WHEN I returned to the verandah, I found that they were not talking
of me at all, as I had anticipated. On the contrary, Varenika had laid
aside the book, and was engaged in a heated dispute with Dimitri, who,
for his part, was walking up and down the verandah, and frowningly
adjusting his neck in his collar as he did so. The subject of the
quarrel seemed to be Ivan Yakovlevitch and superstition, but it was too
animated a difference for its underlying cause not to be something which
concerned the family much more nearly. Although the Princess and Lubov
Sergievna were sitting by in silence, they were following every word,
and evidently tempted at times to take part in the dispute; yet always,
just when they were about to speak, they checked themselves, and left
the field clear for the two principles, Dimitri and Varenika. On my
entry, the latter glanced at me with such an indifferent air that
I could see she was wholly absorbed in the quarrel and did not care
whether she spoke in my presence or not. The Princess too looked the
same, and was clearly on Varenika’s side, while Dimitri began, if
anything, to raise his voice still more when I appeared, and Lubov
Sergievna, for her part, observed to no one in particular: “Old people
are quite right when they say, ‘Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse
pouvait.’”
Nevertheless this quotation did not check the dispute, though it somehow
gave me the impression that the side represented by the speaker and her
friend was in the wrong. Although it was a little awkward for me to be
present at a petty family difference, the fact that the true relations
of the family revealed themselves during its progress, and that my
presence did nothing to hinder that revelation, afforded me considerable
gratification.
How often it happens that for years one sees a family cover themselves
over with a conventional cloak of decorum, and preserve the real
relations of its members a secret from every eye! How often, too, have
I remarked that, the more impenetrable (and therefore the more decorous)
is the cloak, the harsher are the relations which it conceals! Yet, once
let some unexpected question--often a most trivial one (the colour of
a woman’s hair, a visit, a man’s horses, and so forth)--arise in that
family circle, and without any visible cause there will also arise an
ever-growing difference, until in time the cloak of decorum becomes
unequal to confining the quarrel within due bounds, and, to the dismay
of the disputants and the astonishment of the auditors, the real and
ill-adjusted relations of the family are laid bare, and the cloak,
now useless for concealment, is bandied from hand to hand among the
contending factions until it serves only to remind one of the years
during which it successfully deceived one’s perceptions. Sometimes to
strike one’s head violently against a ceiling hurts one less than just
to graze some spot which has been hurt and bruised before: and in
almost every family there exists some such raw and tender spot. In the
Nechludoff family that spot was Dimitri’s extraordinary affection
for Lubov Sergievna, which aroused in the mother and sister, if not a
jealous feeling, at all events a sense of hurt family pride. This
was the grave significance which underlay, for all those present, the
seeming dispute about Ivan Yakovlevitch and superstition.
“In anything that other people deride and despise you invariably profess
to see something extraordinarily good!” Varenika was saying in her clear
voice, as she articulated each syllable with careful precision.
“Indeed?” retorted Dimitri with an impatient toss of his head. “Now,
in the first place, only a most unthinking person could ever speak of
DESPISING such a remarkable man as Ivan Yakovlevitch, while, in the
second place, it is YOU who invariably profess to see nothing good in
what confronts you.”
Meanwhile Sophia Ivanovna kept looking anxiously at us as she turned
first to her nephew, and then to her niece, and then to myself. Twice
she opened her mouth as though to say what was in her mind and drew a
deep sigh.
“Varia, PLEASE go on reading,” she said at length, at the same time
handing her niece the book, and patting her hand kindly. “I wish to
know whether he ever found HER again” (as a matter of fact, the novel in
question contained not a word about any one finding any one else). “And,
Mitia dear,” she added to her nephew, despite the glum looks which he
was throwing at her for having interrupted the logical thread of his
deductions, “you had better let me poultice your cheek, or your teeth
will begin to ache again.”
After that the reading was resumed. Yet the quarrel had in no way
dispelled the calm atmosphere of family and intellectual harmony which
enveloped this circle of ladies.
Clearly deriving its inspiration and character from the Princess
Maria Ivanovna, it was a circle which, for me, had a wholly novel
and attractive character of logicalness mingled with simplicity and
refinement. That character I could discern in the daintiness, good
taste, and solidity of everything about me, whether the handbell, the
binding of the book, the settee, or the table. Likewise, I divined it in
the upright, well-corseted pose of the Princess, in her pendant curls
of grey hair, in the manner in which she had, at our first introduction,
called me plain “Nicolas” and “he,” in the occupations of the ladies
(the reading and the sewing of garments), and in the unusual whiteness
of their hands. Those hands, en passant, showed a family feature common
to all--namely, the feature that the flesh of the palm on the outer side
was rosy in colour, and divided by a sharp, straight line from the pure
whiteness of the upper portion of the hand. Still more was the character
of this feminine circle expressed in the manner in which the three
ladies spoke Russian and French--spoke them, that is to say, with
perfect articulation of syllables and pedantic accuracy of substantives
and prepositions. All this, and more especially the fact that the ladies
treated me as simply and as seriously as a real grown-up--telling me
their opinions, and listening to my own (a thing to which I was so
little accustomed that, for all my glittering buttons and blue facings,
I was in constant fear of being told: “Surely you do not think that we
are talking SERIOUSLY to you? Go away and learn something”)--all this, I
say, caused me to feel an entire absence of restraint in this society. I
ventured at times to rise, to move about, and to talk boldly to each
of the ladies except Varenika (whom I always felt it was unbecoming, or
even forbidden, for me to address unless she first spoke to me).
As I listened to her clear, pleasant voice reading aloud, I kept
glancing from her to the path of the flower-garden, where the
rain-spots were making small dark circles in the sand, and thence to
the lime-trees, upon the leaves of which the rain was pattering down in
large detached drops shed from the pale, shimmering edge of the livid
blue cloud which hung suspended over us. Then I would glance at her
again, and then at the last purple rays of the setting sun where they
were throwing the dense clusters of old, rain-washed birches into
brilliant relief. Yet again my eyes would return to Varenika, and, each
time that they did so, it struck me afresh that she was not nearly so
plain as at first I had thought her.
“How I wish that I wasn’t in love already!” I reflected, “or that
Sonetchka was Varenika! How nice it would be if suddenly I could become
a member of this family, and have the three ladies for my mother, aunt,
and wife respectively!” All the time that these thoughts kept passing
through my head I kept attentively regarding Varenika as she read, until
somehow I felt as though I were magnetising her, and that presently she
must look at me. Sure enough, at length she raised her head, threw me a
glance, and, meeting my eyes, turned away.
“The rain does not seem to stop,” she remarked.
Suddenly a new feeling came over me. I began to feel as though
everything now happening to me was a repetition of some similar
occurrence before--as though on some previous occasion a shower of rain
had begun to fall, and the sun had set behind birch-trees, and I
had been looking at her, and she had been reading aloud, and I had
magnetised her, and she had looked up at me. Yes, all this I seemed to
recall as though it had happened once before.
“Surely she is not--SHE?” was my thought. “Surely IT is not beginning?”
However, I soon decided that Varenika was not the “SHE” referred to, and
that “it” was not “beginning.” “In the first place,” I said to myself,
“Varenika is not at all BEAUTIFUL. She is just an ordinary girl whose
acquaintance I have made in the ordinary way, whereas the she whom I
shall meet somewhere and some day and in some not ordinary way will
be anything but ordinary. This family pleases me so much only because
hitherto I have never seen anybody. Such things will always be happening
in the future, and I shall see many more such families during my life.”