The room into which the servant conducted Nejdanov was beautifully neat and spacious, with wide-open windows looking on to the garden. A gentle breeze stirred the white curtains, blowing them out high like sails and letting them fall again. Golden reflections glided lightly over the ceiling; the whole room was filled with the moist freshness of spring. Nejdanov dismissed the servant, unpacked his trunk, washed, and changed. The journey had thoroughly exhausted him. The constant presence of a stranger during the last two days, the many fruitless discussions, had completely upset his nerves. A certain bitterness, which was neither boredom nor anger, accumulated mysteriously in the depths of his being. He was annoyed with himself for his lack of courage, but his heart ached. He went up to the window and looked out into the garden. It was an old- fashioned garden, with rich dark soil, such as one rarely sees around Moscow, laid out on the slope of a hill into four separate parts. In front of the house there was a flower garden, with straight gravel paths, groups of acacias and lilac, and round flower beds. To the left, past the stable yard, as far down as the barn, there was an orchard, thickly planted with apples, pears, plums, currants, and raspberries. Beyond the flower garden, in front of the house, there was a large square walk, thickly enterlaced with lime trees. To the right, the view was shut out by an avenue of silver poplars; a glimpse of an orangery could be seen through a group of weeping willows. The whole garden was clothed in its first green leaves; the loud buzz of summer insects was not yet heard; the leaves rustled gently, chaffinches twittered everywhere; two doves sat cooing on a tree; the note of a solitary cuckoo was heard first in one place, then in another; the friendly cawing of rooks was carried from the distance beyond the mill pond, sounding like the creaking of innumerable cart wheels. Light clouds floated dreamily over this gentle stillness, spreading themselves out like the breasts of some huge,lazy birds.
Nejdanov gazed and listened, drinking in the cool air through half-parted lips.
His depression left him and a wonderful calmness entered his soul.
Meanwhile he was being discussed in the bedroom below. Sipiagin was telling his wife how he had met him, what Prince G. had said of him, and the gist of their talks on the journey.
“A clever chap!” he repeated, “and well educated, too. It’s true he’s a revolutionist, but what does it matter? These people are ambitious, at any rate. As for Kolia, he is too young to be spoiled by any of this nonsense.”
Valentina Mihailovna listened to her husband affectionately; an amused smile played on her lips, as if he were telling her of some naughty amusing prank. It was pleasant to her to think that her seigneur a maitre, such a respectable man, of important position, could be as mischievous as a boy of twenty. Standing before the looking-glass in a snow-white shirt and blue silk braces, Sipiagin was brushing his hair in the English fashion with two brushes, while Valentina Mihailovna, her feet tucked under her, was sitting on a narrow Turkish couch, telling him various news about the house, the paper mill, which, alas, was not going well, as was to be expected; about the possibilities of changing the cook, about the church, of which the plaster had come off; about Mariana, Kollomietzev. . .
Between husband and wife there existed the fullest confidence and good understanding; they certainly lived in “love and harmony,” as people used to say in olden days. When Sipiagin, after finishing his toilet, asked chivalrously for his wife’s hand and she gave him both, and watched him with an affectionate pride as he kissed them in turn, the feeling expressed in their faces was good and true, although in her it shone out of a pair of eyes worthy of Raphael, and in him out of the ordinary eyes of a mere official.
On the stroke of five Nejdanov went down to dinner, which was announced by a Chinese gong, not by a bell. The whole company was already assembled in the dining room. Sipiagin welcomed him again from behind his high cravat, and showed him to a place between Anna Zaharovna and Kolia. Anna Zaharovna was an old maid, a sister of Sipiagin’s father; she exhaled a smell of camphor, like a garment that had been put away for a long time, and had a nervous, dejected look. She had acted as Kolia’s nurse or governess, and her wrinkled face expressed displeasure when Nejdanov sat down between her and her charge. Kolia looked sideways at his new neighbour; the intelligent boy soon saw that his tutor was shy and uncomfortable, that he did not raise his eyes, and scarcely ate anything. This pleased Kolia, who had been afraid that his tutor would be cross and severe. Valentina Mihailovna also watched Nejdanov.
“He looks like a student,” she thought to herself. “He’s not accustomed to society, but has a very interesting face, and the colour of his hair is like that of the apostle whose hair the old Italian masters always painted red — and his hands are clean!” Indeed, everybody at the table stared at Nejdanov, but they had mercy on him, and left him in peace for the time being. He was conscious of this, and was pleased and angry about it at the same time.
Sipiagin and Kollomietzev carried on the conversation. They talked about the county council, the governor, the highway tax, the peasants buying out the land, about mutual Moscow and St. Petersburg acquaintances, Katkov’s lyceum, which was just coming into fashion, about the difficulty of getting labour, penalties, and damage caused by cattle, even of Bismarck, the war of 1866, and Napoleon III., whom Kollomietzev called a hero. Kollomietzev gave vent to the most retrograde opinions, going so far as to propose, in jest it is true, a toast given by a certain friend of his on a names-day banquet, “I drink to the only principle I acknowledge, the whip and Roedeger!”
Valentina Mihailovna frowned, and remarked that it was de tres mauvais gout.
Sipiagin, on the contrary, expressed the most liberal views, refuted Kollomietzev’s arguments politely, though with a certain amount of disdain, and even chaffed him a little.
“Your terror of emancipation, my dear Simion Petrovitch,” he said, “puts me in mind of our much respected friend, Alexai Ivanovitch Tveritinov, and the petition he sent in, in the year 1860. He insisted on reading it in every drawing room in St. Petersburg. There was one rather good sentence in it about our liberated serf, who was to march over the face of the fatherland bearing a torch in his hand. You should have seen our dear Alexai Ivanovitch, blowing out his cheeks and blinking his little eyes, pronounce in his babyish voice, ‘T-torch! t-torch! Will march with a t-torch!’ Well, the emancipation is now an established fact, but where is the peasant with the torch?
“Tveritinov was only slightly wrong,” Kollomietzev said solemnly. “Not the peasants will march with the torch, but others.”
At the words, Nejdanov, who until............