Rashevitch looked round towards the door. 'No one is surprised nowadays when a wife robs and leaves her husband. What's that, a trifle! Nowadays, my dear boy, a chit of a girl of twelve is scheming to get a lover, and all these amateur theatricals and literary evenings are only invented to make it easier to get a rich merchant to take a girl on as his mistress. . . . Mothers sell their daughters, and people make no bones about asking a husband at what price he sells his wife, and one can haggle over the bargain, you know, my dear. . . .'
Meier, who had been sitting motionless and silent all the time, suddenly got up from the sofa and looked at his watch.
'I beg your pardon, Pavel Ilyitch,' he said, 'it is time for me to be going.'
But Pavel Ilyitch, who had not finished his remarks, put his arm round him and, forcibly reseating him on the sofa, vowed that he would not let him go without supper. And again Meier sat and listened, but he looked at Rashevitch with perplexity and uneasiness, as though he were only now beginning to understand him. Patches of red came into his face. And when at last a maidservant came in to tell them that the young ladies asked them to go to supper, he gave a sigh of relief and was the first to walk out of the study.
At the table in the next room were Rashevitch's daughters, Genya and Iraida, girls of four-and-twenty and two-and-twenty respectively, both very pale, with black eyes, and exactly the same height. Genya had her hair down, and Iraida had hers done up high on her head. Before eating anything they each drank a wineglassful of bitter liqueur, with an air as though they had drunk it by accident for the first time in their lives and both were overcome with confusion and burst out laughing.
'Don't be naughty, girls,' said Rashevitch.
Genya and Iraida talked French with each other, and Russian with their father and their visitor. Interrupting one another, and mixing up French words with Russian, they began rapidly describing how just at this time in August, in previous years, they had set off to the hoarding school and what fun it had been. Now there was nowhere to go, and they had to stay at their home in the country, summer and winter without change. Such dreariness!
'Don't be naughty, girls,' Rashevitch said again.
He wanted to be talking himself. If other people talked in his presence, he suffered from a feeling like jealousy.
'So that's how it is, my dear boy,' he began, looking affectionately at Meier. 'In the simplicity and goodness of our hearts, and from fear of being suspected of being behind the times, we fraternize with, excuse me, all sorts of riff-raff, we preach fraternity and equality with money-lenders and innkeepers; but if we would only think, we should see how criminal that good-nature is. We have brought things to such a pass, that the fate of civilization is hanging on a hair. My dear fellow, what our forefathers gained in the course of ages will be to-morrow, if not to- day, outraged and destroyed by these modern Huns. . . .'
After supper they all went into the drawing-room. Genya and Iraida lighted the candles on the piano, got out their music. . . . But their father still went on talking, and there was no telling when he would leave off. They looked with misery and vexation at their egoist-father, to whom the pleasure of chattering and displaying his intelligence was evidently more precious and important than his daughters' happiness. Meier, the only young man who ever came to their house, came--they knew--for the sake of their charming, feminine society, but the irrepressible old man had taken possession of him, and would not let him move a step away.
'Just as the knights of the west repelled the invasions of the Mongols, so we, before it is too late, ought to unite and strike together against our foe,' Rashevitch went on in the tone of a preacher, holding up his right hand. 'May I appear to the riff-raff not as Pavel Ilyitch, but as a mighty, menacing Richard Coeur-de-Lion. Let us give up sloppy sentimentality; enough of it! Let us all make a compact, that as soon as a plebeian comes near us we fling some careless phrase straight in his ugly face: 'Paws off! Go back to your kennel, you cur!' straight in his ugly face,' Rashevitch went on gleefully, flicking his crooked finger in front of him. 'In his ugly face!'
'I can't do that,' Meier brought out, turning away.
'Why not?' Rashevitch answered briskly, anticipating a prolonged and interesting argument. 'Why not?'
'Because I am of the artisan class myself!'
As he said this Meier turned crimson, and his neck seemed to swell, and tears actually gleamed in his eyes.
'My father was a simple workman,' he said, in a rough, jerky voice, 'but I see no harm in that.'
Rashevitch was fearfully confused. Dumbfoundered, as though he had been caught in the act of a crime, he gazed helplessly at Meier, and did not know what to say. Genya and Iraida flushed crimson, and bent over their music; they were ashamed of their tactless father. A minute passed in silence, and there was a feeling of unbearable discomfort, when all at once with a sort of painful stiffness and inappropriateness, there sounded in the air the words:
'Yes, I am of the artisan class, and I am proud of it!'
Thereupon Meier, stumbling awkwardly among the furniture, took his leave, and walked rapidly into the hall, though his carriage was not yet at the door.
'You'll have a dark drive to-night,' Rashevitch muttered, following him. 'The moon does not rise till late to- night.'
They stood together on the steps in the dark, and waited for the horses to be brought. It was cool.
'There's a falling star,' said Meier, wrapping himself in his overcoat.
'There are a great many in August.'
When the horses were at the door, Rashevitch gazed intently at the sky, and said with a sigh:
'A phenomenon worthy of the pen of Flammarion. . . .'
After seeing his visitor off, he walked up and down the garden, gesticulating in the darkness, reluctant to believe that such a queer, stupid misunderstanding had only just occurred. He was ashamed and vexed with himself. In the first place it had been extremely incautious and tactless on his part to raise the damnable subject of blue blood, without finding out beforehand what his visitor's position was. Something of the same sort had happened to him before; he had, on one occasion in a railway carriage, begun abusing the Germans, and it had afterwards appeared that all the persons he had been conversing with were German. In the second place he felt that Meier would never come and see him again. These intellectuals who have risen from the people are morbidly sensitive, obstinate and slow to forgive.
