Katia. Tolstoy Leo
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was the first to perceive him.
“Ah! Sergius Mikaïlovitch!” she cried; “we were just talking about you.”
I rose to run in and change my dress; but he met me as I reached the door.
“Come, Katia, no ceremony in the country,” said he, smiling, and looking at my head and my handkerchief, “you have no scruples before Gregory, – I can be Gregory to you.”
But at the same time it darted into my mind that he was not looking at me precisely as Gregory would have done, and this embarrassed me.
“I will be back directly,” I replied, drawing away from him.
“What is wrong about it?” he exclaimed, following me, “one might take you for a little peasant girl!”
“How strangely he looked at me,” I thought, as I hastened up-stairs to dress myself. “At last, thank Heaven, here he is, and we shall be gayer!” And with a parting glance at the mirror I flew down again, not even trying to conceal my eager delight, and reached the terrace, out of breath. He was sitting near the table, talking to Macha about our business matters. Noticing me, he gave me a smile, and went on talking. Our affairs, he said, were in very satisfactory condition. We had nothing to do but to finish our country summer, and then we could go, either to St. Petersburg for Sonia’s education, or abroad.
“That would be very well, if you would come abroad with us,” said Macha, “but by ourselves we should be like people lost in the woods.”
“Ah! would to Heaven I could go around the world with you,” was the half-jesting, half-serious answer.
“Well and good,” said I, “let us go around the world then!”
He smiled and shook his head.
“And my mother? And my business? Come, we will let the tour of the world alone, now, and you can tell me how you have passed your time. Can it be possible that you have had the blues again?”
When I told him that I had been able, without him, to employ myself and not to yield to ennui, and Macha had confirmed the good account, he praised me, with the same words and looks of encouragement he would have used to a child, and as if he had a perfect right to do so. It seemed to me quite natural that I should tell him frankly and minutely everything I had done that was right, and also, on the contrary, own to him, as if in the confessional, whatever I had done that might deserve his censure. The evening was so beautiful that, when the tea-tray was carried away, we remained upon the terrace, and I found the conversation so interesting that I only gradually became aware that all the sounds from the house were ceasing around us. Upon all sides arose the penetrating night perfume of flowers, the turf was drenched with heavy dew, the nightingale in a lilac bush near us was executing his roulades, stopping abruptly at the sound of our voices. The starry sky seemed to stoop close above our heads.
What warned me that night had come, was the swift, heavy rush of a bat beneath the awning of the terrace, and its blind, terrified circling around my white dress. I fell back against the wall, and almost cried out, but with another dull swoop it was off again and lost in the blackness of the garden.
“How I love your Pokrovski,” said Sergius Mikaïlovitch, interrupting the conversation… “One could linger for a lifetime on this terrace!”
“Well,” said Macha, “linger!”
“Ah, yes! linger; but life – does not pause!”
“Why do you not marry?” continued Macha; “you would make an excellent husband!”
“Why?” he repeated, smiling. “People long ago, ceased to count me a marriageable man!”
“What!” replied Macha, “thirty-six years old, and already you pretend to be tired of living?”
“Yes, certainly, and even so tired that I desire nothing but rest. To marry, one must have something else to offer. There, ask Katia,” he added, pointing me out with a nod “Girls of her age are the ones for marriage. For us … our rôle is to enjoy their happiness.”
There was a secret melancholy, a certain tension in the tone of his voice, which did not escape me. He kept silence a moment; neither Macha nor I said anything.
“Imagine now,” he resumed, turning towards the table again, “if all at once, by some deplorable accident, I should marry a young girl of seventeen, like Katia Alexandrovna! That is a very good example, and I am pleased that it applies so well to the point … there could not be a better instance.”
I began to laugh, but I could not at all understand what pleased him so much, nor to what it applied so well.
“Come, now, tell me the truth, ‘hand on heart,’” he went on, turning to me with a bantering air, “would it not be a great misfortune for you, to bind your life to a man already old, who has had his day, and wants nothing except to stay just where he is, while you, – Heaven knows where you would not want to run off to, as the fancy took you!”
I felt uncomfortable, and was silent, not knowing very well what to say in reply.
“I am not making a proposal for your hand,” said he, laughing, “but, now, tell us the truth are you dreaming of such a husband, as you wander through your alleys in the evening, and would he not be a great misfortune?”
“Not so great a misfortune …” I began.
“And not so great a boon, either,” he finished for me.
“Yes … but I may be mistaken…”
He interrupted me again.
“You see?.. she is perfectly right… I like her honesty, and am delighted that we have had this conversation. I will add that – to me – it would have been a supreme misfortune!”
“What an original you are! you have not changed in the least!” said Macha, leaving the terrace to order supper to be served.
After her departure we were silent, and all was still around us. Then the solitary nightingale recommenced, not his abrupt, undecided notes of early evening, but his night song, slow and tranquil, whose thrilling cadence filled the garden; and from far down the ravine came for the first time a response from another nightingale. The one near us was mute for a moment, listening, then burst out anew in a rapture of song, louder and clearer than before. Their voices resounded, calm and supreme, amid that world of night which is their own and which we inhabit as aliens. The gardener went by, on his way to his bed in the orange-house, we heard his heavy boots on the path as he went farther and farther from us. Some one in the direction of the mountain blew two shrill, quick notes on a whistle, then all was still once more. Scarcely a leaf was heard to move; yet all at once the awning of the terrace puffed out slowly, stirred by a breath of air, and a more penetrating perfume stole up to us from below. The silence embarrassed me, but I did not know what to say. I looked at him. His eyes, bright in the darkness, were fixed upon me.
“It is good to live in this world!” he murmured.
I know not why, but at the words I sighed.
“Well?” he questioned.
“Yes, it is good to live in this world!” I repeated.
Again the silence fell upon us, and again I felt ill at ease. I could not get it out of my head that I had hurt him, by agreeing with him that he was old; I would have liked to console him, but did not know how to set about it.
“But good-bye!” he said, rising, “my mother expects me to supper. I have hardly seen her to-day.”
“I would have liked to play you my new sonata.”
“Another time,” he replied coldly, at least so it seemed to me; then, moving off a step, he said with a careless gesture: “Good-bye!”
I was more than ever convinced that I had given him pain, and this distressed me. Macha and I went with him, as far as the porch, and stood there awhile looking down the road where he had disappeared. When we no longer caught the slightest echo from his horse’s feet, I began to walk about the terrace and watch the garden, and I remained