“Me? Me frighten you?” Mitya suddenly cried, throwing up his hands. “Oh, pass me by, go your way, I won’t hinder you . . .!” And suddenly, quite unexpectedly for everyone, and certainly also for himself, he flung himself down on a chair and dissolved in tears, his head turned away to the opposite wall, and his arms firmly grasping the back of the chair as though embracing it. “Now, now, is that any way to behave?” Grushenka exclaimed reproachfully. “That’s just how he used to be when he came visiting me—he’d suddenly start talking, and I wouldn’t understand a thing. Then once he began crying just like that, and now again—shame on you! What are you crying for? As if you had anything to cry about!” she suddenly added mysteriously, emphasizing her words with a sort of irritation.
“I ... I’m not crying ... Well, good evening!” he turned around instantly on his chair and suddenly laughed, not his abrupt, wooden laugh, but a sort of long, nervous, inaudible, and shaking laugh.
“What, again ... ? Come on, cheer up, cheer up!”Grushenka urged him. “I’m very glad you’ve come, very glad, Mitya, do you hear that? I am very glad. I want him to sit here with us,” she said imperiously, as if addressing everyone, though her words were obviously aimed at the man sitting on the sofa. “I want it, I want it! And if he leaves, I will leave, too, that’s what!” she added, her eyes suddenly flashing.
“Whatever my queen pleases is the law!” the pan said, gallantly kissing Grushenka’s hand. “You, panie, I ask to join our company!” he addressed Mitya courteously. Mitya jumped up a little again, obviously intending to break once more into a tirade, but something else came out.
“Let’s drink, panie!” he stopped short suddenly instead of making a speech. Everyone laughed.
“Lord! I thought he was going to start talking again,” Grushenka exclaimed nervously. “Listen, Mitya,” she added insistently, “don’t jump up any more, and it’s lovely that you’ve brought champagne. I’ll drink some myself, I can’t stand liqueur. The best thing is that you yourself have come, it’s such a bore ... Are you on a spree again, or what? Do put your money in your pocket! Where did you get so much?”
Mitya, still holding in his hand the crumpled bank notes, which had been very well noticed by everyone, especially by the Poles, quickly and embarrassedly thrust them into his pocket. He blushed. At that same moment, the innkeeper brought an open bottle of champagne on a tray, with glasses. Mitya seized the bottle, but was so confused that he forgot what to do with it. Kalganov finally took it from him and poured the wine.
“Another bottle, another!” Mitya cried to the innkeeper, and, forgetting to clink glasses with the pan whom he had just so solemnly invited to drink for peace, suddenly drained his whole glass by himself, without waiting for anyone else. His whole face suddenly changed. Instead of the solemn and tragic expression he was wearing when he entered, something childlike, as it were, appeared in him. He seemed suddenly to have humbled and diminished himself. He looked timidly and joyfully at everyone, giggling nervously and frequently, with the grateful look of a guilty pup that has been patted and let in again. He seemed to have forgotten everything and looked at everyone around him admiringly, with a childish smile. He looked at Grushenka, laughing continually, and moved his chair up next to her armchair. Gradually he made out the two Poles, though he could make little sense of them. The pan on the sofa struck him by his bearing, his Polish accent, and, above all, his pipe. “Well, what of it? It’s good that he smokes a pipe,” Mitya contemplated. The pan’s nearly forty-year-old face, somewhat flabby, with a tiny little nose, under which appeared a pair of the thinnest little pointed moustaches, dyed and insolent, so far had not aroused the least question in Mitya. Even the pan’s quite wretched wig, made in Siberia, with the hair stupidly brushed forward on the temples, did not particularly strike him: “So, if there’s a wig, that’s how it should be,” he went on contemplating blissfully. As for the other pan sitting by the wall, who was younger than the pan on the sofa, and was looking impudently and defiantly at the whole company, listening with silent disdain to the general conversation, he, in turn, struck Mitya only by his great height, terribly disproportionate to the pan sitting on the sofa. “About six foot six standing up,” flashed through Mitya’s head. It also flashed in him that this tall pan was most likely the friend and henchman of the pan on the sofa, “his bodyguard,” so to speak, and that the little pan with the pipe of course gave orders to the tall pan. But all this, too, seemed terribly good and indisputable to Mitya. All rivalry had ceased in the little pup. He did not yet understand anything about Grushenka and the mysterious tone of some of her phrases; he only understood, trembling with his whole heart, that she had treated him tenderly, that she had “forgiven” him and sat him down next to her. He was beside himself with delight seeing her take a sip of wine from her glass. Suddenly, however, the silence of the company seemed to strike him, and he began looking around at everyone, his eyes expecting something: “Why are we just sitting here, why don’t we get something started, gentlemen?” his grinning eyes seemed to say.
“It’s him, he keeps telling lies, and we keep laughing,” Kalganov suddenly began, as if guessing Mitya’s thought, and he pointed at Maximov.
Mitya swiftly fixed his eyes on Kalganov and then at once on Maximov.
“Lies?” he burst into his abrupt, wooden laughter, at once becoming happy about something. “Ha, ha!”
“Yes. Imagine, he maintains that in the twenties our entire cavalry allegedly married Polish women; but that’s awful nonsense, isn’t it?”
“Polish women?” Mitya chimed in, now decidedly delighted.
Kalganov well understood Mitya’s relations with Grushenka; he had also guessed about the pan; but all that did not interest him very much, and perhaps did not interest him at alclass="underline" what interested him most was Maximov. He had turned up there with Maximov by chance, and met the Poles for the first time in his life there at the inn. As for Grushenka, he had known her previously and once even visited her with someone; she had not liked him then. But now she kept glancing at him very tenderly; before Mitya arrived she had even caressed him, but he remained somehow insensible. He was a young man, not more than twenty years old, stylishly dressed, with a very sweet, pale face, and with beautiful, thick, light brown hair. And set in this pale face were a pair of lovely light blue eyes, with an intelligent and sometimes deep expression, even beyond his age, notwithstanding that the young man sometimes spoke and looked just like a child, and was not at all embarrassed by it, being quite aware of it himself. Generally, he was very original, even whimsical, though always kind. Occasionally something fixed and stubborn flashed in the expression of his face: he looked at you, listened, and all the while kept dreaming about something of his own. At times he would become sluggish and lazy, at others he would suddenly get excited, often apparently for the most trivial reason.
“Imagine, I’ve been taking him around with me for four days now,” he went on, drawing the words out a little, lazily, as it were, but quite naturally, and without any foppery. “Ever since the day your brother pushed him out of the carriage and sent him flying, remember? That made me very interested in him then, and I took him to the village with me, but now he keeps telling such lies that I’m ashamed to be with him. I’m taking him back...”