For a long time we confronted one another without speaking as we took stock of each other. When the flood of dresses had swept past I made shift to begin a conversation by asking him whether it had not been very close in the carriage.
“I don’t know,” he answered indifferently. “I never ride inside it, for it makes me feel sick directly, and Mamma knows that. Whenever we are driving anywhere at night-time I always sit on the box. I like that, for then one sees everything. Philip gives me the reins, and sometimes the whip too, and then the people inside get a regular — well, you know,” he added with a significant gesture “It’s splendid then.”
“Master Etienne,” said a footman, entering the hall, “Philip wishes me to ask you where you put the whip.”
“Where I put it? Why, I gave it back to him.”
“But he says that you did not.”
“Well, I laid it across the carriage-lamps!”
“No, sir, he says that you did not do that either. You had better confess that you took it and lashed it to shreds. I suppose poor Philip will have to make good your mischief out of his own pocket.” The footman (who looked a grave and honest man) seemed much put out by the affair, and determined to sift it to the bottom on Philip’s behalf.
Out of delicacy I pretended to notice nothing and turned aside, but the other footmen present gathered round and looked approvingly at the old servant.
“Hm — well, I DID tear it in pieces,” at length confessed Etienne, shrinking from further explanations. “However, I will pay for it. Did you ever hear anything so absurd?” he added to me as he drew me towards the drawing-room.
“But excuse me, sir; HOW are you going to pay for it? I know your ways of paying. You have owed Maria Valericana twenty copecks these eight months now, and you have owed me something for two years, and Peter for —”
“Hold your tongue, will you!” shouted the young fellow, pale with rage “I shall report you for this.”
“Oh, you may do so,” said the footman. “Yet it is not fair, your highness,” he added, with a peculiar stress on the title, as he departed with the ladies’ wraps to the cloak-room. We ourselves entered the salon.
“Quite right, footman,” remarked someone approvingly from the ball behind us.
Grandmamma had a peculiar way of employing, now the second person singular, now the second person plural, in order to indicate her opinion of people. When the young Prince Etienne went up to her she addressed him as “YOU,” and altogether looked at him with such an expression of contempt that, had I been in his place, I should have been utterly crestfallen. Etienne, however, was evidently not a boy of that sort, for he not only took no notice of her reception of him, but none of her person either. In fact, he bowed to the company at large in a way which, though not graceful, was at least free from embarrassment.
Sonetchka now claimed my whole attention. I remember that, as I stood in the salon with Etienne and Woloda, at a spot whence we could both see and be seen by Sonetchka, I took great pleasure in talking very loud (and all my utterances seemed to me both bold and comical) and glancing towards the door of the drawing-room, but that, as soon as ever we happened to move to another spot whence we could neither see nor be seen by her, I became dumb, and thought the conversation had ceased to be enjoyable. The rooms were now full of people — among them (as at all children’s parties) a number of elder children who wished to dance and enjoy themselves very much, but who pretended to do everything merely in order to give pleasure to the mistress of the house.
When the Iwins arrived I found that, instead of being as delighted as usual to meet Seriosha, I felt a kind of vexation that he should see and be seen by Sonetchka.
Chapter 21 — Before the Mazurka
“HULLO, Woloda! So we are going to dance to-night,” said Seriosha, issuing from the drawing-room and taking out of his pocket a brand new pair of gloves. “I suppose it IS necessary to put on gloves?”
“Goodness! What shall I do? We have no gloves,” I thought to myself. “I must go upstairs and search about.” Yet though I rummaged in every drawer, I only found, in one of them, my green travelling mittens, and, in another, a single lilac-coloured glove, a thing which could be of no use to me, firstly, because it was very old and dirty, secondly, because it was much too large for me, and thirdly (and principally), because the middle finger was wanting — Karl having long ago cut it off to wear over a sore nail.
However, I put it on — not without some diffident contemplation of the blank left by the middle finger and of the ink-stained edges round the vacant space.
“If only Natalia Savishna had been here,” I reflected, “we should certainly have found some gloves. I can’t go downstairs in this condition. Yet, if they ask me why I am not dancing, what am I to say? However, I can’t remain here either, or they will be sending upstairs to fetch me. What on earth am I to do?” and I wrung my hands.
“What are you up to here?” asked Woloda as he burst into the room. “Go and engage a partner. The dancing will be beginning directly.”
“Woloda,” I said despairingly, as I showed him my hand with two fingers thrust into a single finger of the dirty glove,
“Woloda, you, never thought of this.”
“Of what?” he said impatiently. “Oh, of gloves,” he added with a careless glance at my hand. “That’s nothing. We can ask Grandmamma what she thinks about it,” and without further ado he departed downstairs. I felt a trifle relieved by the coolness with which he had met a situation which seemed to me so grave, and hastened back to the drawing-room, completely forgetful of the unfortunate glove which still adorned my left hand.
Cautiously approaching Grandmamma’s arm-chair, I asked her in a whisper:
“Grandmamma, what are we to do? We have no gloves.”
“What, my love?”
“We have no gloves,” I repeated, at the same time bending over towards her and laying both hands on the arm of her chair,
“But what is that?” she cried as she caught hold of my left hand. “Look, my dear!” she continued, turning to Madame Valakhin. “See how smart this young man has made himself to dance with your daughter!”
As Grandmamma persisted in retaining hold of my hand and gazing with a mock air of gravity and interrogation at all around her, curiosity was soon aroused, and a general roar of laughter ensued.
I should have been infuriated at the thought that Seriosha was present to see this, as I scowled with embarrassment and struggled hard to free my hand, had it not been that somehow Sonetchka’s laughter (and she was laughing to such a degree that the tears were standing in her eyes and the curls dancing about her lovely face) took away my feeling of humiliation. I felt that her laughter was not satirical, but only natural and free; so that, as we laughed together and looked at one another, there seemed to begin a kind of sympathy between us. Instead of turning out badly, therefore, the episode of the glove served only to set me at my ease among the dreaded circle of guests, and to make me cease to feel oppressed with shyness. The sufferings of shy people proceed only from the doubts which they feel concerning the opinions of their fellows. No sooner are those opinions expressed (whether flattering or the reverse) than the agony disappears.
How lovely Sonetchka looked when she was dancing a quadrille as my vis-a-vis, with, as her partner, the loutish Prince Etienne! How charmingly she smiled when, en chaine, she accorded me her hand! How gracefully the curls, around her head nodded to the rhythm, and how naively she executed the jete assemble with her little feet!