After supper he talked with the old man. Having heard him out, Shelestov reflected and said:
“I’m very grateful to you for the honor you are showing me and my daughter, but allow me to speak with you as a friend. I’ll speak not as a father, but as a gentleman to a gentleman. Tell me, please, why do you wish to marry so early? Only peasants marry early, but with them, of course, it’s boorishness, but what about you? What is the pleasure of putting yourself in fetters at such a young age?”
“I’m not all that young!” Nikitin was offended. “I’m twenty-six years old.”
“Papa, the farrier’s here!” Varya shouted from the other room.
And the conversation ended. Varya, Manyusya, and Polyansky went to see Nikitin home. When they came to his gate, Varya said:
“Why is it your mysterious Mitropolit Mitropolitych never shows himself anywhere? Let him come to see us.”
The mysterious Ippolit Ippolitych was sitting on his bed and taking off his trousers when Nikitin came to his room.
“Don’t go to bed, my dear friend!” Nikitin said breathlessly. “Wait, don’t go to bed!”
Ippolit Ippolitych quickly put on his trousers and asked worriedly:
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m getting married!”
Nikitin sat down beside his colleague and, looking at him in surprise, as if he were surprised at himself, said:
“Imagine, I’m getting married! To Masha Shelestova! I proposed today!”
“Really? She seems like a nice girl. Only very young.”
“Yes, young!” Nikitin sighed and shrugged worriedly. “Very, very young!”
“She was my student in school. I know her. She wasn’t bad in geography, but in history—very poor. And she was inattentive in class.”
For some reason Nikitin suddenly felt sorry for his colleague and wanted to say something gentle and comforting to him.
“My dear friend, why don’t you get married?” he asked. “Why not marry Varya, for instance—eh, Ippolit Ippolitych? She’s a wonderful, superlative girl! She loves to argue, true, but her heart…such a heart! She just asked about you. Marry her, my dear friend! Eh?”
He knew perfectly well that Varya would never marry this dull, pug-nosed man, but he still went on persuading him to marry her. Why?
“Marriage is a serious step,” Ippolit Ippolitych said on reflection. “One must discuss everything, ponder, it’s not done just like that. Good sense never hurts, especially in marriage, when a man ceases to be a bachelor and starts a new life.”
And he went on talking about things that had long been known to everyone. Nikitin stopped listening to him, said good night, and went to his room. He quickly undressed and quickly went to bed, the sooner to start thinking about his happiness, about Manyusya, about the future, smiled, and suddenly remembered that he had not yet read Lessing.
“I’ll have to read him…,” he thought. “Though why should I read him? To hell with him!”
And, wearied by his happiness, he immediately fell asleep and went on smiling till morning.
He dreamed about the drumming of horse hooves on the timber floor; dreamed of how they had first led the black Count Nulin from the stable, then the white Giant, then his sister Maika…
II
“The church was very crowded and noisy, and someone even cried out once, and the archpriest, who was marrying Manyusya and me, looked at the crowd through his spectacles and said sternly:
“ ‘Do not walk around in the church and do not make noise, but stand quietly and pray. You must have the fear of God.’
“My best men were two of my colleagues, and Manya’s were Staff-Captain Polyansky and Lieutenant Gernet. The bishop’s choir sang magnificently. The sputtering of the candles, the brilliance, the finery, the officers, the multitude of happy, pleased faces, and Manya’s especially ethereal look, and the whole situation in general, and the words of the marriage prayers moved me to tears, filled me with festive feeling. I thought: how my life has blossomed, how poetically beautiful it has come to be recently! Two years ago I was still a student, I lived in cheap furnished rooms on Neglinny Passage, with no money, no family, and, as it seemed then, no future. Yet now I am a high school teacher in one of the best provincial capitals, I am secure, loved, pampered. It is for me, I thought, that this crowd has now gathered, for me that three chandeliers are burning, the protodeacon is bellowing, the singers are outdoing themselves, and for me that she is so young, elegant, and joyful—this young being who will soon be called my wife. I remembered our first meetings, our rides out of town, my declaration of love, and the weather which, as if on purpose, had been wondrously fine all summer; and that happiness which, when I lived on Neglinny Passage, had seemed possible to me only in novels and stories, I now experienced in reality, as if I were taking it in my hands.
“After the wedding everyone crowded in disorder around Manya and me and expressed their sincere pleasure, congratulated us, and wished us happiness. The brigadier general, an old man of about seventy, congratulated only Manyusya and said in an old man’s rasping voice, so loudly that it resounded all through the church:
“ ‘I hope, my dear, that even after the wedding you will remain the same rose you are now.’
“The officers, the headmaster, and all the teachers smiled politely, and I also felt on my face a pleasant, insincere smile. Dearest Ippolit Ippolitych, the teacher of history and geography, who always says what everyone already knows, firmly shook my hand and said with feeling:
“ ‘Up to now you weren’t married and lived alone, but now you’re married and will live as two.’
“From the church we drove to the two-story unstuccoed house I received as a dowry. Besides this house, Manya comes with twenty thousand in cash and also some vacant lot in Melitonovo with a watch house, where they say there are lots of chickens and ducks that are untended and have gone wild. On coming back from church, I stretched out, sprawled on the Turkish divan in my new study, and smoked: it felt soft, comfortable, and cozy, like never before in my life, and just then the guests shouted ‘Hurrah’ and in the front room a bad orchestra played flourishes and all sorts of nonsense. Varya, Manya’s sister, came running into the study with a wineglass in her hand and with some sort of strange, tense expression, as if her mouth was full of water; it looked as if she wanted to run on further, but suddenly she started laughing and sobbing, and the wineglass fell to the floor with a clank. We took her under the arms and led her out.
“ ‘Nobody can understand!’ she muttered afterwards in the farthest room, lying on the wet-nurse’s bed. ‘Nobody, nobody! My God, nobody can understand!’
“But everybody understood perfectly well that she was four years older than her sister Manya and was still unmarried, and that she wept not out of envy, but out of a sad awareness that her time was passing and might already have passed. When they were dancing the quadrille, she was already in the reception room, with a tearful, heavily powdered face, and I saw how Staff-Captain Polyansky held a dish of ice cream out for her, and she ate it with a little spoon…
“It is already past five in the morning. I sat down with my diary in order to describe my full and varied happiness, and I thought I would write some six pages and read them to Manya tomorrow, but, strangely enough, everything got confused in my head, became vague, dreamlike, and the only thing I remember with clarity is that episode with Varya, and I want to write: poor Varya! I could just sit here and write: poor Varya! What’s more, the trees are rustling: it’s going to rain; the crows are cawing, and for some reason my Manya, who just fell asleep, has a sad face.”
Then for a long time Nikitin did not touch his diary. In early August there were repeat examinations and entrance examinations, and after the Dormition classes started.13 He usually went to work by eight o’clock, and by nine he had already begun to pine for Manya and his new house and kept glancing at his watch. In the lower grades he would make one of the boys dictate, and while the youngsters were writing, he would sit on the windowsill with his eyes shut, dreaming; whether he dreamed of the future or remembered the past, it all came out equally beautiful, like in a fairy tale. In the higher grades they read Gogol or Pushkin’s prose aloud, and that made him drowsy; people, trees, fields, saddle horses rose up in his imagination, and he said with a sigh, as if admiring the author: