Part 34

“Yes; I did. Monsieur Gaston taught me. I read the Æneid with him. It’s a dull thing, but there are fine passages. Do you remember when Dido and Æneas are in the forest?…”

“Yes, yes, I remember,” Sanin answered hurriedly. He had long ago forgotten all his Latin, and had only very faint notions about the Æneid.

Maria Nikolaevna glanced at him, as her way was, a little from one side and looking upwards. “Don’t imagine, though, that I am very learned. Mercy on us! no; I’m not learned, and I’ve no talents of any sort. I scarcely know how to write … really; I can’t read aloud; nor play the piano, nor draw, nor sew—nothing! That’s what I am—there you have me!”

She threw out her hands. “I tell you all this,” she said, “first, so as not to hear those fools (she pointed to the stage where at that instant the actor’s place was being filled by an actress, also howling, and also with her elbows projecting before her) and secondly, because I’m in your debt; you told me all about yourself yesterday.”

“It was your pleasure to question me,” observed Sanin.

Maria Nikolaevna suddenly turned to him. “And it’s not your pleasure to know just what sort of woman I am? I can’t wonder at it, though,” she went on, leaning back again on the sofa cushions. “A man just going to be married, and for love, and after a duel…. What thoughts could he have for anything else?”

Maria Nikolaevna relapsed into dreamy silence, and began biting the handle of her fan with her big, but even, milkwhite teeth.

And Sanin felt mounting to his head again that intoxication which he had not been able to get rid of for the last two days.

The conversation between him and Maria Nikolaevna was carried on in an undertone, almost in a whisper, and this irritated and disturbed him the more….

When would it all end?

Weak people never put an end to things themselves—they always wait for the end.

Some one sneezed on the stage; this sneeze had been put into the play by the author as the “comic relief” or “element”; there was certainly no other comic element in it; and the audience made the most of it; they laughed.

This laugh, too, jarred upon Sanin.

There were moments when he actually did not know whether he was furious or delighted, bored or amused. Oh, if Gemma could have seen him!

“It’s really curious,” Maria Nikolaevna began all at once. “A man informs one and in such a calm voice, ‘I am going to get married’; but no one calmly says to one, ‘I’m going to throw myself in the water.’ And yet what difference is there? It’s curious, really.”

Annoyance got the upper hand of Sanin. “There’s a great difference, Maria Nikolaevna! It’s not dreadful at all to throw oneself in the water if one can swim; and besides … as to the strangeness of marriages, if you come to that …”

He stopped short abruptly and bit his tongue.

Maria Nikolaevna slapped her open hand with her fan.

“Go on, Dimitri Pavlovitch, go on—I know what you were going to say. ‘If it comes to that, my dear madam, Maria Nikolaevna Polozov,’ you were going to say, ‘anything more curious than your marriage it would be impossible to conceive…. I know your husband well, from a child!’ That’s what you were going to say, you who can swim!”

“Excuse me,” Sanin was beginning….

“Isn’t it the truth? Isn’t it the truth?” Maria Nikolaevna pronounced insistently.

“Come, look me in the face and tell me I was wrong!”

Sanin did not know what to do with his eyes. “Well, if you like; it’s the truth, if you absolutely insist upon it,” he said at last.

Maria Nikolaevna shook her head. “Quite so, quite so. Well, and did you ask yourself, you who can swim, what could be the reason of such a strange … step on the part of a woman, not poor … and not a fool … and not ugly? All that does not interest you, perhaps, but no matter. I’ll tell you the reason not this minute, but directly the entr’acte is over. I am in continual uneasiness for fear some one should come in….”

Maria Nikolaevna had hardly uttered this last word when the outer door actually was half opened, and into the box was thrust a head—red, oily, perspiring, still young, but toothless; with sleek long hair, a pendent nose, huge ears like a bat’s, with gold spectacles on inquisitive dull eyes, and a pince-nez over the spectacles. The head looked round, saw Maria Nikolaevna, gave a nasty grin, nodded…. A scraggy neck craned in after it….

Maria Nikolaevna shook her handkerchief at it. “I’m not at home! Ich bin nicht zu Hause, Herr P…! Ich bin nicht zu Hause…. Ksh-sk! ksh-sh-sh!”

The head was disconcerted, gave a forced laugh, said with a sort of sob, in imitation of Liszt, at whose feet he had once reverently grovelled, “Sehr gut, sehr gut!” and vanished.

“What is that object?” inquired Sanin.