“Yes, there should be women here. I sense it instinctively.”
On the doorstep of the house the officers were met by von Rabbek himself, a fine-looking old man of about sixty, in civilian dress. Shaking his guests’ hands, he said he was very glad and delighted, but earnestly, for God’s sake, asked the gentlemen officers to forgive him for not inviting them to stay the night; two sisters with children, brothers, and neighbors had come to visit, so that there was not a single spare room left.
The general shook hands with them all, apologized and smiled, but from his face it could be seen that he was far from being as glad of his guests as last year’s count, and that he had invited the officers only because, in his opinion, propriety demanded it. And the officers themselves, going up the carpeted stairs and listening to him, felt that they had been invited to this house only because it was awkward not to invite them, and at the sight of the servants, who were hurriedly lighting candles downstairs by the entrance and upstairs in the front hall, it began to seem to them that, along with themselves, they had brought unrest and anxiety. In the house, where, probably on account of some family celebration or event, two sisters with children, brothers, and neighbors had gathered, how could anyone be pleased by the presence of nineteen unknown officers?
Upstairs, at the entrance to the reception room, the guests were met by a tall and slender old woman with a long, dark-browed face, very much resembling the empress Eugénie.2 With a welcoming and majestic smile, she said she was glad and delighted to see guests in her house, and apologized that she and her husband were deprived this time of the possibility of inviting the gentlemen officers to stay the night with them. By her beautiful, majestic smile, which instantly disappeared from her face each time she turned away from her guests for some reason, one could see that she had seen many gentlemen officers in her time, that she could not be bothered with them right now, and if she invited them to her house and apologized, it was only because her upbringing and social position demanded it.
In the large dining room that the officers entered, at one end of a long table, some dozen men and women, old and young, sat at tea. Further behind their chairs, a group of men enveloped in light cigar smoke showed darkly; in the middle of it stood a lean young man with red sideburns, speaking loudly in English and rolling his r’s. Beyond the group, through a doorway, a bright room with light blue furniture could be seen.
“Gentlemen, there are so many of you that it’s impossible to introduce you!” the general said loudly, trying to seem very cheerful. “Simply introduce yourselves, gentlemen!”
The officers—some with very serious, even stern faces, others with forced smiles, all of them feeling very awkward—somehow made their bows and sat down to tea.
The one who felt most awkward of all was Staff-Captain Ryabovich, a short, stoop-shouldered officer in spectacles and with side-whiskers like a lynx. While some of his comrades put on serious faces and others forced smiles, his face, his lynx side-whiskers, and his spectacles seemed to say: “I’m the most timid, the most modest, and the most colorless officer in the whole brigade!” At first, coming into the dining room and then sitting at tea, he could not fix his attention on any one face or object. Faces, dresses, cut-glass decanters of cognac, steam from the tea-glasses, molded cornices—it all merged into one enormous general impression, which aroused anxiety in Ryabovich and a wish to hide his head. Like a reciter appearing before the public for the first time, he saw everything that was before his eyes, but somehow understood it poorly (in physiology such a state, when the subject sees but does not understand, is known as “psychic blindness”). A little later, feeling more at ease, Ryabovich recovered his sight and began to observe. For him, as a timid and unsociable man, what struck his eyes first of all was something he had never possessed, namely—the extraordinary courage of his new acquaintances. Von Rabbek, his wife, two elderly ladies, a certain young lady in a lilac dress, and the young man with red sideburns, who turned out to be Rabbek’s younger son, very cleverly, as if they had rehearsed it beforehand, positioned themselves among the officers and immediately got into a heated argument, which their guests could not fail to mix into. The lilac young lady began to insist heatedly that an artillerist had a much easier life than a cavalry or infantry man, while Rabbek and the elderly ladies maintained the opposite. Cross-talk began. Ryabovich looked at the lilac young lady, who was arguing very heatedly about something alien and totally uninteresting to her, and watched insincere smiles appear and disappear on her face.
Von Rabbek and his family artfully drew the officers into the argument, and meanwhile kept a close eye on their glasses and mouths, to see if they were all drinking, if they had sugar, and why this or that one was not eating biscuits or drinking cognac. And the more Ryabovich looked and listened, the more he liked this insincere but perfectly disciplined family.
After tea the officers went to the reception room. Lieutenant Lobytko’s intuition had not deceived him: there were many young ladies, married and unmarried, in the room. The setter-lieutenant was already standing beside a very young blond girl in a black dress and, dashingly bending over, as if leaning on an invisible sword, smiled and flirtatiously twitched his shoulders. He was probably saying some very interesting nonsense, because the blond girl looked indulgently at his well-fed face and asked indifferently: “Really?” And from this impassive “Really?” the setter, had he been intelligent, might have concluded that he was unlikely to hear the call “Fetch!”
A grand piano thundered; a melancholy waltz flew out of the reception room through the wide-open windows, and for some reason everyone remembered that outside the windows it was now spring, a May evening. Everyone sensed that the air smelled of young poplar leaves, roses, and lilacs. Ryabovich, in whom, under the effect of the music, the cognac he had drunk began to tell, looked askance at the window, smiled, and started to follow the women’s movements, and it now seemed to him that the smell of roses, poplars, and lilacs came not from the garden, but from the women’s faces and dresses.
Rabbek’s son invited some skinny girl and made two turns with her. Lobytko, gliding over the parquet, flew up to the lilac young lady and whirled around the room with her. The dancing began…Ryabovich stood by the door among the non-dancers and watched. He had never once danced in his life and had never once held his arms around the waist of a respectable woman. He was terribly pleased when a man, before everyone’s eyes, took hold of an unknown girl’s waist and offered his shoulder to her hand, but he was unable to imagine himself in this man’s place. There was a time when he envied his comrades’ boldness and pluck, and his heart ached; the awareness that he was timid, stoop-shouldered, and colorless, that he had a long waist and lynx side-whiskers, was deeply humiliating, but with the years this awareness became habitual, and now, looking at the dancing or loudly talking people, he no longer envied them, but only felt sadly moved.
When the quadrille began, the young von Rabbek approached the non-dancers and invited two officers to a game of billiards. The officers accepted and left the reception room with him. Ryabovich, having nothing to do, and wishing to take at least some part in the general activity, trudged after them. From the reception room they went to the drawing room, then down a narrow glass corridor, from there to a room where, when they appeared, three sleepy servants jumped up from the sofas. Finally, having gone through a whole string of rooms, the young Rabbek and the officers entered a small room where the billiard table stood. The game began.
Ryabovich, who had never played anything but cards, stood by the billiard table and looked indifferently at the players, and they, in unbuttoned coats, with cues in their hands, walked about, made puns, and shouted unintelligible words. The players did not notice him, and only occasionally one of them, having shoved him with an elbow or caught him accidentally with a cue, would turn and say, “Pardon!” The first game was not yet over, but he was already bored, and it began to seem to him that he was superfluous and a nuisance…He felt drawn back to the reception room, and he left.