Fifty-Two Stories

The one who felt most awkward of all was Staff-Captain Ryabovich, a short, stoop-shouldered officer in spectacles and with side-whiskers like a lynx. While some of his comrades put on serious faces and others forced smiles, his face, his lynx side-whiskers, and his spectacles seemed to say: “I’m the most timid, the most modest, and the most colorless officer in the whole brigade!” At first, coming into the dining room and then sitting at tea, he could not fix his attention on any one face or object. Faces, dresses, cut-glass decanters of cognac, steam from the tea-glasses, molded cornices—it all merged into one enormous general impression, which aroused anxiety in Ryabovich and a wish to hide his head. Like a reciter appearing before the public for the first time, he saw everything that was before his eyes, but somehow understood it poorly (in physiology such a state, when the subject sees but does not understand, is known as “psychic blindness”). A little later, feeling more at ease, Ryabovich recovered his sight and began to observe. For him, as a timid and unsociable man, what struck his eyes first of all was something he had never possessed, namely—the extraordinary courage of his new acquaintances. Von Rabbek, his wife, two elderly ladies, a certain young lady in a lilac dress, and the young man with red sideburns, who turned out to be Rabbek’s younger son, very cleverly, as if they had rehearsed it beforehand, positioned themselves among the officers and immediately got into a heated argument, which their guests could not fail to mix into. The lilac young lady began to insist heatedly that an artillerist had a much easier life than a cavalry or infantry man, while Rabbek and the elderly ladies maintained the opposite. Cross-talk began. Ryabovich looked at the lilac young lady, who was arguing very heatedly about something alien and totally uninteresting to her, and watched insincere smiles appear and disappear on her face.

Von Rabbek and his family artfully drew the officers into the argument, and meanwhile kept a close eye on their glasses and mouths, to see if they were all drinking, if they had sugar, and why this or that one was not eating biscuits or drinking cognac. And the more Ryabovich looked and listened, the more he liked this insincere but perfectly disciplined family.

After tea the officers went to the reception room. Lieutenant Lobytko’s intuition had not deceived him: there were many young ladies, married and unmarried, in the room. The setter-lieutenant was already standing beside a very young blond girl in a black dress and, dashingly bending over, as if leaning on an invisible sword, smiled and flirtatiously twitched his shoulders. He was probably saying some very interesting nonsense, because the blond girl looked indulgently at his well-fed face and asked indifferently: “Really?” And from this impassive “Really?” the setter, had he been intelligent, might have concluded that he was unlikely to hear the call “Fetch!”

A grand piano thundered; a melancholy waltz flew out of the reception room through the wide-open windows, and for some reason everyone remembered that outside the windows it was now spring, a May evening. Everyone sensed that the air smelled of young poplar leaves, roses, and lilacs. Ryabovich, in whom, under the effect of the music, the cognac he had drunk began to tell, looked askance at the window, smiled, and started to follow the women’s movements, and it now seemed to him that the smell of roses, poplars, and lilacs came not from the garden, but from the women’s faces and dresses.

Rabbek’s son invited some skinny girl and made two turns with her. Lobytko, gliding over the parquet, flew up to the lilac young lady and whirled around the room with her. The dancing began…Ryabovich stood by the door among the non-dancers and watched. He had never once danced in his life and had never once held his arms around the waist of a respectable woman. He was terribly pleased when a man, before everyone’s eyes, took hold of an unknown girl’s waist and offered his shoulder to her hand, but he was unable to imagine himself in this man’s place. There was a time when he envied his comrades’ boldness and pluck, and his heart ached; the awareness that he was timid, stoop-shouldered, and colorless, that he had a long waist and lynx side-whiskers, was deeply humiliating, but with the years this awareness became habitual, and now, looking at the dancing or loudly talking people, he no longer envied them, but only felt sadly moved.