The son, Sergye’f, had been busied with all the mate-rial conditions on the way; and, while busied with them, made up for his lack of knowledge by the energy char-acteristic of his five and twenty years and his bustling activity, which filled him with satisfaction. Twenty times, at least, and apparently without any sufficient cause, dressed in but a single paletot, he had run down to the sledge and up the steps again, shivering with the cold, and taking two or three steps at a time with his long, young legs. Natalya Nikolayevna begged him not to catch cold, but he assured her that there was no danger, and he kept giving orders, slamming doors, and going and coming; and, even after he was convinced that everything now rested on the servants and muzhiks alone, he several times made a tour of all the rooms, entering the drawing-room by one door and going out by another, trying to find something more to do.
“Tell me, papa, will you go to the bath? Do you know where it is?” he asked.
Papa was in a brown study, and seemed to be entirely unable to account for his present environment. He was slow in replying. He heard the words, but they made no impression on him. Suddenly he comprehended. “Yes, yes, yes; please find out;. …at the Kamennoi’ Most.”
The head of the family, with quick, nervous step, crossed the room and sat down in an arm-chair.
“Well, now we must decide what is to be done, how to get settled,” said he. “Help me, children; be quick about it! Be good and take hold and get things ar-ranged, and then to-morrow we will send Serozha with a note to sister Mary Ivanovna, to Nikitin, or we will go ourselves. How is that, Natasha? But now let us get. settled.”
“To-morrow is Sunday; I hope that you will go to service first, before you do anything else, Pierre,” said his wife, who was kneeling before a trunk and open-ing it.
“Oh, it is Sunday, is it? Assuredly; we will go to the Uspyensky Cathedral. That will note the begin-ning of our return. My God! when I recall the last time I was in the Uspyensky Cathedral …. do you re-member, Natasha? But that is not the matter in hand.”
And the head of the family leaped up from the chair in which he had only just sat down.
“But now we must get established.”
Yet, without doing anything to help, he walked from one room into the other. “Tell me, will you drink some tea? Or are you tired, and would you rather rest?”
“Yes, yes,” replied his wife, taking something from the trunk, “but I thought you were going to the bath.”
“Yes …. in my day it used to be on the Kamenno’i Most. Serozha, just go and find out if the baths are still at the Kamenno’f Most. Here, Serozha and I will take this room. Serozha, do you like this one?”
But Serozha had already gone to find out about the baths. “No,” the old man went on to say, “that won’t do at all. You won’t have a passage directly into the drawing-room. What do you think about it, Natasha?”
“Don’t you worry, Pierre, everything will be ar-ranged,” replied Natasha from the next room, into which the muzhiks were carrying various articles. But Pierre had come under the influence of the excitement and enthusiasm caused by his return.
“See here, don’t disturb Serozha’s things; there, they ‘ve brought his snow-shoes into the drawing-room.” And he himself picked them up, and with extraordinary carefulness, as if the whole future order of their estab-lishment depended on it, placed them against the lin-tel of the door, and pressed them close to it. But the shoes would not stay put, and as soon as Pierre had left them they fell with a crash across the door. Natalya Nikolayevna frowned and shuddered, but, when she saw the cause of the disturbance, she said :-
“Sonya, pick them up, my love.”
“Pick them up, my love,” echoed her husband. “And I am going to see the landlord. Don’t make any changes in our arrangements. We must talk it all over with him first.”
“Better send for him, Pierre. Why do you disturb yourself?”
Pierre acquiesced in this.
“Sonya, do you attend to this, please M. Cavalier;
tell him that we want to talk things over with him.”
“Chevalier, papa,” said Sonya, and she started to go.
Natalya Nikolayevna, who was giving orders in a low voice, and moving about quietly from room to room, now with a drawer, now with a pipe, now with a cushion, gradually and imperceptibly reducing the heaps of arti cles into order, and getting everything into its place, remarked, as she passed Sonya :
“Don’t go yourself; send a servant.”
While the man was gone after the landlord, Pierre em-ployed his spare moments, under the pretext of assisting his wife, in rumpling up some of her gowns, and then he tumbled over a half-emptied trunk. Catching by the wall to keep from falling, the Dekabrist looked round with a smile. His wife, it seemed, was too busy to notice; but Sonya looked at him with such mischievous eyes that it seemed as if she were asking his permission to laugh out loud. He readily gave her that permission, and laughed himself with such a hearty laugh that all who were in the room, his wife as well as the maid-servant and the muzhik, joined in.
This laughter still more cheered up the old man; he discovered that the divan in the room taken by his wife and daughter was placed inconveniently for them, not-withstanding the fact that they assured him to the con-trary and begged him not to trouble himself. Just as he, with the assistance of the muzhik, was trying to move it to another place, the French landlord entered the room.
“You asked for me? “asked the landlord, curtly; and, as a proof of his indifference, if not his disdain, he delib-erately took out his handkerchief, deliberately unfolded it, and deliberately blew his nose.
“Yes, my dear friend,” said Piotr Ivanovitch, ap-proaching him. “You see, we ourselves do not know how long we shall be here, my wife and I.” And Piotr Ivanovitch, who had the weakness of seeing an in-timate in every man, began to tell him his circumstances and plans.
Mr. Chevalier did not share this way of men, and was not interested in the particulars communicated by Piotr Ivanovitch; but the excellent French which the Deka-brist spoke, a French which, as every one knows, has something of the nature of a patent of respectability in Russia, and the aristocratic ways of the newcomers, caused him to have a higher opinion of them than before.
“In what way can I aid you? “he asked.
This question did not embarrass Piotr Ivanovitch. He expressed his desire to have rooms, tea, a samovar, luncheon, dinner, food for his servants, in a word, all those things for which hotels are intended to provide; and when Mr. Chevalier, amazed at the innocence of the old man, who, it may be surmised, thought that he had reached the Trukhmensky steppe, or that all these things were to be furnished as a free gift, explained that his desires would be fully gratified, Piotr Ivanovitch reached the height of enthusiasm.
“There, that is excellent! very good! Then we will arrange it so. Now; how then, please….”
But he began to feel ashamed of talking about him-self exclusively, and so he proceeded to ask Mr. Che-valier about his family and affairs.
Sergyei’ Petrovitch, returning, showed evident signs of dissatisfaction at his father’s behavior. He noticed the landlord’s irritation, and he reminded his father of the bath. But Piotr Ivanovitch was greatly interested in the question how a French hotel could succeed in Moscow in 1856, and how Madame Chevalier spent her time. At last the landlord bowed, and asked if there was anything they wished to order.
“Will you have some tea, Natasia. Yes? Tea, then, if you please, and we will have another talk, mon cher monsieur! What a splendid man!”
“But are you going to the bath, papa?”
“Oh, then we don’t need any tea.”
Thus the only result of the conference with the new-comers was snatched away from the landlord.
Accordingly Piotr Ivanovitch was now proud and happy with the arrangements that he had made. The drivers who came to get their vodka-money annoyed him because Serozha had no small change, and Piotr Ivano-vitch was about to send for the landlord again, when the happy thought occurred to him that he ought not to be the only gay one that evening, and restored him to his good humor. He took out two three-ruble notes, and, pressing one into the hand of one of the drivers, said, “This is for you,” Piotr Ivanovitch had the custom of addressing all persons without exception, save the mem-bers of his own family, with the formal second person, plural, vui “and this is for you,” said he, thrusting the bank-note into the man’s palm, somewhat as men do when they pay a doctor for his visit. After all these matters had been attended to, he went to his bath.
Sonya sat down on the divan, and, supporting her head on her hand, laughed heartily.
“Oh, how good it is, mamma; oh, how good it is!”
Then she put up her feet on the divan, stretched her-self out, lay back, and thus fell
