Fifty-Two Stories

“After traveling, you need a drink. I’m a woman, but I sometimes drink, too. Mitya and Kolya will have Malaga. It’s weak wine, don’t worry. What fine fellows, really! Fit to be married off.”

Olga Mikhailovna talked non-stop. She knew from experience that, in entertaining guests, it was much easier and more relaxing to talk than to listen. When you talk, there is no need to strain your attention, to invent answers to questions and change the expression of your face. But she had inadvertently asked a serious question, the student began to reply at length, and like it or not she had to listen. The student knew that she had once taken some courses, and therefore, in addressing her, he tried to seem serious.

“What are you studying?” she asked, forgetting that she had already asked this question.

“Medicine.”

Olga Mikhailovna remembered that she had not been with the ladies for a long time.

“Are you? Meaning you’re going to be a doctor?” she said, getting up. “That’s good. I’m sorry I didn’t take courses in medicine. So have your dinner here, gentlemen, and then come out to the garden. I’ll introduce you to the young ladies.”

As she went out, she glanced at her watch: it was five minutes to six. She was surprised that time passed so slowly and dreaded the thought that midnight, when the guests would leave, was still six hours away. How to kill those six hours? What phrases to speak? How to behave with her husband?

There was not a soul in the drawing room or on the terrace. All the guests had wandered off to the garden.

“I’ll have to offer them a stroll in the birch grove before tea, or a boat ride,” Olga Mikhailovna thought, hurrying to the croquet ground, where voices and laughter could be heard. “And the old ones can sit and play whist…”

The footman Grigory came walking towards her from the croquet ground carrying empty bottles.

“Where are the ladies?” she asked.

“In the raspberry patch. The master’s there, too.”

“Oh, my God!” someone shouted in exasperation on the croquet ground. “I’ve told you the same thing a thousand times! To know the Bulgars, you have to see them! You can’t judge by the newspapers!”

Owing to this shout, or to something else, Olga Mikhailovna suddenly felt a great weakness all through her body, especially in her legs and shoulders. She suddenly wanted not to speak, not to hear, not to move.

“Grigory,” she said wearily and with effort, “when you’re serving tea or whatever, please don’t address me, don’t ask, don’t speak about anything…Do everything yourself and…and don’t stamp your feet. I beg you…I can’t, because…”

She did not finish and walked off to the croquet ground, but on the way she remembered the ladies and turned to the raspberry patch. The sky, the air, and the trees were still overcast and promised rain; it was hot and sultry; huge flocks of crows, anticipating bad weather, circled cawing over the garden. The closer to the kitchen garden, the more overgrown, dark, and narrow were the pathways; in one of them, which was hiding in a thicket of wild pear trees, crabapples, young oaks, and hops, whole clouds of tiny black flies surrounded Olga Mikhailovna; she covered her face with her hands and forced herself to imagine the little person…In her mind’s eye flashed Grigory, Mitya, Kolya, the faces of the peasants who had come in the morning with congratulations…

She heard someone’s footsteps and opened her eyes. Her uncle Nikolai Nikolaich was quickly walking towards her.

“It’s you, dear? I’m very glad…,” he began breathlessly. “Just a couple of words…” He wiped his clean-shaven red chin with a handkerchief, then suddenly stepped back, clasped his hands, and rolled his eyes. “My dear, how long will this go on?” he said quickly, spluttering. “I ask you: where are the limits? I’m not even saying that his overbearing views demoralize the milieu, that he insults all that is best and most sacred in me and in any honest, thinking man—I’m not saying that, but let him at least be decent! What is it? He shouts, he roars, he minces, he acts like some sort of Bonaparte, won’t let anyone say a word…devil knows about him! Some sort of majestic gestures, generalissimo laughter, condescending tone! Allow me to ask: Who is he? I ask you: Who is he? His wife’s husband, a small landowning titular councillor, who had the luck to marry a rich girl! An upstart, a junker, like so many others! Shchedrin described the type!⁷ I swear to God, it’s one of two things: either he’s suffering from megalomania, or that imbecilic old rat, Count Alexei Petrovich, is right when he says that today’s children and young people take a long time growing up, and play at being cabbies or generalissimos till they’re forty years old!”

“That’s true, true…,” Olga Mikhailovna agreed. “Let me pass.”