"Boys!" cried Ba.s.sistoff suddenly, "do you see that willow at the corner? let"s see who can get to it first. One! two! three! and away!"
The boys set off at full speed to the willow. Ba.s.sistoff rushed after them.
"What a lout!" thought Pandalevsky, "he is spoiling those boys. A perfect peasant!"
And looking with satisfaction at his own neat and elegant figure, Konstantin Diomiditch struck his coat-sleeve twice with his open hand, pulled up his collar, and went on his way. When he had reached his own room, he put on an old dressing-gown and sat down with an anxious face to the piano.
II
Darya Mihailovna"s house was regarded as almost the first in the whole province. It was a huge stone mansion, built after designs of Rastrelli in the taste of last century, and in a commanding position on the summit of a hill, at whose base flowed one of the princ.i.p.al rivers of central Russia. Darya Mihailovna herself was a wealthy and distinguished lady, the widow of a privy councillor. Pandalevsky said of her, that she knew all Europe and all Europe knew her! However, Europe knew her very little; even at Petersburg she had not played a very prominent part; but on the other hand at Moscow every one knew her and visited her. She belonged to the highest society, and was spoken of as a rather eccentric woman, not wholly good-natured, but excessively clever. In her youth she had been very pretty. Poets had written verses to her, young men had been in love with her, distinguished men had paid her homage. But twenty-five or thirty years had pa.s.sed since those days and not a trace of her former charms remained. Every one who saw her now for the first time was impelled to ask himself, if this woman--skinny, sharp-nosed, and yellow-faced, though still not old in years--could once have been a beauty, if she was really the same woman who had been the inspiration of poets.... And every one marvelled inwardly at the mutability of earthly things. It is true that Pandalevsky discovered that Darya Mihailovna had preserved her magnificent eyes in a marvellous way; but we have seen that Pandalevsky also maintained that all Europe knew her.
Darya Mihailovna went every summer to her country place with her children (she had three: a daughter of seventeen, Natalya, and two sons of nine and ten years old). She kept open house in the country, that is, she received men, especially unmarried ones; provincial ladies she could not endure. But what of the treatment she received from those ladies in return?
Darya Mihailovna, according to them, was a haughty, immoral, and insufferable tyrant, and above all--she permitted herself such liberties in conversation, it was shocking! Darya Mihailovna certainly did not care to stand on ceremony in the country, and in the unconstrained frankness of her manners there was perceptible a slight shade of the contempt of the lioness of the capital for the petty and obscure creatures who surrounded her. She had a careless, and even a sarcastic manner with her own set; but the shade of contempt was not there.
By the way, reader, have you observed that a person who is exceptionally nonchalant with his inferiors, is never nonchalant with persons of a higher rank? Why is that? But such questions lead to nothing.
When Konstantin Diomiditch, having at last learnt by heart the _etude_ of Thalberg, went down from his bright and cheerful room to the drawing-room, he already found the whole household a.s.sembled. The salon was already beginning. The lady of the house was reposing on a wide couch, her feet gathered up under her, and a new French pamphlet in her hand; at the window behind a tambour frame, sat on one side the daughter of Darya Mihailovna, on the other, Mlle. Boncourt, the governess, a dry old maiden lady of sixty, with a false front of black curls under a parti-coloured cap and cotton wool in her ears; in the corner near the door was huddled Ba.s.sistoff reading a paper, near him were Petya and Vanya playing draughts, and leaning by the stove, his hands clasped behind his back, was a gentleman of low stature, with a swarthy face covered with bristling grey hair, and fiery black eyes--a certain African s.e.m.e.nitch Pigasov.
This Pigasov was a strange person. Full of acerbity against everything and every one--especially against women--he was railing from morning to night, sometimes very aptly, sometimes rather stupidly, but always with gusto. His ill-humour almost approached puerility; his laugh, the sound of his voice, his whole being seemed steeped in venom. Darya Mihailovna gave Pigasov a cordial reception; he amused her with his sallies. They were certainly absurd enough. He took delight in perpetual exaggeration.
For example, if he were told of any disaster, that a village had been struck by lightning, or that a mill had been carried away by floods, or that a peasant had cut his hand with an axe, he invariably asked with concentrated bitterness, "And what"s her name?" meaning, what is the name of the woman responsible for this calamity, for according to his convictions, a woman was the cause of every misfortune, if you only looked deep enough into the matter. He once threw himself on his knees before a lady he hardly knew at all, who had been effusive in her hospitality to him and began tearfully, but with wrath written on his face, to entreat her to have compa.s.sion on him, saying that he had done her no harm and never would come to see her for the future. Once a horse had bolted with one of Darya Mihailovna"s maids, thrown her into a ditch and almost killed her. From that time Pigasov never spoke of that horse except as the "good, good horse," and he even came to regard the hill and the ditch as specially picturesque spots. Pigasov had failed in life and had adopted this whimsical craze. He came of poor parents.
His father had filled various petty posts, and could scarcely read and write, and did not trouble himself about his son"s education; he fed and clothed him and nothing more. His mother spoiled him, but she died early. Pigasov educated himself, sent himself to the district school and then to the gymnasium, taught himself French, German, and even Latin, and, leaving the gymnasiums with an excellent certificate, went to Dorpat, where he maintained a perpetual struggle with poverty, but succeeded in completing his three years" course. Pigasov"s abilities did not rise above the level of mediocrity; patience and perseverance were his strong points, but the most powerful sentiment in him was ambition, the desire to get into good society, not to be inferior to others in spite of fortune. He had studied diligently and gone to the Dorpat University from ambition. Poverty exasperated him, and made him watchful and cunning. He expressed himself with originality; from his youth he had adopted a special kind of stinging and exasperated eloquence. His ideas did not rise above the common level; but his way of speaking made him seem not only a clever, but even a very clever, man. Having taken his degree as candidate, Pigasov decided to devote himself to the scholastic profession; he understood that in any other career he could not possibly be the equal of his a.s.sociates. He tried to select them from a higher rank and knew how to gain their good graces; even by flattery, though he was always abusing them. But to do this he had not, to speak plainly, enough raw material. Having educated himself through no love for study, Pigasov knew very little thoroughly. He broke down miserably in the public disputation, while another student who had shared the same room with him, and who was constantly the subject of his ridicule, a man of very limited ability who had received a careful and solid education, gained a complete triumph. Pigasov was infuriated by this failure, he threw all his books and ma.n.u.scripts into the fire and went into a government office. At first he did not get on badly, he made a fair official, not very active, extremely self-confident and bold, however; but he wanted to make his way more quickly, he made a false step, got into trouble, and was obliged to retire from the service. He spent three years on the property he had bought himself and suddenly married a wealthy half-educated woman who was captivated by his unceremonious and sarcastic manners. But Pigasov"s character had become so soured and irritable that family life was unendurable to him. After living with him a few years, his wife went off secretly to Moscow and sold her estate to an enterprising speculator; Pigasov had only just finished building a house on it. Utterly crushed by this last blow, Pigasov began a lawsuit with his wife, but gained nothing by it. After this he lived in solitude, and went to see his neighbours, whom he abused behind their backs and even to their faces, and who welcomed him with a kind of constrained half-laugh, though he did not inspire them with any serious dread. He never took a book in his hand. He had about a hundred serfs; his peasants were not badly off.
"Ah! _Constantin_," said Darya Mihailovna, when Pandalevsky came into the drawing-room, "is _Alexandrine_ coming?"
"Alexandra Pavlovna asked me to thank you, and they will be extremely delighted," replied Konstantin Diomiditch, bowing affably in all directions, and running his plump white hand with its triangular cut nails through his faultlessly arranged hair.
"And is Volintsev coming too?"
"Yes."
"So, according to you, African s.e.m.e.nitch," continued Darya Mihailovna, turning to Pigasov, "all young ladies are affected?"
Pigasov"s mouth twitched, and he plucked nervously at his elbow.
"I say," he began in a measured voice--in his most violent moods of exasperation he always spoke slowly and precisely. "I say that young ladies, in general--of present company, of course, I say nothing."
"But that does not prevent your thinking of them," put in Darya Mihailovna.
"I say nothing of them," repeated Pigasov. "All young ladies, in general, are affected to the most extreme point--affected in the expression of their feelings. If a young lady is frightened, for instance, or pleased with anything, or distressed, she is certain first to throw her person into some such elegant att.i.tude (and Pigasov threw his figure into an unbecoming pose and spread out his hands) and then she shrieks--ah! or she laughs or cries. I did once though (and here Pigasov smiled complacently) succeed in eliciting a genuine, unaffected expression of emotion from a remarkably affected young lady!"
"How did you do that?"
Pigasov"s eyes sparkled.
"I poked her in the side with an aspen stake, from behind. She did shriek, and I said to her, "Bravo, bravo! that"s the voice of nature, that was a genuine shriek! Always do like that for the future!""
Every one in the room laughed.
"What nonsense you talk, African s.e.m.e.nitch," cried Darya Mihailovna. "Am I to believe that you would poke a girl in the side with a stake!"
"Yes, indeed, with a stake, a very big stake, like those that are used in the defence of a fort."
"_Mais c"est un horreur ce que vous dites la, Monsieur_," cried Mlle.
Boncourt, looking angrily at the boys, who were in fits of laughter.
"Oh, you mustn"t believe him," said Darya Mihailovna. "Don"t you know him?"
But the offended French lady could not be pacified for a long while, and kept muttering something to herself.
"You need not believe me," continued Pigasov coolly, "but I a.s.sure you I told the simple truth. Who should know if not I? After that perhaps you won"t believe that our neighbour, Madame Tchepuz, Elena Antonovna, told me herself, mind _herself_, that she had murdered her nephew?"
"What an invention!"
"Wait a minute, wait a minute! Listen and judge for yourselves. Mind, I don"t want to slander her, I even like her as far as one can like a woman. She hasn"t a single book in her house except a calendar, and she can"t read except aloud, and that exercise throws her into a violent perspiration, and she complains then that her eyes feel bursting out of her head.... In short, she"s a capital woman, and her servant girls grow fat. Why should I slander her?"
"You see," observed Darya Mihailovna, "African s.e.m.e.nitch has got on his hobbyhorse, now he will not be off it to-night."
"My hobby! But women have three at least, which they are never off, except, perhaps, when they"re asleep."
"What three hobbies are those?"
"Reproof, reproach, recrimination."
"Do you know, African s.e.m.e.nitch," began Darya Mihailovna, "you cannot be so bitter against women for nothing. Some woman or other must have----"
"Done me an injury, you mean?" Pigasov interrupted.
Darya Mihailovna was rather embarra.s.sed; she remembered Pigasov"s unlucky marriage, and only nodded.
"One woman certainly did me an injury," said Pigasov, "though she was a good, very good one."
"Who was that?"
"My mother," said Pigasov, dropping his voice.
"Your mother? What injury could she have done you?"
"She brought me into the world."
Darya Mihailovna frowned.
"Our conversation," she said, "seems to have taken a gloomy turn.
_Constantin_, play us Thalberg"s new _etude_. I daresay the music will soothe African s.e.m.e.nitch. Orpheus soothed savage beasts."