worm, the unnecessary worm, will crawl away, and there'll be no more of him. I will commemorate my day of joy on my last night.'
He was almost choking. There was so much, so much he wanted to say, but strange exclamations were all that came from his lips. The Pole gazed fixedly at him, at the bundle of notes in his hand; looked at Grushenka, and was in evident perplexity.
'If my suverin lady is permitting--' he was beginning.
'What does ‘suverin’ mean? ‘Sovereign,’ I suppose?' interrupted Grushenka. 'I can't help laughing at you, the way you talk. Sit down, Mitya, what are you talking about? Don't frighten us, please. You won't frighten us, will you? If you won't, I am glad to see you...'
'Me, me frighten you?' cried Mitya, flinging up his hands. 'Oh, pass me by, go your way, I won't hinder you!...'
And suddenly he surprised them all, and no doubt himself as well, by flinging himself on a chair, and bursting into tears, turning his head away to the opposite wall, while his arms clasped the back of the chair tight, as though embracing it.
'Come, come, what a fellow you are!' cried Grushenka reproachfully. 'That's just how he comes to see me--he begins talking, and I can't make out what he means. He cried like that once before, and now he's crying again! It's shamefull Why are you crying? As though you had anything to cry for!' she added enigmatically, emphasising each word with some irritability.
'I... I'm not crying.... Well, good evening!' He instantly turned round in his chair, and suddenly laughed, not his abrupt wooden laugh, but a long, quivering, inaudible nervous laugh.
'Well, there you are again.... Come, cheer up, cheer up!' Grushenka said to him persuasively. 'I'm very glad you've come, very glad, Mitya, do you hear, I'm very glad! I want him to stay here with us,' she said peremptorily, addressing the whole company, though her words were obviously meant for the man sitting on the sofa. 'I wish it, I wish it! And if he goes away I shall go, too!' she added with flashing eyes.
'What my queen commands is law!' pronounced the Pole, gallantly kissing Grushenka's hand. 'I beg you, panie, to join our company,' he added politely, addressing Mitya.
Mitya was jumping up with the obvious intention of delivering another tirade, but the words did not come.
'Let's drink, Panie,' he blurted out instead of making a speech. Everyone laughed.
'Good heavens! I thought he was going to begin again!' Grushenka exclaimed nervously. 'Do you hear, Mitya,' she went on insistently, 'don't prance about, but it's nice you've brought the champagne. I want some myself, and I can't bear liqueurs. And best of all, you've come yourself. We were fearfully dull here.... You've come for a spree again, I suppose? But put your money in your pocket. Where did you get such a lot?'
Mitya had been, all this time, holding in his hand the crumpled bundle of notes on which the eyes of all, especially of the Poles, were fixed. In confusion he thrust them hurriedly into his pocket. He flushed. At that moment the innkeeper brought in an uncorked bottle of champagne, and glasses on a tray. Mitya snatched up the bottle, but he was so bewildered that he did not know what to do with it. Kalgonov took it from him and poured out the champagne.
'Another! Another bottle!' Mitya cried to the inn-keeper, and, forgetting to clink glasses with the Pole whom he had so solemnly invited to drink to their good understanding, he drank off his glass without waiting for anyone else. His whole countenance suddenly changed. The solemn and tragic expression with which he had entered vanished completely, and a look of something childlike came into his face. He seemed to have become suddenly gentle and subdued. He looked shyly and happily at everyone, with a continual nervous little laugh, and the blissful expression of a dog who has done wrong, been punished, and forgiven. He seemed to have forgotten everything, and was looking round at everyone with a childlike smile of delight. He looked at Grushenka, laughing continually, and bringing his chair close up to her. By degrees he had gained some idea of the two Poles, though he had formed no definite conception of them yet.
The Pole on the sofa struck him by his dignified demeanour and his Polish accent; and, above all, by his pipe. 'Well, what of it? It's a good thing he's smoking a pipe,' he reflected. The Pole's puffy, middle-aged face, with its tiny nose and two very thin, pointed, dyed and impudent-looking moustaches, had not so far roused the faintest doubts in Mitya. He was not even particularly struck by the Pole's absurd wig made in Siberia, with love-locks foolishly combed forward over the temples. 'I suppose it's all right since he wears a wig,' he went on, musing blissfully. The other, younger Pole, who was staring insolently and defiantly at the company and listening to the conversation with silent contempt, still only impressed Mitya by his great height, which was in striking contrast to the Pole on the sofa. 'If he stood up he'd be six foot three.' The thought flitted through Mitya's mind. It occurred to him, too, that this Pole must be the friend of the other, as it were, a 'bodyguard,' and no doubt the big Pole was at the disposal of the little Pole with the pipe. But this all seemed to Mitya perfectly right and not to be questioned. In his mood of doglike submissiveness all feeling of rivalry had died away.
Grushenka's mood and the enigmatic tone of some of her words he completely failed to grasp. All he understood, with thrilling heart, was that she was kind to him, that she had forgiven him, and made him sit by her. He was beside himself with delight, watching her sip her glass of champagne. The silence of the company seemed somehow to strike him, however, and he looked round at everyone with expectant eyes.
'Why are we sitting here though, gentlemen? Why don't you begin doing something?' his smiling eyes seemed to ask.
'He keeps talking nonsense, and we were all laughing,' Kalgonov began suddenly, as though divining his thought, and pointing to Maximov.
Mitya immediately stared at Kalgonov and then at Maximov
'He's talking nonsense?' he laughed, his short, wooden laugh, seeming suddenly delighted at something--'ha ha!'
'Yes. Would you believe it, he will have it that all our cavalry officers in the twenties married Polish women. That's awful rot, isn't it?'
'Polish women?' repeated Mitya, perfectly ecstatic.
Kalgonov was well aware of Mitya's attitude to Grushenka, and he guessed about the Pole, too, but that did not so much interest him, perhaps did not interest him at all; what he was interested in was Maximov. He had come here with Maximov by chance, and he met the Poles here at the inn for the first time in his life. Grushenka he knew before, and had once been with someone to see her; but she had not taken to him. But here she looked at him very affectionately: before Mitya's arrival, she had been making much of him, but he seemed somehow to be unmoved by it. He was a boy, not over twenty, dressed like a dandy, with a very charming fair-skinned face, and splendid thick, fair hair. From his fair face looked out beautiful pale blue eyes, with an intelligent and sometimes even deep expression, beyond his age indeed, although the young man sometimes looked and talked quite like a child, and was not at all ashamed of it, even when he was aware of it himself. As a rule he was very wilful, even capricious, though always friendly. Sometimes there was something fixed and obstinate in his expression. He would look at you and listen, seeming all the while to be persistently dreaming over something else. Often he was listless and lazy; at other times he would grow excited, sometimes, apparently, over the most trivial matters.
'Only imagine, I've been taking him about with me for the last four days,' he went on, indolently drawling his words, quite naturally though, without the slightest affectation. 'Ever since your brother, do you remember, shoved him off the carriage and sent him flying. That made me take an interest in him at the time, and I took him into the country, but he keeps talking such rot I'm ashamed to be with him. I'm taking him back.'
'The gentleman has not seen Polish ladies, and says what is impossible,' the Pole with the pipe observed to Maximov.
He spoke Russian fairly well, much better, anyway, than he pretended. If he used Russian words, he always distorted them into a Polish form.
'But I was married to a Polish lady myself,' tittered Maximov.
'But did you serve in the cavalry? You were talking about the cavalry. Were you a cavalry officer?' put in Kalgonov at once.
'Was he a cavalry officer indeed? Ha ha!' cried Mitya, listening eagerly, and turning his inquiring eyes to each as he spoke, as though there were no knowing what he might hear from each.
'No, you see,' Maximov turned to him. 'What I mean is that those pretty Polish ladies ... when they danced the mazurka with our Uhlans... when one of them dances a mazurka with a Uhlan she jumps on his knee like a
