'Get along to your sovereign mistress,' she said to him (there was at that time in Wiesbaden a certain princess di Monaco, who looked surprisingly like a cocotte of the poorer sort); 'what do you want to stay with a plebeian like me for?'
'Really, dear madam,' protested the luckless secretary,' all the princesses in the world….'
But Maria Nikolaevna was remorseless, and the secretary went away, parting and all.
Maria Nikolaevna was dressed that day very much 'to her advantage,' as our grandmothers used to say. She wore a pink glacé silk dress, with sleeves à la Fontange, and a big diamond in each ear. Her eyes sparkled as much as her diamonds; she seemed in a good humour and in high spirits.
She made Sanin sit beside her, and began talking to him about Paris, where she was intending to go in a few days, of how sick she was of Germans, how stupid they were when they tried to be clever, and how inappropriately clever sometimes when they were stupid; and suddenly, point-blank, as they say—à brûle pourpoint—asked him, was it true that he had fought a duel with the very officer who had been there just now, only a few days ago, on account of a lady?
'How did you know that?' muttered Sanin, dumfoundered.
'The earth is full of rumours, Dimitri Pavlovitch; but anyway, I know you were quite right, perfectly right, and behaved like a knight. Tell me, was that lady your betrothed?'
Sanin slightly frowned …
'There, I won't, I won't,' Maria Nikolaevna hastened to say. 'You don't like it, forgive me, I won't do it, don't be angry!' Polozov came in from the next room with a newspaper in his hand. 'What do you want? Or is dinner ready?'
'Dinner'll be ready directly, but just see what I've read in the Northern Bee … Prince Gromoboy is dead.'
Maria Nikolaevna raised her head.
'Ah! I wish him the joys of Paradise! He used,' she turned to Sanin, 'to fill all my rooms with camellias every February on my birthday, But it wasn't worth spending the winter in Petersburg for that. He must have been over seventy, I should say?' she said to her husband.
'Yes, he was. They describe his funeral in the paper. All the court were present. And here's a poem too, of Prince Kovrizhkin's on the occasion.'
'That's nice!'
'Shall I read them? The prince calls him the good man of wise counsel.'
'No, don't. The good man of wise counsel? He was simply the goodman of Tatiana Yurevna. Come to dinner. Life is for the living. Dimitri Pavlovitch, your arm.'
* * * * *
The dinner was, as on the day before, superb, and the meal was a very lively one. Maria Nikolaevna knew how to tell a story … a rare gift in a woman, and especially in a Russian one! She did not restrict herself in her expressions; her countrywomen received particularly severe treatment at her hands. Sanin was more than once set laughing by some bold and well-directed word. Above all, Maria Nikolaevna had no patience with hypocrisy, cant, and humbug. She discovered it almost everywhere. She, as it were, plumed herself on and boasted of the humble surroundings in which she had begun life. She told rather queer anecdotes of her relations in the days of her childhood, spoke of herself as quite as much of a clodhopper as Natalya Kirilovna Narishkin. It became apparent to Sanin that she had been through a great deal more in her time than the majority of women of her age.
Polozov ate meditatively, drank attentively, and only occasionally cast first on his wife, then on Sanin, his lightish, dim-looking, but, in reality, very keen eyes.
'What a clever darling you are!' cried Maria Nikolaevna, turning to him; 'how well you carried out all my commissions in Frankfort! I could give you a kiss on your forehead for it, but you're not very keen after kisses.'
'I'm not,' responded Polozov, and he cut a pine-apple with a silver knife.
Maria Nikolaevna looked at him and drummed with her fingers on the table. 'So our bet's on, isn't it?' she said significantly. 'Yes, it's on.'
'All right. You'll lose it.'
Polozov stuck out his chin. 'Well, this time you mustn't be too sanguine, Maria Nikolaevna, maybe you will lose.'
'What is the bet? May I know?' asked Sanin.
'No … not now,' answered Maria Nikolaevna, and she laughed.
It struck seven. The waiter announced that the carriage was ready.
Polozov saw his wife out, and at once waddled back to his easy-chair.
'Mind now! Don't forget the letter to the overseer,' Maria Nikolaevna shouted to him from the hall.
'I'll write, don't worry yourself. I'm a business-like person.'
XXXIX
In the year 1840, the theatre at Wiesbaden was a poor affair even externally, and its company, for affected and pitiful mediocrity, for studious and vulgar commonplaceness, not one hair's-breadth above the level, which might be regarded up to now as the normal one in all German theatres, and which has been displayed in perfection lately by the company in Carlsruhe, under the 'illustrious' direction of Herr Devrient. At the back of the box taken for her 'Serenity Madame von Polozov' (how the waiter devised the means of getting it, God knows, he can hardly have really bribed the stadt-director!) was a little room, with sofas all round it; before she went into the box, Maria Nikolaevna asked Sanin to draw up the screen that shut the box off from the theatre.
'I don't want to be seen,' she said, 'or else they'll be swarming round directly, you know.' She made him sit down beside her with his back to the house so that the box seemed to be empty. The orchestra played the overture from the Marriage of Figaro. The curtain rose, the play began.
It was one of those numerous home-raised products in which well-read but talentless authors, in choice, but dead language, studiously and cautiously enunciated some 'profound' or 'vital and palpitating' idea, portrayed a so-called tragic conflict, and produced dulness … an Asiatic dulness, like Asiatic cholera. Maria Nikolaevna listened patiently to half an act, but when the first lover, discovering the treachery of his mistress (he was dressed in a cinnamon-coloured coat with 'puffs' and a plush collar, a striped waistcoat with mother-of-pearl buttons, green trousers with straps of varnished leather, and white chamois leather gloves), when this lover pressed both fists to his bosom, and poking his two elbows out at an acute angle, howled like a dog, Maria Nikolaevna could not stand it.
'The humblest French actor in the humblest little provincial town acts better and more naturally than the highest German celebrity,' she cried in indignation; and she moved away and sat down in the little room at the back. 'Come here,' she said to Sanin, patting the sofa beside her. 'Let's talk.'
Sanin obeyed.
Maria Nikolaevna glanced at him. 'Ah, I see you're as soft as silk! Your wife will have an easy time of it with you. That buffoon,' she went on, pointing with her fan towards the howling actor (he was acting the part of a tutor), 'reminded me of my young days; I, too, was in love with a teacher. It was my first … no, my second passion. The first time I fell in love with a young monk of the Don monastery. I was twelve years old. I only saw him on Sundays. He used to wear a short velvet cassock, smelt of lavender water, and as he made his way through the crowd with the censer, used to say to the ladies in French, "Pardon, excusez" but never lifted his eyes, and he had eyelashes like that!' Maria Nikolaevna marked off with the nail of her middle finger quite half the length of the little finger and showed Sanin. 'My tutor was called—Monsieur Gaston! I must tell you he was an awfully learned and very severe person, a Swiss,—and with such an energetic face! Whiskers black as pitch, a Greek profile, and lips that looked like cast iron! I was afraid of him! He was the only man I have ever been afraid of in my life. He was tutor to my brother, who died … was drowned. A gipsy woman has foretold a violent death for me too, but that's all moonshine. I don't believe in it. Only fancy Ippolit Sidoritch with a dagger!'