‘To Portugal? How absurd!’
‘Yes, brother, to Portugal, with two Matronovtsys.’
‘With whom?’
‘The Matronovtsys; that’s what the members of her party are called.’
‘Matrona Semyonovna has a party of her own? And is it a numerous one?’
‘Well, it consists of precisely those two. And he will soon have been back here six months. Others have got into difficulties, but he was all right. He lives in the country with his brother, and you should just hear him now....’
‘Bambaev!’
‘Coming, Stepan Nikolaitch, coming. And you, dear old chap, are flourishing, enjoying yourself! Well, thank God for that! Where are you off to now?... There, I never thought, I never guessed.... You remember Baden? Ah, that was a place to live in! By the way, you remember Bindasov too? Only fancy, he’s dead. He turned exciseman, and was in a row in a public-house; he got his head broken with a billiard-cue. Yes, yes, hard times have come now! But still I say, Russia ... ah, our Russia! Only look at those two geese; why, in the whole of Europe there’s nothing like them! The genuine Arzamass breed!’
And with this last tribute to his irrepressible desire for enthusiasm, Bambaev ran off to the station hut, where again, seasoned with opprobrious epithets, his name was shouted.
Towards the close of the same day, Litvinov was nearly reaching Tatyana’s village. The little house where his former betrothed lived stood on the slope of a hill, above a small river, in the midst of a garden recently planted. The house, too, was new, lately built, and could be seen a long way off across the river and the open country. Litvinov caught sight of it more than a mile and a half off, with its sharp gable, and its row of little windows, gleaming red in the evening sun. At starting from the last station he was conscious of a secret agitation; now he was in a tremor simply—a happy tremor, not unmixed with dread. ‘How will they meet me?’ he thought, ‘how shall I present myself?’... To turn off his thoughts with something, he began talking with his driver, a steady peasant with a grey beard, who charged him, however, for twenty-five miles, when the distance was not twenty. He asked him, did he know the Shestov ladies?