The Czar, his immense figure encased in a light frock coat of excellent fit, was sauntering along apparently unaccompanied except by his terrier and cane. When saluted he would raise his straw hat and nod his enormous well-shaped head with a cordiality that bordered on good-fellowship. He seemed to relish this exchange of courtesies with people who were not his subjects in this little republic of physical malady. It was as though he felt apart from his autocratic self without feeling out of that pampering atmosphere of deference and attention which was his second nature; and he gave an effect of inhaling his freedom as one does the first whiffs of spring air.
As to his fellow patients, they either discovered something majestic in the very dog that followed him, or were struck by the knuckles of his ungloved hands, for example, as if it were remarkable that they should be the same sort of knuckles as their own. He was strikingly well-built and strikingly handsome. He wore thick close-cropped side whiskers of the kind that is rarely becoming, but his face they became very well indeed, adding majesty to a cast of large, clear-cut features. It was the most monarchical face of its time, and yet it was anything but a strong face. His imposing side whiskers and moustache left bare a full sensuous mouth and a plump weak chin; his blueish eyes gave forth suggestions of melancholy and anguish. Interest in him was whetted by stories of his passion for Princess Dolgoruki, lady in waiting to the Czarina; so the women at the watering place tried to decipher the tale of his liaison in those sad amative eyes of his.
Two refined looking, middle-aged women attracted attention by the bizarre simplicity with which one of them was attired and coiffured. She was extremely pale and made one think of an insane asylum or a convent. She was grey, while her companion had auburn hair and was shorter and flabbier of figure. They were conversing in French, but it was not their native tongue. The one with the grey hair was Pani Oginska, a Polish woman; the other a Russian countess named Anna Nicolayevna Varova (Varoff). They had first met, in this watering place, less than a fortnight ago, when a chat, in the course of which they warmed to each other, led to the discovery that their estates lay in neighbouring provinces in Little Russia. They were preceded by a slender youth of eighteen in a broad-brimmed straw hat and a clean-shaven elderly little man in one of soft grey felt. These were Prince Pavel Alexeyevich Boulatoff, a son of the countess by a former marriage, and Alexandre Alexandrovich Pievakin, his private tutor, as well as one of his instructors at the gymnasium[A] of his native town. Pavel’s straw hat was too sedate for his childish face and was pushed down so low that a delicately sculptured chin and mouth and the turned up tip of a rudely hewn Russian nose was all one could see under its vast expanse of yellow brim. The old man knew no German and this was his first trip abroad, so his high-born pupil, who had an advantage over him in both these respects, was explaining things to him, with an air at once patronising and respectful. Presently Pavel interrupted himself.
“The Czar!” he whispered, in a flutter. “The Czar!” he repeated over his shoulder, addressing himself to his mother.
Pievakin raised his glance, paling as he did so, but was so overawed by the sight that he forthwith dropped his eyes, a sickly expression on his lips.
When the men came face to face with their monarch they made way and snatched off their hats as if they were on fire. Countess Varoff, Pavel’s mother, curtseyed deeply, her flaccid insignificant little body retreating toward the side of the promenade and then sinking to the ground; while the Polish woman proceeded on her way stiffly without so much as a nod of her head. The Czar returned the greeting of the Russian woman gallantly and disappeared in the rear of them.
The group walked on in nervous silence, the two women now in the lead. When they reached a deserted spot the youth suddenly flushed a violent red, and, thrusting out his finely chiselled chin at his mother, he said, in quick pugnacious full-toned accents as out of keeping with his boyish figure as his hat:
“Mother, you are not going to keep up acquaintance with a person who has offered an insult to our Czar.”
“Paul! What has come over you?” the countess stammered out, colouring abjectly as she paused.
“I mean just what I say, mother.”