Aratov knew this poem also.... And now these
words were incessantly haunting his memory....
‘Unhappy Clara! Poor, frantic Clara!’
... (This was why he had been so surprised when Kupfer
told him the name of Clara Militch.)
Platosha herself noticed, not a change exactly in
Yasha’s temper—no change in reality
took place in it—but something unsatisfactory
in his looks and in his words. She cautiously
questioned him about the literary matinee at which
he had been present; muttered, sighed, looked at him
from in front, from the side, from behind; and suddenly
clapping her hands on her thighs, she exclaimed:
‘To be sure, Yasha; I see what it is!’
‘Why? what?’ Aratov queried.
’You’ve met for certain at that matinee
one of those long-tailed creatures’—this
was how Platonida Ivanovna always spoke of all fashionably-dressed
ladies of the period—’with a pretty
dolly face; and she goes prinking this way
... and pluming that way’—Platonida
presented these fancied manoeuvres in mimicry—’and
making saucers like this with her eyes’—and
she drew big, round circles in the air with her forefinger—’You’re
not used to that sort of thing. So you fancied
... but that means nothing, Yasha ... no-o-thing at
all! Drink a cup of posset at night ... it’ll
pass off!... Lord, succour us!’
Platosha ceased speaking, and left the room....
She had hardly ever uttered such a long and animated
speech in her life.... While Aratov thought,
’Auntie’s right, I dare say.... I’m
not used to it; that’s all ...’—it
actually was the first time his attention had ever
happened to be drawn to a person of the female sex
... at least he had never noticed it before—’I
mustn’t give way to it.’
And he set to work on his books, and at night drank
some lime-flower tea; and positively slept well that
night, and had no dreams. The next morning he
took up his photography again as though nothing had
happened....
But towards evening his spiritual repose was again
disturbed.
And this is what happened. A messenger brought
him a note, written in a large irregular woman’s
hand, and containing the following lines:
’If you guess who it is writes to you, and if
it is not a bore to you, come to-morrow after dinner
to the Tversky boulevard—about five o’clock—and
wait. You shall not be kept long. But it
is very important. Do come.’
There was no signature. Aratov at once guessed
who was his correspondent, and this was just what
disturbed him. ‘What folly,’ he said,
almost aloud; ‘this is too much. Of course
I shan’t go.’ He sent, however, for
the messenger, and from him learnt nothing but that
the note had been handed him by a maid-servant in
the street. Dismissing him, Aratov read the letter
through and flung it on the ground.... But, after
a little while, he picked it up and read it again:
a second time he cried, ’Folly!’—he
