He recalled a poem he had read in a magazine, in which the poet said to his sweetheart that they were not going to swear to each other because vows would have been an insult to their trusting and ardent love.
Bobrov saw the Zinenkos’ two carriages arrive after Kvashnin’s troika. Nina was in the first. Wearing a pale-yellow dress trimmed with broad lace of the same colour at the crescent-shaped low neck, and a broad-brimmed white Italian hat adorned with a bouquet of tea-roses, she seemed to him paler and graver than usual. She caught sight of him from afar, but did not give him a significant look as he would have expected. In fact, he fancied that she deliberately turned away from him. And when he ran up to the carriage to help her to alight, she jumped nimbly out on the other side, as if to forestall him. He felt a pang of foreboding, but hastened to reassure himself. “Poor Nina, she’s ashamed of her decision and her love. She imagines that now anyone can easily read her inmost thoughts in her eyes. The delightful naivete of it!”
He was sure that Nina would herself make an opportunity, as she had done previously at the station, to exchange a few confidential words with him. But she was apparently absorbed by Kvashnin’s parley with the women and she never looked back at Bobrov, not even stealthily. Suddenly his heart began to beat in alarm and anguish. He made up his mind to walk up to the Zinenko family who kept together in a close group – the other ladies seemed to cut them – and, taking advantage of the noise which held the general attention, ask Nina at least by a look why she was so indifferent to him.
Bowing to Anna Afanasyevna and kissing her hand, he tried to read in her eyes whether she knew anything. Yes, she dearly did: her thin, angular eyebrows – suggesting a false character, as Bobrov often thought – were knitted resentfully, and her lips wore a haughty expression. Bobrov inferred that Nina had told everything to her mother, who had scolded her.
He stepped up to Nina, but she did not so much as glance at him. Her hand lay limp and cold in his trembling hand as he clasped it. Instead of responding to his greeting she turned her head to Beta and exchanged some trivial remarks with her. He read into that hasty manoeuvre of hers something guilty, something cowardly that shrank from a forthright answer. He felt his knees give way, and a chill feeling came into his mouth. He did not know what to think. Even if Nina had let out her secret to her mother, she could have said to him by one of those swift, eloquent glances that women instinctively command, “Yes, you’ve guessed right, she does know about our talk. But I haven’t changed, dear, I haven’t changed, don’t worry.” But she had preferred to turn away. “Never mind, I’ll get an answer from her at the picnic,” he thought, with a vague presentiment of something disastrous and dastardly. “She’ll have to tell me anyway.”
X
At the 200th Mile stop the picnickers got out of the carriages and started for Beshenaya Balka in a long, colourful file down a narrow road that led past the watchman’s house. The pungent freshness of autumnal woods floated to their flushed faces from afar. The road grew steeper and steeper, disappearing beneath a dark canopy of hazel bushes and honeysuckle. Dead leaves, yellow and curled, rustled underfoot. A scarlet sunset showed through the thicket far ahead.
The bushes ended. A wide clearing, flattened and strewn with fine sand, came into view unexpectedly. At one end of it stood an octagonal pavilion decked with bunting and greenery, and at the other was a covered platform for the band. As soon as the first couples came out of the thicket the band struck up a lively march. The gay brass sounds sped playfully through the woods, reverberating among the trees and merging far away into another band that sometimes seemed to outrace, and sometimes to lag behind the first. In the pavilion waiters were bustling round the tables, set in a U shape and covered with white cloths.
As soon as the hand stopped the picnickers broke into enthusiastic applause. They had reason to be delighted, for only a fortnight ago the clearing had been a hillside scantily covered with shrubs.
The band began to play a waltz.
Bobrov saw Svezhevsky, who was standing beside Nina, at once put his arm round her waist without asking permission and whirl with her about the clearing.
Scarcely had he released her when a mining student ran up to her, land then someone else. Bobrov was a poor dancer; he did not care for dancing. Nevertheless, it occurred to him to invite Nina for a quadrille. “It may give me a chance to ask for an explanation,” he thought. He walked over to her when, having danced two turns, she sat down, fanning herself.
“I hope you’ve reserved a quadrille for me, Nina Grigoryevna?”
“Oh, my goodness! Such a pity. I’ve promised all my quadrilles,” she replied, without looking at him. “You have? So soon?” Bobrov said thickly. “Of course.” She shrugged her shoulders, impatiently and ironically. “Why do you come so late? I gave away all my quadrilles while we were on the train.”
“So you completely forgot about me,” he said sadly. His tone moved Nina. She nervously folded and opened her fan, but did not look up.
“It’s ail your fault. Why didn’t you ask me before?” “I only came to this picnic because I wanted to see you. Was the whole thing simply a joke, Nina Grigoryevna?” She made no answer, fumbling with her fan in confusion. She was rescued by a young engineer who rushed up to her. Quickly she rose and, without glancing at Bobrov, laid her thin hand in a long white glove on the engineer’s shoulder. Bobrov followed her with his eyes. After dancing one turn she sat down at the other end of the clearing – no doubt purposely, he thought. She seemed almost afraid of him, or else she felt ashamed in his presence.
The dull, listless melancholy, so long familiar to him, gripped him afresh. All the faces about him appeared vulgar and pitiful, almost comical. The cadeneed beat of the music resounded painfully in his brain. But he had not yet lost hope and sought comfort in various conjectures. “She may be cross with me because I didn’t send her flowers. Or perhaps she simply doesn’t care to dance with a clumsy bear like me? Well, she’s probably right. These trifles mean such an awful lot to girls. In fact, they make up all their joys and sorrows, all the poetry of their lives.”
At dusk Chinese lanterns were lit in long chains round the pavilion. But it was not enough – they shed hardly any light on the clearing. Suddenly the bluish light of two electric suns, carefully camouflaged in the foliage until then, flared up blindingly at both ends of the clearing. The surrounding birches and hornbeams stood out instantly. Their motionless curly boughs, brought out by the unnatural glare, looked like stage scenery set in the foreground. In the grey-green haze beyond them, the round and jagged tops of other trees were dimly silhouetted against a pitch black sky. The music could not drown the chirping of grasshoppers in the steppe, a strange chorus that sounded like a single grasshopper chirping simultaneously to right and left and overhead.
The ball went on, growing livelier and noisier as one dance followed another, the band being given hardly any respite. The women were drunk with music and the fairytale setting.
The smell of perfume and heated bodies mixed oddly with the scent of wormwood, withering leaves, and damp woods, with the remote, subtle fragrance of new-mown hay. Fans were waving everywhere like the wings of beautifully coloured birds about to take flight. Loud conversation, laughter, and the shuffling of feet on the sand-strewn earth blended into a monotonous yet lively hubbub that sounded extra loud whenever the band stopped playing.
Bobrov did not take his eyes off Nina. Once or twice she almost brushed him with her dress. He even felt a whiff of air as she swept past. While she danced her left arm lay on her partner’s shoulder, bent gracefully and with seeming helplessness, and she tilted her head as if she were going to put it on his shoulder. Occasionally he caught a glimpse of the lace edging of her white petticoat flying with her rapid motion,