When I am left alone with her I always become nervous and clumsy. As I follow with my eyes the people leaving the room I feel as ill at ease as in the fifth figure of the quadrille, when I see my partner crossing to the far side, condemning me to be left alone. I am sure Napoleon did not feel so wretched when the Saxons went over to the enemy at Waterloo, as I did in my early youth when I contemplated this cruel manoeuvre. The tactic I use in dancing the quadrille, I now use in this situation too: I try to give the impression that I have not noticed I am alone. Now even the conversation which had begun before his exit had come to a halt; I repeated the last words I had spoken, adding only: ‘So it had to be,’ and she repeated her previous words, adding ‘Yes’. But alongside this there began at once a second, inaudible conversation.
She: ‘I know why you are repeating what you have already said: you feel embarrassed to be alone with me, and you can see I am embarrassed too – so to appear interested you had to say something. I am grateful to you for your consideration, but you might have said something a bit more intelligent.’—I: ‘That is true, your remark is accurate, but I don’t know why you should feel embarrassed; can you be thinking that if you are alone with me I may start saying the kind of things which you would find unacceptable? Just to prove to you how ready I am to sacrifice my own satisfactions for your benefit, however delightful our present conversation may be to me, I shall now start to speak aloud. Or perhaps you would like to start.’ She: ‘Well then, let us do so!’
I was still composing my mouth to say something of the kind which allows one to be thinking one thing while conversing about something else, when she launched into a conversation out loud which gave the impression that it might go on for some time; but in this sort of situation even the most significant topics fall flat, because that other conversation is still going on. Having produced a sentence each, we fell silent, attempted once more to speak, then lapsed again into silence. The other conversation:—I: ‘No, it is quite impossible to converse. Since I can see that you are embarrassed, it would be preferable if your husband came back.’ She (aloud): ‘Boy, where is Ivan Ivanovich? Go and ask him to come here.’ If anyone did not believe that such secret conversations do exist, I hope this example will convince them.
‘I am very glad we are alone now,’ I continued in the same mode. ‘I have already remarked to you that you often upset me by your lack of trust in me. If I accidentally touch your foot with mine, you at once hasten to apologize, and do not give me time to apologize first, while I, having made sure that it was your foot I touched, wanted simply to apologize. I cannot keep up with you in these matters, yet you still think that I lack delicacy.’
Her husband came back. We sat down to supper and chatted, and I returned home at half-past midnight.
In the sledge
It is spring now, the twenty-fifth of March. The night is still and clear; the new moon has come into view from behind the red roof of the big white house opposite; the snow has mostly melted.
‘Let’s be off, driver!…’
My night-service sledge was the only one waiting near the house porch and Dmitry had evidently heard me coming out without waiting for any shouted summons from the footman, for the smacking noise he made with his lips was audible, as though he were kissing someone in the darkness: a sound which I suppose was meant to tell the little horse to pull the sledge off the stone roadway, on which the runners screeched and scraped unpleasantly. At length the sledge drew up. The obliging footman took my elbow and guided me towards the seat; had he not supported me I should have jumped straight into the sledge, but now, so as not to offend him, I made my way more cautiously and broke through the layer of thin ice on a puddle, wetting my feet. ‘Thank you, my man.’—‘Dmitry, is it freezing?’—‘As well as you could wish for, sir; at this time of the year you still get a good light frost any night, sir.’
—How stupid! Why am I asking him?—No, that’s not true, there’s nothing stupid about it: you have an urge to talk, to make contact with people, because you are in a cheerful mood. So why am I cheerful? If I had got into the sledge at any time in the past half-hour I would not have started chatting. It is because you spoke really rather well before taking your leave, and because her husband came out to see you off and said ‘When shall we be seeing one another again?’ And because as soon as the footman caught sight of you he immediately roused himself, and for all that his breath smelt strongly of parsley, he attended to you with such enthusiasm. I once gave him fifty copecks. In all our memories the central part gets lost, but the first and last impressions remain, especially the last. Hence the delightful custom whereby the master of the house sees a guest to the door where, generally standing there with his legs twined together in semi-embarrassment, he cannot avoid saying something kind to his guest: no matter how short the acquaintance may have been, this rule cannot be neglected. Thus, for example, ‘When shall we be seeing each other again?’ means nothing, but the guest out of self-esteem translates it so: when means ‘Please let it be soon’; we means ‘my wife and I, for my wife too greatly enjoys seeing you’; again means ‘We have only just finished spending this evening together, but in your company no one could possibly be bored’; be seeing one another means ‘Please do us the pleasure once more’. And the guest departs with an agreeable impression. It is likewise essential, particularly in less well organized houses where not all the servants, especially the doorman (he is a most important person because he provides one’s first and last impressions) are courteous, to give them some money. They meet you and they see you off just as if you were one of the household, and their obligingness, which may well be the result of a fifty-copeck piece, can be translated so:—‘Everyone here likes you and respects you, and so we try, just as we oblige our masters, to oblige you too.’ Perhaps it is only the footman himself who does really like and respect you, but all the same it is very pleasant. What harm is there if you should be mistaken? If there were no such thing as illusion, that would not mean that …
‘If he hasn’t gone clean out of his wits!… De-evil take him!…’
Dmitry and I had been driving very gently and very carefully along some boulevard or other, keeping to the thin covering of ice on the right-hand side of the carriageway, when some ‘wood demon’ (as Dmitry afterwards referred to him) with a carriage and pair had run into us. We extricated ourselves, and when we were already a dozen or so paces safely distant from them Dmitry said: ‘See there, the wood demon doesn’t know his right from his left!’
Do not assume that Dmitry was a timid fellow or slow to respond. No, quite the reverse: although short in stature and beardless (but still with a moustache) he was deeply conscious of his own worth, and scrupulous in carrying out his duties. The cause of his apparent weakness in this instance was twofold. First, Dmitry was accustomed to driving carriages which inspired respect, whereas now we were travelling in an insignificant little sledge behind a small horse in extremely long shafts, so that even with the length of the whip it was quite hard to reach the animal, and the horse in question was pathetically unsteady in the hind legs and liable to call forth ridicule from passers-by who saw it: so that this incident was particularly awkward for Dmitry, sufficiently so to cancel out his customary feeling of dignity. Second, my question ‘Is it freezing?’ probably reminded him of the same sort of question I would ask when going out with him on hunting trips in the autumn. He is a sportsman, and a sportsman has plenty of material for daydreaming – which may even make him forget to curse appropriately a driver who does not keep to the right. Among coachmen as with everyone else, that man is in the right who shouts at the other driver first and with the greater conviction. There are exceptions: for example, a poor droshky-driver cannot possibly shout at a carriage, and a man on his own, even if he is a bit of a dandy, is hard put to it to shout at a team of four horses; in fact everything turns on the nature of the particular circumstances, and chiefly on the personality of the coachman and the direction he is travelling in. In Tula I once witnessed a striking example of the effect one man can produce on others by sheer audacity.