From the so-called ‘mosaic’ drawing-room, large French windows led into the garden. They made a loud noise as I opened them and went down the marble terrace steps into the garden. After I’d taken a few strides along the avenue I met Nastasya, an old crone of about ninety who had been the Count’s nanny. She was a tiny, wrinkled creature whom death had forgotten, with bald head and piercing eyes. Whenever you looked at her face you couldn’t help remembering the nickname that the other servants had given her: Owlet. When she saw me she shuddered and almost dropped the jug of cream she was carrying in both hands.
‘How are you, Owlet?’ I asked.
She gave me a sidelong glance and silently walked past. I grasped her shoulder.
‘Don’t be scared, you old fool… where’s the Count?’
The old woman pointed at her ears.
‘Are you deaf? Have you been like that long?’
Despite her advanced age the old crone could hear and see very well, but she found it not unprofitable to calumniate her sensory organs. I wagged my finger and let her go.
After a few more steps I heard voices and before long I saw people. Just where the avenue widened out into an open space, surrounded by cast-iron benches and shaded by tall, white acacias, stood a table with a gleaming samovar on it. People were sitting around the table, talking. I quietly made my way across the grass to the little open space, hid behind a lilac bush, and sought out the Count with my eyes.
My friend, Count Karneyev, was sitting at the table on a folding cane chair, drinking tea. He was wearing that same multicoloured dressing-robe in which I’d seen him two years before, and a straw hat. His face had an anxious, preoccupied look and was deeply furrowed, so that those who didn’t know him might have thought that some grave thought or problem was troubling him at that precise moment. In appearance the Count hadn’t changed one bit during our two-year separation: there was that same small, thin body, as frail and sluggish as a corncrake’s, those same narrow, consumptive’s shoulders and that small head with reddish hair. His nose was as red as ever, and his cheeks were the same as they had been two years ago, sagging like limp rags. There was nothing bold, strong or manly in his face. Everything was weak, apathetic and flaccid. Only his long, drooping moustache made any impression. Someone had told my friend that a long moustache suited him: he believed him and every morning he would measure how much that hairy growth over his pale lips had lengthened. That moustache put you in mind of a bewhiskered but very young and puny kitten.
Next to the Count, at the same table, sat a stout gentleman I didn’t know, with a large, closely cropped head and jet-black eyebrows. This gentleman’s face was plump and shiny as a ripe melon. His moustache was longer than the Count’s, his forehead low, his lips tightly pressed and his eyes were gazing lazily at the sky. His features had run to fat, but despite that they were as stiff as dried-up leather. He wasn’t the Russian type. This stout gentleman was without jacket or waistcoat and simply wore a smock stained with dark patches of sweat. He was drinking seltzer water instead of tea.
At a respectful distance from the table stood a portly, stocky man with a plump red neck and protruding ears. This was Urbenin, the Count’s estate manager. In honour of His Excellency’s arrival he had donned a new black suit and was now suffering agonies. The sweat simply streamed from his red, sunburnt face. Next to the manager stood the peasant who had brought me the letter. It was only then that I noticed that he had one eye missing. Holding himself stiffly to attention and not daring to budge, he stood there like a statue as he waited to be questioned.
‘I’d like to take your whip from you, Kuzma, and thrash the living daylights out of you,’ the manager was telling him in a drawling, admonitory, soft, deep voice. ‘How can you be so slapdash about the Master’s orders? You should have asked the gentleman to come right away and found out exactly when we could expect him.’
‘Yes, yes,’ agreed the Count nervously. ‘You should have found everything out! So, he told you he’d come. But that’s not good enough! I need him here, this very minute! Right away – wi-th-out fail! He couldn’t have understood you when you asked him.’
‘Why do you need him so badly?’ the stout gentleman asked the Count.
‘I have to see him!’
‘Is that all? If you ask me, Aleksey, that investigating magistrate of yours would be best advised to stay at home today. I don’t feel up to visitors at the moment.’
I opened my eyes wide. What did that imperious, peremptory ‘I’ imply?
‘But he’s not just a visitor,’ my friend pleaded. ‘He won’t prevent you from resting after your journey. You don’t have to stand on ceremony with him – you’ll soon see what a fine fellow he is. You’ll take to him immediately and you’ll be the best of friends, my dear chap!’
I emerged from my hiding place behind the lilac bush and went towards the table. When the Count saw me and recognized me his face lit up with a smile.
‘Here he is, here he is!’ he exclaimed, flushed with pleasure and leaping from the table. ‘It’s so very nice of you to come!’ After running up to me he performed a little jig, embraced me and scratched my cheeks several times with his bristly moustache. The kisses were followed by prolonged handshaking and peering into my eyes.
‘You haven’t changed one bit, Sergey! Still just the same! As handsome and as strong as ever! Thanks for doing me the favour of coming!’
Freeing myself from the Count’s embrace, I greeted the manager, whom I knew very well, and took my place at the table.
‘Ah, my dear chap!’ the Count continued, at once anxious and overjoyed. ‘If you only knew how pleasant it is to behold your grave countenance!… You haven’t met? Allow me to introduce you – my good friend Kaetan Kazimirovich Pshekhotsky… And this is…’ he went on, introducing me to the fat gentleman, ‘my good, long-standing friend Sergey Petrovich Zinovyev! He’s our district investigating magistrate.’ The stout, black-browed gentleman rose slightly and offered me his chubby, dreadfully sweaty hand.
‘Delighted!’ he mumbled, eyeing me up and down. ‘Absolutely delighted!’
After he had unbosomed himself and calmed down, the Count poured me a glass of cold, dark-brown tea and pushed a box of biscuits towards me.
‘Help yourself… I bought them at Eynem’s11 as I was passing through Moscow. But I’m angry with you, Seryozha – so angry that I even felt like terminating our friendship! It’s not simply that you haven’t written me a single line over the past two years – you haven’t even deigned to answer any of my letters. That’s not very friendly!’
‘I’m no good at writing letters,’ I said. ‘And besides, I don’t have time for letter-writing. Please tell me – what was there to write about?’
‘There must have been plenty of things!’
‘But there weren’t, honestly. I acknowledge only three kinds of letter: love letters, congratulatory letters and business letters. I didn’t write the first, as you’re not a woman and I’m not in love with you. You don’t need the second and we can do without the third, as neither of us has had any mutual business since the day we were born.’