“The Devil take you! what a touchy fellow you are! Sit down and be damned to you! But you are all alike. You look at me as if I were a wild beast. ‘The old fossil goes for us without rhyme or reason.’ And all the time God knows I love you as if you were my own children. Do you think I have nothing to put up with, either? Ah, gentlemen, how little you know me! It is true I scold you occasionally, but, damn it all! an old fellow has a right to be angry sometimes. Oh, you youngsters! Well, let us make peace. Give me your hand and come to dinner.”
Romashov bowed without uttering a syllable, and pressed the coarse, cold, hairy hand. His recollection of the past insult to some extent faded, but his heart was none the lighter for this. He remembered his proud, inflated fancies of that very morning, and he now felt like a little pale, pitiful schoolboy, like a shy, abandoned, scarcely tolerated brat, and he thought of all this with shame and mortification. Also, whilst accompanying Shulgovich to the dining-room, he could not help addressing himself, as his habit was, in the third person—
“And a shadow rested on his brow.”
Shulgovich was childless. In the dining-room, his wife—a fat, coarse, self-important, and silent woman—awaited him. She had not a vestige of neck, but displayed a whole row of chins. Notwithstanding her pince-nez and her scornful mien, there was a certain air of vulgarity about her countenance, which gave the impression of its being formed, at the last minute, hurriedly and negligently, out of dough, with raisins or currants instead of eyes. Behind her waddled, dragging her feet, the Colonel’s old mother—a little deaf, but still an active, domineering, venomous old hag. While she closely and rudely examined Romashov over her spectacles, she clawed hold of his fingers and coolly pressed to his lips her black, shrivelled, bony hand, that reminded one most of an anatomical specimen. This done, she turned to the Colonel and asked him, just as if they had been absolutely alone in the dining-room—
“Who is this? I don’t remember seeing him here before?”
Shulgovich formed his hands into a sort of speaking-tube, and bawled into the old woman’s ear:
“Sub-lieutenant Romashov, mamma. A capital officer, a smart fellow, and an ornament to his regiment—comes from the Cadet School. By the way, Sub-lieutenant,” he exclaimed abruptly, “we are certainly from the same province. Aren’t you from Pevsa?”[9]
“Yes, Colonel, I was born in Pevsa.”
“To be sure, to be sure; now I remember. You are from the Narovtschátski district?”
“Quite right, Colonel.”