‘It will be boring for you,’ said Countess Lydia Ivanovna, turning to Landau, ‘you don’t know English. But it’s short.’
‘Oh, I shall understand,’ Landau said with the same smile and closed his eyes.
Alexei Alexandrovich and Lydia Ivanovna exchanged meaningful glances, and the reading began.
XXII
Stepan Arkadyich felt completely baffled hearing this talk, which was new and strange to him. The complexity of Petersburg life generally had an exhilarating effect on him, lifting him out of his Moscow stagnation; but he liked and understood those complexities in spheres that were close and familiar to him, while in this alien milieu he was baffled, dumbfounded, and could not grasp it all. Listening to Countess Lydia Ivanovna and sensing Landau’s beautiful eyes - naive or sly, he did not know which - fixed on him, Stepan Arkadyich began to feel some peculiar heaviness in his head.
The most diverse thoughts were tangled in his head. ‘Marie Sanin is glad her child died ... Would be nice to smoke now ... To be saved, one need only believe, and the monks don’t know how to do it, but Countess Lydia Ivanovna does ... And why is there such a heaviness in my head? From the cognac, or because it’s all so strange? Anyhow, I don’t think I’ve done anything improper yet. But, still, it’s impossible to ask for her help now. I’ve heard they make people pray. What if they make me pray? That would be too stupid. And what’s this nonsense she’s reading, albeit with good enunciation? Landau is Bezzubov. Why is he Bezzubov?’ Suddenly Stepan Arkadyich felt his lower jaw beginning to contract irrepressibly before a yawn. He smoothed his side-whiskers, concealing the yawn, and shook himself. But next he felt he was already asleep and about to snore. He woke up just as the voice of Countess Lydia Ivanovna said, ‘He’s asleep.’
Stepan Arkadyich woke up in fear, feeling guilty and exposed. But he was reassured at once, seeing that the words ‘He’s asleep’ referred not to him but to Landau. The Frenchman had fallen asleep as had Stepan Arkadyich. But while Stepan Arkadyich’s sleep, as he thought, would have offended them (however, he did not think even that, so strange everything seemed to him), Landau’s sleep delighted them in the extreme, Countess Lydia Ivanovna especially.
The Frenchman slept, or pretended to sleep, his head resting on the back of the armchair, and made feeble movements with the sweaty hand that lay on his knee, as if attempting to catch something. Alexei Alexandrovich got up, trying to be careful but brushing against the table, went over and put his hand into the Frenchman’s hand. Stepan Arkadyich also got up and, opening his eyes wide, wishing to waken himself in case he was asleep, looked now at the one man, now at the other. It was all real. Stepan Arkadyich felt that his head was getting worse and worse.
And, receiving an affirmative reply, Stepan Arkadyich, forgetting about what he had wanted to ask Lydia Ivanovna, and also forgetting about his sister’s business, with the sole desire of quickly getting out of there, left on tiptoe and, as if it were a plague house, ran out to the street and spent a long time talking and joking with a cabby, hoping the sooner to come to his senses.
At the French Theatre, where he arrived for the last act, and then over champagne at the Tartars‘, Stepan Arkadyich caught his breath a little in an atmosphere more suitable to him. But even so he felt quite out of sorts that evening.
Returning home to Pyotr Oblonsky‘s, where he was staying in Petersburg, Stepan Arkadyich found a note from Betsy. She wrote that she wished very much to finish the conversation they had started and invited him to come the next day. No sooner had he read the note and winced at it than he heard downstairs the heavy footsteps of people carrying some weighty object.
