I turned round and strode back to the brilliantly lit castle.
There, in the castle, the guests were making preparations for congratulating the betrothed pair. They kept glancing impatiently at the clock. In the hallway the waiters were carrying trays and jostling one another: there were bottles and glasses on the trays. Chaikhidzev was impatiently squeezing his right hand with his left, and his eyes were searching for Olya. The Princess was wandering through all the rooms of the castle, looking for Olya, bent on giving her instructions—she should know how to conduct herself towards her mother, and so on, and so on. And we laughed.
“Have you seen Olya?” the Princess asked me.
“No.”
“Then go and find her.”
I went out into the garden and twice circled the castle, my hands behind my back. Our artist blew a note on a trumpet. It was the signal that meant: “Hold her! Don’t let her escape!” From the summer house Yegorov answered with an owl’s cry, which meant: “All’s well! Am holding her!”
I wandered around for a little while and then returned to the house. In the hallway the waiters had put their trays down on the tables and stood empty-handed, staring dully at the guests. The guests themselves were gazing at the clock with perplexed looks on their faces. The pianos were silent. A dull and brooding silence reigned oppressively in all the rooms.
“Where’s Olya?” the Princess asked me. She was purple.
“I don’t know. She is not in the garden.”
The Princess shrugged her shoulders.
“Doesn’t she realize she is long overdue?” she asked, pulling at my sleeve.
I shrugged my shoulders. The Princess moved away and whispered something to Chaikhidzev, who also shook his shoulders. The Princess pulled at his sleeve.
“Complete idiot!” she muttered, and went running through all the rooms.
The maids and some schoolboys who were related to Olya ran noisily down the steps and went searching for the vanished fiancee in the depths of the garden. I, too, went into the garden. I was afraid Yegorov would not be able to keep Olya much longer: and our carefully contrived plot would come to nothing. I went straight to the summer house. My fears were unfounded. Olya was sitting beside Yegorov, gesticulating with her little hands, whispering, whispering.… Whenever Olya stopped whispering, Yegorov would begin murmuring. She was explaining her “ideas,” as the Princess would call them. He sweetened each word with a kiss. When he spoke to her, not a moment passed without a kiss, and somehow he succeeded in holding his mouth sideways so that she would not smell his vodka-laden breath. They were both completely happy, oblivious of the world, and of time passing. For a moment I stood rejoicing at the gate of the summer house, and then, having no desire to disturb them, I returned to the castle.
The Princess was almost out of her wits, inhaling her smelling salts. She was full of wild conjectures, but before Chaikhidzev and the assembled guests she felt angry and ashamed. She was a woman who had never had recourse to violence, but when a maidservant came to tell her there was no sign of Olya, she slapped the maidservant on the face. The guests, weary of waiting for the champagne and the congratulations, exchanged smiles and the latest gossip, and began dancing again.
The clock struck one, and still no sign of Olya. The Princess was close to madness.
“This is one of your tricks,” she hissed, passing by one of our group. “She’ll hear about this! Where is she?”
Finally she found a benefactor who revealed Olya’s hiding place. This benefactor was her nephew, a small potbellied schoolboy, who came running out of the garden like someone possessed, hurled himself at the Princess, jumped on her lap, pulled her head down, and whispered into her ear. The Princess turned pale and bit her lip so hard that she drew blood.
“In the summer house?” she asked.
“Yes.”
The Princess rose, and with a grimace which somehow resembled the smile of officialdom, she informed the guests that Olya was suffering from a headache and had begged to be excused, et cetera, et cetera. The guests expressed their regrets, quickly finished supper, and began leaving.
At two o’clock—Yegorov had excelled himself by keeping Olya all this time—I was standing at the entrance to the terrace behind some oleanders, waiting for Olya’s return. I wanted to see how her face would express at one and the same time her love for Yegorov and her fear of the Princess; and which was stronger, her love or her fear. For a little while longer I breathed the scent of the oleanders. Then Olya appeared, and I feasted my eyes on her face. She walked slowly, holding up her skirt a little, revealing her tiny slippers. Her face was brilliantly clear in the light of the moon and of the lanterns hanging on the trees, the glow of the lanterns somehow spoiling the pure radiance of the moon. Her face was solemn, very pale, with the ghost of a smile playing around her lips. She was gazing thoughtfully on the ground with the expression of one pondering a particularly difficult problem. When Olya climbed the first step I saw that her eyes were troubled, darting restlessly to and fro, as she remembered her mother. For a moment her hand went up to her disheveled hair, and then for a while she stood on that first step undecided. At last, with a toss of her head, she marched bravely to the door. And then I saw an extraordinary thing. The door was flung open suddenly, and Olya’s white face was lit with a fierce light. She shuddered, stepped back, and her knees trembled under her.
Olya was completely annihilated. She was shivering feverishly as she made a serpentine glide past the Princess and flew to her own room. All night long she sat on her bed and stared at the window with terror-stricken eyes.
At three o’clock that morning we had another meeting. At this meeting we had a good laugh at Yegorov, drunk with happiness, and we appointed our baronial lawyer from Kharkov as an ambassador to Chaikhidzev. The prince was still awake. The baronial lawyer from Kharkov was to explain “in the most friendly fashion” the delicacy of Chaikhidzev’s position, and to beg his pardon for our interference in his affairs, all this, of course, “in the most
