Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [27]
“Clumsy fool!” she would say. “You made me drop it when you came blundering along, and now you won’t even pick it up! Pick it up! Pick it up this moment! God sent you to punish me! You are in the way!”
Sometimes we would commit small crimes for fun. Inevitably we would be brought before the old lady for an interrogation.
“So it is you who stepped on my flower bed?” the judge would say. “How dare you?…”
“It was only an accident.…”
“Shut up! I am asking you how you could dare to step on my flower bed!”
Such trials always ended with a free pardon, the kissing of the Princess’s hands, and the withdrawal of the culprit to the sound of Homeric laughter from behind the door. The Princess never spoiled us: she reserved her kinder words for old ladies and little children.
I never saw her smile. There was an old general who came over to play piquet with her on Sundays, who was once the recipient of her whispered confidence that every one of us—all these doctors, professors, artists, writers, and baronial lawyers-would have come to a bad end if it had not been for her good offices. We did not try to make her change her mind. Let her think as she pleased! We would have tolerated the Princess more if she had not made us get up no later than eight o’clock in the morning and go to bed no later than midnight. Poor Olya had to go to bed at eleven o’clock. Useless to contradict her. But we derived a good deal of fun from her illegal attempts to encroach upon our freedom! The whole crowd of us would go up to her and beg her pardon, or we would address complimentary verses to her in the style of Lomonosov, and we would draw up the genealogical tree of the Mikshadze princes, and so on. The Princess would accept all these offerings as pure gold, while we roared with laughter. She loved us, and there was nothing in the least insincere about her deep-throated sighing over the fact that we were not princes. She grew accustomed to us, as one grows accustomed to children.
The only one of us she did not love was Lieutenant Yegorov. She cordially disliked him, and nourished an unwavering antipathy toward him. She only let him come to Green Scythe because they had some financial dealings together, and for reasons of etiquette. There was a time when the lieutenant had been her favorite. He spoke rarely, was handsome and witty, and was “army”: the Princess held the Army in high regard. Sometimes Yegorov behaved strangely. He would sit down, prop his head in his hands, and start saying the most awful things. He would say them about anyone and anything, sparing neither the living nor the dead. The Princess would be beside herself, and whenever he said these awful things she would send us all packing from the room.
One day at lunch Yegorov propped his head in his hands and for no reason at all he embarked on a speech about Caucasian princes, and then he pulled a copy of The Dragonfly from his pocket, and in the presence of the Princess he had the effrontery to read the following passage: “Tiflis is a grand city. Among the merits of this beautiful city, where the ‘princes’ are street-sweepers and hotel bootblacks, must be included …” The Princess rose from the table and left the room in silence. Her hatred for him was all the more inopportune and unfortunate because the lieutenant dreamed of marrying