‘Pray enjoy yourself and dance as much as ever you can. See, we have one lady and two beaux already,’ she added, turning to Madame Valakhina and stretching out her hand to me.

This coupling of Sonya and myself pleased me so much that I blushed again.

Feeling that my shyness was increasing and hearing another carriage drive up, I thought it best to beat a retreat. In the hall I met Princess Kornakova with her son and an incredible number of daughters, who all looked alike – they resembled the princess and were all plain so not one of them attracted attention. As they took off their mantles and boas they all talked together in thin voices, and bustled about and laughed at something – probably at there being so many of them. Étienne was a tall fleshy boy of about fifteen, with a bloodless face, sunken eyes that had dark shadows under them, and hands and feet which were enormous for his age. He was clumsy and had a disagreeable rough voice but seemed very well satisfied with himself, and according to my idea was precisely the sort that a boy who was beaten with a switch would be.

We stood for some time confronting and scrutinizing one another without uttering a word. Then we moved closer, meaning, I think, to kiss, but after looking once more into each other’s eyes for some reason we changed our minds. When the dresses of all his sisters had rustled past us, in order to start a conversation I asked him whether they had not been very crowded in the carriage.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered indifferently. ‘You see I never ride inside the carriage because as soon as I get in I feel sick, and mamma knows that. When we go anywhere in the evening I always sit on the box – it is much more fun, you can see everything. Filip gives me the reins, and sometimes the whip too. So that now and then the passers-by get a taste of it’ – he added with a significant gesture. ‘It’s fine!’

‘Your excellency,’ said a footman coming into the hall, ‘Filip wants to know where you have put the whip.’

‘Put the whip? Why, I gave it back to him.’

‘He says you didn’t.’

‘Well then, I hung it on the carriage-lamp.’

‘Filip says it is not on the lamp either, and you had better say you took it and lost it, or Filip will have to pay out of his own money for your mischief,’ continued the angry footman, getting more and more worked up.

The footman, who looked a glum honest man, seemed to be very warmly on Filip’s side and determined to get to the bottom of the affair. Prompted by an instinctive feeling of tactfulness I stepped aside as if I had not noticed anything, but the other footmen who were there behaved quite differently: they drew nearer and stared approvingly at the old servant.

‘‘Well if I lost it, I lost it,’ said Étienne, avoiding further explanations. ‘What the whip cost I’ll pay. Did you ever hear anything so absurd?’ he added, coming up to me and impelling me towards the drawing-room.

‘No, allow me, sir, how will you pay? I know the way you pay: for more than seven months now you have been going to pay Marya Vassilyevna her twenty kopecks, and I have been waiting for over a year, and there’s Petrushka…’

‘Hold your tongue, will you!’ shouted the young prince, turning pale with rage. ‘See if I don’t tell everything.’

‘Tell everything, tell everything!’ repeated the footman. ‘It is not good, your excellency,’ he added with particular stress on the title as we entered the ball-room and he departed to the chest with the cloaks.

‘Quite right, quite right!’ remarked someone approvingly from the hall behind us.

Grandmamma had a peculiar faculty for expressing her opinion of people by addressing them in a special tone of voice and in certain circumstances now in the second person plural, now in the singular. Though she used the pronouns ‘you’ and ‘thou’ quite contrary to the usual way of doing so, these distinctions assumed a very different significance on her lips. When the young prince went up to her she said a few words to him, calling him ‘you’ and looking at him with such disdain that had I been in his shoes I should have been utterly abashed; but Étienne was evidently not a boy of that stamp: he not only did not take any notice of grandmamma’s reception of him but even took none of her, and bowed to the whole company, if not gracefully at least with perfect ease.

Sonya claimed my whole attention: I remember that when Volodya, Étienne and I were chatting in a part of the ball-room where I could see Sonya and she could see and hear us, I enjoyed talking; and when I happened to say anything that seemed to me smart or amusing I raised my voice and glanced towards the drawing-room door; but when we moved to another part of the room from which we could not be heard or seen from the drawing-room I was silent and took no further pleasure in the conversation.

The drawing-room and ball-room gradually filled with guests; among their number, as is always the case at children’s parties, were some older girls and boys who did not want to miss a chance of enjoying themselves and dancing, though they pretended to do so only to please the hostess.

When the Ivins arrived, instead of the pleasure it generally gave me to be with Seriozha I was conscious of a certain strange vexation with him that he would see Sonya and she would see him.

21 • BEFORE THE MAZURKA

‘Ah, you are having some dancing, I see,’ said Seriozha, coming from the drawing-room and pulling a new pair of kid gloves from his pocket. ‘I must put my gloves on.’

‘Goodness, what shall I do? We have no gloves,’ I thought. ‘I must go upstairs and try and find some.’

But although I rummaged through every chest of drawers all I found was, in one, our green travelling mittens, and in another a single kid glove which could be of no use to me – in the first place because it was exceedingly old and dirty, secondly because it was too large, and above all because the middle finger was missing, having most likely been cut off long ago by Karl Ivanych for a sore finger. However, I put on this remnant of a glove and contemplated that part of my middle finger which was always ink-stained.

‘Now if Natalya Savishna were here she would surely have found me some gloves. I can’t go down like this because if they ask me why I don’t dance, what can I say? But I can’t stay here either for they are certain to miss me. What am I to do?’ I said to myself, swinging my arms backwards and forwards.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Volodya, running into the room. ‘Go down quick and invite a lady to dance… they are just beginning.’

‘Volodya,’ I said, displaying my hand with two fingers sticking out of the dirty glove, and speaking in a voice bordering on despair, ‘Volodya, you never thought of this!’

‘Of what?’ he asked impatiently. ‘Oh, you mean gloves,’ he added with indifference when he caught sight of my hand. ‘No, I didn’t. We must ask grandmamma what she thinks,’ and without further ado he ran downstairs.

The composure with which he met a situation that had seemed to me so grave relieved my mind and I hurried to the drawing-room, quite forgetting the horrid glove on my left hand.

Cautiously approaching grandmamma’s arm-chair and lightly touching her sleeve, I whispered:

‘Grandmamma, what are we to do? We have no gloves!’

‘What, my dear?’

‘We have no gloves,’ I repeated, coming closer and closer and putting both my hands on the arm of her chair.

‘And what is this?’ she said, suddenly seizing my left hand. ‘Voyez, ma chère,’ she went on, turning to Madame Valakhina, ‘voyez comme ce jeune homme s’est fait élégant pour danser avec votre fille!’1

Grandmamma held my hand firmly and gazed seriously and with a look of inquiry at the company present until all had satisfied their curiosity and the laughter had become general.

I should have been much chagrined had Seriozha seen me vainly endeavouring to pull my hand away, scowling with embarrassment, but I did not feel at all ashamed in front of Sonya, who laughed so much that the tears came into her eyes and her ringlets danced about her flushed little face.