taking all
circumstances into consideration, they saw no necessity for putting a
veto on it at once. Litvinov’s fortune was considerable....

‘But his family, his family!’ ... protested the princess. ‘Yes, his
family, of course,’ replied the prince; but at least he’s not quite a
plebeian; and, what’s the principal point, Irina, you know, will not
listen to us. Has there ever been a time when she did not do what she
chose? _Vous connaissez sa violence!_ Besides, there is nothing fixed
definitely yet.’ So reasoned the prince, but mentally he added, however:
‘Madame Litvinov--is that all? I had expected something else.’ Irina
took complete possession of her future _fiancé_, and indeed he himself
eagerly surrendered himself into her hands. It was as if he had fallen
into a rapid river, and had lost himself.... And bitter and sweet it was
to him, and he regretted nothing and heeded nothing. To reflect on the
significance and the duties of marriage, or whether he, so hopelessly
enslaved, could be a good husband, and what sort of wife Irina would
make, and whether their relations to one another were what they should
be--was more than he could bring himself to. His blood was on fire, he
could think of nothing, only--to follow her, be with her, for the future
without end, and then--let come what may!

But in spite of the complete absence of opposition on Litvinov’s side,
and the wealth of impulsive tenderness on Irina’s, they did not get on
quite without any misunderstandings and quarrels. One day he ran to her
straight from the university in an old coat and ink-stained hands. She
rushed to meet him with her accustomed fond welcome; suddenly she
stopped short.

‘You have no gloves,’ she said abruptly, and added directly after: ‘Fie!
what a student you are!’

‘You are too particular, Irina,’ remarked Litvinov.

‘You are a regular student,’ she repeated. ‘_Vous n’êtes pas
distingué_’; and turning her back on him she went out of the room. It is
true that an hour later she begged him to forgive her.... As a rule she
readily censured herself and accused herself to him; but, strange to
say, she often almost with tears blamed herself for evil propensities
which she had not, and obstinately denied her real defects. Another time
he found her in tears, her head in her hands, and her hair in disorder;
and when, all in agitation, he asked her the cause of her grief, she
pointed with her finger at her own bosom without speaking. Litvinov gave
an involuntary shiver. ‘Consumption!’ flashed through his brain, and he
seized her hand.

‘Are you ill, Irina?’ he articulated in a shaking voice. (They had
already begun on great occasions to call each other by their first
names.) ‘Let me go at once for a doctor.’

But Irina did not let him finish; she stamped with her foot in vexation.

‘I am perfectly well ... but this dress ... don’t you understand?’

‘What is it? ... this dress,’ he repeated in bewilderment.

‘What is it? Why, that I have no other, and that it is old and
disgusting, and I am obliged to put on this dress every day ... even
when you--Grisha--Grigory, come here.... You will leave off loving me,
at last, seeing me so slovenly!’

‘For goodness sake, Irina, what are you saying? That dress is very
nice.... It is dear to me too because I saw you for the first time in
it, darling.’

Irina blushed.

‘Do not remind me, if you please, Grigory Mihalovitch, that I had no
other dress even then.’

‘But I assure you, Irina Pavlovna, it suits you so exquisitely.’

‘No, it is horrid, horrid,’ she persisted, nervously pulling at her
long, soft curls. ‘Ugh, this poverty, poverty and squalor! How is one
to escape from this sordidness! How get out of this squalor!’

Litvinov did not know what to say, and slightly turned away from her.

All at once Irina jumped up from her chair, and laid both her hands on
his shoulders.

‘But you love me, Grisha? You love me?’ she murmured, putting her face
close to him, and her eyes, still filled with tears, sparkled with the
light of happiness, ‘You love me, dear, even in this horrid dress?’

Litvinov flung himself on his knees before her.

‘Ah, love me, love me, my sweet, my saviour,’ she whispered, bending
over him.

So the days flew, the weeks passed, and though as yet there had been no
formal declaration, though Litvinov still deferred his demand for her
hand, not, certainly, at his own desire, but awaiting directions from
Irina (she remarked sometimes that they were both ridiculously young,
and they must add at least a few weeks more to their years), still
everything was moving to a conclusion, and the future as it came nearer
grew more and more clearly defined, when suddenly an event occurred,
which scattered all their dreams and plans like light roadside dust.




VIII


That winter the court visited Moscow. One festivity followed another; in
its turn came the customary great ball in the Hall of Nobility. The news
of this ball, only, it is true, in the form of an announcement in the
_Political Gazette_, reached even the little house in Dogs’ Place. The
prince was the first to be roused by it; he decided at once that he must
not fail to go and take Irina, that it would be unpardonable to let slip
the opportunity of seeing their sovereigns, that for the old nobility
this constituted indeed a duty in its own way. He defended his opinion
with a peculiar warmth, not habitual in him; the princess agreed with
him to some extent, and only sighed over the expense; but a resolute
opposition was displayed by Irina. ‘It is not necessary, I will not go,’
she replied to all her parents’ arguments. Her obstinacy reached such
proportions that the old prince decided at last to beg Litvinov to try
to persuade her, by reminding her among other reasons that it was not
proper for a young girl to avoid society, that she ought to ‘have this
experience,’ that no one ever saw her anywhere, as it was. Litvinov
undertook to lay these ‘reasons’ before her. Irina looked steadily and
scrutinisingly at him, so steadily and scrutinisingly that he was
confused, and then, playing with the ends of her sash, she said calmly:

‘Do you desire it, you?’

‘Yes.... I suppose so,’ replied Litvinov hesitatingly. ‘I agree with
your papa.... Indeed, why should you not go ... to see the world, and
show yourself,’ he added with a short laugh.

‘To show myself,’ she repeated slowly. ‘Very well then, I will go....
Only remember, it is you yourself who desired it.’

‘That’s to say, I----.’ Litvinov was beginning.

‘You yourself have desired it,’ she interposed. ‘And here is one
condition more; you must promise me that you will not be at this ball.’

‘But why?’

‘I wish it to be so.’

Litvinov unclasped his hands.

‘I submit ... but I confess I should so have enjoyed seeing you in all
your grandeur, witnessing the sensation you are certain to make.... How
proud I should be of you!’ he added with a sigh.

Irina laughed.

‘All the grandeur will consist of a white frock, and as for the
sensation.... Well, any way, I wish it.’

‘Irina, darling, you seem to be angry?’

Irina laughed again.

‘Oh, no! I am not angry. Only, Grisha....’ (She fastened her eyes on
him, and he thought he had never before seen such an expression in
them.) ‘Perhaps, it must be,’ she added in an undertone.

‘But, Irina, you love me, dear?’

‘I love you,’ she answered with almost solemn gravity, and she clasped
his hand firmly like a man.

All the following days Irina was busily occupied over her dress and her
coiffure; on the day before the ball she felt unwell, she could not sit
still, and twice she burst into tears in solitude; before Litvinov she
wore the same uniform smile.... She treated him, however, with her old
tenderness, but carelessly, and was constantly looking at herself in the
glass. On the day of the ball she was silent and pale, but collected. At
nine o’clock in the evening Litvinov came to look at her. When she came
to meet him in a white tarlatan gown, with a spray of small blue flowers
in her slightly raised hair, he almost uttered a cry; she seemed to him
so lovely and stately beyond what was natural to her years. ‘Yes, she
has grown up since this morning!’ he thought, ‘and how she holds
herself! That’s what race does!’ Irina stood before him, her hands
hanging loose, without smiles or affectation, and looked resolutely,
almost boldly, not at him, but away into the distance straight before
her.

‘You are just like a princess in a story book,’ said Litvinov at last.
‘You are like a warrior before the battle, before victory.... You did
not allow me to go to this ball,’ he went on, while she remained
motionless as before, not because she was not listening to him, but
because she was following another inner voice, ‘but you will not refuse
to accept and take with you these flowers?’

He offered her a bunch of heliotrope. She looked quickly at Litvinov,
stretched out her hand, and suddenly seizing the end of the spray which
decorated her hair, she said:

‘Do you wish it, Grisha? Only say the word, and I will tear off all
this, and stop at home.’

Litvinov’s heart seemed fairly bursting. Irina’s hand had already
snatched the spray....

‘No, no, what for?’ he interposed hurriedly, in a rush of generous and
magnanimous feeling, ‘I am not an egoist.... Why should I restrict your
freedom ... when I know that your heart----’

‘Well, don’t come near me, you will crush my dress,’ she said hastily.

Litvinov was disturbed.

‘But you will take the nosegay?’ he asked.

‘Of course; it is very pretty, and I love that scent. _Merci_--I shall
keep it in memory----’

‘Of your first coming out,’ observed Litvinov, ‘your first triumph.’

Irina looked over her shoulder at herself in the glass, scarcely bending
her figure.

‘And do I really look so nice? You are not partial?’

Litvinov overflowed in enthusiastic praises. Irina was already not
listening to him, and holding the flowers up to her face, she was again
looking away into the distance with her strange, as it were,
overshadowed, dilated eyes, and the ends of her delicate ribbons stirred
by a faint current of air rose slightly behind her shoulders like wings.

The prince made his appearance, his hair well becurled, in a white tie,
and a shabby black evening coat, with the medal of nobility on a
Vladimir ribbon in his buttonhole. After him came the princess in a
china silk dress of antique cut, and with the anxious severity under
which mothers try to conceal their agitation, set her daughter to
rights behind, that is to say, quite needlessly shook out the folds of
her gown. An antiquated hired coach with seats for four, drawn by two
shaggy hacks, crawled up to the steps, its wheels grating over the
frozen mounds of unswept snow, and a decrepit groom in a most
unlikely-looking livery came running out of the passage, and with a sort
of desperate courage announced that the carriage was ready.... After
giving a blessing for the night to the children left at home, and
enfolding themselves in their fur wraps, the prince and princess went
out to the steps; Irina in a little cloak, too thin and too short--how
she hated the little cloak at that moment!--followed them in silence.
Litvinov escorted them outside, hoping for a last look from Irina, but
she took her seat in the carriage without turning her head.

About midnight he walked under the windows of the Hall of Nobility.
Countless lights of huge candelabra shone with brilliant radiance
through the red curtains; and the whole square, blocked with carriages,
was ringing with the insolent, festive, seductive strains of a waltz of
Strauss’.

The next day at one o’clock, Litvinov betook himself to the Osinins’. He
found no one at home but the prince, who informed him at once that
Irina had a headache, that she was in bed, and would not get up till the
evening, that such an indisposition was however little to be wondered at
after a first ball.

‘_C’est très naturel, vous savez, dans les jeunes filles_,’ he added in
French, somewhat to Litvinov’s surprise; the latter observed at the same
instant that the prince was not in his dressing-gown as usual, but was
wearing a coat. ‘And besides,’ continued Osinin, ‘she may well be a
little upset after the events of yesterday!’

‘Events?’ muttered Litvinov.

‘Yes, yes, events, events, _de vrais événements_. You cannot imagine,
Grigory Mihalovitch, _quel succès elle a eu_! The whole court noticed
her! Prince Alexandr Fedorovitch said that her place was not here, and
that she reminded him of Countess Devonshire. You know ... that ...
celebrated.... And old Blazenkrampf declared in the hearing of all, that
Irina was _la reine du bal_, and desired to be introduced to her; he was
introduced to me too, that’s to say, he told me that he remembered me a
hussar, and asked me where I was holding office now. Most entertaining
man that Count, and such an _adorateur du beau sexe_! But that’s not
all; my princess ... they gave her no peace either: Natalya Nikitishna
herself conversed with her ... what more could we have? Irina danced
_avec tous les meilleurs cavaliers_; they kept bringing them up to
me.... I positively lost count of them. Would you believe it, they were
all flocking about us in crowds; in the mazurka they did nothing but
seek her out. One foreign diplomatist, hearing she was a Moscow girl,
said to the Tsar: ‘_Sire_,’ he said, ‘_décidément c’est Moscou qui est
le centre de votre empire!_’ and another diplomatist added: ‘_C’est une
vraie révolution, Sire--révélation_ or _révolution_ ... something of
that sort. Yes, yes, it was. I tell you it was something extraordinary.’

‘Well, and Irina Pavlovna herself?’ inquired Litvinov, whose hands and
feet had grown cold hearing the prince’s speech, ‘did she enjoy herself,
did she seem pleased?’

‘Of course she enjoyed herself; how could she fail to be pleased? But,
as you know, she’s not to be seen through at a glance! Every one was
saying to me yesterday: it is really surprising! _jamais on ne dirait
que mademoiselle votre fille est a son premier bal_. Count Reisenbach
among the rest ... you know him most likely.’

‘No, I don’t know him at all, and have never heard of him.’

‘My wife’s cousin.’

‘I don’t know him.’

‘A rich man, a chamberlain, living in Petersburg, in the swim of things;
in Livonia every one is in his hands. Hitherto he has neglected us ...
but there, I don’t bear him ill-will for that. _J’ai l’humeur facile,
comme vous savez._ Well, that’s the kind of man he is. He sat near
Irina, conversed with her for a quarter of an hour, not more, and said
afterwards to my princess: “_Ma cousine_,” he says, “_votre fille est
une perle; c’est une perfection_, every one is congratulating me on such
a niece....” And afterwards I look round--and he had gone up to a ... a
very great personage, and was talking, and kept looking at Irina ... and
the personage was looking at her too.’...

‘And so Irina Pavlovna will not appear all day?’ Litvinov asked again.

‘Quite so; her head aches very badly. She told me to greet you from her,
and thank you for your flowers, _qu’on a trouvé charmant_. She needs
rest.... The princess has gone out on a round of visits ... and I myself
... you see....’

The prince cleared his throat, and began to fidget as though he were at
a loss what to add further. Litvinov took his hat, and saying he did not
want to disturb him, and would call again later to inquire after her
health, he went away.

A few steps from the Osinins’ house he saw an elegant carriage for two
persons standing before the police sentry-box. A groom in livery,
equally elegant, was bending negligently from the box, and inquiring of
the Finnish police-sergeant whereabouts Prince Pavel Vassilyevitch
Osinin lived. Litvinov glanced at the carriage; in it sat a middle-aged
man of bloated complexion, with a wrinkled and haughty face, a Greek
nose, and an evil mouth, muffled in a sable wrap, by all outward signs a
very great man indeed.




IX


Litvinov did not keep his promise of returning later; he reflected that
it would be better to defer his visit till the following day. When he
went into the too familiar drawing-room at about twelve o’clock, he
found there the two youngest princesses, Viktorinka and Kleopatrinka. He
greeted them, and then inquired, ‘Was Irina Pavlovna better, and could
he see her?’

‘Irinotchka has gone away with mammy,’ replied Viktorinka; she lisped a
little, but was more forward than her sister.

‘How ... gone away?’ repeated Litvinov, and there was a sort of still
shudder in the very bottom of his heart. ‘Does she not, does she not
look after you about this time, and give you your lessons?’

‘Irinotchka will not give us any lessons any more now,’ answered
Viktorinka. ‘Not any more now,’ Kleopatrinka repeated after her.

‘Is your papa at home?’ asked Litvinov.

‘Papa is not at home,’ continued Viktorinka, ‘and Irinotchka is not
well; all night long she was crying and crying....’

‘Crying?’

‘Yes, crying ... Yegorovna told me, and her eyes are so red, they are
quite in-inflamed....’

Litvinov walked twice up and down the room shuddering as though with
cold, and went back to his lodging. He experienced a sensation like that
which gains possession of a man when he looks down from a high tower;
everything failed within him, and his head was swimming slowly with a
sense of nausea. Dull stupefaction, and thoughts scurrying like mice,
vague terror, and the numbness of expectation, and curiosity--strange,
almost malignant--and the weight of crushed tears in his heavy laden
breast, on his lips the forced empty smile, and a meaningless
prayer--addressed to no one.... Oh, how bitter it all was, and how
hideously degrading! ‘Irina does not want to see me,’ was the thought
that was incessantly revolving in his brain; ‘so much is clear; but why
is it? What can have happened at that ill-fated ball? And how is such a
change possible all at once? So suddenly....’ People always see death
coming suddenly, but they can never get accustomed to its suddenness,
they feel it senseless. ‘She sends no message for me, does not want to
explain herself to me....’

‘Grigory Mihalitch,’ called a strained voice positively in his ear.

Litvinov started, and saw before him his servant with a note in his
hand. He recognised Irina’s writing.... Before he had broken the seal,
he had a foreknowledge of woe, and bent his head on his breast and
hunched his shoulders, as though shrinking from the blow.

He plucked up courage at last, and tore open the envelope all at once.
On a small sheet of notepaper were the following lines:

‘Forgive me, Grigory Mihalitch. All is over between us; I am going away
to Petersburg. I am dreadfully unhappy, but the thing is done. It seems
my fate ... but no, I do not want to justify myself. My presentiments
have been realised. Forgive me, forget me; I am not worthy of
you.--Irina. Be magnanimous: do not try to see me.’

Litvinov read these five lines, and slowly dropped on to the sofa, as
though some one had dealt him a blow on the breast. He dropped the note,
picked it up, read it again, whispered ‘to Petersburg,’ and dropped it
again; that was all. There even came upon him a sense of peace; he even,
with his hands thrown behind him, smoothed the pillow under his head.
‘Men wounded to death don’t fling themselves about,’ he thought, ‘as it
has come, so it has gone. All this is natural enough: I always expected
it....’ (He was lying to himself; he had never expected anything like
it.) ‘Crying?... Was she crying?... What was she crying for? Why, she
did not love me! But all that is easily understood and in accordance
with her character. She--she is not worthy of me.... That’s it!’ (He
laughed bitterly.) ‘She did not know herself what power was latent in
her,--well, convinced of it in her effect at the ball, was it likely she
would stay with an insignificant student?--all that’s easily
understood.’

But then he remembered her tender words, her smile, and those eyes,
those never to be forgotten eyes, which he would never see again, which
used to shine and melt at simply meeting his eyes; he recalled one
swift, timorous, burning kiss--and suddenly he fell to sobbing, sobbing
convulsively, furiously, vindictively; turned over on his face, and
choking and stifling with frenzied satisfaction as though thirsting to
tear himself to pieces with all around him, he turned his hot face in
the sofa pillow, and bit it in his teeth.

Alas! the gentleman whom Litvinov had seen the day before in the
carriage was no other than the cousin of the Princess Osinin, the rich
chamberlain, Count Reisenbach. Noticing the sensation produced by Irina
on certain personages of the highest rank, and instantaneously
reflecting what advantages might _mit etwas Accuratesse_ be derived from
the fact, the count made his plan at once like a man of energy and a
skilful courtier. He decided to act swiftly, in Napoleonic style. ‘I
will take that original girl into my house,’ was what he meditated, ‘in
Petersburg; I will make her my heiress, devil take me, of my whole
property even; as I have no children. She is my niece, and my countess
is dull all alone.... It’s always more agreeable to have a pretty face
in one’s drawing-room.... Yes, yes; ... that’s it; _es ist eine Idee, es
ist eine Idee!_’ He would have to dazzle, bewilder, and impress the
parents. ‘They’ve not enough to eat’--the count pursued his reflection
when he was in the carriage and on his way to Dogs’ Place--‘so, I
warrant, they won’t be obstinate. They’re not such over-sentimental
folks either. I might give them a sum of money down into the bargain.
And she? She will consent. Honey is sweet--she had a taste of it last
night. It’s a whim on my part, granted; let them profit by it, ... the
fools. I shall say to them one thing and another ... and you must
decide--otherwise I shall adopt another--an orphan--which would be
still more suitable. Yes or no--twenty-four hours I fix for the
term--_und damit Punctum_.’

And with these very words on his lips, the count presented himself
before the prince, whom he had forewarned of his visit the evening
before at the ball. On the result of this visit it seems hardly worth
while to enlarge further. The count was not mistaken in his
prognostications: the prince and princess were in fact not obstinate,
and accepted the sum of money; and Irina did in fact consent before the
allotted term had expired. It was not easy for her to break off her
relations with Litvinov; she loved him; and after sending him her note,
she almost kept her bed, weeping continually, and grew thin and wan. But
for all that, a month later the princess carried her off to Petersburg,
and established her at the count’s; committing her to the care of the
countess, a very kind-hearted woman, but with the brain of a hen, and
something of a hen’s exterior.

Litvinov threw up the university, and went home to his father in the
country. Little by little his wound healed. At first he had no news of
Irina, and indeed he avoided all conversation that touched on Petersburg
and Petersburg society. Later on, by degrees, rumours--not evil
exactly, but curious--began to circulate about her; gossip began to be
busy about her. The name of the young Princess Osinin, encircled in
splendour, impressed with quite a special stamp, began to be more and
more frequently mentioned even in provincial circles. It was pronounced
with curiosity, respect, and envy, as men at one time used to mention
the name of the Countess Vorotinsky. At last the news came of her
marriage. But Litvinov hardly paid attention to these last tidings; he
was already betrothed to Tatyana.

Now, the reader can no doubt easily understand exactly what it was
Litvinov recalled when he cried, ‘Can it be she?’ and therefore we will
return to Baden and take up again the broken thread of our story.




X


Litvinov fell asleep very late, and did not sleep long; the sun had only
just risen when he got out of bed. The summits of dark mountains visible
from his windows stood out in misty purple against the clear sky. ‘How
cool it must be there under the trees!’ he thought; and he dressed in
haste, and looked with indifference at the bouquet which had opened more
luxuriantly after the night; he took a stick and set off towards the
‘Old Castle’ on the famous ‘Cliffs.’ Invigorating and soothing was the
caressing contact of the fresh morning about him. He drew long breaths,
and stepped out boldly; the vigorous health of youth was throbbing in
every vein; the very earth seemed springy under his light feet. With
every step he grew more light-hearted, more happy; he walked in the dewy
shade in the thick sand of the little paths, beside the fir-trees that
were fringed with the vivid green of the spring shoots at the end of
every twig. ‘How jolly it is!’ he kept repeating to himself. Suddenly
he heard the sound of familiar voices; he looked ahead and saw
Voroshilov and Bambaev coming to meet him. The sight of them jarred upon
him; he rushed away like a school-boy avoiding his teacher, and hid
himself behind a bush.... ‘My Creator!’ he prayed, ‘mercifully remove my
countrymen!’ He felt that he would not have grudged any money at the
moment if only they did not see him.... And they actually did not see
him: the Creator was merciful to him. Voroshilov, in his self-confident
military voice, was holding forth to Bambaev on the various phases of
Gothic architecture, and Bambaev only grunted approvingly; it was
obvious that Voroshilov had been dinning his phrases into him a long
while, and the good-natured enthusiast was beginning to be bored.
Compressing his lips and craning his neck, Litvinov listened a long
while to their retreating footsteps; for a long time the accents of
instructive discourse--now guttural, now nasal--reached his ears; at
last, all was still again. Litvinov breathed freely, came out of his
ambush, and walked on.

For three hours he wandered about the mountains. Sometimes he left the
path, and jumped from rock to rock, slipping now and then on the smooth
moss; then he would sit down on a fragment of the cliff under an oak or
a beech, and muse on pleasant fancies to the never-ceasing gurgle of the
little rills over-grown with ferns, the soothing rustle of the leaves,
and the shrill notes of a solitary blackbird. A light and equally
pleasant drowsiness began to steal over him, it seemed to approach him
caressingly, and he dropped asleep ... but suddenly he smiled and looked
round; the gold and green of the forest, and the moving foliage beat
down softly on his eyes--and again he smiled and again closed them. He
began to want breakfast, and he made his way towards the old castle
where for a few kreutzers he could get a glass of good milk and coffee.
But he had hardly had time to establish himself at one of the little
white-painted tables set on the platform before the castle, when the
heavy tramping of horses was heard, and three open carriages drove up,
out of which stepped a rather numerous company of ladies and
gentlemen.... Litvinov at once recognised them as Russians, though they
were all talking French ... just because they were all talking French.
The ladies’ dresses were marked by a studied elegance; the gentlemen
wore close-fitting coats with waists--which is not altogether usual
nowadays--grey trousers of fancy material, and very glossy town hats. A
narrow black cravat closely fettered the neck of each of these
gentlemen, and something military was apparent in their whole
deportment. They were, in fact, military men; Litvinov had chanced upon
a picnic party of young generals--persons of the highest society, of
weight and importance. Their importance was clearly expressed in
everything: in their discreet nonchalance, in their amiably
condescending smiles, in the intense indifference of their expression,
the effeminate little movements of their shoulders, the swing of the
figure, and the crook of the knees; it was expressed, too, in the sound
of their voices, which seemed to be affably and fastidiously thanking a
subservient multitude. All these officers were superlatively washed and
shaved, and thoroughly saturated with that genuine aroma of nobility and
the Guards, compounded of the best cigar smoke, and the most marvellous
patchouli. They all had the hands too of noblemen--white and large, with
nails firm as ivory; their moustaches seemed positively polished, their
teeth shone, and their skin--rosy on their cheeks, bluish on their
chins--was most delicate and fine. Some of the young generals were
frivolous, others were serious; but the stamp of the best breeding was
on all of them. Each of them seemed to be deeply conscious of his own
dignity, and the importance of his own future part in the government,
and conducted himself with severity and ease, with a faint shade of that
carelessness, that ‘deuce-take-it’ air, which comes out so naturally
during foreign travel. The party seated themselves with much noise and
ostentation, and called the obsequious waiters. Litvinov made haste to
drink off his glass of milk, paid for it, and putting his hat on, was
just making off past the party of generals....

‘Grigory Mihalitch,’ he heard a woman’s voice. ‘Don’t you recognise me?’

He stopped involuntarily. That voice ... that voice had too often set
his heart beating in the past.... He turned round and saw Irina.

She was sitting at a table, her arms folded on the back of a chair drawn
up near; with her head bent on one side and a smile on her face, she was
looking at him cordially, almost with delight.

Litvinov knew her at once, though she had changed since he saw her that
last time ten years ago, though she had been transformed from a girl
into a woman. Her slim figure had developed and reached its perfection,
the lines of her once narrow shoulders now recalled the goddesses that
stand out on the ceilings of ancient Italian palaces. But her eyes
remained the same, and it seemed to Litvinov that they were looking at
him just as in those days in the little house in Moscow.

‘Irina Pavlovna,’ he uttered irresolutely.

‘You know me? How glad I am! how glad----’

She stopped short, slightly blushing, and drew herself up.

‘This is a very pleasant meeting,’ she continued now in French. ‘Let me
introduce you to my husband. _Valérien, Monsieur Litvinov, un ami
d’enfance_; Valerian Vladimirovitch Ratmirov, my husband.’

One of the young generals, almost the most elegant of all, got up from
his seat, and with excessive courtesy bowed to Litvinov, while the rest
of his companions faintly knitted their brows, or rather each of them
withdrew for an instant into himself, as though protesting betimes
against any contact with an extraneous civilian, and the other ladies
taking part in the picnic thought fit to screw up their eyes a little
and simper, and even to assume an air of perplexity.

‘Have you--er--been long in Baden?’ asked General Ratmirov, with a
dandified air utterly un-Russian. He obviously did not know what to talk
about with the friend of his wife’s childhood.

‘No, not long!’ replied Litvinov.

‘And do you intend to stay long?’ pursued the polite general.

‘I have not made up my mind yet.’

‘Ah! that is very delightful ... very.’

The general paused. Litvinov, too, was speechless. Both held their hats
in their hands and bending forward with a grin, gazed at the top of each
other’s heads.

‘_Deux gendarmes un beau dimanche_,’ began humming--out of tune of
course, we have never come across a Russian nobleman who did not sing
out of tune--a dull-eyed and yellow-faced general, with an expression of
constant irritability on his face, as though he could not forgive
himself for his own appearance. Among all his companions he alone had
not the complexion of a rose.

‘But why don’t you sit down, Grigory Mihalitch,’ observed Irina at last.

Litvinov obeyed and sat down.

‘_I say, Valérien, give me some fire_,’ remarked in English another
general, also young, but already stout, with fixed eyes which seemed
staring into the air, and thick silky whiskers, into which he slowly
plunged his snow-white fingers. Ratmirov gave him a silver matchbox.

‘_Avez vous des papiros?_’ asked one of the ladies, with a lisp.

‘_De vrais papelitos, comtesse._’

‘_Deux gendarmes un beau dimanche_,’ the dull-eyed general hummed again,
with intense exasperation.

‘You must be sure to come and see us,’ Irina was saying to Litvinov
meantime; ‘we are staying at the Hôtel de l’Europe. From four to six I
am always at home. We have not seen each other for such a long time.’

Litvinov looked at Irina; she did not drop her eyes.

‘Yes, Irina Pavlovna, it is a long time--ever since we were at Moscow.’

‘At Moscow, yes, at Moscow,’ she repeated abruptly. ‘Come and see me, we
will talk and recall old times. Do you know, Grigory Mihalitch, you have
not changed much.’

‘Really? But you have changed, Irina Pavlovna.’

‘I have grown older.’

‘No, I did not mean that.’

‘_Irène?_’ said a lady in a yellow hat and with yellow hair in an
interrogative voice after some preliminary whispering and giggling with
the officer sitting near her. ‘_Irène?_’

‘I am older,’ pursued Irina, without answering the lady, ‘but I am not
changed. No, no, I am changed in nothing.’

‘_Deux gendarmes un beau dimanche!_’ was heard again. The irritable
general only remembered the first line of the well-known ditty.

‘It still pricks a little, your excellency,’ observed the stout general
with the whiskers, with a loud and broad intonation, apparently quoting
from some amusing story, well-known to the whole _beau monde_, and, with
a short wooden laugh he again fell to staring into the air. All the rest
of the party laughed too.

‘What a sad dog you are, Boris!’ observed Ratmirov in an undertone. He
spoke in English and pronounced even the name ‘Boris’ as if it were
English.

‘_Irène?_’ the lady in the yellow hat said inquiringly for the third
time. Irina turned sharply round to her.

‘_Eh bien? quoi? que me voulez-vous?_’

‘_Je vous dirai plus tard_,’ replied the lady, mincing. With a very
unattractive exterior, she was for ever mincing and grimacing. Some wit
said of her that she ‘_minaudait dans le vide_,’ ‘grimaced upon the
desert air.’

Irina frowned and shrugged her shoulders impatiently. ‘_Mais que fait
donc Monsieur Verdier? Pourquoi ne vient-il pas?_’ cried one lady with
that prolonged drawl which is the peculiarity of the Great Russian
accent, and is so insupportable to French ears.

‘Ah, voo, ah, voo, mossoo Verdew, mossoo Verdew,’ sighed another lady,
whose birthplace was Arzamass.

‘_Tranquillisez-vous, mesdames_,’ interposed Ratmirov. ‘_Monsieur
Verdier m’a promis de venir se mettre à vos pieds._’

‘He, he, he!’--The ladies fluttered their fans.

The waiter brought some glasses of beer.

‘_Baierisch-Bier?_’ inquired the general with whiskers, assuming a bass
voice, and affecting astonishment--‘_Guten Morgen._’

‘Well? Is Count Pavel still there?’ one young general inquired coldly
and listlessly of another.

‘Yes,’ replied the other equally coldly, ‘_Mais c’est provisoire_.
_Serge_, they say, will be put in his place.’

‘Aha!’ filtered the first through his teeth.

‘Ah, yes,’ filtered the second.

‘I can’t understand,’ began the general who had hummed the song, ‘I
can’t understand what induced Paul to defend himself--to bring forward
all sorts of reasons. Certainly, he crushed the merchant pretty well,
_il lui a fait rendre gorge_ ... well, and what of it? He may have had
his own motives.’

‘He was afraid ... of being shown up in the newspapers,’ muttered some
one.

The irritable general grew hot.

‘Well, it is too much! Newspapers! Shown up! If it depended on me, I
would not let anything be printed in those papers but the taxes on meat
or bread, and announcements of sales of boots or furs.’

‘And gentlemen’s properties up for auction,’ put in Ratmirov.

‘Possibly under present circumstances.... What a conversation, though,
in Baden _au Vieux-Château_.’

‘_Mais pas du tout! pas du tout!_’ replied the lady in the yellow hat,
‘_j’adore les questions politiques_.’

‘_Madame a raison_,’ interposed another general with an exceedingly
pleasant and girlish-looking face. ‘Why should we avoid those questions
... even in Baden?’

As he said these words he looked urbanely at Litvinov and smiled
condescendingly. ‘A man of honour ought never under any circumstances to
disown his convictions. Don’t you think so?’

‘Of course,’ rejoined the irritable general, darting a look at Litvinov,
and as it were indirectly attacking him, ‘but I don’t see the
necessity....’

‘No, no,’ the condescending general interposed with the same mildness,
‘your friend, Valerian Vladimirovitch, just referred to the sale of
gentlemen’s estates. Well? Is not that a fact?’

‘But it’s impossible to sell them nowadays; nobody wants them!’ cried
the irritable general.

‘Perhaps ... perhaps. For that very reason we ought to proclaim that
fact ... that sad fact at every step. We are ruined ... very good; we
are beggared ... there’s no disputing about that; but we, the great
owners, we still represent a principle ... _un principe_. To preserve
that principle is our duty. _Pardon, madame_, I think you dropped your
handkerchief. When some, so to say, darkness has come over even the
highest minds, we ought submissively to point out (the general held out
his finger) with the finger of a citizen the abyss to which everything
is tending. We ought to warn, we ought to say with respectful firmness,
‘turn back, turn back.... That is what we ought to say.’

‘There’s no turning back altogether, though,’ observed Ratmirov moodily.

The condescending general only grinned.

‘Yes, altogether, altogether, _mon très cher_. The further back the
better.’

The general again looked courteously at Litvinov. The latter could not
stand it.

‘Are we to return as far as the Seven Boyars, your excellency?’

‘Why not? I express my opinion without hesitation; we must undo ... yes
... undo all that has been done.’

‘And the emancipation of the serfs.’

‘And the emancipation ... as far as that is possible. _On est patriote
ou on ne l’est pas._ “And freedom?” they say to me. Do you suppose that
freedom is prized by the people? Ask them----’

‘Just try,’ broke in Litvinov, ‘taking that freedom away again.’

‘_Comment nommez-vous ce monsieur?_’ whispered the general to Ratmirov.

‘What are you discussing here?’ began the stout general suddenly. He
obviously played the part of the spoilt child of the party. ‘Is it all
about the newspapers? About penny-a-liners? Let me tell you a little
anecdote of what happened to me with a scribbling fellow--such a lovely
thing. I was told he had written a libel on me. Well, of course, I at
once had him brought before me. They brought me the penny-a-liner.

‘“How was it,” said I, “my dear chap, you came to write this libel? Was
your patriotism too much for you?” “Yes, it was too much,” says he.
“Well,” says I, “and do you like money?” “Yes,” says he. Then,
gentlemen, I gave him the knob of my cane to sniff at. “And do you like
that, my angel?” “No,” says he, “I don’t like that.” “But sniff it as
you ought,” says I, “my hands are clean.” “I don’t like it,” says he,
“and that’s all.” “But I like it very much, my angel,” says I, “though
not for myself. Do you understand that allegory, my treasure?” “Yes,”
says he. “Then mind and be a good boy for the future, and now here’s a
rouble sterling for you; go away and be grateful to me night and day,”
and so the scribbling chap went off.’

The general burst out laughing and again every one followed his
example--every one except Irina, who did not even smile and looked
darkly at the speaker.

The condescending general slapped Boris on the shoulder.

‘That’s all your invention, O friend of my bosom.... You threatening any
one with a stick.... You haven’t got a stick. _C’est pour faire rire ces
dames._ For the sake of a good story. But that’s not the point. I said
just now that we must turn back completely. Understand me. I am not
hostile to so-called progress, but all these universities and
seminaries, and popular schools, these students, priests’ sons, and
commoners, all these small fry, _tout ce fond du sac, la petite
propriété, pire que le prolétariat_ (the general uttered this in a
languishing, almost faint voice) _voilà ce qui m’effraie_ ... that’s
where one ought to draw the line, and make other people draw it too.’
(Again he gave Litvinov a genial glance.) ‘Yes, one must draw the line.
Don’t forget that among us no one makes any demand, no one is asking for
anything. Local government, for instance--who asks for that? Do you ask
for it? or you, or you? or you, _mesdames_? You rule not only yourselves
but all of us, you know.’ (The general’s handsome face was lighted up by
a smile of amusement.) ‘My dear friends, why should we curry favour with
the multitude. You like democracy, it flatters you, and serves your ends
... but you know it’s a double weapon. It is better in the old way, as
before ... far more secure. Don’t deign to reason with the herd, trust
in the aristocracy, in that alone is power.... Indeed it will be better.
And progress ... I certainly have nothing against progress. Only don’t
give us lawyers and sworn juries and elective officials ... only don’t
touch discipline, discipline before all things--you may build bridges,
and quays, and hospitals, and why not light the streets with gas?’

‘Petersburg has been set on fire from one end to the other, so there you
have your progress!’ hissed the irritable general.

‘Yes, you’re a mischievous fellow, I can see,’ said the stout general,
shaking his head lazily; ‘you would do for a chief-prosecutor, but in
my opinion _avec Orphée aux enfers le progrès a dit son dernier mot_.’

‘_Vous dites toujours des bêtises_,’ giggled the lady from Arzamass.

The general looked dignified.

‘_Je ne suis jamais plus sérieux, madame, que quand je dis des
bêtises._’

‘Monsieur Verdier has uttered that very phrase several times already,’
observed Irina in a low voice.

‘_De la poigne et des formes_,’ cried the stout general, ‘_de la poigne
surtout_. And to translate into Russian: be civil but don’t spare your
fists.’

‘Ah, you’re a rascal, an incorrigible rascal,’ interposed the
condescending general. ‘_Mesdames_, don’t listen to him, please. A
barking dog does not bite. He cares for nothing but flirtation.’

‘That’s not right, though, Boris,’ began Ratmirov, after exchanging a
glance with his wife, ‘it’s all very well to be mischievous, but that’s
going too far. Progress is a phenomenon of social life, and this is what
we must not forget; it’s a symptom. It’s what we must watch.’

‘All right, I say,’ observed the stout general, wrinkling up his nose;
‘we all know you are aiming at the ministry.’

‘Not at all ... the ministry indeed! But really one can’t refuse to
recognise things.’

Boris plunged his fingers again into his whiskers, and stared into the
air.

‘Social life is very important, because in the development of the
people, in the destinies, so to speak, of the country----’

‘_Valérien_,’ interrupted Boris reprovingly, ‘_il y a des dames ici_. I
did not expect this of you, or do you want to get on to a committee?’

‘But they are all closed now, thank God,’ put in the irritable general,
and he began humming again ‘_Deux gendarmes un beau dimanche_.’

Ratmirov raised a cambric handkerchief to his nose and gracefully
retired from the discussion; the condescending general repeated ‘Rascal!
rascal!’ but Boris turned to the lady who ‘grimaced upon the desert air’
and without lowering his voice, or a change in the expression of his
face, began to ply her with questions as to when ‘she would reward his
devotion,’ as though he were desperately in love with her and suffering
tortures on her account.

At every moment during this conversation Litvinov felt more and more ill
at ease. His pride, his clean plebeian pride, was fairly in revolt.

What had he, the son of a petty official, in common with these military
aristocrats of Petersburg? He loved everything they hated; he hated
everything they loved; he was only too vividly conscious of it, he felt
it in every part of his being. Their jokes he thought dull, their tone
intolerable, every gesture false; in the very smoothness of their
speeches he detected a note of revolting contemptuousness--and yet he
was, as it were, abashed before them, before these creatures, these
enemies. ‘Ugh! how disgusting! I am in their way, I am ridiculous to
them,’ was the thought that kept revolving in his head. ‘Why am I
stopping? Let me escape at once, at once.’ Irina’s presence could not
retain him; she, too, aroused melancholy emotions in him. He got up from
his seat and began to take leave.

‘You are going already?’ said Irina, but after a moment’s reflection she
did not press him to stay, and only extracted a promise from him that he
would not fail to come and see her. General Ratmirov took leave of him
with the same refined courtesy, shook hands with him and accompanied him
to the end of the platform.... But Litvinov had scarcely had time to
turn round the first bend in the road when he heard a general roar of
laughter behind him. This laughter had no reference to him, but was
occasioned by the long-expected Monsieur Verdier, who suddenly made his
appearance on the platform, in a Tyrolese hat, and blue blouse, riding
a donkey, but the blood fairly rushed into Litvinov’s cheeks, and he
felt intense bitterness: his tightly compressed lips seemed as though
drawn by wormwood. ‘Despicable, vulgar creatures,’ he muttered, without
reflecting that the few minutes he had spent in their company had not
given him sufficient ground for such severe criticism. And this was the
world into which Irina had fallen, Irina, once his Irina! In this world
she moved, and lived, and reigned; for it, she had sacrificed her
personal dignity, the noblest feelings of her heart.... It was clearly
as it should be; it was clear that she had deserved no better fate! How
glad he was that she had not thought of questioning him about his
intentions! He might have opened his heart before ‘them’ in ‘their’
presence.... ‘For nothing in the world! never!’ murmured Litvinov,
inhaling deep draughts of the fresh air and descending the road towards
Baden almost at a run. He thought of his betrothed, his sweet, good,
sacred Tatyana, and how pure, how noble, how true she seemed to him.
With what unmixed tenderness he recalled her features, her words, her
very gestures ... with what impatience he looked forward to her return.

The rapid exercise soothed his nerves. Returning home he sat down at the
table and took up a book; suddenly he let it fall, even with a
shudder.... What had happened to him? Nothing had happened, but Irina
... Irina.... All at once his meeting with her seemed something
marvellous, strange, extraordinary. Was it possible? he had met, he had
talked with the same Irina.... And why was there no trace in her of that
hateful worldliness which was so sharply stamped upon all these others.
Why did he fancy that she seemed, as it were, weary, or sad, or sick of
her position? She was in their camp, but she was not an enemy. And what
could have impelled her to receive him joyfully, to invite him to see
her?

Litvinov started. ‘O Tanya, Tanya!’ he cried passionately, ‘you are my
guardian angel, you only, my good genius. I love you only and will love
you for ever. And I will not go to see _her_. Forget her altogether! Let
her amuse herself with her generals.’ Litvinov set to his book again.




XI


Litvinov took up his book again, but he could not read. He went out of
the house, walked a little, listened to the music, glanced in at the
gambling, returned again to his room, and tried again to read--still
without success. The time seemed to drag by with peculiar dreariness.
Pishtchalkin, the well-intentioned peaceable mediator, came in and sat
with him for three hours. He talked, argued, stated questions, and
discoursed intermittently, first of elevated, and then of practical
topics, and succeeded in diffusing around him such an atmosphere of
dulness that poor Litvinov was ready to cry. In raising
dulness--agonising, chilling, helpless, hopeless dulness--to a fine art,
Pishtchalkin was absolutely unrivalled even among persons of the highest
morality, who are notoriously masters in that line. The mere sight of
his well-cut and well-brushed head, his clear lifeless eyes, his
benevolent nose, produced an involuntary despondency, and his
deliberate, drowsy, lazy tone seemed to have been created only to state
with conviction and lucidity such sententious truths as that twice two
makes four and not five or three, that water is liquid, and benevolence
laudable; that to the private individual, no less than to the state, and
to the state no less than to the private individual, credit is
absolutely indispensable for financial operations. And with all this he
was such an excellent man! But such is the sentence the fates have
passed on Russia; among us, good men are dull. Pishtchalkin retreated at
last; he was replaced by Bindasov, who, without any beating about the
bush, asked Litvinov with great effrontery for a loan of a hundred
guldens, and the latter gave it him, in spite of the fact that Bindasov
was not only unattractive, but even repulsive to him, that he knew for
certain that he would never get his money back; and was, besides,
himself in need of it. What made him give him the money then, the reader
will inquire. Who can tell! That is another Russian weakness. Let the
reader lay his hand on his heart and remember how many acts in his own
life have had absolutely no other reason. And Bindasov did not even
thank Litvinov; he asked for a glass of red Baden wine, and without
wiping his lips departed, loudly and offensively tramping with his
boots. And how vexed Litvinov was with himself already, as he watched
the red nape of the retreating sharper’s neck! Before evening he
received a letter from Tatyana in which she informed him that as her
aunt was not well, she could not come to Baden for five or six days.
This news had a depressing influence on Litvinov; it increased his
vexation, and he went to bed early in a disagreeable frame of mind. The
following day turned out no better, if not worse, than the preceding.
From early morning Litvinov’s room was filled with his own countrymen;
Bambaev, Voroshilov, Pishtchalkin, the two officers, the two Heidelberg
students, all crowded in at once, and yet did not go away right up till
dinner time, though they had soon said all they had to say and were
obviously bored. They simply did not know what to do with themselves,
and having got into Litvinov’s lodgings they ‘stuck’ there, as they say.
First they discussed the fact that Gubaryov had gone back to Heidelberg,
and that they would have to go after him; then they philosophised a
little, and touched on the Polish question; then they advanced to
reflections on gambling and _cocottes_, and fell to repeating scandalous
anecdotes; at last the conversation sank into a discussion of all sorts
of ‘strong men’ and monsters of obesity and gluttony. First, they
trotted out all the ancient stories of Lukin, of the deacon who ate no
less than thirty-three herrings for a wager, of the Uhlan colonel,
Ezyedinov, renowned for his corpulence, and of the soldier who broke the
shin-bone on his own forehead; then followed unadulterated lying.
Pishtchalkin himself related with a yawn that he knew a peasant woman in
Little Russia, who at the time of her death had proved to weigh half a
ton and some pounds, and a landowner who had eaten three geese and a
sturgeon for luncheon; Bambaev suddenly fell into an ecstatic condition,
and declared he himself was able to eat a whole sheep, ‘with seasoning’
of course; and Voroshilov burst out with something about a comrade, an
athletic cadet, so grotesque that every one was reduced to silence, and
after looking at each other, they took up their hats, and the party
broke up. Litvinov, when he was left alone, tried to occupy himself, but
he felt just as if his head was full of smouldering soot; he could do
nothing that was of any use, and the evening too was wasted. The next
morning he was just preparing for lunch, when some one knocked at his
door. ‘Good Lord,’ thought Litvinov, ‘one of yesterday’s dear friends
again,’ and not without some trepidation he pronounced:

‘_Herein!_’

The door opened slowly and in walked Potugin. Litvinov was exceedingly
delighted to see him.

‘This is nice!’ he began, warmly shaking hands with his unexpected
visitor, ‘this is good of you! I should certainly have looked you up
myself, but you would not tell me where you live. Sit down, please, put
down your hat. Sit down.’

Potugin made no response to Litvinov’s warm welcome, and remained
standing in the middle of the room, shifting from one leg to the other;
he only laughed a little and shook his head. Litvinov’s cordial
reception obviously touched him, but there was some constraint in the
expression of his face.

‘There’s ... some little misunderstanding,’ he began, not without
hesitation. ‘Of course, it would always be ... a pleasure ... to me ...
but I have been sent ... especially to you.’

‘That’s to say, do you mean,’ commented Litvinov in an injured voice,
‘that you would not have come to me of your own accord?’

‘Oh, no, ... indeed! But I ... I should, perhaps, not have made up my
mind to intrude on you to-day, if I had not been asked to come to you.
In fact, I have a message for you.’

‘From whom, may I ask?’

‘From a person you know, from Irina Pavlovna Ratmirov. You promised
three days ago to go and see her and you have not been.’

Litvinov stared at Potugin in amazement.

‘You know Madame Ratmirov?’

‘As you see.’

‘And you know her well?’

‘I am to a certain degree a friend of hers.’

Litvinov was silent for a little.

‘Allow me to ask you,’ he began at last, ‘do you know why Irina Pavlovna
wants to see me?’

Potugin went up to the window.

‘To a certain degree I do. She was, as far as I can judge, very pleased
at meeting you,--well,--and she wants to renew your former relations.’

‘Renew,’ repeated Litvinov. ‘Excuse my indiscretion, but allow me to
question you a little more. Do you know what was the nature of those
relations?’

‘Strictly speaking ... no, I don’t know. But I imagine,’ added Potugin,
turning suddenly to Litvinov and looking affectionately at him, ‘I
imagine that they were of some value. Irina Pavlovna spoke very highly
of you, and I was obliged to promise her I would bring you. Will you
come?’

‘When?’

‘Now ... at once.’

Litvinov merely made a gesture with his hand.

‘Irina Pavlovna,’ pursued Potugin, ‘supposes that the ... how can I
express it ... the environment, shall we say, in which you found her the
other day, was not likely to be particularly attractive to you; but she
told me to tell you, that the devil is not so black as he is fancied.’

‘Hm.... Does that saying apply strictly to the environment?’

‘Yes ... and in general.’

‘Hm.... Well, and what is your opinion, Sozont Ivanitch, of the devil?’

‘I think, Grigory Mihalitch, that he is in any case not what he is
fancied.’

‘Is he better?’

‘Whether better or worse it’s hard to say, but certainly he is not the
same as he is fancied. Well, shall we go?’

‘Sit here a little first. I must own that it still seems rather strange
to me.’

‘What seems strange, may I make bold to inquire?’

‘In what way can you have become a friend of Irina Pavlovna?’

Potugin scanned himself.

‘With my appearance, and my position in society, it certainly does seem
rather incredible; but you know--Shakespeare has said already, “There
are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, etc.” Life too is not to
be trifled with. Here is a simile for you; a tree stands before you when
there is no wind; in what way can a leaf on a lower branch touch a leaf
on an upper branch? It’s impossible. But when the storm rises it is all
changed ... and the two leaves touch.’

‘Aha! So there were storms?’

‘I should think so! Can one live without them? But enough of philosophy.
It’s time to go.’

Litvinov was still hesitating.

‘O good Lord!’ cried Potugin with a comic face, ‘what are young men
coming to nowadays! A most charming lady invites them to see her, sends
messengers after them on purpose, and they raise difficulties. You ought
to be ashamed, my dear sir, you ought to be ashamed. Here’s your hat.
Take it and “Vorwärts,” as our ardent friends the Germans say.’

Litvinov still stood irresolute for a moment, but he ended by taking his
hat and going out of the room with Potugin.




XII


They went to one of the best hotels in Baden and asked for Madame
Ratmirov. The porter first inquired their names, and then answered at
once that ‘_die Frau Fürstin ist zu Hause_,’ and went himself to conduct
them up the staircase and knock at the door of the apartment and
announce them. ‘_Die Frau Fürstin_’ received them promptly: she was
alone, her husband had gone off to Carlsruhe for an interview with a
great official, an influential personage who was passing through that
town.

Irina was sitting at a small table, embroidering on canvas when Potugin
and Litvinov crossed the threshold. She quickly flung her embroidery
aside, pushed away the little table and got up; an expression of genuine
pleasure overspread her face. She wore a morning dress, high at the
neck; the superb lines of her shoulders and arms could be seen through
the thin stuff; her carelessly-coiled hair had come loose and fell low
on her slender neck. Irina flung a swift glance at Potugin, murmured
‘_merci_,’ and holding out her hand to Litvinov reproached him amicably
for forgetfulness.

‘And you such an old friend!’ she added.

Litvinov was beginning to apologise. ‘_C’est bien, c’est bien_,’ she
assented hurriedly and, taking his hat from him, with friendly
insistence made him sit down. Potugin, too, was sitting down, but got up
again directly, and saying that he had an engagement he could not put
off, and that he would come in again after dinner, he proceeded to take
leave. Irina again flung him a rapid glance, and gave him a friendly
nod, but she did not try to keep him, and directly he had vanished
behind the portière, she turned with eager impatience to Litvinov.

‘Grigory Mihalitch,’ she began, speaking Russian in her soft musical
voice, ‘here we are alone at last, and I can tell you how glad I am at
our meeting, because it ... it gives me a chance...’ (Irina looked him
straight in the face) ‘of asking your forgiveness.’

Litvinov gave an involuntary start. He had not expected so swift an
attack. He had not expected she would herself turn the conversation upon
old times.

‘Forgiveness ... for what?’ ... he muttered.

Irina flushed.

‘For what? ... you know for what,’ she said, and she turned slightly
away. ‘I wronged you, Grigory Mihalitch ... though, of course, it was my
fate’ (Litvinov was reminded of her letter) ‘and I do not regret it ...
it would be in any case too late; but, meeting you so unexpectedly, I
said to myself that we absolutely must become friends, absolutely ...
and I should feel it deeply, if it did not come about ... and it seems
to me for that we must have an explanation, without putting it off, and
once for all, so that afterwards there should be no ... _gêne_, no
awkwardness, once for all, Grigory Mihalitch; and that you must tell me
you forgive me, or else I shall imagine you feel ... _de la rancune_.
_Voilà!_ It is perhaps a great piece of fatuity on my part, for you have
probably forgotten everything long, long ago, but no matter, tell me,
you have forgiven me.’

Irina uttered this whole speech without taking breath, and Litvinov
could see that there were tears shining in her eyes ... yes, actually
tears.

‘Really, Irina Pavlovna,’ he began hurriedly, ‘how can you beg my
pardon, ask forgiveness?... That is all past and buried, and I can only
feel astounded that, in the midst of all the splendour which surrounds
you, you have still preserved a recollection of the obscure companions
of your youth....’

‘Does it astound you?’ said Irina softly.

‘It touches me,’ Litvinov went on, ‘because I could never have
imagined----’

‘You have not told me you have forgiven me, though,’ interposed Irina.

‘I sincerely rejoice at your happiness, Irina Pavlovna. With my whole
heart I wish you all that is best on earth....’

‘And you will not remember evil against me?’

‘I will remember nothing but the happy moments for which I was once
indebted to you.’

Irina held out both hands to him; Litvinov clasped them warmly, and did
not at once let them go.... Something that long had not been, secretly
stirred in his heart at that soft contact. Irina was again looking
straight into his face; but this time she was smiling.... And he for the
first time gazed directly and intently at her.... Again he recognised
the features once so precious, and those deep eyes, with their
marvellous lashes, and the little mole on her cheek, and the peculiar
growth of her hair on her forehead, and her habit of somehow sweetly and
humorously curving her lips and faintly twitching her eyebrows, all, all
he recognised.... But how beautiful she had grown! What fascination,
what power in her fresh, woman’s body! And no rouge, no touching up, no
powder, nothing false on that fresh pure face.... Yes, this was a
beautiful woman. A mood of musing came upon Litvinov.... He was still
looking at her, but his thoughts were far away.... Irina perceived it.

‘Well, that is excellent,’ she said aloud; ‘now my conscience is at rest
then, and I can satisfy my curiosity.’

‘Curiosity,’ repeated Litvinov, as though puzzled.

‘Yes, yes ... I want above all things to know what you have been doing
all this time, what plans you have; I want to know all, how, what, when
... all, all. And you will have to tell me the truth, for I must warn
you, I have not lost sight of you ... so far as I could.’

‘You did not lose sight of me, you ... there ... in Petersburg?’

‘In the midst of the splendour which surrounded me, as you expressed it
just now. Positively, yes, I did not. As for that splendour we will talk
about that again; but now you must tell me, you must tell me so much, at
such length, no one will disturb us. Ah, how delightful it will be,’
added Irina, gaily sitting down and arranging herself at her ease in an
armchair. ‘Come, begin.’

‘Before telling my story, I have to thank you,’ began Litvinov.

‘What for?’

‘For the bouquet of flowers, which made its appearance in my room.’

‘What bouquet? I know nothing about it.’

‘What?’

‘I tell you I know nothing about it.... But I am waiting.... I am
waiting for your story.... Ah, what a good fellow that Potugin is to
have brought you!’

Litvinov pricked up his ears.

‘Have you known this Mr. Potugin long?’ he queried.

‘Yes, a long while ... but tell me your story.’

‘And do you know him well?’

‘Oh, yes!’ Irina sighed. ‘There are special reasons.... You have heard,
of course, of Eliza Byelsky.... Who died, you know, the year before
last, such a dreadful death?... Ah, to be sure, I’d forgotten you don’t
know all our scandals.... It is well, it is well indeed, that you don’t
know them. _O quelle chance!_ at last, at last, a man, a live man, who
knows nothing of us! And to be able to talk Russian with him, bad
Russian of course, but still Russian, not that everlasting, mawkish,
sickening French patter of Petersburg.’

‘And Potugin, you say, was connected with--’

‘It’s very painful for me even to refer to it,’ Irina broke in. ‘Eliza
was my greatest friend at school, and afterwards in Petersburg we saw
each other continually. She confided all her secrets to me, she was very
unhappy, she suffered much. Potugin behaved splendidly in the affair,
with true chivalry. He sacrificed himself. It was only then I learnt to
appreciate him! But we have drifted away again. I am waiting for your
story, Grigory Mihalitch.’

‘But my story cannot interest you the least, Irina Pavlovna.’

‘That’s not your affair.’

‘Think, Irina Pavlovna, we have not seen each other for ten years, ten
whole years. How much water has flowed by since then.’

‘Not water only! not water only!’ she repeated with a peculiar bitter
expression; ‘that’s just why I want to hear what you are going to tell
me.’

‘And beside I really don’t know where to begin.’

‘At the beginning. From the very time when you ... when I went away to
Petersburg. You left Moscow then.... Do you know I have never been back
to Moscow since!’

‘Really?’

‘It was impossible at first; and afterwards when I was married----.’

‘Have you been married long?’

‘Four years.’

‘Have you no children?’

‘No,’ she answered drily.

Litvinov was silent for a little.

‘And did you go on living at that, what was his name, Count
Reisenbach’s, till your marriage?’

Irina looked steadily at him, as though she were trying to make up her
mind why he asked that question.

‘No,’ ... was her answer at last.

‘I suppose, your parents.... By the way, I haven’t asked after them. Are
they----’

‘They are both well.’

‘And living at Moscow as before?’

‘At Moscow as before.’

‘And your brothers and sisters?’

‘They are all right; I have provided for all of them.’

‘Ah!’ Litvinov glanced up from under his brows at Irina. ‘In reality,
Irina Pavlovna, it’s not I who ought to tell my story, but you, if
only----’ He suddenly felt embarrassed and stopped.

Irina raised her hands to her face and turned her wedding-ring round
upon her finger.

‘Well? I will not refuse,’ she assented at last. ‘Some day ...
perhaps.... But first you ... because, do you see, though I tried to
follow you up, I know scarcely anything of you; while of me ... well, of
me you have heard enough certainly. Haven’t you? I suppose you have
heard of me, tell me?’

‘You, Irina Pavlovna, occupied too conspicuous a place in the world, not
to be the subject of talk ... especially in the provinces, where I have
been and where every rumour is believed.’

‘And do you believe the rumours? And of what kind were the rumours?’

‘To tell the truth, Irina Pavlovna, such rumours very seldom reached me.
I have led a very solitary life.’

‘How so? why, you were in the Crimea, in the militia?’

‘You know that too?’

‘As you see. I tell you, you have been watched.’

Again Litvinov felt puzzled.

‘Why am I to tell you what you know without me?’ said Litvinov in an
undertone.

‘Why ... to do what I ask you. You see I ask you, Grigory Mihalitch.’

Litvinov bowed his head and began ... began in rather a confused fashion
to recount in rough outline to Irina his uninteresting adventures. He
often stopped and looked inquiringly at Irina, as though to ask whether
he had told enough. But she insistently demanded the continuation of his
narrative and pushing her hair back behind her ears, her elbows on the
arm of her chair, she seemed to be catching every word with strained
attention. Looking at her from one side and following the expression on
her face, any one might perhaps have imagined she did not hear what
Litvinov was saying at all, but was only deep in meditation.... But it
was not of Litvinov she was meditating, though he grew confused and red
under her persistent gaze. A whole life was rising up before her, a very
different one, not his life, but her own.

Litvinov did not finish his story, but stopped short under the influence
of an unpleasant sense of growing inner discomfort. This time Irina said
nothing to him, and did not urge him to go on, but pressing her open
hand to her eyes, as though she were tired, she leaned slowly back in
her chair, and remained motionless. Litvinov waited for a little; then,
reflecting that his visit had already lasted more than two hours, he was
stretching out his hand for his hat, when suddenly in an adjoining room
there was the sound of the rapid creak of thin kid boots, and preceded
by the same exquisite aristocratic perfume, there entered Valerian
Vladimirovitch Ratmirov.

Litvinov rose and interchanged bows with the good-looking general, while
Irina, with no sign of haste, took her hand from her face, and looking
coldly at her husband, remarked in French, ‘Ah! so you’ve come back! But
what time is it?’

‘Nearly four, _ma chère amie_, and you not dressed yet--the princess
will be expecting us,’ answered the general; and with an elegant bend of
his tightly-laced figure in Litvinov’s direction, he added with the
almost effeminate playfulness of intonation characteristic of him, ‘It’s
clear an agreeable visitor has made you forgetful of time.’

The reader will permit us at this point to give him some information
about General Ratmirov. His father was the natural ... what do you
suppose? You are not wrong--but we didn’t mean to say that ... the
natural son of an illustrious personage of the reign of Alexander I. and
of a pretty little French actress. The illustrious personage brought his
son forward in the world, but left him no fortune, and the son himself
(the father of our hero) had not time to grow rich; he died before he
had risen above the rank of a colonel in the police. A year before his
death he had married a handsome young widow who had happened to put
herself under his protection. His son by the widow, Valerian
Alexandrovitch, having got into the Corps of Pages by favour, attracted
the notice of the authorities, not so much by his success in the
sciences, as by his fine bearing, his fine manners, and his good
behaviour (though he had been exposed to all that pupils in the
government military schools were inevitably exposed to in former days)
and went into the Guards. His career was a brilliant one, thanks to the
discreet gaiety of his disposition, his skill in dancing, his excellent
seat on horseback when an orderly at reviews, and lastly, by a kind of
special trick of deferential familiarity with his superiors, of tender,
attentive almost clinging subservience, with a flavour of vague
liberalism, light as air.... This liberalism had not, however, prevented
him from flogging fifty peasants in a White Russian village, where he
had been sent to put down a riot. His personal appearance was most
prepossessing and singularly youthful-looking; smooth-faced and
rosy-checked, pliant and persistent, he made the most of his amazing
success with women; ladies of the highest rank and mature age simply
went out of their senses over him. Cautious from habit, silent from
motives of prudence, General Ratmirov moved constantly in the highest
society, like the busy bee gathering honey even from the least
attractive flowers--and without morals, without information of any kind,
but with the reputation of being good at business; with an insight into
men, and a ready comprehension of the exigencies of the moment, and
above all, a never-swerving desire for his own advantage, he saw at last
all paths lying open before him....

Litvinov smiled constrainedly, while Irina merely shrugged her
shoulders.

‘Well,’ she said in the same cold tone, ‘did you see the Count?’

‘To be sure I saw him. He told me to remember him to you.’

‘Ah! is he as imbecile as ever, that patron of yours?’

General Ratmirov made no reply. He only smiled to himself, as though
lenient to the over-hastiness of a woman’s judgment. With just such a
smile kindly-disposed grown-up people respond to the nonsensical whims
of children.

‘Yes,’ Irina went on, ‘the stupidity of your friend the Count is too
striking, even when one has seen a good deal of the world.’

‘You sent me to him yourself,’ muttered the general, and turning to
Litvinov he asked him in Russian, ‘Was he getting any benefit from the
Baden waters?’

‘I am in perfect health, I’m thankful to say,’ answered Litvinov.

‘That’s the greatest of blessings,’ pursued the general, with an affable
grimace; ‘and indeed one doesn’t, as a rule, come to Baden for the
waters; but the waters here are very effectual, _je veux dire,
efficaces_; and any one who suffers, as I do for instance, from a
nervous cough----’

Irina rose quickly. ‘We will see each other again, Grigory Mihalitch,
and I hope soon,’ she said in French, contemptuously cutting short her
husband’s speech, ‘but now I must go and dress. That old princess is
insufferable with her everlasting _parties de plaisir_, of which nothing
comes but boredom.’

‘You’re hard on every one to-day,’ muttered her husband, and he slipped
away into the next room.

Litvinov was turning towards the door.... Irina stopped him.

‘You have told me everything,’ she said, ‘but the chief thing you
concealed.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You are going to be married, I’m told?’

Litvinov blushed up to his ears.... As a fact, he had intentionally not
referred to Tanya; but he felt horribly vexed, first, that Irina knew
about his marriage, and, secondly, that she had, as it were, convicted
him of a desire to conceal it from her. He was completely at a loss
what to say, while Irina did not take her eyes off him.

‘Yes, I am going to be married,’ he said at last, and at once withdrew.

Ratmirov came back into the room.

‘Well, why aren’t you dressed?’ he asked.

‘You can go alone; my head aches.’

‘But the princess....’

Irina scanned her husband from head to foot in one look, turned her back
upon him, and went away to her boudoir.




XIII


Litvinov felt much annoyed with himself, as though he had lost money at
roulette, or failed to keep his word. An inward voice told him that
he--on the eve of marriage, a man of sober sense, not a boy--ought not
to have given way to the promptings of curiosity, nor the allurements of
recollection. ‘Much need there was to go!’ he reflected. ‘On her side
simply flirtation, whim, caprice.... She’s bored, she’s sick of
everything, she clutched at me ... as some one pampered with dainties
will suddenly long for black bread ... well, that’s natural enough....
But why did I go? Can I feel anything but contempt for her?’ This last
phrase he could not utter even in thought without an effort.... ‘Of
course, there’s no kind of danger, and never could be,’ he pursued his
reflections. ‘I know whom I have to deal with. But still one ought not
to play with fire.... I’ll never set my foot in her place again.’
Litvinov dared not, or could not as yet, confess to himself how
beautiful Irina had seemed to him, how powerfully she had worked upon
his feelings.

Again the day passed dully and drearily. At dinner, Litvinov chanced to
sit beside a majestic _belhomme_, with dyed moustaches, who said
nothing, and only panted and rolled his eyes ... but, being suddenly
taken with a hiccup, proved himself to be a fellow-countryman, by at
once exclaiming, with feeling, in Russian, ‘There, I said I ought not to
eat melons!’ In the evening, too, nothing happened to compensate for a
lost day; Bindasov, before Litvinov’s very eyes, won a sum four times
what he had borrowed from him, but, far from repaying his debt, he
positively glared in his face with a menacing air, as though he were
prepared to borrow more from him just because he had been a witness of
his winnings. The next morning he was again invaded by a host of his
compatriots; Litvinov got rid of them with difficulty, and setting off
to the mountains, he first came across Irina--he pretended not to
recognise her, and passed quickly by--and then Potugin. He was about to
begin a conversation with Potugin, but the latter did not respond to him
readily. He was leading by the hand a smartly dressed little girl, with
fluffy, almost white curls, large black eyes, and a pale, sickly little
face, with that peculiar peremptory and impatient expression
characteristic of spoiled children. Litvinov spent two hours in the
mountains, and then went back homewards along the Lichtenthaler
Allee.... A lady, sitting on a bench, with a blue veil over her face,
got up quickly, and came up to him.... He recognised Irina.

‘Why do you avoid me, Grigory Mihalitch?’ she said, in the unsteady
voice of one who is boiling over within.

Litvinov was taken aback. ‘I avoid you, Irina Pavlovna?’

‘Yes, you ... you----’

Irina seemed excited, almost angry.

‘You are mistaken, I assure you.’

‘No, I am not mistaken. Do you suppose this morning--when we met, I
mean--do you suppose I didn’t see that you knew me? Do you mean to say
you did not know me? Tell me.’

‘I really ... Irina Pavlovna----’

‘Grigory Mihalitch, you’re a straightforward man, you have always told
the truth; tell me, tell me, you knew me, didn’t you? you turned away on
purpose?’

Litvinov glanced at Irina. Her eyes shone with a strange light, while
her cheeks and lips were of a deathly pallor under the thick net of her
veil. In the expression of her face, in the very sound of her abruptly
jerked-out whisper, there was something so irresistibly mournful,
beseeching ... Litvinov could not pretend any longer.

‘Yes ... I knew you,’ he uttered not without effort.

Irina slowly shuddered, and slowly dropped her hands.

‘Why did you not come up to me?’ she whispered.

‘Why ... why!’ Litvinov moved on one side, away from the path, Irina
followed him in silence. ‘Why?’ he repeated once more, and suddenly his
face was aflame, and he felt his chest and throat choking with a passion
akin to hatred. ‘You ... you ask such a question, after all that has
passed between us? Not now, of course, not now; but there ... there ...
in Moscow.’

‘But, you know, we decided; you know, you promised----’ Irina was
beginning.

‘I have promised nothing! Pardon the harshness of my expressions, but
you ask for the truth--so think for yourself: to what but a
caprice--incomprehensible, I confess, to me--to what but a desire to try
how much power you still have over me, can I attribute your ... I don’t
know what to call it ... your persistence? Our paths have lain so far
apart! I have forgotten it all, I’ve lived through all that suffering
long ago, I’ve become a different man completely; you are
married--happy, at least, in appearance--you fill an envied position in
the world; what’s the object, what’s the use of our meeting? What am I
to you? what are you to me? We cannot even understand each other now;
there is absolutely nothing in common between us now, neither in the
past nor in the present! Especially ... especially in the past!’

Litvinov uttered all this speech hurriedly, jerkily, without turning his
head. Irina did not stir, except from time to time she faintly stretched
her hands out to him. It seemed as though she were beseeching him to
stop and listen to her, while, at his last words, she slightly bit her
lower lip, as though to master the pain of a sharp, rapid wound.

‘Grigory Mihalitch,’ she began at last, in a calmer voice; and she moved
still further away from the path, along which people from time to time
passed.

Litvinov in his turn followed her.

‘Grigory Mihalitch, believe me, if I could imagine I had one
hair’s-breadth of power over you left, I would be the first to avoid
you. If I have not done so, if I made up my mind, in spite of my ... of
the wrong I did you in the past, to renew my acquaintance with you, it
was because ... because----’

‘Because what?’ asked Litvinov, almost rudely.

‘Because,’ Irina declared with sudden force--‘it’s too insufferable, too
unbearably stifling for me in society, in the envied position you talk
about; because meeting you, a live man, after all these dead
puppets--you have seen samples of them three days ago, there _au Vieux
Château_,--I rejoice over you as an oasis in the desert, while you
suspect me of flirting, and despise me and repulse me on the ground that
I wronged you--as indeed I did--but far more myself!’

‘You chose your lot yourself, Irina Pavlovna,’ Litvinov rejoined
sullenly, as before not turning his head.

‘I chose it myself, yes ... and I don’t complain, I have no right to
complain,’ said Irina hurriedly; she seemed to derive a secret
consolation from Litvinov’s very harshness. ‘I know that you must think
ill of me, and I won’t justify myself; I only want to explain my feeling
to you, I want to convince you I am in no flirting humour now.... Me
flirting with you! Why, there is no sense in it.... When I saw you, all
that was good, that was young in me, revived ... that time when I had
not yet chosen my lot, everything that lies behind in that streak of
brightness behind those ten years....’

‘Come, really, Irina Pavlovna! So far as I am aware, the brightness in
your life began precisely with the time we separated....’

Irina put her handkerchief to her lips.

‘That’s very cruel, what you say, Grigory Mihalitch; but I can’t feel
angry with you. Oh, no, that was not a bright time, it was not for
happiness I left Moscow; I have known not one moment, not one instant of
happiness ... believe me, whatever you have been told. If I were happy,
could I talk to you as I am talking now.... I repeat to you, you don’t
know what these people are.... Why, they understand nothing, feel for
nothing; they’ve no intelligence even, _ni esprit ni intelligence_,
nothing but tact and cunning; why, in reality, music and poetry and art
are all equally remote from them.... You will say that I was rather
indifferent to all that myself; but not to the same degree, Grigory
Mihalitch ... not to the same degree! It’s not a woman of the world
before you now, you need only look at me--not a society queen.... That’s
what they call us, I believe ... but a poor, poor creature, really
deserving of pity. Don’t wonder at my words.... I am beyond feeling
pride now! I hold out my hand to you as a beggar, will you understand,
just as a beggar.... I ask for charity,’ she added suddenly, in an
involuntary, irrepressible outburst, ‘I ask for charity, and you----’

Her voice broke. Litvinov raised his head and looked at Irina; her
breathing came quickly, her lips were quivering. Suddenly his heart beat
fast, and the feeling of hatred vanished.

‘You say that our paths have lain apart,’ Irina went on. ‘I know you are
about to marry from inclination, you have a plan laid out for your whole
life; yes, that’s all so, but we have not become strangers to one
another, Grigory Mihalitch; we can still understand each other. Or do
you imagine I have grown altogether dull--altogether debased in the
mire? Ah, no, don’t think that, please! Let me open my heart, I beseech
you--there--even for the sake of those old days, if you are not willing
to forget them. Do so, that our meeting may not have come to pass in
vain; that would be too bitter; it would not last long in any case.... I
don’t know how to say it properly, but you will understand me, because I
ask for little, so little ... only a little sympathy, only that you
should not repulse me, that you should let me open my heart----’

Irina ceased speaking, there were tears in her voice. She sighed, and
timidly, with a kind of furtive, searching look, gazed at Litvinov, held
out her hand to him....

Litvinov slowly took the hand and faintly pressed it.

‘Let us be friends,’ whispered Irina.

‘Friends,’ repeated Litvinov dreamily.

‘Yes, friends ... or if that is too much to ask, then let us at least be
friendly.... Let us be simply as though nothing had happened.’

‘As though nothing had happened,...’ repeated Litvinov again. ‘You said
just now, Irina Pavlovna, that I was unwilling to forget the old
days.... But what if I can’t forget them?’

A blissful smile flashed over Irina’s face, and at once disappeared, to
be replaced by a harassed, almost scared expression.

‘Be like me, Grigory Mihalitch, remember only what was good in them; and
most of all, give me your word.... Your word of honour....’

‘Well?’

‘Not to avoid me ... not to hurt me for nothing. You promise? tell me!’

‘Yes.’

‘And you will dismiss all evil thoughts of me from your mind.’

‘Yes ... but as for understanding you--I give it up.’

‘There’s no need of that ... wait a little, though, you will understand.
But you will promise?’

‘I have said yes already.’

‘Thanks. You see I am used to believe you. I shall expect you to-day,
to-morrow, I will not go out of the house. And now I must leave you. The
Grand Duchess is coming along the avenue.... She’s caught sight of me,
and I can’t avoid going up to speak to her.... Good-bye till we meet....
Give me your hand, _vite, vite_. Till we meet.’

And warmly pressing Litvinov’s hand, Irina walked towards a middle-aged
person of dignified appearance, who was coming slowly along the gravel
path, escorted by two other ladies, and a strikingly handsome groom in
livery.

‘_Eh bonjour, chère Madame_,’ said the personage, while Irina curtseyed
respectfully to her. ‘_Comment allez-vous aujourd’hui? Venez un peu avec
moi._’

‘_Votre Altesse a trop de bonté_,’ Irina’s insinuating voice was heard
in reply.




XIV


Litvinov let the Grand Duchess and all her suite get out of sight, and
then he too went along the avenue. He could not make up his mind clearly
what he was feeling; he was conscious both of shame and dread, while his
vanity was flattered.... The unexpected explanation with Irina had taken
him utterly by surprise; her rapid burning words had passed over him
like a thunder-storm. ‘Queer creatures these society women,’ he thought;
‘there’s no consistency in them ... and how perverted they are by the
surroundings in which they go on living, while they’re conscious of its
hideousness themselves!’... In reality he was not thinking this at all,
but only mechanically repeating these hackneyed phrases, as though he
were trying to ward off other more painful thoughts. He felt that he
must not think seriously just now, that he would probably have to blame
himself, and he moved with lagging steps, almost forcing himself to pay
attention to everything that happened to meet him.... He suddenly found
himself before a seat, caught sight of some one’s legs in front of it,
and looked upwards from them.... The legs belonged to a man, sitting on
the seat, and reading a newspaper; this man turned out to be Potugin.
Litvinov uttered a faint exclamation. Potugin laid the paper down on his
knees, and looked attentively, without a smile, at Litvinov; and
Litvinov also attentively, and also without a smile, looked at Potugin.

‘May I sit by you?’ he asked at last.

‘By all means, I shall be delighted. Only I warn you, if you want to
have a talk with me, you mustn’t be offended with me--I’m in a most
misanthropic humour just now, and I see everything in an exaggeratedly
repulsive light.’

‘That’s no matter, Sozont Ivanitch,’ responded Litvinov, sinking down on
the seat, ‘indeed it’s particularly appropriate.... But why has such a
mood come over you?’

‘I ought not by rights to be ill-humoured,’ began Potugin. ‘I’ve just
read in the paper a project for judicial reforms in Russia, and I see
with genuine pleasure that we’ve got some sense at last, and they’re not
as usual on the pretext of independence, nationalism, or originality,
proposing to tack a little home-made tag of our own on to the clear
straightforward logic of Europe; but are taking what’s good from abroad
intact. A single adaptation in its application to the peasants’ sphere
is enough.... There’s no doing away with communal ownership!...
Certainly, certainly, I ought not to be ill-humoured; but to my
misfortune I chanced upon a Russian “rough diamond,” and had a talk with
him, and these rough diamonds, these self-educated geniuses, would make
me turn in my grave!’

‘What do you mean by a rough diamond?’ asked Litvinov.

‘Why, there’s a gentleman disporting himself here, who imagines he’s a
musical genius. “I have done nothing, of course,” he’ll tell you. “I’m a
cipher, because I’ve had no training, but I’ve incomparably more melody
and more ideas in me than in Meyerbeer.” In the first place, I say: why
have you had no training? and secondly, that, not to talk of Meyerbeer,
the humblest German flute-player, modestly blowing his part in the
humblest German orchestra, has twenty times as many ideas as all our
untaught geniuses; only the flute-player keeps his ideas to himself, and
doesn’t trot them out with a flourish in the land of Mozarts and Haydns;
while our friend the rough diamond has only to strum some little waltz
or song, and at once you see him with his hands in his trouser pocket
and a sneer of contempt on his lips: I’m a genius, he says. And in
painting it’s just the same, and in everything else. Oh, these natural
geniuses, how I hate them! As if every one didn’t know that it’s only
where there’s no real science fully assimilated, and no real art, that
there’s this flaunting affectation of them. Surely it’s time to have
done with this flaunting, this vulgar twaddle, together with all
hackneyed phrases such as “no one ever dies of hunger in Russia,”
“nowhere is there such fast travelling as in Russia,” “we Russians could
bury all our enemies under our hats.” I’m for ever hearing of the
richness of the Russian nature, their unerring instinct, and of
Kulibin.... But what is this richness, after all, gentlemen?
Half-awakened mutterings or else half-animal sagacity. Instinct, indeed!
A fine boast. Take an ant in a forest and set it down a mile from its
ant-hill, it will find its way home; man can do nothing like it; but
what of it? do you suppose he’s inferior to the ant? Instinct, be it
ever so unerring, is unworthy of man; sense, simple, straightforward,
common sense--that’s our heritage, our pride; sense won’t perform any
such tricks, but it’s that that everything rests upon. As for Kulibin,
who without any knowledge of mechanics succeeded in making some very
bad watches, why, I’d have those watches set up in the pillory, and
say: see, good people, this is the way _not_ to do it. Kulibin’s not to
blame for it, but his work’s rubbish. To admire Telushkin’s boldness and
cleverness because he climbed on to the Admiralty spire is well enough;
why not admire him? But there’s no need to shout that he’s made the
German architects look foolish, that they’re no good, except at making
money.... He’s not made them look foolish in the least; they had to put
a scaffolding round the spire afterwards, and repair it in the usual
way. For mercy’s sake, never encourage the idea in Russia that anything
can be done without training. No; you may have the brain of a Solomon,
but you must study, study from the A B C. Or else hold your tongue, and
sit still, and be humble! Phoo! it makes one hot all over!’

Potugin took off his hat and began fanning himself with his
handkerchief.

‘Russian art,’ he began again. ‘Russian art, indeed!... Russian
impudence and conceit, I know, and Russian feebleness too, but Russian
art, begging your pardon, I’ve never come across. For twenty years on
end they’ve been doing homage to that bloated nonentity Bryullov, and
fancying that we have founded a school of our own, and even that it will
be better than all others.... Russian art, ha, ha, ha! ho, ho!’

‘Excuse me, though, Sozont Ivanitch,’ remarked Litvinov, ‘would you
refuse to recognise Glinka too, then?’

Potugin scratched his head.

‘The exception, you know, only proves the rule, but even in that
instance we could not dispense with bragging. If we’d said, for example,
that Glinka was really a remarkable musician, who was only prevented by
circumstances--outer and inner--from becoming the founder of the Russian
opera, none would have disputed it; but no, that was too much to expect!
They must at once raise him to the dignity of commander-in-chief, of
grand-marshal, in the musical world, and disparage other nations while
they were about it; they have nothing to compare with him, they declare,
then quote you some marvellous home-bred genius whose compositions are
nothing but a poor imitation of second-rate foreign composers, yes,
second-rate ones, for they’re the easiest to imitate. Nothing to compare
with him? Oh, poor benighted barbarians, for whom standards in art are
non-existent, and artists are something of the same species as the
strong man Rappo: there’s a foreign prodigy, they say, can lift fifteen
stone in one hand, but our man can lift thirty! Nothing to compare with
us, indeed! I will venture to tell you some thing I remember, and can’t
get out of my head. Last spring I visited the Crystal Palace near
London; in that Palace, as you’re aware, there’s a sort of exhibition of
everything that has been devised by the ingenuity of man--an
encyclopædia of humanity one might call it. Well, I walked to and fro
among the machines and implements and statues of great men; and all the
while I thought, if it were decreed that some nation or other should
disappear from the face of the earth, and with it everything that nation
had invented, should disappear from the Crystal Palace, our dear mother,
Holy Russia, could go and hide herself in the lower regions, without
disarranging a single nail in the place: everything might remain
undisturbed where it is; for even the _samovar_, the woven bast shoes,
the yoke-bridle, and the knout--these are our famous products--were not
invented by us. One could not carry out the same experiment on the
Sandwich islanders; those islanders have made some peculiar canoes and
javelins of their own; their absence would be noticed by visitors. It’s
a libel! it’s too severe, you say perhaps.... But I say, first, I don’t
know how to roar like any sucking dove; and secondly, it’s plain that
it’s not only the devil no one dares to look straight in the face, for
no one dares to look straight at himself, and it’s not only children who
like being soothed to sleep. Our older inventions came to us from the
East, our later ones we’ve borrowed, and half spoiled, from the West,
while we still persist in talking about the independence of Russian art!
Some bold spirits have even discovered an original Russian science;
twice two makes four with us as elsewhere, but the result’s obtained
more ingeniously, it appears.’

‘But wait a minute, Sozont Ivanitch,’ cried Litvinov. ‘Do wait a minute!
You know we send something to the universal exhibitions, and doesn’t
Europe import something from us.’

‘Yes, raw material, raw products. And note, my dear sir: this raw
produce of ours is generally only good by virtue of other exceedingly
bad conditions; our bristles, for instance, are large and strong,
because our pigs are poor; our hides are stout and thick because our
cows are thin; our tallow’s rich because it’s boiled down with half the
flesh.... But why am I enlarging on that to you, though; you are a
student of technology, to be sure, you must know all that better than I
do. They talk to me of our inventive faculty! The inventive faculty of
the Russians! Why our worthy farmers complain bitterly and suffer loss
because there’s no satisfactory machine for drying grain in existence,
to save them from the necessity of putting their sheaves in ovens, as
they did in the days of Rurik; these ovens are fearfully wasteful--just
as our bast shoes and our Russian mats are,--and they are constantly
getting on fire. The farmers complain, but still there’s no sign of a
drying-machine. And why is there none? Because the German farmer doesn’t
need them; he can thrash his wheat as it is, so he doesn’t bother to
invent one, and we ... are not capable of doing it! Not capable--and
that’s all about it! Try as we may! From this day forward I declare
whenever I come across one of those rough diamonds, these self-taught
geniuses, I shall say: “Stop a minute, my worthy friend! Where’s that
drying-machine? let’s have it!” But that’s beyond them! Picking up some
old cast-off shoe, dropped ages ago by St. Simon or Fourier, and
sticking it on our heads and treating it as a sacred relic--that’s what
we’re capable of; or scribbling an article on the historical and
contemporary significance of the proletariat in the principal towns of
France--that we can do too; but I tried once, asking a writer and
political economist of that sort--rather like your friend, Mr.
Voroshilov--to mention twenty towns in France, and what do you think
came of that? Why the economist in despair at last mentioned
Mont-Fermeuil as one of the French towns, remembering it probably from
some novel of Paul de Kock’s. And that reminds me of the following
anecdote. I was one day strolling through a wood with a dog and a
gun----’

‘Are you a sportsman then?’ asked Litvinov.

‘I shoot a little. I was making my way to a swamp in search of snipe;
I’d been told of the swamp by other sportsmen. I saw sitting in a
clearing before a hut a timber merchant’s clerk, as fresh and smooth as
a peeled nut, he was sitting there, smiling away--what at, I can’t say.
So I asked him: “Whereabouts was the swamp, and were there many snipe in
it?” “To be sure, to be sure,” he sang out promptly, and with an
expression of face as though I’d given him a rouble; “the swamp’s
first-rate, I’m thankful to say; and as for all kinds of wild fowl,--my
goodness, they’re to be found there in wonderful plenty.” I set off, but
not only found no wild fowl, the swamp itself had been dry for a long
time. Now tell me, please, why is the Russian a liar? Why does the
political economist lie, and why the lie about the wild fowl too?’

Litvinov made no answer, but only sighed sympathetically.

‘But turn the conversation with the same political economist,’ pursued
Potugin, ‘on the most abstruse problems of social science, keeping to
theory, without facts...!--he takes flight like a bird, a perfect eagle.
I did once succeed, though, in catching one of those birds. I used a
pretty snare, though an obvious one, as you shall see if you please. I
was talking with one of our latter-day “new young men” about various
questions, as they call them. Well, he got very hot, as they always do.
Marriage among other things he attacked with really childish
exasperation. I brought forward one argument after another.... I might
as well have talked to a stone wall! I saw I should never get round him
like that. And then I had a happy thought! “Allow me to submit to you,”
I began,--one must always talk very respectfully to these “new young
men”--“I am really surprised at you, my dear sir; you are studying
natural science, and your attention has never up till now been caught by
the fact that all carnivorous and predatory animals--wild beasts and
birds--all who have to go out in search of prey, and to exert themselves
to obtain animal food for themselves and their young ... and I suppose
you would include man in the category of such animals?” “Of course, I
should,” said the “new young man,” “man is nothing but a carnivorous
animal.” “And predatory?” I added. “And predatory,” he declared. “Well
said,” I observed. “Well, then I am surprised you’ve never noticed that
such animals live in monogamy.” The “new young man” started. “How so?”
“Why, it is so. Think of the lion, the wolf, the fox, the vulture, the
kite; and, indeed, would you condescend to suggest how they could do
otherwise. It’s hard work enough for the two together to get a living
for their offspring.” My “new young man” grew thoughtful. “Well,” says
he, “in that case the animal is not a rule for man.” Thereupon I called
him an idealist, and wasn’t he hurt at that! He almost cried. I had to
comfort him by promising not to tell of him to his friends. To deserve
to be called an idealist is no laughing matter! The main point in which
our latter-day young people are out in their reckoning is this. They
fancy that the time for the old, obscure, underground work is over, that
it was all very well for their old-fashioned fathers to burrow like
moles, but that’s too humiliating a part for us, we will take action in
the light of day, we will take action.... Poor darlings! why your
children even won’t take action; and don’t you care to go back to
burrowing, burrowing underground again in the old tracks?’

A brief silence followed.

‘I am of opinion, my dear sir,’ began Potugin again, ‘that we are not
only indebted to civilisation for science, art, and law, but that even
the very feeling for beauty and poetry is developed and strengthened
under the influence of the same civilisation, and that the so-called
popular, simple, unconscious creation is twaddling and rubbishy. Even in
Homer there are traces of a refined and varied civilisation; love itself
is enriched by it. The Slavophils would cheerfully hang me for such a
heresy, if they were not such chicken-hearted creatures; but I will
stick up for my own ideas all the same; and however much they press
Madame Kohanovsky and “The swarm of bees at rest” upon me,--I can’t
stand the odour of that _triple extrait de mougik Russe_, as I don’t
belong to the highest society, which finds it absolutely necessary to
assure itself from time to time that it has not turned quite French, and
for whose exclusive benefit this literature _en cuir de Russie_ is
manufactured. Try reading the raciest, most “popular” passages from the
“Bees” to a common peasant--a real one; he’ll think you’re repeating him
a new spell against fever or drunkenness. I repeat, without civilisation
there’s not even poetry. If you want to get a clear idea of the poetic
ideal of the uncivilised Russian, you should turn up our ballads, our
legends. To say nothing of the fact that love is always presented as the
result of witchcraft, of sorcery, and produced by some philtre, to say
nothing of our so-called epic literature being the only one among all
the European and Asiatic literatures--the only one, observe, which does
not present any typical pair of lovers--unless you reckon Vanka-Tanka as
such; and of the Holy Russian knight always beginning his acquaintance
with his destined bride by beating her “most pitilessly” on her white
body, because “the race of women is puffed up”! all that I pass over;
but I should like to call your attention to the artistic form of the
young hero, the _jeune premier_, as he was depicted by the imagination
of the primitive, uncivilised Slav. Just fancy him a minute; the _jeune
premier_ enters; a cloak he has worked himself of sable, back-stitched
along every seam, a sash of seven-fold silk girt close about his
armpits, his fingers hidden a

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