Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Penguin ed.)

by Leo Tolstoy

  The most striking feature of her face was the exceptional size of her prominent, hooded eyes, which made an odd but pleasing contrast to her small mouth. Her lips were shaped in such a way, and the look in her eyes was so grave, that her general expression was the kind from which you wouldn’t have expected a smile, so that when one did come it was all the more enchanting.

  Hoping not to be noticed, I slipped through the doorway into the salon, where I regarded it necessary to pace back and forth, pretending to be immersed in thought and quite unaware that company had arrived. When the guests were halfway through the salon I, as if coming to, bowed with a scrape of my foot and informed them that Grandmother was in the drawing room. Mme Valakhina, whose face I liked very much, especially since I saw in it a great resemblance to that of her daughter, Sonyechka, graciously nodded.

  Grandmother seemed to be very glad to see Sonyechka. She called her closer, set right a curl that had fallen onto her forehead and, looking carefully at her face, said, ‘Quelle charmante enfant!’49 Sonyechka smiled, blushed and became so sweet that watching her made me blush too.

  ‘I hope that you won’t be bored in my home, my little friend,’ Grandmother said, lifting Sonyechka’s little face by the chin. ‘Please enjoy yourself and dance as much as you like. Now we have one lady and two cavaliers,’ she added, addressing Mme Valakhina and stretching out her hand to me.

  That intimate association gave me so much pleasure that I blushed again.

  Sensing that my shyness was increasing, and hearing the clatter of another carriage, I considered it best to withdraw. In the entry room I found Princess Kornakova with her son and an improbable quantity of daughters. The daughters all looked alike: they resembled the princess and were homely, and therefore not one of them caught your eye. As they took off their pelerines and foxtails, they all started to talk at once in high-pitched little voices and to bustle about and laugh at something – no doubt at the fact that there were so many of them. Étienne was a boy of about fifteen, tall, stout, with a haggard face, sunken eyes with dark-blue circles under them and, for someone his age, enormous hands and feet. He was awkward and had a rough, unpleasant voice, but seemed very pleased with himself and was, according to my notions, precisely the sort of boy someone thrashed with a birch rod should be.

  We stood facing and examining each other without a word for quite some time. Then, after moving closer, presumably to kiss, we for some reason changed our minds upon looking each other again in the eye. After the dresses of his sisters had all rustled past, I asked him, in order to make conversation, if it hadn’t been crowded in the coach.

  ‘I have no idea,’ he carelessly replied. ‘You see, I never ride in the coach, because as soon as I get in I start to feel sick, and Mama knows that. Whenever we go out in the evening, I always sit on the box. It’s a lot more fun. You can see everything. Filipp lets me drive, and sometimes I take the whip. And sometimes, you know, I go like that! at those passing by,’ he added with an expressive gesture. ‘It’s excellent!’

  ‘Your highness,’ said a footman, coming into the entry room, ‘Filipp wants to know where you were kind enough to put the whip.’

  ‘What do you mean, where did I put it? I gave it to him.’

  ‘He says that you didn’t.’

  ‘Well, then I hung it on the lantern.’

  ‘Filipp says that it isn’t on the lantern either, and that it would be better for you to say that you took it and lost it, or else Filipp will have to pay for your prank out of his own pocket,’ the irritated footman said, becoming increasingly exercised.

  The footman, who seemed to be a dour, respectable man, was warmly taking Filipp’s side and meant to get to the bottom of it, whatever the cost. From an involuntary sense of tact, I moved off to the side as if I hadn’t noticed anything, but the other footmen who were present reacted quite differently: they moved closer, looking at the old servant with approval.

  ‘Well, if I lost it, then I lost it,’ Étienne said, avoiding further explanation. ‘Whatever the whip costs I’ll pay. It’s hilarious!’ he added, coming over to me and pulling me into the drawing room.

  ‘No, permit me, master, but with what will you pay? I know how you pay. You’ve been saying for eight months that you’ll pay back Marya Vasilyevna two kopeks, and in my own case it’s been well over a year, and Petrushka –’

  ‘Silence, you!’ the young prince shouted, livid with rage. ‘See if I don’t tell everything!’

  ‘I’ll tell everything! I’ll tell everything!’ the footman muttered. ‘It’s not good, your highness!’ he added with particular emphasis as we were entering the salon, and then he left to put the pelerines away in the bin.

  ‘Quite right!’ an approving voice was heard behind us in the entry room.

  Grandmother had a special knack for using the second-person singular and plural pronouns with a certain tone of voice in certain situations to express her view of people. Her use of ‘thou’ and ‘you’ inverted the generally accepted practice, with their nuances acquiring a completely different meaning on her lips. When the young prince came over to her, she said several words to him, addressed him as ‘you’, and gazed at him with such disdain that had I been in his place, I would have been utterly crushed. But Étienne was clearly not a boy of that ‘make-up’. He ignored not only Grandmother’s reception of him, but even her entire person and bowed instead to the whole company, if not gracefully then with complete nonchalance. It was Sonyechka, however, who occupied my full attention. I remember that when Volodya, Étienne and I were talking in the salon in a place where Sonyechka could be seen and could see and hear us, I talked with pleasure, and whenever I produced what to my mind was an amusing or spirited mot, I said it louder and glanced around at the door to the drawing room. But when we went off to a different part where we could be neither seen nor heard from the drawing room, I was silent and took no more pleasure in the conversation.

  The drawing room and salon gradually filled up with guests. Among them, as always at children’s parties, were several older children, who didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to dance and enjoy themselves, but were taking part as if the only reason they were doing so was to please the hostess.

  When the Ivins arrived, instead of the pleasure I usually experienced on seeing Seryozha, I felt a kind of strange vexation at the fact that he would see Sonyechka and that she would see him.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Before the Mazurka

  ‘Well, it looks like you’re going to have dancing,’ Seryozha said, coming out of the drawing room and taking a new pair of kid gloves out of his pocket. ‘I’ll have to put my gloves on.’

  ‘How can it be that we have no gloves?’ I thought. ‘I had better go upstairs and find some.’

  Yet even though I dug around in all the chests, I found only our green travelling mittens in one, and in another a single kid glove that didn’t suit me at all, first because it was extraordinarily old and filthy, second because it was too big, but mainly because it had no middle finger, which had probably been cut off long before by Karl Ivanych for an injured hand. Nevertheless, I put on that relic of a glove and stared at the place on my finger that was always stained with ink.

  ‘If Natalya Savishna were here, she would surely have found some gloves among her things. I can’t go downstairs looking like this, for if someone should ask me why I’m not dancing, what would I say? And I can’t stay here either, since I’ll certainly be missed. What shall I do?’ I said to myself, throwing my hands up.

  ‘What are you doing up here?’ asked Volodya, running in. ‘Go engage a partner. It’s about to start.’

  ‘Volodya,’ I said in a voice verging on despair as I showed him my hand with two fingers sticking out of the filthy glove. ‘Volodya, you didn’t think of it either!’

  ‘Think of what?’ he asked impatiently. ‘Oh! Gloves,’ he added with complete indifference as he looked at my hand. ‘No
, I certainly didn’t. We’ll have to see what Grandmother says.’ And without giving it another thought, he ran downstairs.

  The calmness of his response to a situation that had seemed so important to me put my mind at ease, and I hurried off to the drawing room, completely forgetting the misshapen glove on my left hand.

  Cautiously approaching Grandmother’s chair and lightly touching her mantle, I said to her in a whisper, ‘Grandmother! What are we to do? We have no gloves!’

  ‘What, my friend?’

  ‘We have no gloves,’ I repeated, moving closer and putting both hands on the arm of her chair.

  ‘What’s this?’ she said, suddenly grabbing my left wrist. ‘Voyez, ma chère,’ she continued, addressing Mme Valakhina. ‘Voyez comme ce jeune homme s’est fait élégant pour danser avec votre fille.’50

  Grandmother held on tightly to my wrist and looked with a serious but enquiring expression at everyone present, until the curiosity of all the guests was satisfied and the laughter was general.

  I would have been mortified if Seryozha had seen me then, cringing in embarrassment as I attempted in vain to pull my hand free, but I wasn’t at all embarrassed in front of Sonyechka, who was laughing so hard that her curls bounced up and down beside her flushed little face and there were tears in her eyes. I realized that her laughter was too loud and natural to be mocking. On the contrary, laughing together while looking at each other seemed to draw us closer. The episode with the glove, although it could have ended badly, had the benefit of putting me at ease in the circle that had always seemed the most intimidating – that of the drawing room – and I no longer felt the least shy in the salon.

  The suffering of the shy comes from uncertainty about the opinion others have of them, but once that opinion has been clearly expressed – whatever it may be – their suffering ends.

  How sweet Sonyechka Valakhina was as she danced the French quadrille across from me with the awkward young prince! How sweetly she smiled as she offered me her hand en chaîne! How sweetly her chestnut curls bounced in time, and how naïvely she did a jeté-assemblé with her tiny feet! In the fifth figure, when my partner ran over to the other side, and I, waiting for the beat, got ready for my solo, Sonyechka compressed her lips in a grave expression and looked away. But there was nothing to fear. I boldly performed the chassé en arrière and glissade, and when I came even with her, I playfully showed her the glove with my two fingers sticking out. She burst out laughing and minced even more sweetly across the parquet. I remember, too, how, when we were making a circle and had all taken each other by the hand, she dipped her head and, without removing her hand from mine, rubbed her little nose against her glove. I see everything right before my eyes as if it were now, and I hear the quadrille from the Danube Maiden,51 to the strains of which it all took place.

  Then came the second quadrille, which I had engaged to dance with Sonyechka. Taking my place beside her, I felt an extraordinary awkwardness and had absolutely no idea what to say to her. When my silence had gone on too long, I began to fear that she might take me for a dunce and resolved, whatever the cost, to set her straight on that account. ‘Vous êtes une habitante de Moscou?’ I asked her, and after her affirmative reply I continued, ‘Et moi, je n’ai encore jamais fréquenté la capitale,’ relying in particular on the effect of the verb fréquenter.52 I sensed, however, that although my beginning was quite splendid and completely demonstrated my lofty knowledge of the French language, continuing the conversation in that vein was beyond my ability. Our turn to dance wasn’t to come for a good while yet, and the silence returned. I looked at her in dismay, wanting to know what sort of impression I had made and hoping for help from her. ‘Where did you find such a hilarious glove?’ she asked all of a sudden, and that question gave me great pleasure and relief. I explained that the glove belonged to Karl Ivanych, even enlarging a little ironically on the person of Karl Ivanych himself, and how ridiculous he looked when he took off his red cap, and how he once fell off a horse into a puddle while wearing a green fur-trimmed overcoat and so on. The quadrille proceeded without our noticing it. It was all very fine, but why had I made fun of Karl Ivanych? Would I really have lost Sonyechka’s good opinion if I had described him with all the love and respect I actually felt?

  After the quadrille ended, Sonyechka said ‘Merci’ with such a sweet expression that it was as if I really had earned her gratitude. I was delighted and beside myself with happiness and no longer recognized myself: where had all that boldness, assurance and even audacity come from? ‘There isn’t anything that could frighten me now!’ I thought, as I walked unconcernedly about the salon. ‘I’m ready for anything!’

  Seryozha suggested that we be vis-à-vis.53 ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I don’t have a partner, but I’ll find one.’ A quick, resolute glance around the salon established that all the ladies were taken, except for one grown-up girl standing by the drawing-room door. A tall young man was walking towards her with the aim, I surmised, of asking her. He was two paces from her, while I was at the other end of the salon. Gracefully gliding across the parquet, I flew the entire distance separating her from me in the twinkling of an eye, and with a scrape of my foot asked her in a firm voice for the contredanse. The grown-up girl extended her hand to me with a patronizing smile, and the young man was left without a partner.

  I was so full of my own strength that I didn’t notice the young man’s chagrin, although I did learn afterwards that he had asked who that tousled boy was who had skipped past him and snatched a partner right from under his nose.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Mazurka

  The young man from whom I had stolen a partner for the contredanse was dancing the mazurka in the first couple. He leapt from his place, holding his partner by the hand and, instead of doing pas de Basques, as Mimi had taught us, he simply ran forward. Reaching the corner, he paused, spread his legs, stamped his heel, pivoted, and then with a skipping movement made another run.

  Since I had no partner for the mazurka, I sat behind Grandmother’s tall armchair and watched.

  ‘Why is he doing that?’ I wondered to myself. ‘That’s not at all what Mimi taught us. She assured us that everyone dances the mazurka on tiptoe, moving the feet in a smooth semicircle, but it turns out it isn’t danced that way at all! The Ivins and Étienne and the others are all dancing without doing pas de Basques, and our Volodya has adopted the new way too. It’s not bad! And isn’t Sonyechka a darling?! There she goes.’ I was having an extraordinarily good time.

  The mazurka was nearing its end. Several older men and ladies had come over to Grandmother to say goodnight before leaving. Carefully avoiding the dancers, the footmen were taking supper things to the rooms at the back. Grandmother was noticeably tired and spoke as if reluctantly, drawling her speech. The musicians were listlessly starting the same tune for the thirtieth time. The grown-up girl with whom I had danced caught sight of me as she was executing a figure, and with an arch smile – no doubt meant to please Grandmother – she led Sonyechka and one of the innumerable young princesses over to me. ‘Rose ou hortie?’54 she asked.

  ‘Ah, there you are!’ Grandmother said, turning around in her armchair. ‘Go on, my little friend, go on.’

  Although at that moment I felt more like hiding my head under Grandmother’s armchair than coming out from behind it, how could I refuse? I stood up and said ‘rose’ and glanced timidly at Sonyechka. Almost before I realized what was happening, I felt a white-gloved hand in mine, and the young princess set off ahead with a most pleasant smile, not at all suspecting that I had absolutely no idea what to do with my feet.

  I now knew that pas de Basques were inappropriate and out of place and could even put me completely to shame, but as the mazurka’s familiar strains acted on my hearing, they imparted a certain impetus to my auditory nerves, which in their turn transmitted movement to my feet. And the latter, quite involuntarily and to the astonishment of all who were wa
tching, began to execute the fatal smooth semicircular pas on tiptoe. As long as we proceeded in a straight line, that was all right, but at the turn I realized that if I didn’t do something, I would certainly pull ahead. In my attempt to avoid that dilemma, I paused, meaning to execute the same ‘caper’ the young man in the first couple had done so beautifully. But just as I was separating my legs and about to skip, the young princess, who was hurriedly circling me, looked down at my feet with an expression of dull curiosity and surprise. That look was the end of me. I was so flustered that instead of dancing, I stamped my feet in place in the strangest way, neither with the beat nor with anything else that made sense, finally coming to a complete stop. Everyone was staring at me, some with astonishment, some with curiosity, some with derision, some with compassion. Only Grandmother was completely indifferent.

  ‘Il ne fallait pas danser, si vous ne savez pas!’55 Papa’s angry voice said above my ear, and, lightly pushing me away, he took the hand of my partner, performed the tour with her in the old-fashioned way to the loud approval of the spectators, and returned her to her place. And with that the mazurka ended.