"I fancied that, too, but here I am alive. . . • One has all sorts of fancies."
Varvara, who was just going to have her fifth, looked do^ a little on her mistress from the height of her ex- perience and spoke in a rather didactic tone, and Olga Mihailovna could not help feeling her authority; she would have liked to have talked of her fears, of the child, of her sensations, but she was afraid it might strike Varvara as naive and trivial. And she waited in silence for Varvara to say something herself.
"Olga, we are going indoors," Pyotr Drnitrich called from the raspberries.
Olga Mihailovna liked being silent, waiting and watching Varvara. She would have been ready to stay like ihat till night without speaking or having any duty to perform. But she had to go. She had hardly left the cottage when Lubochka, Nata, and Vata carne running to meet her. The sisters stopped short abruptly a couple of yards away; Lubochka ran right up to her and flung herself on her neck.
"You dear, darling, precious," she said, kissing her face and her neck. "Let us go and have tea on the island!"
"On the island, on the island!" said the precisely similar Nata and Vata, both at once, without a smile.
"But it's going to rain, my dears."
"It's not, it's not," cried Lubochka with a woebegone face. "They've all agreed to go. Dear! darling!"
"They are all getting ready to have tea on the island," said Pyotr Drnitrich, corning up. "See to the arrange- ments . . . We wiU all go in the boats, and the samo- vars and all the rest of it must be sent in the carriage with the servants."
He walked beside his wife and gave her his arm. Olga Mihailovna had a desire to say something disagreeable to her husband, something biting, even about her do^^ perhaps—the crueler the better, she felt. She thought a little, and said:
"Why is it Count Alexey Petrovich hasn't come? What a pity!"
"I am very glad he hasn't come," said Pyotr Drnitrich, lying. Tm sick to death of that old lunatic."
"But yet before dinner you were expecting him so eagerly!"
DI
Half an hour later all the guests were crowding on the bank near the piles to which the boats were fastened. They were all talking and laughing, and were in such excitement and commotion that they could hardly get into the boats. Three boats were crammed with pas- sengers, while two stood empty. The keys to the pad- locks on these two boats had been somehow mislaid, and messengers were continually running from the river to the house to look for them. Some said Grigory had the keys, others that the steward had them, while others again suggested sending for a blacksmith and breaking the padlocks. And all talked at once, interrupting and shouting one another down. Pyotr Dmitrich paced im- patiently to and fro on the bank, saying:
'What the devil's the meaning of it! The keys ought always to be lying on the hall window sill! Who has dared to take them away? The steward can get a boat of his own if he wants one!"
At last the keys were found. Then it appeared that two oars were missing. Again there was a great hulla- baloo. Pyotr Dmitrich, who was weary of pacing about the bank, jumped into a long, narrow skiff hollowed out of the trunk of a poplar, and, lurching from side to side and almost falling into the water, pushed off from the bank. The other boats followed him one after another, amid loud laughter and the shrieks of the young ladies.
The white cloudy sky, the trees on the banks, the boats with the people in them, and the oars, were re- flected in the water as in a mirror; under the boats, far away below in the bottomless depths, was a second sky with birds flying across it. The bank on which the house stood was high, steep, and covered with trees; on the other, which was sloping, stretched broad green water- meadows with sheets of water glistening in them. The boats had floated a hundred yards when, behind the mournfully drooping willows on the sloping banks, huts and a herd of cows came into sight; they began to hear songs, drunken shouts, and the strains of an accordion.
Here and there on the river darted the boats of fisher- men who were going out to set their nets for the night. In one of these boats was a festive party, playing on homemade violins and a cello.
Olga Mihailovna was sitting at the rudder; she was smiling affably and talking a great deal to entertain her visitors, while stealing a glance at her husband from time to time. He was ahead of them aU, standing up and punting with one oar. The light sharp-nosed canoe, which all the guests called the "deathtrap"—while Pyotr Dmitrich, for some reason, called it Penderaklia—moved along quickly; it had a brisk, crafty expression, as though it hated its heavy occupant and was waiting for a favor- able moment to glide away from under his feet. Olga Mihailovna kept glancing at her husband, and she loathed his good looks which attracted everyone, the back of his head, his attitude, his familiar manner with women; she hated all the women sitting in the boat with her, was jealous, and at the same time was trembling every minute in terror that her husband's frail craft would upset and cause an accident.
"Take care, Pyotr!" she cried, while her heart fluttered with terror. "Sit down! We believe in your courage with- out aU that!"
She was worried, too, by the people who were in the boat with her. They were aU ordinary, good people like thousands of others, but now each one of them struck her as exceptional and evil. In each one of them she saw nothing but falsity. "That young man," she thought, "rowing, in gold-rimmed spectacles, with chestnut hair and a nice-looking beard; he is a mamma's darling, rich, and well-fed, and always fortunate, and everyone con- siders him an honorable, free-thinking, progressive per- son. It's not a year since he left the university and c^e to live in the district, but he already talks of himself as 'we active members of the Zemstvo.' But in another year he will be bored like so many others and go off to Peters- burg, and to justify his running away, will tell everyone that the Zemstvo is good for nothing, and that it has dis- appointed him. And from the other boat his young wife keeps her eyes fixed on him, and believes that he is 'an active member of the Zemstvo,' just as in a year she will believe that the Zemstvo is good for nothing. And that stout, carefully shaven gentleman in the straw hat with the broad ribbon, an expensive cigar in his mouth: he is fond of saying, 'It is time to put away dreams and set to work!' He has Yorkshire pigs, Butler's hives, rape, pineapples, a dairy, a cheese factory, Italian bookkeep- ing by double entry; but every summer he sells his tim- ber and mortgages part of his land to spend the autumn with his mistress in the Crimea. And there's Uncle Nik- olay Nikolaich, who has quarreled with Pyotr Dmitrich, and yet for some reason does not go home.''
Olga Mihailovna looked at the other boats, and there, too, she saw only uninteresting, queer creatures, affected or stupid people. She thought of all the people she knew in the district, and could not remember one person of whom one could say or think anything good. They all seemed to her mediocre, insipid, unintelligent, narrow, false, heartless; they all said what they did not think, and did what they did not want to. Dreariness and despair were stifling her; she longed to stop smiling, to leap up and cry out, "I am sick of you," and then jump out and swim to the bank.
"I say, let's take Pyotr Dmitrich in tow!" someone shouted.
"In tow, in tow!" the others chimed in. "Olga Mi- hailovna, take your husband in tow."
To take him in tow, Olga Mihailovna, who was steer- ing, had to seize the right moment and to catch hold of his boat by the chain at the prow. When she bent over to grasp the chain Pyotr Dmitrich frowned and looked at her in alarm.
"I hope you won't catch cold," he said.
"If you are uneasy about me and the child, why do you torment me?" thought Olga Mihailovna.