Romashov looked tenderly at her.
“How wonderful that we should think the same thoughts!” he exclaimed in a dreamy tone.
“But let us return to our unser. Does not this word suggest the idea of something long, thin, lanky, and having a sting—a long, twisting insect, poisonous and repulsive?”
“Unser, did you say?”
Shurochka lifted up her head, blinked her eyes, and stared obstinately at the darkest corner of the room. She was evidently striving to improve on Romashov’s fanciful ideas.
“No, wait. Unser is something green and sharp.
Well, we’ll suppose it is an insect—a grasshopper, for instance—but big, disgusting, and poisonous. But how stupid we are, Romochka!”
“There’s another thing I do sometimes, only it was much easier when I was a child,” resumed Romashov in a mysterious tone.
“I used to take a word and pronounce it slowly, extremely slowly.
Every letter was drawn out and emphasized interminably.
All of a sudden I was seized by a strangely inexpressible feeling: all—everything near me sank into an abyss, and I alone remained, marvelling that I lived, thought, and spoke.”
“I, too, have had a similar sensation,” interrupted Shurochka gaily, “yet not exactly the same.
Sometimes I made violent efforts to hold my breath all the time I was thinking. ‘I am not breathing, and I won’t breathe again till, till’—then all at once I felt as if time was running past me.
No, time no longer existed; it was as if—oh, I can’t explain!”
Romashov gazed into her enthusiastic eyes, and repeated in a low tone, thrilling with happiness—
“No, you can’t explain it. It is strange—inexplicable.”
Nikolaiev got up from the table where he had been working. His back ached, and his legs had gone dead from long sitting in the same uncomfortable position. The arteries of his strong, muscular body throbbed when, with arms raised high, he stretched himself to his full length. “Look here, my learned psychologists, or whatever I should call you, it is supper-time.” A cold collation had been laid in the comfortable little dining-room, where, suspended from the ceiling, a china lamp with frosted glass shed its clear light.
Nikolaiev never touched spirits, but a little decanter of schnapps had been put on the table for Romashov.
Shurochka, contorting her pretty face by a contemptuous grimace, said, in the careless tone she so often adopted—
“Of course, you can’t do without that poison?”
Romashov smiled guiltily, and in his confusion the schnapps went the wrong way, and set him coughing.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” scolded his young hostess.
“You can’t even drink it without choking over it. I can forgive it in your adored Nasanski, who is a notorious drunkard, but for you, a handsome, promising young man, not to be able to sit down to table without vodka, it is really melancholy.
But that is Nasanski’s doing too!”
Her husband, who was glancing through the regimental orders that had just come in, suddenly called out—
“Just listen! ‘Lieutenant Nasanski has received a month’s leave from the regiment to attend to his private affairs.’
Tut, tut!
What does that mean? He has been tippling again?
You, Yuri Alexievich, are said, you know, to visit him.
Is it a fact that he has begun to drink heavily?”
Romashov looked embarrassed and lowered his gaze.
“No, I have not observed it, but he certainly does drink a little now and again, you know.”
“Your Nasanski is offensive to me,” remarked Shurochka in a low voice, trembling with suppressed bitterness.
“If it were in my power I would have a creature like that shot as if he were a mad dog.
Such officers are a disgrace to their regiment.”
Almost directly after supper was over, Nikolaiev, who in eating had displayed no less energy than he had just done at his writing-table, began to gape, and at last said quite plainly—
“Do you know, I think I’ll just take a little nap.
Or if one were to go straight off to the Land of Nod, as they used to express it in our good old novels——”
“A good idea, Vladimir Yefimovich,” said Romashov, interrupting him in, as he thought, a careless, dreamy tone, but as he rose from table he thought sadly,
“They don’t stand on ceremony with me here.
Why on earth do I come?”
It seemed to him that it afforded Nikolaiev a particular pleasure to turn him out of the house; but just as he was purposely saying good-bye to his host first, he was already dreaming of the delightful moment when, in taking leave of Shurochka, he would feel at the same time the strong yet caressing pressure of a beloved one’s hand.
When this longed-for moment at length arrived he found himself in such a state of happiness that he did not hear Shurochka say to him—
“Don’t quite forget us.
You know you are always welcome.
Besides, it is far more healthy for you to spend your evenings with us than to sit drinking with that dreadful Nasanski.
Also, don’t forget we stand on no ceremony with you.”
He heard her last words as it were in a dream, but he did not realize their meaning till he reached the street.
“Yes, that is true indeed; they don’t stand on ceremony with me,” whispered he to himself with the painful bitterness in which young and conceited persons of his age are so prone to indulge.
V