Yura, Tonya, and Misha Gordon, who now spent half his life at the Gromekos’, were sitting in the third row.
“Egorovna’s making signs to you,” Yura whispered to Alexander Alexandrovich, who was sitting directly in front of him.
On the threshold of the hall stood Agrafena Egorovna, the Gromeko family’s old, gray-haired maid, and with desperate looks in Yura’s and equally resolute nods in Alexander Alexandrovich’s direction, gave Yura to understand that she urgently needed the host.
Alexander Alexandrovich turned his head, looked at Egorovna reproachfully, and shrugged his shoulders. But Egorovna would not calm down. Soon an exchange started between them, from one end of the hall to the other, as between two deaf-mutes. Eyes turned towards them. Anna Ivanovna cast annihilating glances at her husband.
Alexander Alexandrovich stood up. Something had to be done. He blushed, quietly went around the room by the corner, and approached Egorovna.
“Shame on you, Egorovna! Really, what’s this sudden urgency? Well, be quick, what’s happened?”
Egorovna started whispering something to him.
“From what Montenegro?”
“The hotel.”
“Well, what is it?”
“He’s wanted without delay. Somebody’s dying there.”
“So it’s dying now. I can imagine. Impossible, Egorovna. They’ll finish playing the piece, and I’ll tell him. It’s impossible before.”
“They’re waiting from the hotel. And the cab, too. I’m telling you, somebody’s dying, don’t you understand? An upper-class lady.”
“No and no again. Look, five minutes is no big thing.”
With the same quiet step along the wall, Alexander Alexandrovich returned to his place and sat down, frowning and rubbing the bridge of his nose.
After the first part, he went up to the performers and, while the applause thundered, told Tyshkevich that they had come for him, there was some sort of unpleasantness, and the music would have to be stopped. Then, holding up his palms to the hall, Alexander Alexandrovich silenced the applause and said loudly:
“Ladies and gentlemen. The trio must be interrupted. Let us express our sympathy with Fadei Kazimirovich. There is some trouble. He is forced to leave us. In such a moment, I do not wish to leave him alone. My presence may prove necessary. I will go with him. Yurochka, go, my dear boy, tell Semyon to come to the front porch, he’s been harnessed up for a long time. Ladies and gentlemen, I am not saying good-bye. I beg you all to stay. My absence will be brief.”
The boys begged Alexander Alexandrovich to let them ride with him through the night frost.
21
Despite the restoring of the normal flow of life, there was still shooting here and there after December, and the new fires, of the sort that always happened, looked like the smoldering remains of the earlier ones.
Never before had they driven so far and long as that night. It was within arm’s reach—down Smolensky, Novinsky, and half of Sadovaya. But the brutal frost and the mist isolated the separate parts of dislocated space, as if it were not identical everywhere in the world. The shaggy, shredded smoke of the bonfires, the creak of footsteps and squeal of runners contributed to the impression that they had already been driving God knows how long and had gone somewhere terribly far away.
In front of the hotel stood a blanket-covered horse with bandaged pasterns, hitched to a narrow, jaunty sleigh. The cabby sat in the passenger seat, covering his muffled head with his mittened hands for warmth.
The vestibule was warm, and behind the rail separating the coatroom from the entrance, a doorman dozed, lulled by the sound of the ventilator, the hum of the burning stove, and the whistle of the boiling samovar, snoring loudly and waking himself up by it.
To the left in the vestibule, before a mirror, stood a made-up lady, her plump face floury with powder. She was wearing a fur jacket, too airy for such weather. The lady was waiting for someone from upstairs and, turning her back to the mirror, glanced at herself now over her right, then over her left shoulder, to see how she looked from behind.
A chilled cabby poked himself through the front door. The shape of his kaftan resembled a cruller on a signboard, and the steam that billowed around him increased the likeness.
“Will it be soon now, mamzelle?” he asked the lady at the mirror. “Mixing with your kind’ll only get my horse frozen.”
The incident in number 24 was a minor thing among the ordinary everyday vexations of the staff. Bells jangled every moment and numbers popped up in the long glass box on the wall, showing where and under which number someone had lost his mind and, not knowing what he wanted himself, gave the floor attendants no peace.
Now this foolish old Guichard woman was being pumped full in number 24, was being given an emetic and having her guts and stomach flushed out. The maid Glasha was run off her feet, mopping the floor and carrying out dirty buckets and bringing in clean ones. But the present storm in the servants’ quarters began long before that turmoil, when there was nothing to talk about yet and Tereshka had not been sent in a cab for the doctor and this wretched fiddle scraper, before Komarovsky arrived and so many unnecessary people crowded in the corridor outside the door, hindering all movement.
Today’s hullabaloo flared up in the servants’ quarters because in the afternoon someone turned awkwardly in the narrow passage from the pantry and accidentally pushed the waiter Sysoy at the very moment when he, flexing slightly, was preparing to run through the door into the corridor with a loaded tray on his raised right hand. Sysoy dropped the tray, spilled the soup, and broke the dishes—three bowls and one plate.
Sysoy insisted that it was the dishwasher, she was to blame, and she should pay for the damage. It was nighttime now, past ten o’clock, the shift was about to go off work, and they still kept exchanging fire on the subject.
