Countess Chouróff, sitting bolt upright in her chair of state, was heading her hospitable table in a dazzling haze of jewels that outlined her meager person at every edge.
“She reminds me of a wire sign illuminated by electricity,” thought Basil, who sat on her right hand.
“You are very severe, Vassilissa-Andrièvna, very severe indeed, to my birthplace!” he said, smiling.
“Severe! Hear this miscreant talk!” she appealed to the company, nodding a tiaraed coiffure until the gigantic diamonds and emeralds spiking it in every direction flashed again. “But men are like that ... they do not understand our tenderer natures. My poor husband was identically the same—God rest his soul!” She crossed herself scrupulously with a bony yellow hand loaded with enormous gems. “Duty was his eternal rallying-cry—bless him! It was our duty to vegetate in the wilds at his side until it became imperative for our daughters to be presented, and then the grumbles, the lamentations that ensued! Dear! Dear! One would have sworn he was on his way to be crucified. I assure you, Princess, that if you yield at the beginning to marital tyranny you will never again be able to call your soul your own.”
Laurence, in all the panoply of a great mondaine at a feast given in her honor, was somehow or other entirely out of it. This was something never dreamt of before: a dinner at one of the most ancient houses of a far-off Russian province, carried out with the pompous ceremonial and curious discomforts of past days, in a banqueting-hall spacious enough to shelter an army and evidently open to all the winds of heaven. It was raining heavily outside, with no promise of better things to come, and from her place she could see files of servants in full livery running to and fro from the kitchen—built à la mode d’il-y-a longtemps, in the middle of the inner court—bearing covered silver dishes, all adrip with the diluvian downpour. The majordomo, stiff as a ramrod, advanced as far as the edge of the glass marquise every five minutes or so, to convey his orders in a withering autocratic voice which grew sweet as honey the minute he re-entered the banqueting-hall, and the four butlers in attendance marched and countermarched with the omnipresent lacqueys, all attired in the Chouróff scarlet and gold, like captains heading small detachments of troops. What manner of country was this?
Another surprising anachronism—at least so it appeared to her—was the fact that albeit this was an occasion when, to use the French simile, the little dishes had been rammed into the big ones (les petits plats dans les grands), yet the feudal custom of “guests below the salt” was strictly adhered to. Indeed, the implacable etiquette of the House of Chouróff separated the festive board into two exact parts, one reserved for ceremoniously invited gentlemen and ladies, the other for the poor relatives, the hangers-on, and the household proper—comprising tutors, governesses, the Polish land-steward, a host of lady companions, another of penniless noble damsels awaiting the Countess’s good pleasure to obtain a small “dot” from her generosity, the almoner, the medical officer of the district, and other functionaries of similar importance.
“What an idea!” Laurence reflected. “What extravagant barbarism and outlandishness! How they would laugh at home if they saw this.” Laugh she did not, however. She was impressed, in spite of her silent disapproval, and a little frightened, too. This masterful woman in claret-hued velvet, who led her people with something like a field-marshal’s bâton, and managed, however, to inspire them with a curious mixture of passionate devotion and abject terror, remained a mysterious and awesome power to her. Also Countess Chouróff was by no means dazzled by her, Laurence’s, high rank and fortune, for she was absurdly wealthy herself, and a very great lady, notwithstanding her oddities and extravagances of speech; a personage of weight and power in the land such as Laurence could never hope to be, and one with whom the new-comer could not, as she had done with almost everybody elsewhere, pose and posture, which, of course, vexed the bride not a little.
“You can never realize,” Madame Chouróff was saying now, “what a trip to Petersburg meant then, Princess! Oh, it was a voyage indeed! We looked like a veritable Noah’s ark procession, let me tell you, setting off from here after the snow began to bear. Berlines swung on runners, and kibitkas and fourgons—preceded by couriers on horseback or in light wagons—tèlégas—and what not? A noise, a clamor, when getting under way, of which you can have no conception! Of course we had to carry with us half of the batterie de cuisine—how else would we have fared on the road?—and the chef with his scullions, his silver saucepans! How he would swear over the portable stoves to be used en route, at the miserable post-houses!” She laughed heartily, creating thereby a veritable pyrotechnic commotion with her jewels.
“I remember once when we were snowed in, stuck fast between two stations—post-stations, you understand—flakes as big as swans’ wings falling, falling, falling in a dense curtain. Four of my children were almost infants then, eight and nine years old, I think. Let me see, was it the twins?... I can’t remember; perhaps Zina and Dimitri, Nikola and Sônitzkà; it does not matter, however. Anyhow, they were asleep in their father’s traveling-carriage, at full length, so that he had to get out and join me and the girls—four of them, mind you—that made six of us pressed together like sardines, eating on our laps from the provision-baskets, and swallowing red-hot tea brewed by the chief of our kitchens beneath a lean-to of pine branches in the very throat of the tempest. Behind the berline the maid’s rumble was getting full of snow. It was droll! You must understand the berline was honeycombed with drawers and receptacles, and there were supplementary sacks of leather attached everywhere. As to my ‘sleeper,’ it did not boast so many appendages and cachettes; it was much lighter, and lined with—what do you think?—with rose-colored satin—a conceit of my poor husband. It had served us on our honeymoon. And that night he was in a vile humor, thanks to the fact that for the first time in his existence he had been deprived of his indispensable rastigaï—marrow-filled patés—since you do not know Russian, Princess. Oh, but we had ices!... Don’t laugh, Basil-Vassilièvitch! That cook was a pearl, and with the aid of essences of various fruits and powdered nuts, of which he always took a quantity along, he manufactured a sort of Nesselrode in little moulds. Delicious they were, too, but they did not appease my poor husband’s wrath concerning those rastigaï. He told the butler some impatient things when he brought the Nesselrode shapes on a frozen tray, and repented afterward, for he was consummately golden-hearted. I recall that he gave him ten rubles—gold—the next morning. We left the berline to the girls after that, and took refuge, he and I, in my ‘sleeper.’ He became quite too amiable then, poor fellow, also he was very handsome, an all-conquering mustache—a leg!—men wore knee-breeches still—but I was adamant. I had to punish him for his previous evil mood, and so I threatened to send him to sleep in the cook’s shelter. Ah, the days of our youth ... how often we regret them!”
Laurence’s amazement knew no bounds when she heard the bursts of laughter that followed at her end of the table—echoed pianissimo by those below the salt. All this was hardly decent, she thought, for she had a singular fund of prudishness concealed far down below many other more agreeable defects. This old woman, with her angular shoulders, her corded neck and parchmented skin, seemed to her own youth positively odious as she sat enthroned there, flying her arms and bewailing her lost opportunities. She wondered at Basil, who seemed quite touched, and patted almost filially one of the flat wrists, crowded to the elbow with porte-bonheurs, that reposed for a fleeting second on the cloth beside him. To Laurence the deeps of those wonderful sapphire eyes that had been always the Countess’s sole but very potent beauty, and were still so infinitely expressive and youthful, said nothing at all, although they were just now not quite free from a certain telltale moisture. “An old absurdity,” she called the great lady in her own mind, and, like the Nesselrode tray of the defunct Count, she froze up through and through, becoming with every new experience more hostile to the foreign atmosphere surrounding her.