Fifty-Two Stories

But Pavel Ilyich, who had not yet finished talking, embraced him and, forcing him to sit back down on the divan, swore he would not let him go without supper. And Meier again sat and listened, but now kept glancing at Rashevich in perplexity and apprehension, as if he were only now beginning to understand him. Red blotches appeared on his face. And when the maid finally came in and said that the young ladies invited them to supper, he sighed with relief and was the first to leave the study.

At the table in the next room sat Rashevich’s daughters, Zhenya and Iraida, twenty-four and twenty-two years old, both dark-eyed, very pale, of identical height. Zhenya with her hair down, and Iraida with a tall hairdo. Before eating they both drank a glass of bitter liqueur, looking as if they had drunk it accidentally, for the first time in their life, and they both became embarrassed and burst into laughter.

“Don’t be mischievous, girls,” said Rashevich.

Zhenya and Iraida spoke French with each other, and Russian with their father and the guest. Interrupting each other and mixing Russian with French, they quickly began telling how, in former years, they used to leave for boarding school precisely then, in August, and what a happy time it was. Now there was nowhere to go, and they had to live there in the country without leaving all summer and winter. What boredom!

“Don’t be mischievous, girls,” Rashevich repeated.

He wanted to talk himself. When others talked in his presence, he experienced a feeling similar to jealousy.

“So it goes, my dear fellow…,” he began again, looking affectionately at the magistrate. “In our kindness and simplicity, and also for fear of being suspected of backwardness, we fraternize, forgive me, with all sorts of trash, we preach brotherhood and equality with moneybags and tavernkeepers; but if we cared to think about it, we would see to what degree this kindness of ours is criminal. The result of it is that our civilization is hanging by a hair. My dear fellow! That to which our ancestors devoted centuries will be desecrated and destroyed today or tomorrow by these latter-day Huns…”

After supper they all went to the drawing room. Zhenya and Iraida lit the candles on the grand piano, prepared the scores…but their father went on talking, and there was no knowing when he would stop. They already looked with anguish and annoyance at their egoist-father, for whom the pleasure of babbling and showing off his intelligence was obviously more valuable and important than his daughters’ happiness. Meier was the only young man who frequented their house, frequented it—this they knew—for the sake of their sweet feminine company, but the irrepressible old man took him over and would not let him go even a step away.

“Just as the western knights repelled the attacks of the Mongols, so we, before it’s too late, should rally and attack our enemy with a united front,” Rashevich went on in a preacherly tone, raising his right arm. “Let me appear before the commoner not as Pavel Ilyich, but as the terrible and mighty Richard the Lionhearted. Let us cease all this delicacy with them—enough! Let us decide all together that as soon as a commoner comes near us, we will hurl words of contempt right in his mug: ‘Hands off! Know your place!’ Right in his mug!” Rashevich went on in ecstasy, jabbing in front of him with a bent finger. “In his mug! In his mug!”

“I can’t do it,” Meier said, looking away.

“Why not?” Rashevich asked briskly, looking forward to an interesting and prolonged argument. “Why not?”

“Because I’m a commoner myself.”

Having said that, Meier turned red, his neck even swelled, and tears even glistened in his eyes.

“My father was a simple worker,” he added in a rough, jerky voice, “but I see nothing wrong with it.”

Rashevich was terribly embarrassed, stunned, and, as if he had been caught redhanded, looked at Meier in perplexity, not knowing what to say. Zhenya and Iraida blushed and bent over their music; they were ashamed of their tactless father. A moment passed in silence, and the shame was becoming unbearable, when all at once—morbidly, stiffly, and inappropriately—words rang out in the air:

“Yes, I’m a commoner and proud of it.”

Then Meier, awkwardly stumbling into the furniture, took his leave and quickly went to the front hall, though the horses had not yet been brought.

“You’ll be driving in the dark tonight,” Rashevich muttered, going after him. “The moon rises late now.”

They both stood on the porch in the dark waiting for the horses to be brought. It was chilly.

“A star just fell…,” Meier said, wrapping himself in his coat.

“A lot of them fall in August.”

When the horses were brought, Rashevich looked attentively at the sky and said with a sigh:

“A phenomenon worthy of the pen of Flammarion…”³