Nonsense! nonsense! to - morrow it would all vanish and leave no trace…. But would she let him go to - morrow?
Yes…. All these question he put to himself, but the time was moving on to three o’clock, and he put on a black frockcoat and after a turn in the park, went in to the Polozovs!
* * * * *
He found in their drawing - room a secretary of the legation, a very tall light - haired German, with the profile of a horse, and his hair parted down the back of his head (at that time a new fashion), and … oh, wonder! whom besides? Von Dönhof, the very officer with whom he had fought a few days before! He had not the slightest expectation of meeting him there and could not help being taken aback. He greeted him, however.
‘Are you acquainted?’ asked Maria Nikolaevna who had not failed to notice Sanin’s embarrassment.
‘Yes … I have already had the honour,’ said Dönhof, and bending a little aside, in an undertone he added to Maria Nikolaevna, with a smile, ‘The very man … your compatriot … the Russian …’
‘Impossible!’ she exclaimed also in an undertone; she shook her finger at him, and at once began to bid good - bye both to him and the long secretary, who was, to judge by every symptom, head over ears in love with her; he positively gaped every time he looked at her. Dönhof promptly took leave with amiable docility, like a friend of the family who understands at half a word what is expected of him; the secretary showed signs of restiveness, but Maria Nikolaevna turned him out without any kind of ceremony.
‘Get along to your sovereign mistress,’ she said to him (there was at that time in Wiesbaden a certain princess di Monaco, who looked surprisingly like a cocotte of the poorer sort); ‘what do you want to stay with a plebeian like me for?’
‘Really, dear madam,’ protested the luckless secretary,’ all the princesses in the world….’
But Maria Nikolaevna was remorseless, and the secretary went away, parting and all.
Maria Nikolaevna was dressed that day very much ‘to her advantage,’ as our grandmothers used to say. She wore a pink glacé silk dress, with sleeves à la Fontange, and a big diamond in each ear. Her eyes sparkled as much as her diamonds; she seemed in a good humour and in high spirits.
She made Sanin sit beside her, and began talking to him about Paris, where she was intending to go in a few days, of how sick she was of Germans, how stupid they were when they tried to be clever, and how inappropriately clever sometimes when they were stupid; and suddenly, point - blank, as they say — à brûle pourpoint — asked him, was it true that he had fought a duel with the very officer who had been there just now, only a few days ago, on account of a lady?
‘How did you know that?’ muttered Sanin, dumfoundered.
‘The earth is full of rumours, Dimitri Pavlovitch; but anyway, I know you were quite right, perfectly right, and behaved like a knight. Tell me, was that lady your betrothed?’
Sanin slightly frowned …
‘There, I won’t, I won’t,’ Maria Nikolaevna hastened to say. ‘You don’t like it, forgive me, I won’t do it, don’t be angry!’ Polozov came in from the next room with a newspaper in his hand. ‘What do you want? Or is dinner ready?’
‘Dinner’ll be ready directly, but just see what I’ve read in the Northern Bee … Prince Gromoboy is dead.’
Maria Nikolaevna raised her head.
‘Ah! I wish him the joys of Paradise! He used,’ she turned to Sanin, ‘to fill all my rooms with camellias every February on my birthday, But it wasn’t worth spending the winter in Petersburg for that. He must have been over seventy, I should say?’ she said to her husband.
‘Yes, he was. They describe his funeral in the paper. All the court were present. And here’s a poem too, of Prince Kovrizhkin’s on the occasion.’
‘That’s nice!’
‘Shall I read them? The prince calls him the good man of wise counsel.’
‘No, don’t. The good man of wise counsel? He was simply the goodman of Tatiana Yurevna. Come to dinner. Life is for the living. Dimitri Pavlovitch, your arm.’
* * * * *
The dinner was, as on the day before, superb, and the meal was a very lively one. Maria Nikolaevna knew how to tell a story … a rare gift in a woman, and especially in a Russian one! She did not restrict herself in her expressions; her countrywomen received particularly severe treatment at her hands. Sanin was more than once set laughing by some bold and well - directed word. Above all, Maria Nikolaevna had no patience with hypocrisy, cant, and humbug. She discovered it almost everywhere. She, as it were, plumed herself on and boasted of the humble surroundings in which she had begun life. She told rather queer anecdotes of her relations in the days of her childhood, spoke of herself as quite as much of a clodhopper as Natalya Kirilovna Narishkin. It became apparent to Sanin that she had been through a great deal more in her time than the majority of women of her age.
Polozov ate meditatively, drank attentively, and only occasionally cast first on his wife, then on Sanin, his lightish, dim - looking, but, in reality, very keen eyes.
‘What a clever darling you are!’ cried Maria Nikolaevna, turning to him; ‘how well you carried out all my commissions in Frankfort! I could give you a kiss on your forehead for it, but you’re not very keen after kisses.’
‘I’m not,’ responded Polozov, and he cut a pine - apple with a silver knife.
Maria Nikolaevna looked at him and drummed with her fingers on the table. ‘So our bet’s on, isn’t it?’ she said significantly. ‘Yes, it’s on.’
‘All right. You’ll lose it.’
Polozov stuck out his chin. ‘Well, this time you mustn’t be too sanguine, Maria Nikolaevna, maybe you will lose.’
‘What is the bet? May I know?’ asked Sanin.
‘No … not now,’ answered Maria Nikolaevna, and she laughed.
It struck seven. The waiter announced that the carriage was ready.
Polozov saw his wife out, and at once waddled back to his easy - chair.
‘Mind now! Don’t forget the letter to the overseer,’ Maria Nikolaevna shouted to him from the hall.
‘I’ll write, don’t worry yourself. I’m a business - like person.’
XXXIX
In the year 1840, the theatre at Wiesbaden was a poor affair even externally, and its company, for affected and pitiful mediocrity, for studious and vulgar commonplaceness, not one hair’s - breadth above the level, which might be regarded up to now as the normal one in all German theatres, and which has been displayed in perfection lately by the company in Carlsruhe, under the ‘illustrious’ direction of Herr Devrient. At the back of the box taken for her ‘Serenity Madame von Polozov’ (how the waiter devised the means of getting it, God knows, he can hardly have really bribed the stadt - director!) was a little room, with sofas all round it; before she went into the box, Maria Nikolaevna asked Sanin to draw up the screen that shut the box off from the theatre.
‘I don’t want to be seen,’ she said, ‘or else they’ll be swarming round directly, you know.’ She made him sit down beside her with his back to the house so that the box seemed to be empty. The orchestra played the overture from the Marriage of Figaro. The curtain rose, the play began.
It was one of those numerous home - raised products in which well - read but talentless authors, in choice, but dead language, studiously and cautiously enunciated some ‘profound’ or ‘vital and palpitating’ idea, portrayed a so - called tragic conflict, and produced dulness … an Asiatic dulness, like Asiatic cholera. Maria Nikolaevna listened patiently to half an act, but when the first lover, discovering the treachery of his mistress (he was dressed in a cinnamon - coloured coat with ‘puffs’ and a plush collar, a striped waistcoat with mother - of - pearl buttons, green trousers with straps of varnished leather, and white chamois leather gloves), when this lover pressed both fists to his bosom, and poking his two elbows out at an acute angle, howled like a dog, Maria Nikolaevna could not stand it.
‘The humblest French actor in the humblest li
ttle provincial town acts better and more naturally than the highest German celebrity,’ she cried in indignation; and she moved away and sat down in the little room at the back. ‘Come here,’ she said to Sanin, patting the sofa beside her. ‘Let’s talk.’
Sanin obeyed.
Maria Nikolaevna glanced at him. ‘Ah, I see you’re as soft as silk! Your wife will have an easy time of it with you. That buffoon,’ she went on, pointing with her fan towards the howling actor (he was acting the part of a tutor), ‘reminded me of my young days; I, too, was in love with a teacher. It was my first … no, my second passion. The first time I fell in love with a young monk of the Don monastery. I was twelve years old. I only saw him on Sundays. He used to wear a short velvet cassock, smelt of lavender water, and as he made his way through the crowd with the censer, used to say to the ladies in French, “Pardon, excusez” but never lifted his eyes, and he had eyelashes like that!’ Maria Nikolaevna marked off with the nail of her middle finger quite half the length of the little finger and showed Sanin. ‘My tutor was called — Monsieur Gaston! I must tell you he was an awfully learned and very severe person, a Swiss, — and with such an energetic face! Whiskers black as pitch, a Greek profile, and lips that looked like cast iron! I was afraid of him! He was the only man I have ever been afraid of in my life. He was tutor to my brother, who died … was drowned. A gipsy woman has foretold a violent death for me too, but that’s all moonshine. I don’t believe in it. Only fancy Ippolit Sidoritch with a dagger!’
‘One may die from something else than a dagger,’ observed Sanin.
‘All that’s moonshine! Are you superstitious? I’m not a bit. What is to be, will be. Monsieur Gaston used to live in our house, in the room over my head. Sometimes I’d wake up at night and hear his footstep — he used to go to bed very late — and my heart would stand still with veneration, or some other feeling. My father could hardly read and write himself, but he gave us an excellent education. Do you know, I learnt Latin!’
‘You? learnt Latin?’
‘Yes; I did. Monsieur Gaston taught me. I read the Æneid with him.
It’s a dull thing, but there are fine passages. Do you remember when
Dido and Æneas are in the forest?…’
‘Yes, yes, I remember,’ Sanin answered hurriedly. He had long ago forgotten all his Latin, and had only very faint notions about the Æneid.
Maria Nikolaevna glanced at him, as her way was, a little from one side and looking upwards. ‘Don’t imagine, though, that I am very learned. Mercy on us! no; I’m not learned, and I’ve no talents of any sort. I scarcely know how to write … really; I can’t read aloud; nor play the piano, nor draw, nor sew — nothing! That’s what I am — there you have me!’
She threw out her hands. ‘I tell you all this,’ she said, ‘first, so as not to hear those fools (she pointed to the stage where at that instant the actor’s place was being filled by an actress, also howling, and also with her elbows projecting before her) and secondly, because I’m in your debt; you told me all about yourself yesterday.’
‘It was your pleasure to question me,’ observed Sanin.
Maria Nikolaevna suddenly turned to him. ‘And it’s not your pleasure to know just what sort of woman I am? I can’t wonder at it, though,’ she went on, leaning back again on the sofa cushions. ‘A man just going to be married, and for love, and after a duel…. What thoughts could he have for anything else?’
Maria Nikolaevna relapsed into dreamy silence, and began biting the handle of her fan with her big, but even, milkwhite teeth.
And Sanin felt mounting to his head again that intoxication which he had not been able to get rid of for the last two days.
The conversation between him and Maria Nikolaevna was carried on in an undertone, almost in a whisper, and this irritated and disturbed him the more….
When would it all end?
Weak people never put an end to things themselves — they always wait for the end.
Some one sneezed on the stage; this sneeze had been put into the play by the author as the ‘comic relief’ or ‘element’; there was certainly no other comic element in it; and the audience made the most of it; they laughed.
This laugh, too, jarred upon Sanin.
There were moments when he actually did not know whether he was furious or delighted, bored or amused. Oh, if Gemma could have seen him!
‘It’s really curious,’ Maria Nikolaevna began all at once. ‘A man informs one and in such a calm voice, “I am going to get married”; but no one calmly says to one, “I’m going to throw myself in the water.” And yet what difference is there? It’s curious, really.’
Annoyance got the upper hand of Sanin. ‘There’s a great difference, Maria Nikolaevna! It’s not dreadful at all to throw oneself in the water if one can swim; and besides … as to the strangeness of marriages, if you come to that …’
He stopped short abruptly and bit his tongue.
Maria Nikolaevna slapped her open hand with her fan.
‘Go on, Dimitri Pavlovitch, go on — I know what you were going to say. “If it comes to that, my dear madam, Maria Nikolaevna Polozov,” you were going to say, “anything more curious than your marriage it would be impossible to conceive…. I know your husband well, from a child!” That’s what you were going to say, you who can swim!’
‘Excuse me,’ Sanin was beginning….
‘Isn’t it the truth? Isn’t it the truth?’ Maria Nikolaevna pronounced insistently.
‘Come, look me in the face and tell me I was wrong!’
Sanin did not know what to do with his eyes. ‘Well, if you like; it’s the truth, if you absolutely insist upon it,’ he said at last.
Maria Nikolaevna shook her head. ‘Quite so, quite so. Well, and did you ask yourself, you who can swim, what could be the reason of such a strange … step on the part of a woman, not poor … and not a fool … and not ugly? All that does not interest you, perhaps, but no matter. I’ll tell you the reason not this minute, but directly the entr’acte is over. I am in continual uneasiness for fear some one should come in….’
Maria Nikolaevna had hardly uttered this last word when the outer door actually was half opened, and into the box was thrust a head — red, oily, perspiring, still young, but toothless; with sleek long hair, a pendent nose, huge ears like a bat’s, with gold spectacles on inquisitive dull eyes, and a pince - nez over the spectacles. The head looked round, saw Maria Nikolaevna, gave a nasty grin, nodded…. A scraggy neck craned in after it….
Maria Nikolaevna shook her handkerchief at it. ‘I’m not at home! Ich bin nicht zu Hause, Herr P….! Ich bin nicht zu Hause…. Ksh - sk! ksh - sh - sh!’
The head was disconcerted, gave a forced laugh, said with a sort of sob, in imitation of Liszt, at whose feet he had once reverently grovelled, ‘Sehr gut, sehr gut!’ and vanished.
‘What is that object?’ inquired Sanin.
‘Oh, a Wiesbaden critic. A literary man or a flunkey, as you like. He is in the pay of a local speculator here, and so is bound to praise everything and be ecstatic over every one, though for his part he is soaked through and through with the nastiest venom, to which he does not dare to give vent. I am afraid he’s an awful scandalmonger; he’ll run at once to tell every one I’m in the theatre. Well, what does it matter?’
The orchestra played through a waltz, the curtain floated up again….
The grimacing and whimpering began again on the stage.
‘Well,’ began Maria Nikolaevna, sinking again on to the sofa. ‘Since you are here and obliged to sit with me, instead of enjoying the society of your betrothed — don’t turn away your eyes and get cross — I understand you, and have promised already to let you go to the other end of the earth — but now hear my confession. Do you care to know what I like more than anything?’
‘Freedom,’ hazarded Sanin.
Maria Nikolaevna laid her hand on his hand.
‘Yes, Dimitri Pavlovitch,’ she said, and in her voice there was a note o
f something special, a sort of unmistakable sincerity and gravity, ‘freedom, more than all and before all. And don’t imagine I am boasting of this — there is nothing praiseworthy in it; only it’s so and always will be so with me to the day of my death. I suppose it must have been that I saw a great deal of slavery in my childhood and suffered enough from it. Yes, and Monsieur Gaston, my tutor, opened my eyes too. Now you can, perhaps, understand why I married Ippolit Sidoritch: with him I’m free, perfectly free as air, as the wind…. And I knew that before marriage; I knew that with him I should be a free Cossack!’
Maria Nikolaevna paused and flung her fan aside.
‘I will tell you one thing more; I have no distaste for reflection … it’s amusing, and indeed our brains are given us for that; but on the consequences of what I do I never reflect, and if I suffer I don’t pity myself — not a little bit; it’s not worth it. I have a favourite saying: Cela ne tire pas à conséquence, — I don’t know how to say that in Russian. And after all, what does tire à consequence? I shan’t be asked to give an account of myself here, you see — in this world; and up there (she pointed upwards with her finger), well, up there — let them manage as best they can. When they come to judge me up there, I shall not be I! Are you listening to me? Aren’t you bored?’
A Sportsman's Sketches: Works of Ivan Turgenev 1 Page 176