Here and there along the river darted the boats of fishermen who were setting up their nets for the night. In one boat some tipsy amateur musicians were playing home-made fiddles and a cello.
Olga sat at the rudder, smiling warmly and talking non-stop to entertain her guests, at the same time giving her husband sideways glances. His boat was ahead of all the others as he stood up working away with one oar. That light, sharp-nosed boat, which all the guests called ‘an old dug-out’ – for some reason Pyotr called it Penderakliya – moved swiftly. It had a lively cunning look and seemed to bear a grudge against that clumsy Pyotr – it was only waiting for the right moment to slip away from under him. Olga watched her husband, and she was revolted by his good looks that were universally admired, by the back of his neck, by his posing, by his familiar manner with women. She hated all the women who were sitting in the boat, envied them, and at the same time was in fear and trembling lest disaster struck and the shaky boat capsized.
‘Don’t row so fast!’ she cried and her heart sank. ‘Sit down in the boat, we all know how brave you are!’
And the others in the boat worried her too. They were all ordinary, decent people, but now the lot of them struck her as peculiar, evil. She could see nothing but falsehood in each one. ‘Now,’ she thought, ‘that young man with the auburn hair and gold-rimmed spectacles and fine beard rowing away. He’s a rich, smug, perpetually fortunate mother’s little pet, everyone thinks he’s honest, free-thinking and progressive. It’s hardly a year since he took his degree and came to live in the country, but already he’s proclaiming “We community workers”. But before the year’s out he’ll be bored too, like so many others, he’ll depart for St Petersburg, and to justify his flight he’ll tell them everywhere that local councils are a waste of time, that he’s terribly disenchanted. His young wife in that other boat simply has her eyes glued on him and she’s convinced that he’s a “servant of the community”, but within one year she too will come to believe that local councils are useless. And that stout, immaculately shaven gentleman in the straw hat with the broad ribbon and with an expensive cigar between his teeth – he’s fond of saying, “It’s time we stopped daydreaming and got down to a real job of work!” He has Yorkshire pigs, Butlerov beehives,5 rape seed, pineapples, a creamery and a cheese dairy, and Italian double-entry book-keeping. But every summer he sells some of his forests for timber, mortgages parts of his land so that he can spend the autumn with his mistress in the Crimea. And there’s old Uncle Nikolay, who won’t go home, despite being angry with Pyotr!’
Olga looked at the other boats, where she could discover only boring cranks, hypocrites or idiots. She thought of everyone she knew in the district, but could not call to mind one person about whom she could say or think anything that was good. All of them seemed undistinguished, colourless, stupid, narrow-minded, shifty and heartless. Either they did not say what they meant or they did not do what they wanted to. She was stifled by boredom and feelings of despair. She wanted suddenly to stop smiling, leap up and shout, ‘I’m sick of the lot of you!’, jump out of the boat and swim ashore.
‘Come on, let’s all give Pyotr a tow,’ someone shouted.
‘Give him a tow! Give him a tow!’ the rest joined in. ‘Olga, give your husband a tow!’
While she sat at the rudder, Olga had to seize the right moment and deftly catch hold of the chain at Penderakliya’s bows. As she leant over, trying to grasp it, Pyotr frowned and gave her a frightened look.
‘Mind you don’t catch cold!’ he said.
‘If you’re scared on my account and the baby’s then why do you torment me?’ Olga thought.
Pyotr admitted defeat, but not wishing to be towed, he leapt from Penderakliya into a boat already bursting at the seams. He did this so clumsily that the boat listed sharply and everyone screamed with horror.
‘He only jumped like that to please the ladies,’ Olga thought. ‘He knows how impressive it looks…’
Her arms and legs began to tremble, for which the feeling of jadedness, irritation, the forced smiles and the discomfort that she felt all over her body were to blame, she thought. To hide this trembling from her guests she tried to raise her voice, laugh, keep moving. ‘If I suddenly burst into tears,’ she thought, ‘I’ll tell them I have toothache.’
Now the boats at last put in at the ‘Isle of Good Hope’ – this was the name of the peninsula formed by a sharp bend in the river; it was covered with a copse of ancient birches, oaks, willows and poplars. Tables with steaming samovars were already in position under the trees, and Vasily and Grigory, in tailcoats and white knitted gloves, were busy near the crockery. On the far bank, opposite the ‘Isle of Good Hope’, stood the carriages that had brought the provisions, and baskets and parcels of food were being ferried from them to the island in a boat very similar to Penderakliya. The expressions of the footmen, coachmen – even of the peasant sitting in the boat – were solemn, festive, the kind one usually finds only among children and servants.
While Olga was making the tea and pouring out the first glasses, the guests busied themselves with fruit liqueurs and sweetmeats. Then followed the usual tea-time chaos, so trying and exhausting for the hostess. Grigory and Vasily had hardly served the tea than hands holding empty glasses were reaching towards Olga. One guest asked for tea without sugar, another wanted it strong, a third weak, a fourth said ‘No more, thank you.’ And Olga had to commit all this to memory and then shout, ‘Ivan Petrovich, are you the one without sugar?’ or ‘Who asked for it weak?’ But the guest who had asked for weak tea without sugar simply forgot what he had asked for, being carried away with the pleasant conversation, and took the first glass that was offered. Dejected figures wandered like shadows not far from the table, pretending that they were looking for mushrooms in the grass, or reading labels on boxes – these were the ones for whom there weren’t enough glasses. ‘Have you had some tea?’ Olga would ask, and the guest in question would tell her not to worry and say, ‘I don’t mind waiting’, although the hostess would have preferred her guests to hurry up instead of being prepared to wait.
Some of them were deep in conversation and drank their tea slowly, holding on to their glasses for half an hour, while others, especially those who had drunk a great deal over dinner, did not leave the table but drank glass after glass, so that Olga had a job refilling them. One young humorist sipped his tea through a lump of sugar and kept saying, ‘Sinner that I am, I love to spoil myself with the Chinese Herb.’ Now and then he sighed deeply as he asked, ‘Please, just one more little dish-full.’ He drank a lot, noisily crunched his sugar, thinking this was all very funny and original, and that he was giving a superb imitation of a merchant. No one appreciated that all these little things were sheer torture for the hostess: in fact it would have been difficult for anyone to guess, since Olga managed to keep smiling amiably and engage in idle tittle-tattle.
She was not feeling well, though. The crowd, the laughter, the questions, the young humorist, the flustered servants who were run off their feet, the children running round the table – all this irritated her. And she was irritated by the fact that Vata looked like Nata, Kolya like Mitya, so that it was impossible to tell which of them had had tea. She felt that her strained, warm smile was turning into a nasty scowl and that she would burst into tears at any moment.