“Ah, I beg your pardon!” she said with a smile half-embarrassed,
half-ironical, instantly taking hold of one end of a plait of her hair
and fastening on Sanin her large, grey, clear eyes.
“I did not think you had come yet.”
“Sanin, Dmitri Pavlovitch—known him from a boy,” observed Polozov, as
before not turning towards him and not getting up, but pointing at him
with one finger.
“Yes…. I know…. You told me before. Very glad to make your
acquaintance. But I wanted to ask you, Ippolit Sidorovitch…. My maid
seems to have lost her senses to-day …”
“To do your hair up?”
“Yes, yes, please. I beg your pardon,” Maria Nikolaevna repeated with
the same smile. She nodded to Sanin, and turning swiftly, vanished
through the doorway, leaving behind her a fleeting but graceful
impression of a charming neck, exquisite shoulders, an exquisite
figure.
Polozov got up, and rolling ponderously, went out by the same door.
Sanin did not doubt for a single second that his presence in “Prince
Polozov’s” drawing-room was a fact perfectly well known to its
mistress; the whole point of her entry had been the display of her
hair, which was certainly beautiful. Sanin was inwardly delighted
indeed at this freak on the part of Madame Polozov; if, he thought, she
is anxious to impress me, to dazzle me, perhaps, who knows, she will be
accommodating about the price of the estate. His heart was so full of
Gemma that all other women had absolutely no significance for him; he
hardly noticed them; and this time he went no further than thinking,
“Yes, it was the truth they told me; that lady’s really magnificent to
look at!”
But had he not been in such an exceptional state of mind he would most
likely have expressed himself differently; Maria Nikolaevna Polozov, by
birth Kolishkin, was a very striking personality. And not that she was
of a beauty to which no exception could be taken; traces of her
plebeian origin were rather clearly apparent in her. Her forehead was
low, her nose rather fleshy and turned up; she could boast neither of
the delicacy of her skin nor of the elegance of her hands and feet—but
what did all that matter? Any one meeting her would not, to use
Pushkin’s words, have stood still before “the holy shrine of beauty,”
but before the sorcery of a half-Russian, half-Gipsy woman’s body in
its full flower and full power … and he would have been nothing loath
to stand still!
But Gemma’s image preserved Sanin like the three-fold armour of which
the poets sing.
Ten minutes later Maria Nikolaevna appeared again, escorted by her
husband. She went up to Sanin … and her walk was such that some
eccentrics of that—alas!—already, distant day, were simply crazy over
her walk alone. “That woman, when she comes towards one, seems as
though she is bringing all the happiness of one’s life to meet one,”
one of them used to say. She went up to Sanin, and holding out her hand
to him, said in her caressing and, as it were, subdued voice in
Russian, “You will wait for me, won’t you? I’ll be back soon.”
Sanin bowed respectfully, while Maria Nikolaevna vanished behind the
curtain over the outside door; and as she vanished turned her head back
over her shoulder, and smiled again, and again left behind her the same
impression of grace.
When she smiled, not one and not two, but three dimples came out on
each cheek, and her eyes smiled more than her lips—long, crimson, juicy
lips with two tiny moles on the left side of them.
Polozov waddled into the room and again established himself in the
arm-chair. He was speechless as before; but from time to time a queer
smile puffed out his colourless and already wrinkled cheeks. He looked
like an old man, though he was only three years older than Sanin.
The dinner with which he regaled his guest would of course have
satisfied the most exacting gourmand, but to Sanin it seemed endless,
insupportable! Polozov ate slowly, “with feeling, with judgment, with
deliberation,” bending attentively over his plate, and sniffing at
almost every morsel. First he rinsed his mouth with wine, then
swallowed it and smacked his lips…. Over the roast meat he suddenly
began to talk—but of what? Of merino sheep, of which he was intending
to order a whole flock, and in such detail, with such tenderness, using
all the while endearing pet names for them. After drinking a cup of
coffee, hot to boiling point (he had several times in a voice of
tearful irritation mentioned to the waiter that he had been served the
evening before with coffee, cold—cold as ice!) and bitten off the end
of a Havannah cigar with his crooked yellow teeth, he dropped off, as
his habit was, into a nap, to the intense delight of Sanin, who began
walking up and down with noiseless steps on the soft carpet, and
dreaming of his life with Gemma and of what news he would bring back to
her. Polozov, however, awoke, as he remarked himself, earlier than
usual—he had slept only an hour and a half—and after drinking a glass
of iced seltzer water, and swallowing eight spoonfuls of jam, Russian
jam, which his valet brought him in a dark-green genuine “Kiev” jar,
and without which, in his own words, he could not live, he stared with
his swollen eyes at Sanin and asked him wouldn’t he like to play a game
of “fools” with him. Sanin agreed readily; he was afraid that Polozov
would begin talking again about lambs and ewes and fat tails. The host
and the visitor both adjourned to the drawing-room, the waiter brought
in the cards, and the game began, not,—of course, for money.
At this innocent diversion Maria Nikolaevna found them on her return
from the Countess Lasunsky’s. She laughed aloud directly she came into
the room and saw the cards and the open card-table. Sanin jumped up,
but she cried, “Sit still; go on with the game. I’ll change my dress
directly and come back to you,” and vanished again with a swish of her
dress, pulling off her gloves as she went.
She did in fact return very soon. Her evening dress she had exchanged
for a full lilac silk tea-gown, with open hanging sleeves; a thick
twisted cord was fastened round her waist. She sat down by her husband,
and, waiting till he was left “fool,” said to him, “Come, dumpling,
that’s enough!” (At the word “dumpling” Sanin glanced at her in
surprise, and she smiled gaily, answering his look with a look, and
displaying all the dimples on her cheeks.) “I see you are sleepy; kiss
my hand and get along; and Monsieur Sanin and I will have a chat
together alone.”
“I’m not sleepy,” observed Polozov, getting up ponderously from his
easy-chair; “but as for getting along, I’m ready to get along and to
kiss your hand.” She gave him the palm of her hand, still smiling and
looking at Sanin.
Polozov, too, looked at him, and went away without taking leave of him.
“Well, tell me, tell me,” said Maria Nikolaevna eagerly, setting both
her bare elbows on the table and impatiently tapping the nails of one
hand against the nails of the other, “Is it true, they say, you are
going to be married?”
As she said these words, Maria Nikolaevna positively bent her head a
little on one side so as to look more intently and piercingly into
Sanin’s eyes.