NOTWITHSTANDING that, as yet, Dimitri’s influence had kept me from
indulging in those customary students’ festivities known as kutezhi or
“wines,” that winter saw me participate in such a function, and carry
away with me a not over-pleasant impression of it. This is how it came
about.
At a lecture soon after the New Year, Baron Z.--a tall, light-haired
young fellow of very serious demeanour and regular features--invited us
all to spend a sociable evening with him. By “us all”, I mean all the
men more or less “comme il faut”, of our course, and exclusive of
Grap, Semenoff, Operoff, and commoners of that sort. Woloda smiled
contemptuously when he heard that I was going to a “wine” of first
course men, but I looked to derive great and unusual pleasure from this,
to me, novel method of passing the time. Accordingly, punctually at the
appointed hour of eight I presented myself at the Baron’s.
Our host, in an open tunic and white waistcoat, received his guests
in the brilliantly lighted salon and drawing-room of the small mansion
where his parents lived--they having given up their reception rooms to
him for the evening for purposes of this party. In the corridor could
be seen the heads and skirts of inquisitive domestics, while in the
dining-room I caught a glimpse of a dress which I imagined to belong to
the Baroness herself. The guests numbered a score, and were all of
them students except Herr Frost (in attendance upon Iwin) and a tall,
red-faced gentleman who was superintending the feast and who was
introduced to every one as a relative of the Baron’s and a former
student of the University of Dorpat. At first, the excessive brilliancy
and formal appointments of the reception-rooms had such a chilling
effect upon this youthful company that every one involuntarily hugged
the walls, except a few bolder spirits and the ex-Dorpat student, who,
with his waistcoat already unbuttoned, seemed to be in every room, and
in every corner of every room, at once, and filled the whole place with
his resonant, agreeable, never-ceasing tenor voice. The remainder of the
guests preferred either to remain silent or to talk in discreet tones of
professors, faculties, examinations, and other serious and interesting
matters. Yet every one, without exception, kept watching the door of
the dining-room, and, while trying to conceal the fact, wearing an
expression which said: “Come! It is time to begin.” I too felt that
it was time to begin, and awaited the beginning with pleasurable
impatience.
After footmen had handed round tea among the guests, the Dorpat student
asked Frost in Russian:
“Can you make punch, Frost?”
“Oh ja!” replied Frost with a joyful flourish of his heels, and the
other went on:
“Then do you set about it” (they addressed each other in the second
person singular, as former comrades at Dorpat). Frost accordingly
departed to the dining-room, with great strides of his bowed, muscular
legs, and, after some walking backwards and forwards, deposited upon the
drawing-room table a large punchbowl, accompanied by a ten-pound sugar
loaf supported on three students’ swords placed crosswise. Meanwhile,
the Baron had been going round among his guests as they sat regarding
the punch-bowl, and addressing them, with a face of immutable gravity,
in the formula: “I beg of you all to drink of this loving-cup in student
fashion, that there may be good-fellowship among the members of our
course. Unbutton your waistcoats, or take them off altogether, as you
please.” Already the Dorpat student had divested himself of his tunic
and rolled up his white shirt-sleeves above his elbows, and now,
planting his feet firmly apart, he proceeded to set fire to the rum in
the punch-bowl.
“Gentlemen, put out the candles!” he cried with a sudden shout so loud
and insistent that we seemed all of us to be shouting at once. However,
we still went on silently regarding the punch-bowl and the white shirt
of the Dorpat student, with a feeling that a moment of great solemnity
was approaching.
“Put out the lights, Frost, I tell you!” the Dorpat student shouted
again. Evidently the punch was now sufficiently burnt. Accordingly
every one helped to extinguish the candles, until the room was in total
darkness save for a spot where the white shirts and hands of the three
students supporting the sugarloaf on their crossed swords were lit up by
the lurid flames from the bowl. Yet the Dorpat student’s tenor voice
was not the only one to be heard, for in different quarters of the
room resounded chattering and laughter. Many had taken off their tunics
(especially students whose garments were of fine cloth and perfectly
new), and I now did the same, with a consciousness that “IT” was
“beginning.” There had been no great festivity as yet, but I felt
assured that things would go splendidly when once we had begun drinking
tumblers of the potion that was now in course of preparation.
At length, the punch was ready, and the Dorpat student, with much
bespattering of the table as he did so, ladled the liquor into tumblers,
and cried: “Now, gentlemen, please!” When we had each of us taken a
sticky tumbler of the stuff into our hands, the Dorpat student and Frost
sang a German song in which the word “Hoch!” kept occurring again and
again, while we joined, in haphazard fashion, in the chorus. Next we
clinked glasses together, shouted something in praise of punch, crossed
hands, and took our first drink of the sweet, strong mixture. After that
there was no further waiting; the “wine” was in full swing. The first
glassful consumed, a second was poured out. Yet, for all that I began to
feel a throbbing in my temples, and that the flames seemed to be turning
purple, and that every one around me was laughing and shouting, things
seemed lacking in real gaiety, and I somehow felt that, as a matter
of fact, we were all of us finding the affair rather dull, and only
PRETENDING to be enjoying it. The Dorpat student may have been an
exception, for he continued to grow more and more red in the face and
more and more ubiquitous as he filled up empty glasses and stained the
table with fresh spots of the sweet, sticky stuff. The precise sequence
of events I cannot remember, but I can recall feeling strongly attracted
towards Frost and the Dorpat student that evening, learning their German
song by heart, and kissing them each on their sticky-sweet lips; also
that that same evening I conceived a violent hatred against the Dorpat
student, and was for pushing him from his chair, but thought better of
it; also that, besides feeling the same spirit of independence towards
the rest of the company as I had felt on the night of the matriculation
dinner, my head ached and swam so badly that I thought each moment would
be my last; also that, for some reason or another, we all of us sat down
on the floor and imitated the movements of rowers in a boat as we sang
in chorus, “Down our mother stream the Volga;” also that I conceived
this procedure on our part to be uncalled for; also that, as I lay
prone upon the floor, I crossed my legs and began wriggling about like a
tsigane; [Gipsy dancer.] also that I ricked some one’s neck, and came to
the conclusion that I should never have done such a thing if I had not
been drunk; also that we had some supper and another kind of liquor, and
that I then went to the door to get some fresh air; also that my head
seemed suddenly to grow chill, and that I noticed, as I drove away, that
the scat of the vehicle was so sharply aslant and slippery that for me
to retain my position behind Kuzma was impossible; also that he seemed
to have turned all flabby, and to be waving about like a dish clout.
But what I remember best is that throughout the whole of that evening
I never ceased to feel that I was acting with excessive stupidity in
pretending to be enjoying myself, to like drinking a great deal, and to
be in no way drunk, as well as that every one else present was acting
with equal stupidity in pretending those same things. All the time I had
a feeling that each one of my companions was finding the festivities as
distasteful as I was myself; but, in the belief that he was the only one
doing so, felt himself bound to pretend that he was very merry, in order
not to mar the general hilarity. Also, strange to state, I felt that
I ought to keep up this pretence for the sole reason that into a
punch-bowl there had been poured three bottles of champagne at nine
roubles the bottle and ten bottles of rum at four--making seventy
roubles in all, exclusive of the supper. So convinced of my folly did
I feel that, when, at next day’s lecture, those of my comrades who had
been at Baron Z.’s party seemed not only in no way ashamed to remember
what they had done, but even talked about it so that other students
might hear of their doings, I felt greatly astonished. They all declared
that it had been a splendid “wine,” that Dorpat students were just the
fellows for that kind of thing, and that there had been consumed at it
no less than forty bottles of rum among twenty guests, some of whom had
dropped senseless under the table! That they should care to talk about
such things seemed strange enough, but that they should care to lie
about them seemed absolutely unintelligible.