The Party | Page 3

spoke calmly with careless irony. In reality the trial
that was hanging over him worried him extremely. Olga Mihalovna
remembered how on his return from the unfortunate session he had
tried to conceal from his household how troubled he was, and how
dissatisfied with himself. As an intelligent man he could not help
feeling that he had gone too far in expressing his disagreement; and
how much lying had been needful to conceal that feeling from himself
and from others! How many unnecessary conversations there had been!
How much grumbling and insincere laughter at what was not laughable!
When he learned that he was to be brought up before the Court, he
seemed at once harassed and depressed; he began to sleep badly, stood
oftener than ever at the windows, drumming on the panes with his
fingers. And he was ashamed to let his wife see that he was worried,
and it vexed her.
"They say you have been in the province of Poltava?" Lubotchka
questioned him.
"Yes," answered Pyotr Dmitritch. "I came back the day before
yesterday."

"I expect it is very nice there."
"Yes, it is very nice, very nice indeed; in fact, I arrived just in time for
the haymaking, I must tell you, and in the Ukraine the haymaking is the
most poetical moment of the year. Here we have a big house, a big
garden, a lot of servants, and a lot going on, so that you don't see the
haymaking; here it all passes unnoticed. There, at the farm, I have a
meadow of forty-five acres as flat as my hand. You can see the men
mowing from any window you stand at. They are mowing in the
meadow, they are mowing in the garden. There are no visitors, no fuss
nor hurry either, so that you can't help seeing, feeling, hearing nothing
but the haymaking. There is a smell of hay indoors and outdoors.
There's the sound of the scythes from sunrise to sunset. Altogether
Little Russia is a charming country. Would you believe it, when I was
drinking water from the rustic wells and filthy vodka in some Jew's
tavern, when on quiet evenings the strains of the Little Russian fiddle
and the tambourines reached me, I was tempted by a fascinating
idea--to settle down on my place and live there as long as I chose, far
away from Circuit Courts, intellectual conversations, philosophizing
women, long dinners. . . ."
Pyotr Dmitritch was not lying. He was unhappy and really longed to
rest. And he had visited his Poltava property simply to avoid seeing his
study, his servants, his acquaintances, and everything that could remind
him of his wounded vanity and his mistakes.
Lubotchka suddenly jumped up and waved her hands about in horror.
"Oh! A bee, a bee!" she shrieked. "It will sting!"
"Nonsense; it won't sting," said Pyotr Dmitritch. "What a coward you
are!"
"No, no, no," cried Lubotchka; and looking round at the bees, she
walked rapidly back.
Pyotr Dmitritch walked away after her, looking at her with a softened
and melancholy face. He was probably thinking, as he looked at her, of

his farm, of solitude, and--who knows?--perhaps he was even thinking
how snug and cosy life would be at the farm if his wife had been this
girl--young, pure, fresh, not corrupted by higher education, not with
child. . . .
When the sound of their footsteps had died away, Olga Mihalovna
came out of the shanty and turned towards the house. She wanted to cry.
She was by now acutely jealous. She could understand that her husband
was worried, dissatisfied with himself and ashamed, and when people
are ashamed they hold aloof, above all from those nearest to them, and
are unreserved with strangers; she could understand, also, that she had
nothing to fear from Lubotchka or from those women who were now
drinking coffee indoors. But everything in general was terrible,
incomprehensible, and it already seemed to Olga Mihalovna that Pyotr
Dmitritch only half belonged to her.
"He has no right to do it!" she muttered, trying to formulate her
jealousy and her vexation with her husband. "He has no right at all. I
will tell him so plainly!"
She made up her mind to find her husband at once and tell him all
about it: it was disgusting, absolutely disgusting, that he was attractive
to other women and sought their admiration as though it were some
heavenly manna; it was unjust and dishonourable that he should give to
others what belonged by right to his wife, that he should hide his soul
and his conscience from his wife to reveal them to the first pretty face
he came across. What harm had his wife done him? How was she to
blame? Long ago she had been