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The preparations which had been in progress for some days past had made us expect some unusual event, but this news left us thunderstruck, Woloda turned red, and, with a shaking voice, delivered Mamma's message to Papa. "So this was what my dream foreboded!" I thought to myself. "God send that there come nothing worse!"
How many half-expressed wishes, thoughts, and meanings which one shrinks from revealing are made plain by a single accidental glance which timidly and irresolutely meets the eye! However, in my own case I may have been deceived by my excessive capacity for, and love of, analysis. Possibly Woloda did not feel at all as I did.
"How do you do, DIPLOMAT?" said Dubkoff to me as he shook me by the hand. "Where has Woloda gone to?" asked Nechludoff. "I don't know," I replied, blushing to think that nevertheless they had probably guessed his errand. "I suppose he has no money? Yes, I can see I am right, O diplomatist," he added, taking my smile as an answer in the affirmative. "Well, I have none, either.
Have you any, Dubkoff?" "I'll see," replied Dubkoff, feeling for his pocket, and rummaging gingerly about with his squat little fingers among his small change. "Yes, here are five copecks-twenty, but that's all," he concluded with a comic gesture of his hand. At this point Woloda re-entered. "Are we going?" "No." "What an odd fellow you are!" said Nechludoff.
Already it was twenty minutes past two, and nothing was to be heard of the tutor, nor yet anything to be seen of him in the street, although I kept looking up and down it with the greatest impatience and with an emphatic longing never to see the maitre again. "I believe he is not coming to-day," said Woloda, looking up for a moment from his lesson-book. "I hope he is not, please the Lord!"
"Here is my man of the world," put in Papa, indicating Woloda; "and here is my poet," he added as I kissed the small, dry hand of the Princess, with a vivid picture in my mind of that same hand holding a rod and applying it vigorously. "WHICH one is the poet?" asked the Princess. "This little one," replied Papa, smiling; "the one with the tuft of hair on his top-knot."
I actually felt vexed with Woloda and Dimitri because they went on talking to him. "I tell you what, gentlemen: the DIPLOMAT ought to be christened," said Dubkoff suddenly, with a glance and a smile which seemed to me derisive, and even treacherous. "Yet, O Lord, what a poor specimen he is!" "You yourself ought to be christened, and you yourself are a sorry specimen!"
All the way from Moscow Papa had been preoccupied, and when Woloda had asked him "whether Mamma was ill" he had looked at him sadly and nodded an affirmative. The good, old Foka looked at us, and then lowered his gaze again. Finally he said as he opened the hall-door and turned his head aside: "It is the sixth day since she has not left her bed."
On being shown my verses, he called me to his side, and said: "Who knows, my cousin, but that he may prove to be a second Derzhavin?" Nevertheless he pinched my cheek so hard that I was only prevented from crying by the thought that it must be meant for a caress. Gradually the other guests dispersed, and with them Papa and Woloda.
"Well, what shall it be?" said Lubotshka, blinking in the sunlight and skipping about the grass, "Suppose we play Robinson?" "No, that's a tiresome game," objected Woloda, stretching himself lazily on the turf and gnawing some leaves, "Always Robinson! If you want to play at something, play at building a summerhouse." Woloda was giving himself tremendous airs.
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