The Party | Page 9

said Olga Mihalovna after a
moment's thought. "I keep feeling as though I shall not get through it,
as though I shall die."
"I fancied that, too, but here I am alive. One has all sorts of fancies."
Varvara, who was just going to have her fifth, looked down a little on
her mistress from the height of her experience and spoke in a rather
didactic tone, and Olga Mihalovna could not help feeling her authority;
she would have liked to have talked of her fears, of the child, of her
sensations, but she was afraid it might strike Varvara as naïve and
trivial. And she waited in silence for Varvara to say something herself.
"Olya, we are going indoors," Pyotr Dmitritch called from the
raspberries.
Olga Mihalovna liked being silent, waiting and watching Varvara. She
would have been ready to stay like that till night without speaking or
having any duty to perform. But she had to go. She had hardly left the
cottage when Lubotchka, Nata, and Vata came running to meet her.
The sisters stopped short abruptly a couple of yards away; Lubotchka
ran right up to her and flung herself on her neck.
"You dear, darling, precious," she said, kissing her face and her neck.
"Let us go and have tea on the island!"
"On the island, on the island!" said the precisely similar Nata and Vata,
both at once, without a smile.

"But it's going to rain, my dears."
"It's not, it's not," cried Lubotchka with a woebegone face. "They've all
agreed to go. Dear! darling!"
"They are all getting ready to have tea on the island," said Pyotr
Dmitritch, coming up. "See to arranging things. . . . We will all go in
the boats, and the samovars and all the rest of it must be sent in the
carriage with the servants."
He walked beside his wife and gave her his arm. Olga Mihalovna had a
desire to say something disagreeable to her husband, something biting,
even about her dowry perhaps--the crueller the better, she felt. She
thought a little, and said:
"Why is it Count Alexey Petrovitch hasn't come? What a pity!"
"I am very glad he hasn't come," said Pyotr Dmitritch, lying. "I'm sick
to death of that old lunatic."
"But yet before dinner you were expecting him so eagerly!"
III
Half an hour later all the guests were crowding on the bank near the
pile to which the boats were fastened. They were all talking and
laughing, and were in such excitement and commotion that they could
hardly get into the boats. Three boats were crammed with passengers,
while two stood empty. The keys for unfastening these two boats had
been somehow mislaid, and messengers were continually running from
the river to the house to look for them. Some said Grigory had the keys,
others that the bailiff had them, while others suggested sending for a
blacksmith and breaking the padlocks. And all talked at once,
interrupting and shouting one another down. Pyotr Dmitritch paced
impatiently to and fro on the bank, shouting:
"What the devil's the meaning of it! The keys ought always to be lying
in the hall window! Who has dared to take them away? The bailiff can

get a boat of his own if he wants one!"
At last the keys were found. Then it appeared that two oars were
missing. Again there was a great hullabaloo. Pyotr Dmitritch, who was
weary of pacing about the bank, jumped into a long, narrow boat
hollowed out of the trunk of a poplar, and, lurching from side to side
and almost falling into the water, pushed off from the bank. The other
boats followed him one after another, amid loud laughter and the
shrieks of the young ladies.
The white cloudy sky, the trees on the riverside, the boats with the
people in them, and the oars, were reflected in the water as in a mirror;
under the boats, far away below in the bottomless depths, was a second
sky with the birds flying across it. The bank on which the house and
gardens stood was high, steep, and covered with trees; on the other,
which was sloping, stretched broad green water-meadows with sheets
of water glistening in them. The boats had floated a hundred yards
when, behind the mournfully drooping willows on the sloping banks,
huts and a herd of cows came into sight; they began to hear songs,
drunken shouts, and the strains of a concertina.
Here and there on the river fishing-boats were scattered about, setting
their nets for the night. In one of these boats was the festive party,
playing on home-made violins and violoncellos.
Olga Mihalovna was sitting at the rudder; she was smiling affably and
talking a great deal to entertain her visitors, while