Have you walked in!... I was frightened.
So you wanted to give me up to him, did you?
Did you really want to?"
"I didn't want to spoil your happiness!" Mitya faltered blissfully.
But she did not need his answer.
"Well, go and enjoy yourself..." she sent him away once more. "Don't cry, I'll call you back again."
He would run away and she listened to the singing and looked at the dancing, though her eyes followed him wherever he went. But in another quarter of an hour she would call him once more and again he would run back to her.
"Come, sit beside me, tell me, how did you hear about me, and my coming here yesterday? From whom did you first hear it?"
And Mitya began telling her all about it, disconnectedly, incoherently, feverishly. He spoke strangely, often frowning, and stopping abruptly.
"What are you frowning at?" she asked.
"Nothing.... I left a man ill there.
I'd give ten years of my life for him to get well, to know he was all right!"
"Well, never mind him, if he's ill.
So you meant to shoot yourself to-morrow! What a silly boy! What for?
I like such reckless fellows as you," she lisped, with a rather halting tongue. "So you would go any length for me, eh?
Did you really mean to shoot yourself to-morrow, you stupid?
No, wait a little. To-morrow I may have something to say to you.... I won't say it to-day, but to-morrow.
You'd like it to be to-day?
No, I don't want to to-day. Come, go along now, go and amuse yourself."
Once, however, she called him, as it were, puzzled and uneasy.
"Why are you sad?
I see you're sad.... Yes, I see it," she added, looking intently into his eyes. "Though you keep kissing the peasants and shouting, I see something.
No, be merry. I'm merry; you be merry, too.... I love somebody here. Guess who it is.
Ah, look, my boy has fallen asleep, poor dear, he's drunk."
She meant Kalganov. He was, in fact, drunk, and had dropped asleep for a moment, sitting on the sofa.
But he was not merely drowsy from drink; he felt suddenly dejected, or, as he said, "bored."
He was intensely depressed by the girls' songs, which, as the drinking went on, gradually became coarse and more reckless.
And the dances were as bad. Two girls dressed up as bears, and a lively girl, called Stepanida, with a stick in her hand, acted the part of keeper, and began to "show them."
"Look alive, Marya, or you'll get the stick!
The bears rolled on the ground at last in the most unseemly fashion, amid roars of laughter from the closely-packed crowd of men and women.
"Well, let them! Let them!" said Grushenka sententiously, with an ecstatic expression on her face. "When they do get a day to enjoy themselves; why shouldn't folks be happy?"
Kalgonov looked as though he had been besmirched with dirt.
"It's swinish, all this peasant foolery," he murmured, moving away; "it's the game they play when it's light all night in summer."
He particularly disliked one "new" song to a jaunty dance-tune. It described how a gentleman came and tried his luck with the girls, to see whether they would love him:
The master came to try the girls: Would they love him, would they not?
But the girls could not love the master:
He would beat me cruelly And such love won't do for me.
Then a gypsy comes along and he, too, tries:
The gypsy came to try the girls: Would they love him, would they not?
But they couldn't love the gypsy either:
He would be a thief, I fear, And would cause me many a tear.
And many more men come to try their luck, among them a soldier:
The soldier came to try the girls: Would they love him, would they not?
But the soldier is rejected with contempt, in two indecent lines, sung with absolute frankness and producing a furore in the audience.
The song ends with a merchant:
The merchant came to try the girls: Would they love him, would they not?
And it appears that he wins their love because:
The merchant will make gold for me And his queen I'll gladly be.
Kalgonov was positively indignant.
"That's just a song of yesterday," he said aloud. "Who writes such things for them?