MY second call on the route lay at the Kornakoffs’, who lived on the
first floor of a large mansion facing the Arbat. The staircase of
the building looked extremely neat and orderly, yet in no
way luxurious--being lined only with drugget pinned down with
highly-polished brass rods. Nowhere were there any flowers or mirrors to
be seen. The salon, too, with its polished floor, which I traversed
on my way to the drawing-room, was decorated in the same cold, severe,
unostentatious style. Everything in it looked bright and solid, but
not new, and pictures, flower-stands, and articles of bric-a-brac were
wholly absent. In the drawing-room I found some of the young princesses
seated, but seated with the sort of correct, “company” air about them
which gave one the impression that they sat like that only when guests
were expected.
“Mamma will be here presently,” the eldest of them said to me as she
seated herself by my side. For the next quarter of an hour, this young
lady entertained me with such an easy flow of small-talk that the
conversation never flagged a moment. Yet somehow she made so patent
the fact that she was just entertaining me that I felt not altogether
pleased. Amongst other things, she told me that their brother Stephen
(whom they called Etienne, and who had been two years at the College of
Cadets) had now received his commission. Whenever she spoke of him,
and more particularly when she told me that he had flouted his
mother’s wishes by entering the Hussars, she assumed a nervous air,
and immediately her sisters, sitting there in silence, also assumed
a nervous air. When, again, she spoke of my grandmother’s death, she
assumed a MOURNFUL air, and immediately the others all did the same.
Finally, when she recalled how I had once struck St. Jerome and been
expelled from the room, she laughed and showed her bad teeth, and
immediately all the other princesses laughed and showed their bad teeth
too.
Next, the Princess-Mother herself entered--a little dried-up woman, with
a wandering glance and a habit of always looking at somebody else when
she was addressing one. Taking my hand, she raised her own to my lips
for me to kiss it--which otherwise, not supposing it to be necessary, I
should not have done.
“How pleased I am to see you!” she said with her usual clearness of
articulation as she gazed at her daughters. “And how like your mother
you look! Does he not, Lise?”
Lise assented, though I knew for a fact that I did not resemble my
mother in the least.
“And what a grown-up you have become! My Etienne, you will remember, is
your second cousin. No, not second cousin--what is it, Lise? My mother
was Barbara Dimitrievna, daughter of Dimitri Nicolaevitch, and your
grandmother was Natalia Nicolaevna.”
“Then he is our THIRD cousin, Mamma,” said the eldest girl.
“Oh, how you always confuse me!” was her mother’s angry reply. “Not
third cousin, but COUSIN GERMAN--that is your relationship to Etienne.
He is an officer now. Did you know it? It is not well that he should
have his own way too much. You young men need keeping in hand, or--!
Well, you are not vexed because your old aunt tells you the plain truth?
I always kept Etienne strictly in hand, for I found it necessary to do
so.”
“Yes, that is how our relationship stands,” she went on. “Prince Ivan
Ivanovitch is my uncle, and your late mother’s uncle also. Consequently
I must have been your mother’s first cousin--no, second cousin. Yes,
that is it. Tell me, have you been to call on Prince Ivan yet?”