The Brothers Karamazov
friend of the other, as it were, a “bodyguard,” and no doubt the big
Pole was at the disposal of the little Pole with the pipe. But this all
seemed to Mitya perfectly right and not to be questioned. In his mood
of doglike submissiveness all feeling of rivalry had died away.
Grushenka’s mood and the enigmatic tone of some of her words he
completely failed to grasp. All he understood, with thrilling heart,
was that she was kind to him, that she had forgiven him, and made him
sit by her. He was beside himself with delight, watching her sip her
glass of champagne. The silence of the company seemed somehow to strike
him, however, and he looked round at every one with expectant eyes.
“Why are we sitting here though, gentlemen? Why don’t you begin doing
something?” his smiling eyes seemed to ask.
“He keeps talking nonsense, and we were all laughing,” Kalganov began
suddenly, as though divining his thought, and pointing to Maximov.
Mitya immediately stared at Kalganov and then at Maximov.
“He’s talking nonsense?” he laughed, his short, wooden laugh, seeming
suddenly delighted at something—“ha ha!”
“Yes. Would you believe it, he will have it that all our cavalry
officers in the twenties married Polish women. That’s awful rot, isn’t
it?”
“Polish women?” repeated Mitya, perfectly ecstatic.
Kalganov was well aware of Mitya’s attitude to Grushenka, and he
guessed about the Pole, too, but that did not so much interest him,
perhaps did not interest him at all; what he was interested in was
Maximov. He had come here with Maximov by chance, and he met the Poles
here at the inn for the first time in his life. Grushenka he knew
before, and had once been with some one to see her; but she had not
taken to him. But here she looked at him very affectionately: before
Mitya’s arrival, she had been making much of him, but he seemed somehow
to be unmoved by it. He was a boy, not over twenty, dressed like a
dandy, with a very charming fair-skinned face, and splendid thick,
fair hair. From his fair face looked out beautiful pale blue eyes, with
an intelligent and sometimes even deep expression, beyond his age
indeed, although the young man sometimes looked and talked quite like a
child, and was not at all ashamed of it, even when he was aware of it
himself. As a rule he was very willful, even capricious, though always
friendly. Sometimes there was something fixed and obstinate in his
expression. He would look at you and listen, seeming all the while to
be persistently dreaming over something else. Often he was listless and
lazy, at other times he would grow excited, sometimes, apparently, over
the most trivial matters.
“Only imagine, I’ve been taking him about with me for the last four
days,” he went on, indolently drawling his words, quite naturally
though, without the slightest affectation. “Ever since your brother, do
you remember, shoved him off the carriage and sent him flying. That
made me take an interest in him at the time, and I took him into the
country, but he keeps talking such rot I’m ashamed to be with him. I’m
taking him back.”
“The gentleman has not seen Polish ladies, and says what is
impossible,” the Pole with the pipe observed to Maximov.
He spoke Russian fairly well, much better, anyway, than he pretended.
If he used Russian words, he always distorted them into a Polish form.
“But I was married to a Polish lady myself,” tittered Maximov.
“But did you serve in the cavalry? You were talking about the cavalry.
Were you a cavalry officer?” put in Kalganov at once.
“Was he a cavalry officer indeed? Ha ha!” cried Mitya, listening
eagerly, and turning his inquiring eyes to each as he spoke, as though
there were no knowing what he might hear from each.
“No, you see,” Maximov turned to him. “What I mean is that those pretty
Polish ladies ... when they danced the mazurka with our Uhlans ... when
one of them dances a mazurka with a Uhlan she jumps on his knee like a
kitten ... a little white one ... and the _pan_-father and _pan_-mother
look on and allow it.... They allow it ... and next day the Uhlan comes
and offers her his hand.... That’s how it is ... offers her his hand,
he he!” Maximov ended, tittering.
“The _pan_ is a _lajdak_!” the tall Pole on the chair growled suddenly
and crossed one leg over the other. Mitya’s eye was caught by his huge
greased boot, with its thick, dirty sole. The dress of both the Poles
looked rather greasy.
“Well, now it’s _lajdak_! What’s he scolding about?” said Grushenka,
suddenly vexed.
“_Pani_ Agrippina, what the gentleman saw in Poland were servant girls,
and not ladies of good birth,” the Pole with the pipe observed to
Grushenka.
“You can reckon on that,” the tall Pole snapped contemptuously.
“What next! Let him talk! People talk, why hinder them? It makes it
cheerful,” Grushenka said crossly.
“I’m not hindering them, _pani_,” said the Pole in the wig, with a long
look at Grushenka, and relapsing into dignified silence he sucked his
pipe again.
“No, no. The Polish gentleman spoke the truth.” Kalganov got excited
again, as though it were a question of vast import. “He’s never been in
Poland, so how can he talk about it? I suppose you weren’t married in
Poland, were you?”
“No, in the Province of Smolensk. Only, a Uhlan had brought her to
Russia before that, my future wife, with her mamma and her aunt, and
another female relation with a grown-up son. He brought her straight
from Poland and gave her up to me. He was a lieutenant in our regiment,
a very nice young man. At first he meant to marry her himself. But he
didn’t marry her, because she turned out to be lame.”
“So you married a lame woman?” cried Kalganov.
“Yes. They both deceived me a little bit at the time, and concealed it.
I thought she was hopping; she kept hopping.... I thought it was for
fun.”
“So pleased she was going to marry you!” yelled Kalganov, in a ringing,
childish voice.
“Yes, so pleased. But it turned out to be quite a different cause.
Afterwards, when we were married, after the wedding, that very evening,
she confessed, and very touchingly asked forgiveness. ‘I once jumped
over a puddle when I was a child,’ she said, ‘and injured my leg.’ He
he!”
Kalganov went off into the most childish laughter, almost falling on
the sofa. Grushenka, too, laughed. Mitya was at the pinnacle of
happiness.
“Do you know, that’s the truth, he’s not lying now,” exclaimed
Kalganov, turning to Mitya; “and do you know, he’s been married twice;
it’s his first wife he’s talking about. But his second wife, do you
know, ran away, and is alive now.”
“Is it possible?” said Mitya, turning quickly to Maximov with an
expression of the utmost astonishment.
“Yes. She did run away. I’ve had that unpleasant experience,” Maximov
modestly assented, “with a _monsieur_. And what was worse, she’d had
all my little property transferred to her beforehand. ‘You’re an
educated man,’ she said to me. ‘You can always get your living.’ She
settled my business with that. A venerable bishop once said to me: ‘One
of your wives was lame, but the other was too light-footed.’ He he!”
“Listen, listen!” cried Kalganov, bubbling over, “if he’s telling
lies—and he often is—he’s only doing it to amuse us all. There’s no
harm in that, is there? You know, I sometimes like him. He’s awfully
low, but it’s natural to him, eh? Don’t you think so? Some people are
low from self-interest, but he’s simply so, from nature. Only fancy,
he claims (he was arguing about it all the way yesterday) that Gogol
wrote _Dead Souls_ about him. Do you remember, there’s a landowner
called Maximov in it, whom Nozdryov thrashed. He was charged, do you
remember, ‘for inflicting bodily injury with rods on the landowner
Maximov in a drunken condition.’ Would you believe it, he claims that
he was that Maximov and that he was beaten! Now can it be so?
Tchitchikov made his journey, at the very latest, at the beginning of
the twenties, so that the dates don’t fit. He couldn’t have been
thrashed then, he couldn’t, could he?”
It was difficult to imagine what Kalganov was excited about, but his
excitement was genuine. Mitya followed his lead without protest.
“Well, but if they did thrash him!” he cried, laughing.
“It’s not that they thrashed me exactly, but what I mean is—” put in
Maximov.
“What do you mean? Either they thrashed you or they didn’t.”
“What o’clock is it, _panie_?” the Pole, with the pipe, asked his tall
friend, with a bored expression. The other shrugged his shoulders in
reply. Neither of them had a watch.
“Why not talk? Let other people talk. Mustn’t other people talk because
you’re bored?” Grushenka flew at him with evident intention of finding
fault. Something seemed for the first time to flash upon Mitya’s mind.
This time the Pole answered with unmistakable irritability.
“_Pani_, I didn’t oppose it. I didn’t say anything.”
“All right then. Come, tell us your story,” Grushenka cried to Maximov.
“Why are you all silent?”
“There’s nothing to tell, it’s all so foolish,” answered Maximov at
once, with evident satisfaction, mincing a little. “Besides, all that’s
by way of allegory in Gogol, for he’s made all the names have a
meaning. Nozdryov was really called Nosov, and Kuvshinikov had quite a
different name, he was called Shkvornev. Fenardi really was called
Fenardi, only he wasn’t an Italian but a Russian, and Mamsel Fenardi
was a pretty girl with her pretty little legs in tights, and she had a
little short skirt with spangles, and she kept turning round and round,
only not for four hours but for four minutes only, and she bewitched
every one...”
“But what were you beaten for?” cried Kalganov.
“For Piron!” answered Maximov.
“What Piron?” cried Mitya.
“The famous French writer, Piron. We were all drinking then, a big
party of us, in a tavern at that very fair. They’d invited me, and
first of all I began quoting epigrams. ‘Is that you, Boileau? What a
funny get-up!’ and Boileau answers that he’s going to a masquerade,
that is to the baths, he he! And they took it to themselves, so I made
haste to repeat another, very sarcastic, well known to all educated
people:
Yes, Sappho and Phaon are we!
But one grief is weighing on me.
You don’t know your way to the sea!
They were still more offended and began abusing me in the most unseemly
way for it. And as ill-luck would have it, to set things right, I began
telling a very cultivated anecdote about Piron, how he was not accepted
into the French Academy, and to revenge himself wrote his own epitaph:
Ci-gît Piron qui ne fut rien,
Pas même académicien.
They seized me and thrashed me.”
“But what for? What for?”
“For my education. People can thrash a man for anything,” Maximov
concluded, briefly and sententiously.
“Eh, that’s enough! That’s all stupid, I don’t want to listen. I
thought it would be amusing,” Grushenka cut them short, suddenly.
Mitya started, and at once left off laughing. The tall Pole rose upon
his feet, and with the haughty air of a man, bored and out of his
element, began pacing from corner to corner of the room, his hands
behind his back.
“Ah, he can’t sit still,” said Grushenka, looking at him
contemptuously. Mitya began to feel anxious. He noticed besides, that
the Pole on the sofa was looking at him with an irritable expression.
“_Panie!_” cried Mitya, “let’s drink! and the other _pan_, too! Let us
drink.”
In a flash he had pulled three glasses towards him, and filled them
with champagne.
“To Poland, _panovie_, I drink to your Poland!” cried Mitya.
“I shall be delighted, _panie_,” said the Pole on the sofa, with
dignity and affable condescension, and he took his glass.
“And the other _pan_, what’s his name? Drink, most illustrious, take
your glass!” Mitya urged.