She found her husband in his study. He was sitting at his desk pondering something. His face had a stern, pensive, guilty look. This was not the Pyotr who had been arguing during the meal and whom the guests knew, but someone quite different – exhausted, guilty, dissatisfied with himself – whom only his wife knew. He must have gone into the study for some cigarettes. An open case lay before him, full of cigarettes, and one hand was resting in the desk drawer. He seemed to have frozen at the moment of taking them out.
Olga felt sorry for him. It was as clear as daylight that he was exhausted, worried and perhaps engaged in a battle against himself. Olga silently went over to the desk. Wanting to prove to him that she had forgotten the arguments over dinner and that she was no longer angry, she shut the cigarette case and put it in his side pocket.
‘What shall I tell him?’ she wondered. ‘I’ll say that deceitfulness is like a swamp, the further you go in, the harder it is to get out. Then I’ll tell him: you’ve been carried away by that false role you’ve been acting out, you’ve gone too far. You’ve insulted people who were devoted to you and did you no harm. So please go and apologize to them, have a good laugh at yourself and you’ll feel better. And if you want peace and solitude, let’s go away from here together.’
When his eyes met his wife’s, Pyotr suddenly assumed that indifferent, gently mocking expression he had worn at dinner and in the garden. He yawned and stood up.
‘It’s after five,’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘Even if our guests take pity on us and depart at eleven, that still leaves another six hours. That’s something cheerful to look forward to, need I say!’
Whistling some tune, he slowly left the study, walking in that familiar, dignified fashion. His unhurried footsteps could be heard as he crossed the hall and drawing-room, then his supercilious laugh as he called out ‘Bravo, bravo!’ to the young man at the piano. Soon the footsteps died away – he must have gone out into the garden. Now it was no longer jealousy or annoyance that took hold of Olga, but deep hatred for the way he walked, for that insidious laugh and tone of voice. She went over to the window, looked out into the garden and saw Pyotr walking down the avenue. One hand was in his pocket and he was snapping the fingers of the other. His head tossed slightly backwards, he solemnly ambled along, apparently very pleased with himself, the dinner, his digestion and nature all around.
Two small schoolboys – the sons of Mrs Chizhevsky, a landowner – who had just arrived with their tutor, a student in white tunic and very narrow trousers, appeared on the path. When they came up to Pyotr the boys and the student stopped, probably to congratulate him on his name-day. Exquisitely twitching his shoulders, he patted the children’s cheeks and casually offered the student his hand without looking at him. The student must have praised the weather and compared it to St Petersburg’s, since Pyotr replied in a loud voice, as if addressing a bailiff or court witness instead of a guest, ‘Eh! Is it cold in St Petersburg then? Here, my dear young man, we have a salubrious climate and an abundance of fruits of the earth. Eh, what’s that?’
Placing one hand in his pocket and snapping the fingers of the other, he strode off. Olga gazed at the back of his neck in amazement until he was lost to sight behind the hazel bushes. How had that thirty-four-year-old man acquired the solemn walk of a general? Where did that ponderous, impressive gait come from? Whence that authoritarian vibrancy of voice, all those ‘What!’s, ‘Well, sir!’s and ‘My dear fellow!’s?
Olga remembered going to court sittings, where Pyotr sometimes deputized as president for her godfather, Count Aleksey Petrovich, to escape the boredom and loneliness at home during the first few months of her marriage. Seated in the president’s chair in his uniform, with a chain over his chest, he underwent a complete transformation, what with those grandiose gestures, that thunderous voice, those ‘What, sir?’s, those ‘Hmm’s, that casual tone. All normal human qualities, everything natural to him that she was used to seeing at home, had been swallowed up in grandeur. It was not Pyotr sitting in that chair, but some other man whom everyone called ‘Your honour’. The consciousness of the power he wielded did not allow him to sit still for one minute, and he was always on the look-out for some opportunity to ring his bell, to scowl at the public, to shout… And where did he acquire that shortsightedness and deafness? He had suddenly become myopic and deaf, frowning imperiously as he told people to speak up and to come nearer the bench. From those lofty heights he could not distinguish faces and sounds at all well, and if Olga herself had approached him at these moments, he would most likely have shouted ‘What’s your name?’ He talked down to peasant witnesses, yelled so loud at the public that they could hear him out in the street, and his treatment of barristers was quite outrageous. If a barrister approached him, Pyotr would sit sideways to him, squint at the ceiling to make it plain that the lawyer was not needed in court at all and that he had no wish either to listen to him or to acknowledge his existence. But if a shabby-suited solicitor happened to speak, Pyotr was all ears and sized him up with a devastatingly sarcastic look that seemed to say ‘God, what lawyers we’re afflicted with these days!’ ‘Just what are you trying to say?’ he would interrupt. If some barrister with a florid turn of phrase ventured to use some word of foreign origin and said ‘factitious’ instead of ‘fictitious’, for example, Pyotr would suddenly come to life and ask ‘What’s that? What? Factitious? What does that mean?’ Then he would issue the pompous admonition ‘Don’t use words you don’t understand’. And when the barrister had finished his speech he would come away from the bench red-faced and bathed in perspiration, while Pyotr would settle back in his chair, celebrating his victory with a complacent smile. In the way he addressed barristers, he was imitating Count Aleksey Petrovich to a certain extent, but when the latter said ‘Will counsel for the defence please be quiet?’, for example, the remark sounded quite natural, as if a good-humoured old gentleman were speaking, but with Pyotr it was rather coarse and strained.
II
People were applauding – the young man had finished playing. Olga suddenly remembered her guests and hurried into the drawing-room.
‘You play delightfully,’ she said, going over to the piano. ‘Delightfully. You have a wonderful gift! But isn’t our piano out of tune?’
At that moment the two schoolboys and the student came in.
‘Heavens, it’s Mitya and Kolya!’ Olga drawled joyfully as she went to meet them. ‘How you’ve grown! I wouldn’t have recognized you! But where’s your mother?’
‘Many happy returns to our host,’ the student said breezily. ‘I wish him all the best. Yekaterina Andreyevna Chizhevsky sends her congratulations and her apologies. She’s not feeling very well.’
‘How unkind of her! I’ve been looking forward all day to seeing her. When did you leave St Petersburg?’ Olga asked the student. ‘What’s the weather like there?’
Without waiting for an answer she looked affectionately at the boys and repeated, ‘How they’ve grown! Not so long ago they used to come here with their nanny, and now they’re already at school! The old get older and the young grow up. Have you had dinner?’
‘Oh, please don’t worry,’ the student said.
‘Now you haven’t eaten, have you?’
‘Please don’t worry.’
‘Surely you must be hungry?’ Olga asked impatiently and irritably, in a rough, harsh voice. She did not mean to speak like that and she immediately had a little coughing-fit, then smiled and blushed. ‘How they’ve grown!’ she said, softly.