“Gentlemen – here’s a good sign!” said one of the officers. “Our setter is running ahead of us all: that means he scents game!”
Leading the party was Lieutenant Lobytko, a tall, thick-set officer without the shadow of a moustache (he was over twenty-five, but his plump round face for some reason still showed no sign of a hair growth). He was renowned in the brigade for his sixth sense and ability to detect the presence of females at a distance. Now he turned back to his fellows and said:
“Yes, there must be women here. My instinct tells me so.”
The officers were greeted on the threshold by Von Rabbeck in person. He was a good-looking elderly man of about sixty, dressed in civilian clothes. He shook hands with all his guests, told them that he was delighted, very happy to see them, but begged them most sincerely in God’s name to forgive him for not asking them to stay the night. Two of his sisters with their children, and some brothers and some neighbours of his, were visiting, so there wasn’t a spare bed in the house.
The general shook everybody’s hand, and begged pardon, and smiled – but his face clearly showed that he was by no means as pleased to see his guests as last year’s count had been, and the only reason he had invited the officers was that he believed good manners demanded it. And the officers themselves, as they climbed the thickly carpeted stairs and listened to him talking, felt that the only reason they had been asked to this house was that the general felt he couldn’t get out of it. And when the officers saw the footmen hurrying to light the lamps downstairs by the entrance and upstairs in the hall, they began to feel that they had brought trouble and alarm into this home. If, as it seemed, there was some sort of family celebration going on, bringing in two sisters with their children, and some brothers and neighbours too, how could anybody want to be saddled with nineteen unknown officers?
Upstairs, at the entrance to the drawing room, the guests were greeted by a tall, graceful, elderly lady with dark eyebrows on a long face, bearing a marked resemblance to the Empress Eugénie. Smiling cordially and majestically, she said that she was happy and delighted to welcome her guests, and apologized for the fact that she and her husband were prevented from inviting the officers to stay the night with them on this occasion. Her attractive, majestic smile, which instantly vanished from her face whenever something caused her to turn away from her guests, made it clear that she had come across a great many officers in her day, and at present couldn’t be bothered with them, and that if she had invited them to her home and was now apologizing to them, that was because her breeding and social position demanded it.
The officers entered the great dining room to find a dozen ladies and gentlemen, old and young, sitting at one end of a long table drinking tea. Behind their chairs a group of men could be discerned through a haze of cigar smoke. One of them, a lanky young man with ginger side whiskers and a lisp, was standing talking about something very loudly in English. Through a doorway beyond this group, a bright room with pale-blue furnishings could be seen.
“Gentlemen, there are so many of you, I can’t possibly introduce you all!” the general announced loudly, trying to sound very light-hearted. “Please just make yourselves known to each other!”
The officers, some wearing very serious or even stern expressions, others with forced smiles, but all feeling extremely awkward, made their bows as best they could and sat down to drink tea.
The most uncomfortable of them all was Captain Ryabovich. He was a small, round-shouldered, bespectacled officer with whiskers like a lynx’s. While some of his comrades were putting on serious faces and others wore forced smiles, his own face with its lynx-like whiskers and spectacles seemed to say “I’m the shyest, most modest and colourless officer in the whole brigade!” At first, when he entered the dining room and then sat at tea, he couldn’t focus his attention on any single person or thing. The faces, the dresses, the cut-glass brandy decanters, the steam from the tea glasses, the moulded cornices – everything melted into a single overwhelming impression that filled him with alarm and made him long to hide his face. Like a man giving his first public reading in front of an audience, he could see everything that lay before his eyes, but found it difficult to make sense of what he saw (physiologists describe this state, in which the subject can see without understanding what he sees, as “psychical blindness”). After a short while, once he got used to his surroundings, Ryabovich began to understand what he was seeing, and set about observing it. As a shy, withdrawn person, he was immediately struck by a quality he himself had always lacked – the astonishing boldness of his new acquaintances. Von Rabbeck, his wife, two elderly ladies, a young girl in a lilac dress, and the young man with ginger side whiskers who turned out to be Von Rabbeck’s younger son, very cunningly disposed themselves among the officers – quite as if they had rehearsed the move – and immediately started up a heated argument; the guests were obliged to join in… The girl in lilac argued vehemently that artillerymen had a far easier life than men in the cavalry or infantry, while Von Rabbeck and the elderly ladies maintained the contrary. There was a heated exchange of views. Ryabovich watched the girl in lilac arguing with intense feeling about something quite remote and devoid of interest to her, and observed the insincere smiles appearing on her face and vanishing again.
Skilfully, Von Rabbeck and his family drew the officers into the argument, while themselves keeping a careful eye on their drinking glasses and their mouths to see if they were drinking up, and if they were enjoying it, and why such and such wasn’t eating any biscuits or drinking any brandy. And the longer Ryabovich watched and listened, the more he liked this insincere but beautifully disciplined family.
After tea the officers went through to the drawing room. Lobytko’s sixth sense hadn’t let him down: there were plenty of girls and young ladies there. The lieutenant himself, the “setter”, was already standing beside a very young blonde girl in a black dress. Bending forward in a dashing posture, as though leaning on an invisible sabre, he was smiling and gesturing flirtatiously with his shoulders. He must have been telling her something very boring and pointless, because she looked condescendingly at his plump face and said “Really?” in a voice devoid of interest. That bored “Really?” could have told the setter, had he been wiser, that he wasn’t likely to be told “Go fetch!”
The piano struck up; a melancholy waltz wafted out of the wide-open windows, and for some reason everybody was reminded that outside it was spring, a May evening. Everybody caught the scent of young poplar leaves, and roses, and lilac. Ryabovich, moved by the music and the brandy he had drunk, looked at the window out of the corner of his eye, smiled, watched the women moving around, and felt that the scent of roses, poplars and lilac was coming not from the garden but from the ladies’ faces and gowns.
Von Rabbeck’s son asked a skinny-looking girl to dance, and did a couple of turns round the room with her. Lobytko, gliding over the parquet floor, flew up to the girl in lilac and carried her off around the room. The dancing had started… Ryabovich stood near the door, among those who were not dancing, and watched. In all his life, he had never once danced; never in his life had he held his arm round the waist of a respectable woman.
He loved to see a man putting his arm round the waist of a girl he didn’t know, and offering her his shoulder to rest her hand, all in full view of everybody; but he was quite unable to imagine himself in that man’s situation. There had been a time when he envied his comrades their courage and quick-wittedness, and suffered spiritual agonies; the consciousness that he was shy, round-shouldered and colourless, with a long waist and whiskers like a lynx, used to make him deeply unhappy; but with the passing years he had got used to this feeling, and now, gazing at the people dancing or talking together in loud voices, he no longer felt envious. He just felt rather touched and sad.
When the quadrille started, young Von Rabbeck came up to the group of people who were not dancing and invited two officers to a game of billiards. The officers accepted and left the r
oom with him. With nothing else to do, Ryabovich wandered off after them, hoping to play some part at least in the evening’s activities. They went from the drawing room to the parlour, thence into a narrow glass-lined corridor, and from there into another room where the figures of three sleepy footmen leapt up from a sofa as soon as they appeared. Eventually, after passing through a whole series of rooms, young Von Rabbeck and the officers entered a small room with a billiard table. They began to play.
Ryabovich had never played any game but cards. He stood by the billiard table and watched the players without interest. They had unbuttoned their frock coats and were striding around, cues in hand, swapping puns and shouting out words he couldn’t understand. They took no notice of him, except that from time to time one of them would accidentally brush an elbow against him or jog him with a cue, then turn and say “Pardon!” Before the first frame was even over, Ryabovich was feeling bored, unwanted and in the way… He longed to be back in the drawing room, and walked out.
On his way back, he met with a little adventure. When he had got halfway he realized that he had taken a wrong turning. He clearly remembered that he was supposed to come across the figures of three sleepy footmen, but although he had passed through five or six rooms, these figures seemed to have vanished through the floor. As soon as he realized his mistake, he went back a bit, took a right turn, and found himself in a dimly lit little room he hadn’t seen on his way to the billiard room. He stood here for a moment, then tentatively opened the first door he could see and entered a room that was quite dark. Straight ahead was the crack of a doorway with bright light shining through, and the faint sounds of a melancholy mazurka being played beyond the door. As in the drawing room, the windows around him were wide open, bringing a scent of poplars, lilac and roses…
Ryabovich paused in thought… At that moment he was startled by the sound of scurrying footsteps and the rustle of a gown, and a female voice breathlessly whispered “At last!” A pair of soft, fragrant, unmistakably female arms were clasped round his neck, a warm cheek was pressed against his, and at the same moment there was the sound of a kiss. But straight away the giver of the kiss uttered a little shriek and, as it seemed to Ryabovich, recoiled from him in disgust. He too almost cried out, and ran towards the bright crack in the doorway…
When he reached the drawing room his heart was pounding and his hands trembling so visibly that he hastened to hide them behind his back. At first he was tormented by embarrassment, dreading that everyone in the room knew that he had just been embraced and kissed by a woman; he cringed and looked uneasily from side to side; but once he had reassured himself that everyone in the room was still happily dancing and chatting as before, he surrendered himself to a new sensation which he had never previously experienced in his life. Something strange was happening to him… His neck, so recently embraced by a pair of soft and fragrant arms, seemed to have been anointed with oil. His cheek, next to his left moustache, where the stranger had kissed him, tingled with a faint but pleasant chill, like mint drops, and the more he rubbed the place, the stronger he felt the chill. The whole of his body, from his head to his heels, was filled with a new and strange sensation, which was growing more and more intense… He felt like skipping about, talking, running out into the garden, laughing out loud… He forgot all about being round-shouldered and colourless, and having lynx-like whiskers and an “indefinite sort of look” (that was how his appearance had once been described, in a ladies’ conversation which he had happened to overhear). When Von Rabbeck’s wife walked past him, he gave her such a broad, friendly smile that she stopped and looked enquiringly at him.
“I absolutely love your home!” he told her, straightening his glasses.
The general’s wife smiled and said that the house had belonged to her father. Then she asked him whether his own parents were alive, and whether he had been long in the army, and why he was so thin, and so on… Having received replies to all her questions, she moved on, while his smile grew even friendlier after this conversation, and he began to think that he was surrounded by splendid people…
At dinner Ryabovich mechanically ate and drank everything he was offered, and heard nothing, as he tried to make sense of the adventure he had just had… This adventure had a mysterious and romantic feel to it, but explaining it was easy. No doubt one of the young girls or married ladies had arranged an assignation in that dark room, had been waiting there a long time, and in her nervous excitement had taken Ryabovich for her swain. That was all the more likely since Ryabovich, on his way through the darkened room, had paused in thought, so that he looked like a man who was also awaiting something… That was how Ryabovich accounted for the kiss he had received.
“But who is she?” he wondered, looking at the ladies’ faces. “She must be young, because elderly ladies don’t make assignations. And she’s a cultured person, you could tell that from the rustle of her dress, her scent, her voice…”
He rested his glance on the girl in lilac, and very much liked the look of her. She had beautiful shoulders and arms, an intelligent face and a lovely voice. Looking at her, Ryabovich wanted his stranger to have been her and no one else… But then she gave a kind of false laugh, and wrinkled her long nose which he thought made her look old. So he moved on to look at the blonde girl in black. She was younger, with a simpler and more sincere look, and she had a lovely forehead and was drinking very prettily out of her glass. Now Ryabovich wanted her to be the one. But soon he found that her face was too flat, and shifted his gaze to her neighbour…
“It’s hard to guess,” he said, musing. “If you just take the lilac one’s shoulders and arms, and add the blonde’s forehead, and take the eyes from the one on Lobytko’s left, then…”
He combined all these features together in his mind, and came up with an image of the girl who had kissed him. It was the image that he wanted, but he couldn’t manage to find it at the table…
After dinner the well-fed and rather tipsy guests began taking their leave and thanking their hosts. The hosts once again started apologizing for being unable to put them up for the night.
“I’m very, very glad to know you, gentlemen!” said the general, sincerely this time (probably because people are far more sincere and friendly to their departing guests than to those just arriving). “Very glad! Come and see us on your way back! No standing on ceremony! Which way are you going? Do you want to go by the upper way? No, go through the garden, take the lower way – it’s shorter from here.”
The officers passed out into the garden. After the bright lights and the noise, they found the garden very dark and quiet. They walked in silence all the way to the gate. They were half drunk, light-hearted and pleased with everything, but the darkness and silence made them thoughtful for a space. Each of them probably wondered, as Ryabovich did, whether the time would ever come when they too would be like Von Rabbeck, with a big house, a family and a garden; whether they too would ever have the opportunity of welcoming guests – even insincerely – and feeding them lavishly, and making them tipsy and contented?
As they walked out of the gate, they all immediately began talking and laughing out loud, for no reason. Now they were following a path which went down to the river and then ran along by the waterside, skirting the bushes on the bank, the runnels and the willows overhanging the water. The path and the riverbank were hard to make out, and the opposite bank was lost in the gloom. Here and there a star would be reflected, shimmering and dissolving in the dark water; that was the only thing to show that the river was running fast. It was very quiet there. Sleepy curlews were calling on the far bank, while a nightingale in a bush on the near bank was trilling at full voice, taking no notice whatever of the crowd of officers. They stopped by the bush, and touched it, but the nightingale went on singing.
“What about that!” came the admiring voices. “Here we are, right next to him, and he’s not taking a blind bit of notice! What a rascal!”
At the end of the riverside stre
tch, the path led upwards to open out onto the roadway near the church fence. Here the officers sat down, tired after their climb, to rest and smoke. A dim red flame showed on the far bank, and they idly wondered whether it was a bonfire, or a fire seen through a house window, or something different… Ryabovich, too, gazed at the fire; it seemed to be smiling and winking at him, as though it knew all about the kiss.
When he returned to his quarters, Ryabovich quickly undressed and got into bed. He was sharing the hut with Lobytko and Lieutenant Merzlyakov, a peaceable, untalkative young man who had the reputation among his fellows of being well educated, always carrying a copy of the European Herald with him, and reading it whenever he got a chance. Lobytko undressed and spent a long time pacing the room with a dissatisfied air, before sending his orderly out for some beer. Merzlyakov went to bed, stood a candle by the bedhead and immersed himself in the European Herald.
“Who can she be?” wondered Ryabovich, gazing at the soot on the ceiling.
His neck still felt as if it had been anointed with oil, and there was a chill like mint drops beside his mouth. The lilac girl’s shoulders and arms, the forehead and honest eyes of the blonde in black, and other waists, dresses, brooches, all drifted through his imagination. He tried to fix his attention on these images, but they danced about and dissolved and flickered before him. When all the images completely disappeared, merging into the broad black background that you always see when you shut your eyes, Ryabovich began to hear hurried footsteps, the rustle of a dress, the sound of a kiss – and he was overcome by intense, unreasoning happiness… As he submitted to it, he heard the orderly return and report that there was no beer to be had. Lobytko was quite outraged and started pacing about the room again.
“Well, isn’t he an ass!” he exclaimed, pausing now by Ryabovich, now by Merzlyakov. “What a fool, what an imbecile a man must be, not to find any beer! Eh? Well, I ask you, isn’t he a villain?”
The Beauties: Essential Stories Page 14
