When I am left alone with her I always become nervous and clumsy. As I follow with my eyes the people leaving the room I feel as ill at ease as in the fifth figure of the quadrille, when I see my partner crossing to the far side, condemning me to be left alone. I am sure Napoleon did not feel so wretched when the Saxons went over to the enemy at Waterloo, as I did in my early youth when I contemplated this cruel manoeuvre. The tactic I use in dancing the quadrille, I now use in this situation too: I try to give the impression that I have not noticed I am alone. Now even the conversation which had begun before his exit had come to a halt; I repeated the last words I had spoken, adding only: ‘So it had to be,’ and she repeated her previous words, adding ‘Yes’. But alongside this there began at once a second, inaudible conversation.
I was still composing my mouth to say something of the kind which allows one to be thinking one thing while conversing about something else, when she launched into a conversation out loud which gave the impression that it might go on for some time; but in this sort of situation even the most significant topics fall flat, because that
‘I am very glad we are alone now,’ I continued in the same mode. ‘I have already remarked to you that you often upset me by your lack of trust in me. If I accidentally touch your foot with mine, you at once hasten to apologize, and do not give me time to apologize first, while I, having made sure that it was your foot I touched, wanted simply to apologize. I cannot keep up with you in these matters, yet you still think that I lack delicacy.’
Her husband came back. We sat down to supper and chatted, and I returned home at half-past midnight.
It is spring now, the twenty-fifth of March. The night is still and clear; the new moon has come into view from behind the red roof of the big white house opposite; the snow has mostly melted.
‘Let’s be off, driver!…’
My night-service sledge was the only one waiting near the house porch and Dmitry had evidently heard me coming out without waiting for any shouted summons from the footman, for the smacking noise he made with his lips was audible, as though he were kissing someone in the darkness: a sound which I suppose was meant to tell the little horse to pull the sledge off the stone roadway, on which the runners screeched and scraped unpleasantly. At length the sledge drew up. The obliging footman took my elbow and guided me towards the seat; had he not supported me I should have jumped straight into the sledge, but now, so as not to offend him, I made my way more cautiously and broke through the layer of thin ice on a puddle, wetting my feet. ‘Thank you, my man.’—‘Dmitry, is it freezing?’—‘As well as you could wish for, sir; at this time of the year you still get a good light frost any night, sir.’
