However, to business.
I went down the path to the avenue, stood in the middle of the avenue, and waited for the baroness and baron. From five paces away I took off my hat and bowed.
I remember the baroness was wearing a silk dress of boundless circumference, light gray in color, with flounces, a crinoline, and a train. She was short and extraordinarily fat, with a terribly fat, pendulous chin, so that her neck couldn’t be seen at all. A purple face. Small eyes, wicked and insolent. She walks along as if she’s doing everyone an honor. The baron is dry, tall. His face, as German faces usually are, is crooked and covered with a thousand tiny wrinkles; eyeglasses; forty-five years old. His legs begin almost at the level of his chest; that takes breeding. Proud as a peacock. A bit clumsy. Something sheeplike in the expression of his face, which in its way replaces profundity.
All this flashed in my eyes within three seconds.
My bow and the hat in my hand at first barely caught their attention. Only the baron knitted his brows slightly. The baroness just came sailing towards me.
“Madame la baronne,” I said loudly and clearly, rapping out each word, “j’ai l’honneur d’être votre esclave.”[10]
Then I bowed, put my hat on, and walked past the baron, politely turning my face to him and smiling.
She had told me to take off my hat, but the bowing and prankishness were all my own. Devil knows what pushed me. It was as if I was flying off a hilltop.
“Hein! ” cried, or, better, grunted the baron, turning to me with angry surprise.
I turned and stopped in respectful expectation, continuing to look at him and smile. He was obviously perplexed and raised his eyebrows to the ne plus ultra.[11] His face was darkening more and more. The baroness also turned towards me and stared in wrathful perplexity. Passersby began to look. Some even stopped.
“Hein! ” the baron grunted again with a redoubled grunt and with redoubled wrath.
“Jawohl! ”[12] I drawled, continuing to look him straight in the face.
“Sind Sie rasend?”[13] he cried, waving his stick and, it seemed, beginning to turn a bit cowardly. He might have been thrown off by my outfit. I was very decently, even foppishly, dressed, like a man fully belonging to the most respectable public.
“Jawo-o-ohl! ” I suddenly shouted with all my might, drawing out the O as Berliners do, who constantly use the expression jawohl in conversation, with that more or less drawn out letter O expressing various nuances of thought and feeling.
The baron and baroness quickly turned and all but fled from me in fright. Some of the public started talking, others looked at me in perplexity. However, I don’t remember it very well.
I turned and walked at an ordinary pace towards Polina Alexandrovna. But I was still about a hundred yards from her bench when I saw her get up and go towards the hotel with the children.
I caught up with her by the porch.
“I performed…the foolery,” I said, drawing even with her.
“Well, what of it? Now you can deal with it,” she replied, without even looking at me, and went up the stairs.
That whole evening I spent walking in the park. Through the park and then through the woods, I even walked to another principality.{8} In one cottage I ate scrambled eggs and drank wine. For this idyll I was fleeced as much as one and a half thalers.
I came home only at eleven o’clock. The general sent for me at once.
Our people occupy two suites in the hotel; they have four rooms. The first—a big one—is the salon, with a grand piano. Next to it another big room—the general’s study. He was waiting for me there, standing in the middle of the study in an extemely majestic attitude. Des Grieux was sprawled on the sofa.
“My dear sir, allow me to ask, what you have done?” the general began, addressing me.
“I would like you to get straight to the point, General,” I said. “You probably want to speak of my encounter with a certain German today?”
“A certain German?! This German is Baron Wurmerhelm and an important person, sir! You were rude to him and to the baroness.”
“Not in the least.”
“You frightened them, my dear sir,” cried the general.
“Not at all. Back in Berlin this jawohl got stuck in my ear, which they constantly repeat after every word and draw out so disgustingly. When I met him in the avenue, for some reason this jawohl suddenly popped up in my memory and had an irritating effect on me…Besides, three times now the baroness, on meeting me, has had the habit of walking straight at me as if I was a worm that could be crushed underfoot. You must agree that I, too, may have my self-respect. I took off my hat and politely (I assure you it was politely) said: ‘Madame, j’ai l’honneur d’être votre esclave.’ When the baron turned and shouted ‘Hein! ’—I also suddenly felt pushed to shout: ‘Jawohl! ’ So I shouted it twice, the first time in an ordinary way, and the second time drawing it out with all my might. That’s all.”
I confess, I was terribly glad of this highly schoolboyish explanation. I had an astonishing wish to smear the whole story around as absurdly as possible.
And the further it went, the more I got a taste for it.
“Are you laughing at me, or what?” shouted the general. He turned to the Frenchman and told him in French that I was decidedly inviting a scandal. Des Grieux smiled contemptuously and shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh, don’t think that, it’s nothing of the sort!” I cried to the general. “My act was not nice, of course, and I admit it to you frankly in the highest degree. My act may even be called stupid and indecent prankishness, but—nothing more. And you know, General, I’m repentant in the highest degree. But there’s one circumstance here which, in my eyes, almost even spares me any repentance. Lately, for some two or even three weeks, I’ve been feeling unwelclass="underline" sick, nervous, irritable, fantastic, and on some occasions I even lose all control of myself. Really, I’ve sometimes wanted terribly to address the marquis des Grieux all at once and…However, there’s no point in saying it; he may get offended. In short, these are signs of illness. I don’t know whether Baroness Wurmerhelm will take that circumstance into consideration when I offer my apologies (because I intend to apologize). I suppose she won’t, the less so in that, from what I know, this circumstance has lately been misused in the legal world: in criminal trials, lawyers have begun quite frequently to justify their clients, the criminals, by saying that at the moment of the crime they remembered nothing and that it was supposedly some such illness. ‘He beat someone,’ they say, ‘and remembers nothing.’ And imagine, General, medical science agrees with them—it really confirms that there is such an illness, such a temporary madness, when a man remembers almost nothing, or half-remembers, or a quarter-remembers. But the baron and baroness are people of the older generation, and Prussian Junkers and landowners to boot. They must still be unfamiliar with this progress in the legal and medical world, and therefore will not accept my explanations. What do you think, General?”