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Updated: June 28, 2025
The officers had already heard about the affair in the public gardens, and they hurried back to the brilliantly lighted mess-rooms to give vent in heated language to their indignation. They were really rather pleased at Sarudine's discomfiture, since often enough his smartness and elegance in dress and demeanour had served to put them in the shade. Tanaroff was hailed with undisguised curiosity.
In a moment Sarudine's life had undergone a complete change. Careless, easy, and gay as it had been before, so now it seemed to him distorted, dire, and unendurable. The laughing mask had fallen; the hideous face of a monster was revealed. Tanaroff had taken him home in a droschky. On the way he exaggerated his pain and weakness so as not to have to open his eyes.
He immediately grasped Sarudine's hand and shook it vigorously as he looked him full in the face. Then he frowned, and muttered curtly, "Good-bye, good-night," and left him. For a few moments Sarudine stood perfectly still and watched him depart. He did not know how to take such speeches as these of Sanine; he became at once bewildered and uneasy. Then he thought of Lida, and smiled.
"Well, then, listen," he began, as he placed his hand in confidential fashion on the other's knee. "Let us be quite frank. You are going away, because Lida refused you, and because, at Sarudine's the other day, you had an idea that it was she who came to see him in private." Novikoff bent forward, too distressed to speak. It was as if Sanine had re-opened an agonizing wound.
"Not at all!" said Tanaroff, indignantly. "Don't you find this sort of talk rather boring?" asked Sanine. Sarudine's rejoinder was lost in a fit of coughing. They all of them really thought such a discussion tedious and unnecessary; and yet they all felt somewhat offended. An unpleasant silence reigned. Lida and Maria Ivanovna appeared on the verandah.
The whole affair is deplorable, but it is entirely due to Sarudine's stupidity." "Oh! I think that the real reason lies deeper," said Yourii sadly. "Sarudine lived in a certain set that..." Ivanoff shrugged his shoulders. "Yes, and the very fact that he lived in, and was influenced by, such an idiotic set is only proof positive that he was a fool." Yourii rubbed his hands and said nothing.
When the soldier had gone out, they returned to their subject, the word "Woman" forming the theme of talk that became at times grotesque in its obscenity. Sarudine's instinctive longing to boast, and to eclipse Volochine led him at last to speak of the splendid woman who had yielded to his charms, and gradually to reveal his own secret lasciviousness.
Now amid the noise and drunken laughter, he sat apart, drinking mechanically glass after glass, while intently watching every movement of Sarudine's, much as some wild beast in a wood watches another wild beast, pretending to see nothing, yet ever ready to spring.
He felt that he was the hero of the hour as he began to give a detailed account of the whole incident. In his narrow black eyes there was a look of hatred for the friend who had always been his superior. He thought of the money incident, and of Sarudine's condescending attitude towards him, and he revenged himself for past slights by a minute description of his comrade's defeat.
Volochine had clothed his puny little body in virgin white, after sprinkling himself from head to foot with various essences; and, although he did not exactly approve of Sarudine's society, he hailed a droschky and hastened to the latter's rooms. Sarudine was sitting at the window, drinking cold tea. "What a lovely evening!" he kept saying to himself, as he looked out on the garden.
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