IX
More than twenty years had gone by. Much water had flowed away; many people had died, many been born, many had grown up, many grown old; still more ideas had been born and had died; much that was old and beautiful, and much that was old and bad, had perished, much that was beautiful and new had grown up, and still more that was immature, monstrous, and new, had come into God’s world.
Count Fyódor Toúrbin had been killed long ago in a duel, by some foreigner he had horsewhipped in the street. His son, as like him as one drop of water to another, was a handsome youth, already twenty-three years old, and serving in the Horse Guards. But morally the young Toúrbin did not in the least resemble his father. There was not a shade of the impetuous, passionate, and, to speak frankly, dissolute propensities of the past age. His distinguishing characteristics were intellect, education, and the gifted nature he had inherited; combined with love of propriety and of the comforts of life, a practical way of looking at men and things, reasonableness and foresight. The young Count got on well in the service; at twenty-three he was already a lieutenant. At the commencement of military operations he made up his mind that he would be more likely to get advancement if he exchanged into the active army, and he entered an hussar regiment as captain, and was soon in command of a squadron.
In May 1848 the S⸺ hussar regiment was marching to the campaign through the K⸺ Government, and the very squadron that young Count Toúrbin commanded had to spend the night in the village of Morózovka, Anna Fyódorovna’s estate.
Anna Fyódorovna was still living, but was already so far from young that she did not even consider herself young, which means a good deal for a woman. She had grown very fat, which is said to make a woman younger, but deep, soft wrinkles were apparent on her white plumpness. She never went to town now, it was even difficult for her to get into her carriage, but she was still as kindhearted and still just as silly as ever (now that her beauty no longer biases one, the truth may be told). With her lived her twenty-three-year-old daughter Lisa, a Russian country belle, and her brother, our acquaintance the cavalryman, who had good-naturedly squandered the whole of his little property, and had found a home for his old age with Anna Fyódorovna. The hair on his head was quite grey, his upper lip had fallen in, but the moustache above it was still carefully blackened. Not only his forehead and cheeks but even his nose and neck were wrinkled, and his back was bent, yet in the movements of his feeble, crooked legs, the manner of a cavalryman was still perceptible.
The family and those of the household sat in the little drawing-room of the old house, with an open door leading out on to the verandah and open windows overlooking the ancient star-shaped garden with its lime trees. Grey-haired Anna Fyódorovna sat in a lilac jacket on the sofa, before which stood a round mahogany table on which she was laying out cards. Her old brother, in his clean white trousers and blue coat, had settled himself by the window, and was plaiting a cord out of white cotton with the aid of a wooden fork—an occupation his niece had taught him, and which he liked very much, as he could no longer do anything, and his eyes were too weak for his favourite occupation, newspaper reading. Pímotchka, Anna Fyódorovna’s ward, sat by him learning a lesson—Lisa helping her and at the same time, with wooden knitting needles, making a goat’s-wool stocking for her uncle. The last rays of the setting sun shone, as usual at that hour, through the lime-tree avenue, and threw slanting gleams on to the farthest window and the whatnot standing near it. It was so quiet in the garden and the room, that one could hear the swift flutter of a swallow’s wings outside the window, and in the room Anna Fyódorovna’s soft sigh, or the slight groan of the old man as he crossed his legs.
“How do they go?—Lisa, show me! I always forget,” said Anna Fyódorovna, at a standstill in laying out her cards at “patience.”
Lisa, without stopping her work, went to her mother and, glancing at the cards:
“Ah, you’ve muddled them all, mama dear!” she said, rearranging the cards; “that’s the way they should go. And what you are trying your fortune about will still come true,” she added, withdrawing one card so that it was not noticed.
“Ah yes, you always deceive me and say it has come out.”
“No really, it means … you’ll succeed. It has come out.”
“All right, all right, you sly puss! But is it not time we had tea?”
“I have already ordered the samovar to be lit. I’ll see to it at once. Do you want it brought here? … Be quick and finish your lesson, Pímotchka, and let’s have a run.”
And Lisa went to the door.
“Lisa, Lizzie!” said her uncle, looking intently at his fork, “I think I’ve again dropped a stitch—pick it up, ducky.”
“Directly, directly! I’ll only give a loaf of sugar to be broken up.”
And really, three minutes later, she ran back, went to her uncle and pinched his ear.
“That’s for dropping your stitches!” she said, laughing, “and you have not done your task!”
“Now then, never mind, never mind. Put it right—there’s a little knot of some kind.”
Lisa took the fork, drew a pin out of her tippet—which thereupon, a breeze coming in at the door, blew slightly open—and managing somehow to pick the stitch up with the pin, pulled two loops through and returned the fork to her uncle.
“Now give me a kiss for it,” she said, holding her rosy cheek to him and pinning up her tippet. “You shall have rum with your tea today. It’s Friday, you know.”
And she went again into the tearoom.
“Come here and look, uncle, the hussars are coming!” rang her clear voice from the tearoom.
Anna Fyódorovna came with her brother into the tearoom, the windows of which overlooked the village, to see the hussars. Very little was visible from the windows—only a crowd moving in a cloud of dust.
“It’s a pity, sister, that we have so little room,” the uncle said to Anna Fyódorovna, “and that the wing is not yet finished; we might have invited the officers. Hussar officers, you know, are such splendid, gay, young fellows. One would have liked to see something of them.”
“Why, of course I should have been only too glad; but you know yourself, brother, we have no room. There’s my bedroom, and Lisa’s room, the drawing-room, this, and your room, and that’s all. Where is one to put them?—really now. The village elder’s cottage has been cleaned out for them: Michael Matvéef says it’s quite clean.”
“And we could have chosen a bridegroom for you, Lizzie, from among them—a fine hussar.”
“No, I don’t want an hussar; I’d rather have an Uhlan. Weren’t you in the Uhlans, uncle? … I don’t want to have anything to do with these. They are said all to be desperate fellows.” And Lisa blushed a little, but again laughed her musical laugh.
“Here comes Oustúshka running; we must ask her what she has seen,” said she.
Anna Fyódorovna told her to call Oustúshka.
“It’s not in you to keep at your work; you must needs run off to see the soldiers,” said Anna Fyódorovna. “Well, where have the officers been put up?”
“In Erómkin’s house, mistress. There are two of them, such handsome ones. One’s a Count, they say!”
“And what’s his name?”
“Kazárof or Tourbínof. I beg your pardon—I forget.”
“There’s a fool; can’t even tell us anything. You might at least have found out the name.”
“Well, I’ll run back.”
“Yes, I know, you’re first-rate at that sort of thing. … No, let Daniel go. Tell him, brother, to go and to ask whether the officers want anything. One ought, after all, to show them some politeness; say the mistress sent to inquire.”
The old people returned to the tearoom, and Lisa went into the servants’ room to put away into a box the sugar they had broken up. Oustúshka was there telling about the hussars.
“Darling miss, what a beauty that Count is!” she said; “a regular cherubim with black eyebrows. There now, if you had a bridegroom like that, you would be a couple of the right sort.”
The other maids smiled approvingly; the old nurse, who sat knitting at a window, sighed, and even whispered a prayer, drawing in her breath.
“So you liked the hussars very much?” said Lisa. “And you’re a good one at telling what you’ve seen. Please, Oustúshka, go and bring some of the cranberry juice, to give the hussars something sour to drink.”
And Lisa, laughing, went out with the sugar basin.
“I should really like to have seen what that hussar is like,” she thought, “brown or fair? And he would have been glad to make our acquaintance I should think. … But he will pass and never know that I was here, and thought about him. And how many such have already passed me by? Who sees me here except uncle and Oustúshka? Whichever way I do my hair, whatever sleeves I put on, no one looks at me with pleasure,” she thought, with a sigh, as she looked at her plump, white arm; “I suppose he is tall, with large eyes, and, certainly, little black moustaches … No, I am more than twenty-two, and no one has fallen in love with me, except the pockmarked Iván Ipátitch, and I looked still better four years ago. … And so my early womanhood has passed without gladdening anyone. Oh poor, poor country lass that I am!”
Her mother’s voice, calling her to pour out the tea, roused the country lass from this momentary meditation. She lifted her head with a start and went into the tearoom.
Often the best results are obtained accidentally, and the more one tries the worse things turn out. In the country, people rarely try to educate their children, and therefore, unwittingly, usually give them an excellent education. This was particularly so in Lisa’s case. Anna Fyódorovna, with her limited intellect and careless temperament, gave Lisa no education—did not teach her music or that very useful French language—but having accidentally borne a healthy, pretty child by her deceased husband, she gave her little daughter over to a wet-nurse and a dry-nurse, fed her, dressed her in cotton prints and goatskin shoes, sent her out to walk and to gather mushrooms and wild berries, engaged a pupil of the seminary to teach her reading, writing, and arithmetic, and when sixteen years had passed, she accidentally found in Lisa a friend, an ever-cheerful and kindhearted being, and an active housekeeper. Anna Fyódorovna, being kindhearted, always had some children to bring up: either serf children or foundlings. Lisa began looking after them when she was ten years old: teaching them, dressing them, taking them to church, and checking them when they played too many pranks. Later on, the decrepit, kindly uncle, who had to be tended like a child, appeared on the scene. Then the servants and peasants came to the young lady with various requests and with ailments, which latter she treated with elderberry, peppermint, and camphorated spirits. Then there was the household management, which all fell of itself on to her shoulders. Then an unsatisfied longing for love awoke and found outlet only in nature and religion. And Lisa accidentally grew into an active, good-naturedly cheerful, self-reliant, pure, and deeply religious woman. It is true she suffered from vanity a little when she saw neighbours standing by her in church with fashionable bonnets brought from K⸺ on their heads; and sometimes she was vexed to tears with her grumbling old mother and her whims. She had dreams of love, too, in most absurd and sometimes crude forms; but her useful activity, which had grown into a necessity, dissipated them, and at the age of twenty-two there was not one spot, not one sting of remorse, in the clear, calm soul of the physically and morally beautifully developed maiden. Lisa was of medium height, rather plump than thin, her eyes were hazel, not large, and had slight shadows on the lower lids, and she had a long, light-brown plait of hair. She walked with big steps and with a slight sway—a “duck’s waddle,” as the saying is. Her face, when she was occupied and not agitated by anything in particular, seemed to say to everyone who looked into it, “It is good and gladsome to live in the world when one has people to love and one’s conscience is clear.” Even in moments of vexation, trouble, excitement, or sadness, in spite of herself, there shone—through the tear in her eye, her frowning left eyebrow, and her compressed lips—a kind, straightforward spirit unspoilt by the intellect; it shone in the dimples of her cheeks, in the corners of her mouth, and in her glistening eyes, accustomed to smile and to feel joy in life.