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

had danced with her so often. Countess G⁠⸺ gave a bal costumé⁠—I remember it as though it were today⁠—and she was a Neapolitan maid, oh, so charming! Whenever he came to Moscow, he used to ask, ‘que fait la belle Napolitaine?’ And suddenly this woman, in such a condition (she bore a child on the way), did not stop for a moment to think, without preparing anything, without collecting her things, just as she was, when they took him, followed him a distance of five thousand versts.”

“Oh, what a remarkable woman!” said the hostess.

“Both he and she were remarkable people,” said another lady. “I have been told⁠—I don’t know whether it is true⁠—that wherever they worked in the mines in Siberia, or whatever it is called, the convicts, who were with them, improved in their presence.”

“But she has never worked in the mines,” Pákhtin corrected her.

How much that year ’56 meant! Three years before no one had been thinking of the Labázovs, and if anyone recalled them, it was with that unaccountable feeling of dread with which one speaks of one lately dead; but now they vividly recalled all the former relations, all the beautiful qualities, and each lady was making a plan for getting the monopoly of the Labázovs, in order to treat the other guests to them.

“Their son and their daughter have come with them,” said Pákhtin.

“If they are only as handsome as their mother used to be,” said Countess Fuks. “Still, their father, too, was very, very handsome.”

“How could they educate their children there?” asked the hostess.

“They say, nicely. They say that the young man is as nice, as amiable, and as cultured as though he had been brought up in Paris.”

“I predict great success to that young person,” said a homely spinster. “All those Siberian ladies have something pleasantly trivial about them, which everybody, however, likes.”

“Yes, yes,” said another spinster.

“Here we have another rich prospective bride,” said a third spinster.

The old colonel, of German origin, who had come to Moscow three years before, in order to marry a rich girl, decided as quickly as possible, before the young people knew anything about it, to present himself and propose. But the spinsters and ladies thought almost the same about the young Siberian.

“No doubt that is the one I am destined to marry,” thought a spinster who had been going out for eight years.

“No doubt it was for the best that that stupid officer of the Chevalier Guards did not propose to me. I should certainly have been unhappy.”

“Well, they will again grow yellow with envy, if this one, too, falls in love with me,” thought a young and pretty lady.

We hear much about the provincialism of small towns⁠—but there is nothing worse than the provincialism of the upper classes. There are no new persons there, and society is prepared to receive all kinds of new persons, if they should make their appearance; but they are rarely, very rarely, recognized as belonging to their circle and accepted, as was the case with the Labázovs, and the sensation produced by them is stronger than in a provincial town.

III

“This is Moscow, white-stoned Mother Moscow,” said Peter Ivánovich, rubbing his eyes in the morning, and listening to the tolling of the bells which was proceeding from Gazette Lane. Nothing so vividly resurrects the past as sounds, and these sounds of the Moscow bells, combined with the sight of a white wall opposite the window, and with the rumbling of wheels, so vividly reminded him not only of the Moscow which he had known thirty-five years before, but also of the Moscow with the Kremlin, with the palaces, with Iván the bell, and so forth, which he had been carrying in his heart, that he experienced a childish joy at being a Russian, and in Moscow.

There appeared the Bukhara morning-gown, wide open over the broad chest with its chintz shirt, the pipe with its amber, the lackey with soft manners, tea, the odour of tobacco; a loud male voice was heard in Chevalier’s apartments; there resounded the morning kisses, and the voices of daughter and son, and the Decembrist was as much at home as in Irkútsk, and as he would have been in New York or in Paris.

No matter how much I should like to present to my readers the Decembrist hero above all foibles, I must confess, for truth’s sake, that Peter Ivánovich took great pains in shaving and combing himself, and in looking at himself in the mirror. He was dissatisfied with the garments, which had been made in Siberia with little elegance, and two or three times he buttoned and unbuttoned his coat.

But Natálya Nikoláevna entered the drawing-room, rustling with her black moire gown, with mittens and with ribbons in her cap, which, though not according to the latest fashion, were so arranged that, far from making her appear ridicule, they made her look distinguée. For this ladies have a special sixth sense and perspicacity, which cannot be compared to anything.

Sónya, too, was so dressed that, although she was two years behind in fashion, she could not be reproached in any way. On her mother everything was dark and simple, and on the daughter bright and cheerful.

Serézha had just awakened, and so they went by themselves to mass. Father and mother sat in the back seat, and their daughter was opposite them. Vasíli climbed on the box, and the hired carriage took them to the Kremlin. When they got out of the carriage, the ladies adjusted their robes, and Peter Ivánovich took the arm of his Natálya Nikoláevna, and, throwing back his head, walked up to the door of the church. Many people, merchants, officers, and everybody else, could not make out what kind of people they were.

Who was that old man with his old sunburnt, and still unblanched face, with the large, straight work wrinkles of a peculiar fold, different from the wrinkles acquired in