Pyotr Dmitrich walked away after her, looking at her with a softened and melancholy face. He was probably thinking, as he looked at her, of his farm, of solitude, and—who knows?—perhaps he was even thinking how snug and cozy life would be at the farm if his wife had been this girl—young, pure, fresh, not corrupted by higher education, not with child. . • •
When the sound of their footsteps had died away, Olga Mihailovna came out of the shanty and turned towards the house. She wanted to cry. She was by now acutely jealous. She could understand that her husband was worried, dissatisfied with himself and ashamed, and when people are ashamed they hold aloof, above all from those nearest to them, and are unreserved with strangers; she could understand, also, that she had noth- ing to fear from Lubochka or from those women who were now drinking coffee indoors. But everything in general was terrible, incomprehensible, and it already seemed to Olga Mihailovna that Pyotr Dmitrich only half belonged to her. . . .
"He has no right!" she muttered, trying to find rea- sons for her jealousy and her vexation with her hus- band. "He has no right at all. I will tell him so plainly!"
She made up her mind to find her husband at once and tell him all about it: it was disgusting, absolutely disgusting, that he was attractive to other women and sought their admiration as though it were heavenly manna; it was unjust and dishonorable that he should give to others what belonged by right to his wife, that he should hide his soul and his conscience from his wife to reveal them to the first pretty face he came across. What harm had his wife done him? How was she to blame? She had grown sick of his lying long ago; he was forever posing, flirting, saying what he did not think, and trying to seem different from what he was and what he ought to be. Why this falsity? Was it seemly in a decent man? If he lied he was demeaning himself and those to whom he lied, and slighting what he lied about. Could he not understand that if he swaggered and posed at the judicial table, or held forth at dinner on the prerogatives of Government, simply to provoke her uncle, he was showing thereby that he had not a groat's worth of respect for the Court, or himself, or any of the people who were listening and looking at him?
Coming out into the big avenue, Olga Mihailovna as- sumed an expression of face as though she had just gone away to look after some domestic matter. On the veranda the gentlemen were drinking liqueur and eating straw- berries: one of them, the Examining Magistrate—a stout elderly man, a chatter-box and wit—must have been telling some rather broad anecdote, for, seeing their hostess, he suddenly clapped his hands over his fat lips, rolled his eyes, and sat down. Olga Mihailovna did not like the local officials. She did not care for their clumsy, ceremonious wives, their scandalmongering, their frequent visits, their flattery of her husband, whom they all hated. Now, when they were drinking, were replete with food and showed no signs of going away, she felt their presence an agonizing weariness; but not to appear impolite, she smiled cordially to the magis- trate and shook her finger at him. She walked across the dining-room and drawing-room smiling and looking as though she had gone to give some order and make some arrangement. "God grant no one stops me," she thought, but she forced herself to stop in the drawing- room to listen from politeness to a young man who was sitting at the piano playing; after standing for a minute, she cried, "Bravo, bravo, M. Georges!" and clapping her hands twice, went on.
She found her husband in his study. He was sitting at the table, thinking of something. His face looked stern, thoughtful, and guilty. This was not the same Pyotr Dmitrich who had been arguing at dinner and whom his guests knew, but a different man—tired, feeling guilty and dissatisfied with himself, whom no- body knew but his wife. He must have come to the study to get cigarettes. Before him lay an open ciga- rette-case full of cigarettes, and one of his hands was in the table drawer; he had paused and sunk into thought as he was taking the cigarettes.
Olga Mihailovna felt sorry for him. It was as clear as day that this man was harassed, could find no rest, and was perhaps struggling with himself. Olga Mihail- ovna went up to the table in silence: wanting to show that she had forgotten the argument at dinner and was not cross, she shut the cigarette-case and put it in her husband's coat pocket.
"What should I say to him?" she wondered. "I shall say that lying is like a forest—the further one goes into it the more difficult it is to get out of it. I shall tell him, 'You have been carried away by the false part you are playing; you have insulted people who were attached to you and have done you no harm. Go and apologize to them, laugh at yourself, and you will feel better. And if you want peace and solitude, let us go away to- gether.'"
Meeting his wife's gaze, Pyotr Dmitrich's face im- mediately assumed the expression it had worn at dinner and in the garden—indifferent and slightly ironical. He ya^ed and got up.
"It's past five," he said, looking at his watch. "If our guests are merciful and leave us at eleven, even then we have another six hours of it. It's a cheerful prospect, there's no denying!"
And whistling something, he walked slowly out of the study with his usual dignified gait. She could hear his dignified tread as he crossed the ballroom and the drawing-room, and hear him laugh with pompous as- surance, as he said to the young man who was playing, "Bravo! bravo!" Soon his footsteps died away:he must have gone out into the garden. And now not jealousy, not vexation, but real hatred of his footsteps, his in- sincere laugh and voice, took possession of Olga Mihail- ovna. She went to the window and looked out into the garden. Pyotr Dmitrich was already walking along the avenue. Putting one hand in his pocket and snapping the fingers of the other, he walked with confident swiging steps, throwing his head back a little and looking as though he were very well satisfied with him- self, with his dinner, with his digestion, and with Na- ture. . . .
Two little schoolboys, the children of Madame Chiz- hevskaya, who had only just arrived, made their appear- ance in the avenue, accompanied by their tutor, a stu- dent wearing a white tunic and very tight trousers. When they reached Pyotr Dmitrich, the boys and the student stopped, and probably congratulated him on his name-day. With a graceful swing of his shoulders, he patted the children on their cheeks and carelessly of- fered the student his hand without looking at him. The student must have praised the weather and compared it with the climate of Petersburg, for Pyotr Dmitrich said in a loud voice, in a tone as though he were speaking not to a guest, but to a sergeant-at-arms or a witness at court:
"What? It's cold in Petersburg? And here, my good sir, we have the finest weather and the fruits of the earth in abundance. Eh? What?"
And thrusting one hand in his pocket and snapping the fingers of the other, he walked on. Till he had dis- appeared behind the hazel bushes, Olga Mihailovna watched the back of his head in perplexity. How had this man of thirty-four come by this staid gait of a general? How had he come by that impressive, elegant manner? Where had he got that vibration of authority in his voice? Where had he got these "what's," "to be sure's," and "my good sir's"?
Olga Mihailovna remembered how in the first months of her marriage she had felt dreary at home alone and had driven into to^ to the Circuit Court, at which Pyotr Dmitrich had sometimes presided in lieu of her godfather, Count Alexey Petrovich. In the presidential chair, wearing his uniform and the chain of office on his breast, he was completely transformed. Stately gestures, a voice of thunder, "what?'' "to be sure," a careless tone. • • . Everything, all that was ordinary and human, all that was individual and personal to himself that Olga Mihailovna was accustomed to seeing in him at home, vanished in grandeur, and in the presidential chair there sat not Pyotr Dmitrich but another man whom everyone called Mr. President. This consciousness of power prevented him from sitting still in his place, and he seized every opportunity to ring his bell, to glance sternly at the public, to shout. . . . Where had he got his short-sight and his deafness when he suddenly be- gan to see and hear with difficulty, and, frowning ma- jestically, insisted on people speaking louder and com- ing closer to the table? From the height of his grandeur he could hardly distinguish faces or sounds, so that it seemed that if Olga Mihailovna herself had gone up to him he would have shouted even to her, "Your name?" Peasant witnesses he addressed familiarly, he shouted at the public so that his voice could be heard even in the street, and behaved incredibly with the lawyers. If an attorney had to speak to him, Pyotr Dmitrich, turning a little away from him, looked with half-closed eyes at the ceiling, meaning to signify thereby that the lawyer was utterly superfluous and that he was neither recog- nizing him nor listening to him; if a badly dressed private solicitor spoke, Pyotr Dmitrich pricked up his ears and looked the man up and down with a sarcastic, annihilating stare as though to say: "Queer sort of lawyers nowadays!" "What do you mean by that?" he would interrupt the man. If a lawyer with pretensions to eloquence mispronounced a foreign word, saying, for instance, "factitious" instead of "fictitious," Pyotr Dmi- trich brightened up at once and asked, "What? How? Factitious? What does that mean?" and then observed impressively: "Don't make use of words you do not un- derstand." And the lawyer, finishing his speech, would walk away from the table, red and perspiring, while Pyotr Dmitrich, with a self-satisfied smile, would lean back in his chair triumphant. In his manner with the lawyers he imitated Count Alexey Petrovich a little, but when the latter said, for instance, "Counsel for the de- fense, you keep quiet for a little!" it sounded paternally good-natured and natural, while the same words in Pyotr Dmitrich's mouth were rude and strained.