Accordingly I set off alone. My first call on the route lay at the
Valakhin mansion. It was now three years since I had seen Sonetchka,
and my love for her had long become a thing of the past, yet there
still lingered in my heart a sort of clear, touching recollection of our
bygone childish affection. At intervals, also, during those three years,
I had found myself recalling her memory with such force and vividness
that I had actually shed tears, and imagined myself to be in love with
her again, but those occasions had not lasted more than a few minutes at
a time, and had been long in recurring.
I knew that Sonetchka and her mother had been abroad--that, in fact,
they had been so for the last two years. Also, I had heard that they had
been in a carriage accident, and that Sonetchka’s face had been so badly
cut with the broken glass that her beauty was marred. As I drove
to their house, I kept recalling the old Sonetchka to my mind, and
wondering what she would look like when I met her. Somehow I imagined
that, after her two years’ sojourn abroad, she would look very tall,
with a beautiful waist, and, though sedate and imposing, extremely
attractive. Somehow, also, my imagination refused to picture her with
her face disfigured with scars, but, on the contrary, since I had read
somewhere of a lover who remained true to his adored one in spite of her
disfigurement with smallpox, strove to imagine that I was in love with
Sonetchka, for the purpose of priding myself on holding to my troth in
spite of her scars--Yet, as a matter of fact, I was not really in love
with her during that drive, but having once stirred up in myself old
MEMORIES of love, felt PREPARED to fall into that condition, and the
more so because, of late, my conscience had often been pricking me for
having discarded so many of my old flames.
The Valakhins lived in a neat little wooden mansion approached by a
courtyard. I gained admittance by ringing a bell (then a rarity in
Moscow), and was received by a mincing, smartly-attired page. He either
could not or made no attempt to inform me whether there was any one
at home, but, leaving me alone in the dark hall, ran off down a still
darker corridor. For a long time I waited in solitude in this gloomy
place, out of which, in addition to the front door and the corridor,
there only opened a door which at the moment was closed. Rather
surprised at the dismal appearance of the house, I came to the
conclusion that the reason was that its inmates were still abroad. After
five minutes, however, the door leading into the salon was opened by the
page boy, who then conducted me into a neat, but not richly furnished,
drawing-room, where presently I was joined by Sonetchka.
She was now seventeen years old, and very small and thin, as well as of
an unhealthy pallor of face. No scars at all were visible, however, and
the beautiful, prominent eyes and bright, cheerful smile were the same
as I had known and loved in my childhood. I had not expected her to look
at all like this, and therefore could not at once lavish upon her the
sentiment which I had been preparing on the way. She gave me her hand in
the English fashion (which was then as much a novelty as a door-bell),
and, bestowing upon mine a frank squeeze, sat down on the sofa by my
side.
“Ah! how glad I am to see you, my dear Nicolas!” she said as she looked
me in the face with an expression of pleasure so sincere that in the
words “my dear Nicolas” I caught the purely friendly rather than the
patronising note. To my surprise she seemed to me simpler, kinder, and
more sisterly after her foreign tour than she had been before it.
True, I could now see that she had two small scars between her nose
and temples, but her wonderful eyes and smile fitted in exactly with my
recollections, and shone as of old.
“But how greatly you have changed!” she went on. “You are quite grown-up
now. And I-I-well, what do you think of me?”
“I should never have known you,” I replied, despite the fact that at the
moment I was thinking that I should have known her anywhere and always.
“Why? Am I grown so ugly?” she inquired with a movement of her head.
“Oh, no, decidedly not!” I hastened to reply. “But you have grown taller
and older. As for being uglier, why, you are even--
“Yes, yes; never mind. Do you remember our dances and games, and St.
Jerome, and Madame Dorat?” (As a matter of fact, I could not recollect
any Madame Dorat, but saw that Sonetchka was being led away by the joy
of her childish recollections, and mixing them up a little). “Ah! what
a lovely time it was!” she went on--and once more there shone before me
the same eyes and smile as I had always carried in my memory. While she
had been speaking, I had been thinking over my position at the present
moment, and had come to the conclusion that I was in love with her. The
instant, however, that I arrived at that result my careless, happy mood
vanished, a mist seemed to arise before me which concealed even her eyes
and smile, and, blushing hotly, I became tongue-tied and ill-at-ease.
“But times are different now,” she went on with a sigh and a little
lifting of her eyebrows. “Everything seems worse than it used to be, and
ourselves too. Is it not so, Nicolas?”