Short Fiction by Leo Tolstoy (book reader for pc TXT) 📕

champagne⁠ ⁠… he’s come⁠ ⁠… now then, champagne!⁠ ⁠… I’ll have a champagne bath, and bathe in it! Noble gentlemen!⁠ ⁠… I love the society of our brave old nobility⁠ ⁠… Styóshka, sing ‘The Pathway.’ ”

The cavalryman was also rather tipsy, but in another manner. He sat on a sofa in the corner very close to a tall, handsome gipsy, Lubásha; and feeling his eyes misty with drink, he kept blinking and shaking his head, and, repeating the same words over and over again in a whisper, besought the gipsy to fly with him somewhere. Lubásha smiled and listened as if what he said were very amusing and yet rather sad, and glancing occasionally at her husband⁠—the squinting Sáshka, who was standing beyond the chair in front of her⁠—in reply to the cavalryman’s declarations of love, stooped and, whispering in his ear, asked him to buy her some scent and a ribbon on the quiet so that the others should not know.

“Hurrah!” cried the cavalryman when the Count entered.

The handsome young man was pacing up and down the room with laboriously steady steps and a careworn expression on his face, warbling an air from The Revolt in the Serail. An elderly paterfamilias, tempted to come and hear the gipsies by the persistent entreaties of the noble gentlemen, who said that without him the thing would be worthless and it would be better not to go at all, was lying on a sofa where he had sunk as soon as he arrived, and no one took any notice of him. Some official or other who was there had taken off his swallowtail coat and was sitting up on the table feet and all, ruffling his hair and thereby demonstrating that he was very much on the spree. As soon as the Count entered, the official unbuttoned the collar of his shirt and got still further onto the table. In general, upon the arrival of the Count the carouse revived again.

The gipsies, who had wandered about the room, again gathered and sat down in a circle. The Count took Styóshka, the leading singer, on his knees, and ordered more champagne.

Ilúshka came and stood in front of Styóshka with his guitar, and the “dance” commenced, i.e. the gipsy songs “If I go along the Street”⁠—“Oh, ye Hussars!”⁠—“Do you hear, do you know?” and so on in definite order. Styóshka sang admirably. The flexible, sonorous contralto that flowed from her very chest, her smiles while singing, her laughing, passionate eyes, and the foot that moved involuntarily in measure with the song, her wild shriek at the commencement of the chorus⁠—all touched some powerful but rarely-reached chord. One could see she lived completely in the song she was singing. Ilúshka accompanied her on the guitar, his back, legs, smile, and whole being, expressing sympathy with the song; and, eagerly watching her, he raised and lowered his head, as attentive and engrossed as though he heard the song for the first time. Then, at the last melodious note, he suddenly drew himself up, and, as if feeling himself superior to everyone in the world, with pride and determination threw his guitar up with his foot, twirled it about, stamped, shook back his hair, and frowning, looked round at the choir. His whole body, from neck to heels, began dancing in every muscle. And twenty energetic, powerful voices, each trying to chime in more strongly and more strangely than the rest, rang through the air. The old women bobbed up and down on their chairs, waving their handkerchiefs, showing their teeth, and vying with each other in their harmonious and measured shouts. The basses, with strained necks, and heads bent to one side, boomed standing behind their chairs.

When Styóshka took a high note Ilúshka brought his guitar closer to her, as if wishing to help her, and the handsome young man screamed with rapture, saying that now they were beginning the bémols.194

When a dance was struck up and Dounyáshka, advancing with trembling shoulders and bosom, twirled round in front of the Count and floated onwards, Toúrbin leapt up, threw off his jacket, and in his red shirt paced jauntily with her in precise and measured step, accomplishing such things with his legs that the gipsies, smiling with approval, glanced one at another.

The Captain of Police sat down like a Turk, beat his breast with his fist, and cried “Viva!” and then, having caught hold of the Count’s leg, began to tell him that of two thousand roubles he now had only five hundred left, but that he could do anything he liked if only the Count would allow it. The elderly paterfamilias awoke and wished to go away, but was not permitted to do so. The handsome young man began persuading a gipsy to valse with him. The cavalryman, wishing to show off his intimacy with the Count, rose and embraced Toúrbin. “Ah, my dear fellow!” he said, “why didst thou leave us, eh?” The Count was silent, evidently thinking of something else. “Where have you been? Ah, you rogue of a Count, I know where you went to!”

For some reason this familiarity displeased Toúrbin. Without a smile he looked silently into the cavalryman’s face, and suddenly launched at him such terrible and rude abuse that the cavalryman was pained, and for a while could not make up his mind whether to take the offence as a joke or seriously. At last he decided to take it as a joke, smiled, and went back to his gipsy, assuring her that he would certainly marry her after Easter. They sang another song, and another, danced again, and “hailed the guests,” and everyone continued to imagine he was enjoying it. There was no end to the champagne. The Count drank much. His eyes seemed to grow moist, but he was not unsteady. He danced yet better than before, spoke firmly, even joined in the chorus extremely well, and chimed in when Styóshka sang “Friendship’s Tender Emotions.” In the