Dream Tales and Prose Poems eBook

It ended by Kupfer taking him next day to spend an evening at the princess’s.  But Aratov did not remain there long.  To begin with, he found there some twenty visitors, men and women, sympathetic people possibly, but still strangers, and this oppressed him, even though he had to do very little talking; and that, he feared above all things.  Secondly, he did not like their hostess, though she received him very graciously and simply.  Everything about her was distasteful to him:  her painted face, and her frizzed curls, and her thickly-sugary voice, her shrill giggle, her way of rolling her eyes and looking up, her excessively low-necked dress, and those fat, glossy fingers with their multitude of rings!...  Hiding himself away in a corner, he took from time to time a rapid survey of the faces of all the guests, without even distinguishing them, and then stared obstinately at his own feet.  When at last a stray musician with a worn face, long hair, and an eyeglass stuck into his contorted eyebrow sat down to the grand piano and flinging his hands with a sweep on the keys and his foot on the pedal, began to attack a fantasia of Liszt on a Wagner motive, Aratov could not stand it, and stole off, bearing away in his heart a vague, painful impression; across which, however, flitted something incomprehensible to him, but grave and even disquieting.

III

Kupfer came next day to dinner; he did not begin, however, expatiating on the preceding evening, he did not even reproach Aratov for his hasty retreat, and only regretted that he had not stayed to supper, when there had been champagne! (of the Novgorod brand, we may remark in parenthesis).  Kupfer probably realised that it had been a mistake on his part to disturb his friend, and that Aratov really was a man ‘not suited’ to that circle and way of life.  On his side, too, Aratov said nothing of the princess, nor of the previous evening.  Platonida Ivanovna did not know whether to rejoice at the failure of this first experiment or to regret it.  She decided at last that Yasha’s health might suffer from such outings, and was comforted.  Kupfer went away directly after dinner, and did not show himself again for a whole week.  And it was not that he resented the failure of his suggestion, the good fellow was incapable of that, but he had obviously found some interest which was absorbing all his time, all his thoughts; for later on, too, he rarely appeared at the Aratovs’, had an absorbed look, spoke little and quickly vanished....  Aratov went on living as before; but a sort of—­if one may so express it—­little hook was pricking at his soul.  He was continually haunted by some reminiscence, he could not quite tell what it was himself, and this reminiscence was connected with the evening he had spent at the princess’s.  For all that he had not the slightest inclination to return there again, and the world, a part of which he had looked upon at her house, repelled him more than ever.  So passed six weeks.