The Collected Works of Anton Chekhov. Anton Chekhov
But vain Olenka did not rejoice… She was as pale as the linen she had lately brought home from the Tenevo market. The hand in which she held the candle shook slightly and her chin trembled from time to time. In her eyes there was a certain dullness, as if something had suddenly astonished or frightened her… There was not a sign of that gaiety which had shone in her eyes even the day before when she was running about the garden talking with enthusiasm of the sort of wallpaper she would have in her drawing-room, and saying on what day she would receive guests, and so on. Her face was now too serious, more serious than the solemn occasion demanded…
Urbenin was in a new dress-suit. He was respectably dressed, but his hair was arranged as the orthodox Russians wore their hair in the year ‘twelve. As usual, he was red in the face, and serious. His eyes prayed and the signs of the cross he made after every ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ were not made in a mechanical manner.
Urbenin’s children by his first marriage - the schoolboy Grisha and the little fair-haired girl Sasha - were standing just behind me. They gazed at the back of their father’s red head and his protruding ears, and their faces seemed to represent notes of interrogation. They could not understand why Aunt Olia had given herself to their father, and why he was taking her into his house. Sasha was only surprised, but the fourteen-year-old Grisha frowned and looked scowlingly at him. He would certainly have replied in the negative if his father had asked his permission to marry…
The marriage service was performed with special solemnity. Three priests and two deacons officiated. The service lasted long, so long, indeed, that my arm was quite tired of holding the crown, and the ladies who love to see a wedding ceased looking at the bridal pair. The chief priest read the prayers, with pauses, without leaving out a single one. The choir sang something very long and complicated; the cantor took advantage of the occasion to display the compass of his voice, reading the Gospels with extra slowness. But at last the chief priest took the crown out of my hands… the young couple kissed each other… The guests got excited, the straight lines were broken, congratulations, kisses and exclamations were heard. Urbenin, beaming and smiling, took his young wife on his arm, and we all went out into the air.
If anybody who was in the church with me finds this description incomplete and not quite accurate, let him set down these oversights to the headache from which I was suffering and the above-mentioned spiritual depression which prevented me from observing and noting… Certainly, if I had known at the time that I would have to write a novel, I would not have looked at the floor as I did on that day, and I would not have paid attention to my headache!
Fate sometimes allows itself bitter and malignant jokes! The couple had scarcely had time to leave the church when they were met by an unexpected and unwished for surprise. When the wedding procession, bright with many tints and colours in the sunlight, was proceeding from the church to the Count’s house, Olenka suddenly made a backward step, stopped, and gave her husband’s elbow such a violent pull that he staggered.
‘He’s been let out!’ she said aloud, looking at me with terror.
Poor little thing! Her insane father, the forester Skvortsov, was running down the avenue to meet the procession. Waving his hands and stumbling along with rolling, insane eyes, he presented a most unattractive picture. However, all this would possibly have looked less out of place if he had not been in his print dressing-gown and downtrodden slippers, the raggedness of which ill accorded with the elegant wedding finery of his daughter. His face looked sleepy, his dishevelled hair was blown about by the wind, his nightshirt was unbuttoned.
‘Olenka!’ he mumbled when he had come up to them. ‘Why have you left me?’
Olenka blushed scarlet and looked askance at the smiling ladies. The poor little thing was consumed by shame.
‘Mit’ka did not lock the door!’ the forester continued, turning to us. it would not be difficult for robbers to get in! The samovar was stolen out of the kitchen last summer, and now she wants us to be robbed again.’
‘I don’t know who can have let him out!’ Urbenin whispered to me. ‘I ordered him to be locked up… Sergey Petrovich, golubchek, have pity on us; get us out of this awkward position somehow! Anyhow!’
‘I know who stole your samovar,’ I said to the forester. ‘Come along, I’ll show you where it is.’
Taking Skvortsov round the waist, I led him towards the church. I took him into the churchyard and talked to him until, by my calculation, I thought the wedding procession ought to be in the house, then I left him without having told him where his stolen samovar was to be found.
Although this meeting with the madman was quite unexpected and extraordinary, it was soon forgotten… A further surprise that Fate had prepared for the newly-married pair was still more unusual.
CHAPTER XIV
An hour later we were all seated at long tables, dining. To anybody who was accustomed to cobwebs, mildew and wild gipsy whoops in the Count’s apartments it must have seemed strange to look on the workaday, prosaical crowd that now, by their habitual chatter, broke the usual silence of the ancient and deserted halls. This varied and noisy throng looked like a flight of starlings which in flying past had alighted to rest in a neglected churchyard or - may the noble bird forgive me such a comparison! - a flight of storks that on one of their migrations had settled down on the ruins of a deserted castle.
I sat there hating that crowd which frivolously examined the decaying wealth of the Counts Karnéev. The mosaic walls, the carved ceilings, the rich Persian carpets and the rococo furniture excited enthusiasm and astonishment. A self-satisfied smile never left the Count’s moustachioed face. He received the enthusiastic flattery of his guests as something that he deserved, though in reality all the riches and luxuries of his deserted mansion were not acquired in any way thanks to him, but on the contrary, he merited the bitterest reproaches and contempt for the barbarously dull indifference with which he treated all the wealth that had been collected by his fathers and grandfathers, collected not in days, but in scores of years! It was only the mentally blind or the poor of spirit who could not see in every slab of damp marble, in every picture, in each dark corner of the Count’s garden, the sweat, the tears and the callouses on the hands of the people whose children now swarmed in the little log huts of the Count’s miserable villages… Among all those people seated at the wedding feast, rich, independent people, people who might easily have told him the plainest truths, there was not one who would have told the Count that his self-satisfied grin was stupid and out of place… Everybody found it necessary to smile flatteringly and to burn paltry incense before him. If this was ordinary politeness (with us, many love to attribute everything to politeness and propriety), I would prefer the churl who eats with his hands, who takes the bread from his neighbour’s plate, and blows his nose between two fingers, to these dandies.
Urbenin smiled, but he had his own reasons for this. He smiled flatteringly, respectfully, and in a childlike, happy manner. His broad smiles were the result of a sort of dog’s happiness. A devoted and loving dog, who had been fondled and petted, and now in sign of gratitude wagged its tail gaily and with sincerity.
Like Risler Père in Alphonse Daudet’s novel, beaming and rubbing his hands with delight, he gazed at his young wife, and from the superabundance of his feelings could not refrain from asking question after question:
‘Who could have thought that this young beauty would fall in love with an old man like myself? Is it possible she could not find anybody younger and more elegant? Women’s hearts are incomprehensible!’
He even had the courage to turn to me and blurt out: ‘When one looks around, what an age this is we live in! He, he! When an old man can carry off such a fairy from under the nose of youth! Where have you all had your eyes? He, he… Young men are not what they used to be!’
Not knowing what to do or how to express the feelings of gratitude that were overflowing in his broad breast, he was constantly jumping up, stretching