A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail IUr'evich Lermontov [50]
Grushnitsky has taken on a mysterious look: he walks around, with his hands behind his back, and doesn’t acknowledge anyone. His leg has suddenly healed: he barely limps. He has found occasion both to enter into conversation with the Princess Ligovsky, and to give some sort of compliment to the young princess. She, evidently, is not very discriminating, because since then she has replied to his bows with the sweetest of smiles.
“You are resolute in not wanting to be introduced to the Ligovskys?” he said to me yesterday.
“Resolute.”
“As you please! It is the most pleasant household at the spa! All the best society here . . .”
“My friend, I’m tired even of the best society that is not here. Have you been to their house?”
“Not yet. I have spoken twice with the young princess, not more, but you know, somehow it is not appropriate to impose oneself on a household, though it is done here . . . It would be another matter if I wore epaulets . . .”
“Come now! You are much more interesting as you are! You simply don’t know how to make best use of your advantageous situation . . . That soldier’s greatcoat makes you into a hero or a martyr in the eyes of any sentimental young lady.”
Grushnitsky smiled in a self-satisfied way.
“What nonsense!” he said.
“I am sure,” I continued, “that the young princess is already in love with you.”
He blushed to his ears and puffed out his chest.
Oh vanity! You are the lever with which Archimedes wanted to raise the earthly globe!
“Everything is a joke to you!” he said, pretending to be angry. “Firstly, she knows me so little yet . . .”
“Women only love those that they don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t have the least impression that she likes me. I simply want to make acquaintance with a pleasant household, and it would be very funny if I had any hopes . . . But you, for example, are another matter! You Petersburg conquerors: one look from you and the women melt . . . And do you know, Pechorin, that the young princess has been talking about you?”
“What? She has already spoken of me to you?”
“Well, don’t start rejoicing yet. I somehow entered a conversation with her at the well, by accident. And her third comment was: ‘Who is this gentleman who has such an unpleasant and oppressive gaze? He was with you when . . .’
“She blushed and didn’t want to say which day, having remembered her charming gesture.
“‘You don’t have to tell me which day,’ I responded to her. ‘It will always be in my memory . . .’
“My friend Pechorin! I congratulate you: you are on her black list . . . and this is a shame indeed! Because Mary is very charming . . .”
It must be remarked that Grushnitsky is one of those people, who, in speaking about a woman with whom they are barely acquainted, will call her my Mary, my Sophie, if she has the good fortune to have taken their fancy.
I assumed a serious air and responded to him:
“Yes, she is not foolish . . . But be careful, Grushnitsky! Young Russian ladies live on platonic love for the most part, without adding the thought of marriage to it. And platonic love is the most unsettling of all. The young princess, it seems, is one of those ladies who want you to entertain them. If they are bored with you for more than two minutes in a row, then you are irretrievably finished. Your silence must excite her curiosity, your conversation should never quench it. You must continue to disturb her with every passing minute. She will disregard considered opinion for you ten times in public, then call it a sacrifice; and in order to reward herself for it, she will torment you, and afterward will simply say that she cannot stand you. If you don’t gain power over her, then her first kiss will not give you the right to a second. She will flirt with you abundantly, and after about two years she will marry a monster, out of deference to her mother, and will start to convince herself that she is wretched, that she only loved one person—you, that is—but that the heavens didn’t unite her with him, because he wore a soldier’s greatcoat,