First love, and other stories. Иван Тургенев

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СКАЧАТЬ toward me had definitively annihilated me. What, then, was my amazement when, as she passed me, she whispered to me hastily, and with her former affectionate expression in her eyes:—“Come to us at eight o’clock, do you hear? without fail. …” I merely threw my hands apart in amazement;—but she was already retreating, having thrown a white scarf over her head.

VII

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      Precisely at eight o’clock I entered the tiny wing inhabited by the Princess, clad in my coat, and with my hair brushed up into a crest on top of my head. The old servant glared surlily at me, and rose reluctantly from his bench. Merry voices resounded in the drawing-room. I opened the door and retreated a pace in astonishment. In the middle of the room, on a chair, stood the young Princess, holding a man’s hat in front of her; around the chair thronged five men. They were trying to dip their hands into the hat, but she kept raising it on high and shaking it violently. On catching sight of me she exclaimed:—

      “Stay, stay! Here’s a new guest; he must be given a ticket,”—and springing lightly from the chair, she seized me by the lapel of my coat.—“Come along,”—said she;—“why do you stand there? Messieurs, allow me to make you acquainted: this is Monsieur Voldemar, the son of our neighbour. And this,”—she added, turning to me, and pointing to the visitors in turn—“is Count Malévsky, Doctor Lúshin, the poet Maidánoff, retired Captain Nirmátzky, and Byelovzóroff the hussar, whom you have already seen. I beg that you will love and favour each other.”

      I was so confused that I did not even bow to any one; in Doctor Lúshin I recognised that same swarthy gentleman who had so ruthlessly put me to shame in the garden; the others were strangers to me.

      “Count!”—pursued Zinaída—“write a ticket for M’sieu Voldemar.”

      “That is unjust,”—returned the Count, with a slight accent—a very handsome and foppishly-attired man, with a dark complexion, expressive brown eyes, a thin, white little nose, and a slender moustache over his tiny mouth.—“He has not been playing at forfeits with us.”

      “ ’Tis unjust,”—repeated Byelovzóroff and the gentleman who had been alluded to as the retired Captain—a man of forty, horribly pockmarked, curly-haired as a negro, round-shouldered, bow-legged, and dressed in a military coat without epaulets, worn open on the breast.

      “Write a ticket, I tell you,”—repeated the Princess.—“What sort of a rebellion is this? M’sieu Voldemar is with us for the first time, and to-day no law applies to him. No grumbling—write; I will have it so.”

      The Count shrugged his shoulders, but submissively bowing his head, he took a pen in his white, ring-decked hand, tore off a scrap of paper and began to write on it.

      “Permit me at least to explain to M’sieu Voldemar what it is all about,”—began Lúshin, in a bantering tone;—“otherwise he will be utterly at a loss. You see, young man, we are playing at forfeits; the Princess must pay a fine, and the one who draws out the lucky ticket must kiss her hand. Do you understand what I have told you?”

      I merely glanced at him and continued to stand as though in a fog, while the Princess again sprang upon the chair and again began to shake the hat. All reached up to her—I among the rest.

      “Maidánoff,”—said the Princess to the tall young man with a gaunt face, tiny mole-like eyes and extremely long, black hair—“you, as a poet, ought to be magnanimous and surrender your ticket to M’sieu Voldemar, so that he may have two chances instead of one.”

      But Maidánoff shook his head in refusal and tossed his hair. I put in my hand into the hat after all the rest, drew out and unfolded a ticket. … O Lord! what were my sensations when I beheld on it, “Kiss!”

      “Kiss!”—I cried involuntarily.

      “Bravo! He has won,”—chimed in the Princess.—“How delighted I am!”—She descended from the chair, and gazed into my eyes so clearly and sweetly that my heart fairly laughed with joy.—“And are you glad?”—she asked me.

      “I?” … I stammered.

      “Sell me your ticket,”—suddenly blurted out Byelovzóroff, right in my ear.—“I’ll give you one hundred rubles for it.”

      I replied to the hussar by such a wrathful look that Zinaída clapped her hands, and Lúshin cried:—“That’s a gallant fellow!”

      “But,”—he went on—“in my capacity of master of ceremonies, I am bound to see that all the regulations are carried out. M’sieu Voldemar, get down on one knee. That is our rule.”

      Zinaída stood before me with her head bent a little to one side, as though the better to scrutinise me, and offered me her hand with dignity. Things grew dim before my eyes; I tried to get down on one knee, plumped down on both knees, and applied my lips to Zinaída’s fingers in so awkward a manner that I scratched the tip of my nose slightly on her nails.

      “Good!”—shouted Lúshin, and helped me to rise.

      The game of forfeits continued. Zinaída placed me beside her. What penalties they did invent! Among other things, she had to impersonate a “statue”—and she selected as a pedestal the monstrously homely Nirmátzky, ordering him to lie flat on the floor, and to tuck his face into his breast. The laughter did not cease for a single moment. All this noise and uproar, this unceremonious, almost tumultuous merriment, these unprecedented relations with strangers, fairly flew to my head; for I was a boy who had been reared soberly, and in solitude, and had grown up in a stately home of gentry. I became simply intoxicated, as though with wine. I began to shout with laughter and chatter more loudly than the rest, so that even the old Princess, who was sitting in the adjoining room with some sort of pettifogger from the Íversky Gate[5] who had been summoned for a conference, came out to take a look at me. But I felt so happy that, as the saying is, I didn’t care a farthing for anybody’s ridicule, or anybody’s oblique glances.

      Zinaída continued to display a preference for me and never let me leave her side. In one forfeit I was made to sit by her, covered up with one and the same silk kerchief: I was bound to tell her my secret. I remember how our two heads found themselves suddenly in choking, semi-transparent, fragrant gloom; how near and softly her eyes sparkled in that gloom, and how hotly her parted lips breathed; and her teeth were visible, and the tips of her hair tickled and burned me. I maintained silence. She smiled mysteriously and slyly, and at last whispered to me: “Well, what is it?” But I merely flushed and laughed, and turned away, and could hardly draw my breath. We got tired of forfeits, and began to play “string.” Good heavens! what rapture I felt when, forgetting myself with gaping, I received from her a strong, sharp rap on my fingers; and how afterward I tried to pretend that I was yawning with inattention, but she mocked at me and did not touch my hands, which were awaiting the blow!

      But what a lot of other pranks we played that same evening! We played on the piano, and sang, and danced, and represented a gipsy camp. We dressed Nirmátzky up like a bear, and fed him with water and salt. Count Malévsky showed us several card tricks, and ended by stacking the cards and dealing himself all the trumps at whist; upon which Lúshin “had the honour of congratulating him.” Maidánoff declaimed to us fragments from his poem, “The Murderer” (this occurred in the very thick of romanticism), which he intended to publish in a black binding, with the title in letters of the colour of blood. We stole his hat from the knees СКАЧАТЬ