“What mood is that?” Velchaninov was frowning.
The visitor raised his eyes to him, raised his hat, and now with firm dignity pointed to the crape.
“Yes—here’s what mood, sir!”
Velchaninov gazed dumbly now at the crape, now into his visitor’s face. Suddenly a blush poured instantly over his cheeks, and he became terribly agitated.
“Not Natalia Vassilievna!”
“Herself, sir. Natalia Vassilievna! This past March… Consumption, and almost suddenly, sir, in some two or three months! And I’ve been left—as you see!”
Having said this, the visitor, with strong emotion, spread his arms to both sides, holding his hat with the crape in his left hand and bowing his bald head very deeply for at least ten seconds.
This look and this gesture suddenly as if refreshed Velchaninov; a mocking and even provocative smile flitted over his lips—but as yet only for a moment: the news of the death of this lady (with whom he had been acquainted so long ago and whom he had so long ago managed to forget)—now made an unexpectedly staggering impression on him.
“How can it be!” he muttered the first words that came to his lips. “And why didn’t you come straight to tell me?”
“I thank you for your sympathy, I see and appreciate it, despite…”
“Despite?”
“Despite so many years of separation, you have now treated my grief and even myself with such perfect sympathy that I naturally feel grateful. That is the only thing I wished to say, sir. And it is not that I doubted my friends, even now I can find the most sincere friends here, sir (take just Stepan Mikhailovich Bagautov alone), but my acquaintance with you, Alexei Ivanovich (friendship, perhaps—for I recall it with gratitude)—was nine years ago, sir, you never came back to us; there were no letters on either side…”
The visitor was reciting as if by rote, but all the while he spoke, he looked at the ground, though, of course, he could see everything above as well. But the host, too, had managed to collect himself a little.
With a certain quite strange impression, which was growing more and more, he listened to and observed Pavel Pavlovich, and suddenly, when the man paused—the most motley and unexpected thoughts unexpectedly flooded his head.
“But why did I keep not recognizing you till now?” he cried out, becoming animated. “We ran into each other some five times in the street!”
“Yes, I also remember that; you kept coming toward me, sir—twice, maybe even three times…”
“That is—it was you who kept coming toward me, not I toward you!”
Velchaninov got up and suddenly laughed loudly and quite unexpectedly. Pavel Pavlovich paused, looked attentively, but at once began to go on:
“And you didn’t recognize me because, first of all, you might have forgotten, sir, and, finally, I even had smallpox during this time, which left some traces on my face.”
“Smallpox? Why, he did in fact have smallpox! but how on earth did you…”
“Manage that? All sorts of things happen, Alexei Ivanovich; every now and then one manages!”
“Only it’s terribly funny all the same. Well, go on, go on—my dear friend!”
“And I, though I also kept meeting you, sir…”
“Wait! Why did you just say ‘manage that’? I was going to put it much more politely. Well, go on, go on!”
For some reason he was feeling merrier and merrier. The staggering impression was replaced by something quite different.
He paced up and down the room with quick steps.
“And I, though I also kept meeting you, sir, and as I was coming here to Petersburg I was even intending to look you up without fail, but, I repeat, I’m now in such a state of mind… and so mentally broken since that same month of March…”
“Ah, yes! broken since the month of March… Wait, you don’t smoke?”
“You know, I, while Natalia Vassilievna…”
“Ah, yes, yes; but since the month of March?”
“Maybe a little cigarette.”
“Here’s a cigarette; light up and—go on! go on, I’m terribly…”
And, lighting a cigar, Velchaninov quickly sat down on his bed again. Pavel Pavlovich paused.
“But you yourself, however, are somehow quite agitated—are you well, sir?”
“Ah, to the devil with my health!” Velchaninov suddenly got angry. “Go on!”
The visitor, for his part, seeing the host’s agitation, was growing more pleased and self-confident.
“What’s the point of going on, sir?” he began again. “Imagine to yourself, Alexei Ivanovich, first of all, a man who is crushed—that is, not simply but, so to speak, radically crushed; a man who, after twenty years of marriage, changes his life and hangs about in dusty streets without any suitable purpose, as if in the steppes, all but forgetting himself, and even reveling somewhat in this self-forgetting. After that it’s natural if sometimes, meeting an acquaintance or even a true friend, I may avoid him on purpose, so as not to approach him at such a moment—of self-forgetting, that is. And at another moment, one remembers everything so well and thirsts so much to see at least some witness and partaker of that recent but irretrievable past, and one’s heart starts pounding so, that not only in the daytime but even at night one risks throwing oneself into a friend’s arms, even if one has to wake him up especially for that purpose past three in the morning, sir. I only got the hour wrong, but not the friendship; for at the present moment I’m only too well rewarded, sir. And concerning the hour, really, I thought it wasn’t twelve yet, being in that mood. One drinks one’s own sorrow and is as if intoxicated by it. And not even sorrow, but precisely this novi-condition is what keeps hitting me…”
“What a way to put it, though!” Velchaninov, having suddenly become terribly serious again, observed somehow gloomily.
“Yes, sir, I put it strangely…”
“And you’re… not joking?”
“Joking!” exclaimed Pavel Pavlovich in mournful perplexity, “at the very moment when I announce…”
“Ah, keep quiet about that, I beg you!”
Velchaninov got up and again began pacing the room.
And in this way about five minutes went by. The visitor, too, made as if to get up, but Velchaninov cried out: “Sit, sit!”—and the man at once obediently lowered himself into the armchair.
“How changed you are, though!” Velchaninov began talking again, suddenly stopping in front of him—just as if suddenly struck by the thought. “Terribly changed! Extremely! Quite a different man!”
“No wonder, sir: it’s nine years.”
“No, no, no, it’s not a matter of years! You haven’t changed in appearance, God knows: you’ve changed in something else!”
“Also, maybe, these nine years, sir.”
“Or since the month of March!”
“Heh, heh,” Pavel Pavlovich chuckled slyly, “you’ve got some playful thought… But, if I dare ask—what essentially is this change?”
“What indeed! Before there was such a solid and decent Pavel Pavlovich, such a smarty of a Pavel Pavlovich, and now—a perfect vaurien2 of a Pavel Pavlovich.”
He was in that degree of vexation in which the most restrained people sometimes start saying unnecessary things.
“Vaurien! You think so? And no longer a ‘smarty’? Not a smarty?” Pavel Pavlovich tittered delightedly.
“The devil you’re a ‘smarty’! Now, maybe, you’re thoroughly smart.
“I’m impudent,” Velchaninov went on thinking, “but this rascal is more impudent still. And… and what’s his purpose?”
“Ah, my dearest, ah, my most priceless Alexei Ivanovich!” The visitor suddenly became extremely agitated and started fidgeting in his armchair. “But what’s that to us? We’re not in society now, not in brilliant, high-society company! We’re—two most sincere and ancient former friends, and, so to speak, have come together in the fullest sincerity to mutually recall that precious connection, in which the deceased woman constituted so precious a link in our friendship!”