Chapter 25

I BECOME BETTER ACQUAINTED WITH THE NECHLUDOFFS

WHEN I returned to the verandah, I found that they were not
talking of me at all, as I had anticipated. On the contrary,
Varenika had laid aside the book, and was engaged in a heated
dispute with Dimitri, who, for his part, was walking up and down
the verandah, and frowningly adjusting his neck in his collar as
he did so. The subject of the quarrel seemed to be Ivan
Yakovlevitch and superstition, but it was too animated a
difference for its underlying cause not to be something which
concerned the family much more nearly. Although the Princess and
Lubov Sergievna were sitting by in silence, they were following
every word, and evidently tempted at times to take part in the
dispute; yet always, just when they were about to speak, they
checked themselves, and left the field clear for the two
principles, Dimitri and Varenika. On my entry, the latter glanced
at me with such an indifferent air that I could see she was
wholly absorbed in the quarrel and did not care whether she spoke
in my presence or not. The Princess too looked the same, and was
clearly on Varenika's side, while Dimitri began, if anything, to
raise his voice still more when I appeared, and Lubov Sergievna,
for her part, observed to no one in particular: "Old people are
quite right when they say, 'Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse
pouvait.'"

Nevertheless this quotation did not check the dispute, though it
somehow gave me the impression that the side represented by the
speaker and her friend was in the wrong. Although it was a little
awkward for me to be present at a petty family difference, the
fact that the true relations of the family revealed themselves
during its progress, and that my presence did nothing to hinder
that revelation, afforded me considerable gratification.

How often it happens that for years one sees a family cover
themselves over with a conventional cloak of decorum, and
preserve the real relations of its members a secret from every
eye! How often, too, have I remarked that, the more impenetrable
(and therefore the more decorous) is the cloak, the harsher are
the relations which it conceals! Yet, once let some unexpected
question--often a most trivial one (the colour of a woman's hair,
a visit, a man's horses, and so forth)--arise in that family
circle, and without any visible cause there will also arise an
ever-growing difference, until in time the cloak of decorum
becomes unequal to confining the quarrel within due bounds, and,
to the dismay of the disputants and the astonishment of the
auditors, the real and ill-adjusted relations of the family are
laid bare, and the cloak, now useless for concealment, is bandied
from hand to hand among the contending factions until it serves
only to remind one of the years during which it successfully
deceived one's perceptions. Sometimes to strike one's head
violently against a ceiling hurts one less than just to graze
some spot which has been hurt and bruised before: and in almost
every family there exists some such raw and tender spot. In the
Nechludoff family that spot was Dimitri's extraordinary affection
for Lubov Sergievna, which aroused in the mother and sister, if
not a jealous feeling, at all events a sense of hurt family
pride. This was the grave significance which underlay, for all
those present, the seeming dispute about Ivan Yakovlevitch and
superstition.

"In anything that other people deride and despise you invariably
profess to see something extraordinarily good!" Varenika was
saying in her clear voice, as she articulated each syllable with
careful precision.

"Indeed?" retorted Dimitri with an impatient toss of his head.
"Now, in the first place, only a most unthinking person could
ever speak of DESPISING such a remarkable man as Ivan
Yakovlevitch, while, in the second place, it is YOU who
invariably profess to see nothing good in what confronts you."

Meanwhile Sophia Ivanovna kept looking anxiously at us as she
turned first to her nephew, and then to her niece, and then to
myself. Twice she opened her mouth as though to say what was in
her mind and drew a deep sigh.

"Varia, PLEASE go on reading," she said at length, at the same
time handing her niece the book, and patting her hand kindly. "I
wish to know whether he ever found HER again " (as a matter of
fact, the novel in question contained not a word about any one
finding any one else). "And, Mitia dear," she added to her
nephew, despite the glum looks which he was throwing at her for
having interrupted the logical thread of his deductions, "you had
better let me poultice your cheek, or your teeth will begin to
ache again."

After that the reading was resumed. Yet the quarrel had in no way
dispelled the calm atmosphere of family and intellectual harmony
which enveloped this circle of ladies.

Clearly deriving its inspiration and character from the Princess
Maria Ivanovna, it was a circle which, for me, had a wholly novel
and attractive character of logicalness mingled with simplicity
and refinement. That character I could discern in the daintiness,
good taste, and solidity of everything about me, whether the
handbell, the binding of the book, the settee, or the table.
Likewise, I divined it in the upright, well-corseted pose of the
Princess, in her pendant curls of grey hair, in the manner in
which she had, at our first introduction, called me plain
"Nicolas" and "he," in the occupations of the ladies (the
reading and the sewing of garments), and in the unusual whiteness
of their hands. Those hands, en passant, showed a family feature
common to all--namely, the feature that the flesh of the palm on
the outer side was rosy in colour, and divided by a sharp,
straight line from the pure whiteness of the upper portion of the
hand. Still more was the character of this feminine circle
expressed in the manner in which the three ladies spoke Russian
and French--spoke them, that is to say, with perfect articulation
of syllables and pedantic accuracy of substantives and
prepositions. All this, and more especially the fact that the
ladies treated me as simply and as seriously as a real grown-up--
telling me their opinions, and listening to my own (a thing to
which I was so little accustomed that, for all my glittering
buttons and blue facings, I was in constant fear of being told:
"Surely you do not think that we are talking SERIOUSLY to you? Go
away and learn something")--all this, I say, caused me to feel an
entire absence of restraint in this society. I ventured at times
to rise, to move about, and to talk boldly to each of the ladies
except Varenika (whom I always felt it was unbecoming, or even
forbidden, for me to address unless she first spoke to me).

As I listened to her clear, pleasant voice reading aloud, I kept
glancing from her to the path of the flower-garden, where the
rain-spots were making small dark circles in the sand, and thence
to the lime-trees, upon the leaves of which the rain was
pattering down in large detached drops shed from the pale,
shimmering edge of the livid blue cloud which hung suspended over
us. Then I would glance at her again, and then at the last purple
rays of the setting sun where they were throwing the dense
clusters of old, rain-washed birches into brilliant relief. Yet
again my eyes would return to Varenika, and, each time that they
did so, it struck me afresh that she was not nearly so plain as
at first I had thought her.

"How I wish that I wasn't in love already!" I reflected, "or that
Sonetchka was Varenika! How nice it would be if suddenly I could
become a member of this family, and have the three ladies for my
mother, aunt, and wife respectively!" All the time that these
thoughts kept passing through my head I kept attentively
regarding Varenika as she read, until somehow I felt as though I
were magnetising her, and that presently she must look at me.
Sure enough, at length she raised her head, threw me a glance,
and, meeting my eyes, turned away.

"The rain does not seem to stop," she remarked.

Suddenly a new feeling came over me. I began to feel as though
everything now happening to me was a repetition of some similar
occurrence before--as though on some previous occasion a shower
of rain had begun to fall, and the sun had set behind birch-
trees, and I had been looking at her, and she had been reading
aloud, and I had magnetised her, and she had looked up at me.
Yes, all this I seemed to recall as though it had happened once
before.

"Surely she is not--SHE?" was my thought. "Surely IT is not
beginning?" However, I soon decided that Varenika was not the
"SHE" referred to, and that "it" was not "beginning." "In the
first place," I said to myself, "Varenika is not at all
BEAUTIFUL. She is just an ordinary girl whose acquaintance I have
made in the ordinary way, whereas the she whom I shall meet
somewhere and some day and in some not ordinary way will be
anything but ordinary. This family pleases me so much only
because hitherto I have never seen anybody. Such things will
always be happening in the future, and I shall see many more such
families during my life."