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“You dance nicely, young man,” Ivan Ilyich felt forced to say to the student as he was passing by: the quadrille had just ended.
The student turned sharply to him, pulled some sort of grimace, and, bringing his face indecently close to His Excellency’s, gave a loud cock-crow. This was too much. Ivan Ilyich got up from the table. In spite of that, there followed a burst of irrepressible laughter, because the cock-crow was astonishingly natural, and the whole grimace was completely unexpected. Ivan Ilyich was still standing in perplexity when Pseldonymov himself suddenly came and, bowing, began inviting him to supper. After him came his mother.
“Your Excellency,” she said, bowing, “do us the honor, dearie, don’t scorn our poverty…”
“I… I really don’t know…” Ivan Ilyich began, “it was not for this that I… I… was just about to leave…”
He was indeed holding his hat in his hand. Not only that: just then, at that very instant, he had given himself his word of honor that he would leave without fail, at once, whatever the cost, and not stay for anything, and… and he stayed. A minute later he was leading the procession to the table. Pseldonymov and his mother went ahead, clearing the way for him. He was seated in the place of honor, and again a full bottle of champagne appeared before him. There were appetizers: herring and vodka. He reached out, poured himself a huge glass of vodka, and drank it. He had never drunk vodka before. He felt as if he were tumbling down a mountain, falling, falling, falling, that he must hold on, get a grip on something, but there was no opportunity for that.
His position was indeed becoming more and more peculiar. Not only that: it was some sort of mockery of fate. God knows what had happened to him in one little hour. When he came in, he was, so to speak, opening his embrace to all mankind and all his subordinates; and here, before one little hour had passed, he felt and knew with all his aching heart that he hated Pseldonymov, cursed him, and his wife, and his wedding. Not only that: from his face, from his eyes alone, he could see that Pseldonymov also hated him, that his eyes were all but saying: “Go to blazes, curse you! Fastened yourself on my neck!…” All this he had long since read in his look.
Of course, even now, as he was sitting down at the table, Ivan Ilyich would sooner have let his hand be cut off than admit sincerely, not only aloud, but even to himself, that all this was indeed exactly so. The moment had not yet fully come, and for now there was still a certain moral balance. But his heart, his heart… it was sick! it begged for freedom, air, rest. Ivan Ilyich was all too kindly a man.
He knew, he knew very well, that he should have left long ago, and not only so as to leave, but so as to save himself. That all this had suddenly become something else—well, had turned out totally unlike his dream on the planks that evening.
“Why did I come? Did I really come to eat and drink here?” he asked himself, munching on pickled herring. He even got into negation. There were moments when irony at his great deed stirred in his soul. He was even begi
But how could he leave? To leave like that, without going through with it, was impossible. “What will people say? They’ll say I go dragging myself around to indecent places. In fact, it will even come out that way if I don’t go through with it. What, for instance, will be said tomorrow (because it will spread everywhere), by Stepan Nikiforovich, by Semyon Ivanych, in the offices, at the Shembels’, at the Shubins’? No, I must leave in such a way that they all understand why I came, I must reveal the moral purpose…” And meanwhile this touching moment refused to be caught. “They don’t even respect me,” he went on. “What are they laughing at? They’re so casual, as if unfeeling… Yes, I’ve long suspected the whole younger generation of being unfeeling! I must stay, whatever the cost!… They’ve just been dancing, but once they’ve gathered around the table… I’ll start talking about problems, about reforms, about Russia’s greatness… I’ll still get them carried away! Yes! Maybe absolutely nothing is lost yet… Maybe this is how it always is in reality. Only how shall I begin with them so as to attract them? What sort of method must I come up with? I’m at a loss, simply at a loss… And what do they want, what do they demand?… I see they’re laughing at something over there… Can it be at me, oh, Lord God! But what is it that I want… why am I here, why don’t I leave, what am I after?…” He thought this, and some sort of shame, some deep, unbearable shame wrung his heart more and more.
But it all went on that way, one thing after another.
Exactly two minutes after he sat down at the table, a dreadful thought took possession of his whole being. He suddenly felt that he was terribly drunk, that is, not as before, but definitively drunk. The cause of it was the glass of vodka, which, drunk on top of the champagne, produced an immediate effect. He felt, he sensed with his whole being, that he was definitively weakening. Of course, this greatly increased his bravado, yet consciousness did not abandon him, but cried out: “Not nice, not nice at all, and even quite indecent!” Of course, his unsteady, drunken thoughts could not settle on any one point: suddenly, even tangibly for himself, something like two sides appeared in him. On one was bravado, a yearning for victory, the overthrowing of obstacles, and a desperate conviction that he would still reach his goal. The other side made itself known to him by a tormenting ache in his soul and some gnawing at his heart. “What will people say? where will it end? what will tomorrow bring, tomorrow, tomorrow!…”
Earlier he had somehow vaguely sensed that he already had enemies among the guests. “That’s because I was drunk then, too,” he thought with tormenting doubt. What was his horror now, when he indeed became convinced, by indubitable signs, that he indeed had enemies at the table, and it was no longer possible to doubt it.
“And for what? for what?” he thought.
At this table all thirty guests were placed, some of whom were definitively done in. The others behaved with a certain nonchalant, malignant independence; they all shouted, talked loudly, offered premature toasts, fired bread balls with the ladies. One, a sort of uncomely person in a greasy frock coat, fell off his chair as soon as he sat at the table, and remained that way until the end of the supper. Another absolutely insisted on climbing onto the table and delivering a toast, and only the officer, who grabbed him by the coattails, restrained his premature enthusiasm. The supper was a perfect omniumgatherum, though a cook had been hired to prepare it, some general’s serf: there was a galantine, there was tongue with potatoes, there were meat cakes with green peas, there was, finally, a goose, and, to crown it all, blancmange. For drinks there were beer, vodka, and sherry. A bottle of champagne stood in front of the general alone, which forced him to pour for Akim Petrovich as well, since the man no longer dared use his own initiative at supper. For toasts the rest of the guests were meant to drink Georgian wine or whatever there happened to be. The table itself consisted of many tables put together, among them even a card table. It was covered with many tablecloths, including a colored Yaroslavl one. Gentlemen and ladies were seated alternately. Pseldonymov’s maternal parent did not want to sit at the table; she bustled about and gave orders. Instead there appeared a malignant female figure who had not made an appearance earlier, in a sort of reddish silk dress, with a bound cheek, and in the tallest of bo