The Party | Page 2

my charmer, but not before night," a very familiar
male voice answered languidly. "There will be a good rain."
Olga Mihalovna calculated that if she made haste to hide in the shanty
they would pass by without seeing her, and she would not have to talk
and to force herself to smile. She picked up her skirts, bent down and
crept into the shanty. At once she felt upon her face, her neck, her arms,
the hot air as heavy as steam. If it had not been for the stuffiness and
the close smell of rye bread, fennel, and brushwood, which prevented
her from breathing freely, it would have been delightful to hide from
her visitors here under the thatched roof in the dusk, and to think about
the little creature. It was cosy and quiet.
"What a pretty spot!" said a feminine voice. "Let us sit here, Pyotr
Dmitritch."
Olga Mihalovna began peeping through a crack between two branches.
She saw her husband, Pyotr Dmitritch, and Lubotchka Sheller, a girl of
seventeen who had not long left boarding-school. Pyotr Dmitritch, with
his hat on the back of his head, languid and indolent from having drunk
so much at dinner, slouched by the hurdle and raked the hay into a heap
with his foot; Lubotchka, pink with the heat and pretty as ever, stood
with her hands behind her, watching the lazy movements of his big
handsome person.
Olga Mihalovna knew that her husband was attractive to women, and
did not like to see him with them. There was nothing out of the way in
Pyotr Dmitritch's lazily raking together the hay in order to sit down on
it with Lubotchka and chatter to her of trivialities; there was nothing
out of the way, either, in pretty Lubotchka's looking at him with her
soft eyes; but yet Olga Mihalovna felt vexed with her husband and
frightened and pleased that she could listen to them.

"Sit down, enchantress," said Pyotr Dmitritch, sinking down on the hay
and stretching. "That's right. Come, tell me something."
"What next! If I begin telling you anything you will go to sleep."
"Me go to sleep? Allah forbid! Can I go to sleep while eyes like yours
are watching me?"
In her husband's words, and in the fact that he was lolling with his hat
on the back of his head in the presence of a lady, there was nothing out
of the way either. He was spoilt by women, knew that they found him
attractive, and had adopted with them a special tone which every one
said suited him. With Lubotchka he behaved as with all women. But,
all the same, Olga Mihalovna was jealous.
"Tell me, please," said Lubotchka, after a brief silence--"is it true that
you are to be tried for something?"
"I? Yes, I am . . . numbered among the transgressors, my charmer."
"But what for?"
"For nothing, but just . . . it's chiefly a question of politics," yawned
Pyotr Dmitritch--"the antagonisms of Left and Right. I, an obscurantist
and reactionary, ventured in an official paper to make use of an
expression offensive in the eyes of such immaculate Gladstones as
Vladimir Pavlovitch Vladimirov and our local justice of the
peace--Kuzma Grigoritch Vostryakov."
Pytor Dmitritch yawned again and went on:
"And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun
or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching
the Liberals! Heaven forbid! A Liberal is like the poisonous dry fungus
which covers you with a cloud of dust if you accidentally touch it with
your finger."
"What happened to you?"

"Nothing particular. The whole flare-up started from the merest trifle.
A teacher, a detestable person of clerical associations, hands to
Vostryakov a petition against a tavern-keeper, charging him with
insulting language and behaviour in a public place. Everything showed
that both the teacher and the tavern-keeper were drunk as cobblers, and
that they behaved equally badly. If there had been insulting behaviour,
the insult had anyway been mutual. Vostryakov ought to have fined
them both for a breach of the peace and have turned them out of the
court--that is all. But that's not our way of doing things. With us what
stands first is not the person--not the fact itself, but the trade-mark and
label. However great a rascal a teacher may be, he is always in the right
because he is a teacher; a tavern-keeper is always in the wrong because
he is a tavern-keeper and a money-grubber. Vostryakov placed the
tavern-keeper under arrest. The man appealed to the Circuit Court; the
Circuit Court triumphantly upheld Vostryakov's decision. Well, I stuck
to my own opinion. . . . Got a little hot. . . . That was all."
Pyotr Dmitritch