The Torrents Of Spring

‘Stop, stop. You don’t understand me. I don’t want to flirt with you.’
Maria Nikolaevna shrugged her shoulders. ‘He’s got a betrothed like an
antique statue, is it likely I am going to flirt with him? But you’ve
something to sell, and I’m the purchaser. I want to know what your
goods are like. Well, of course, you must show what they are like. I don’t
only want to know what I’m buying, but whom I’m buying from. That
was my father’s rule. Come, begin … come, if not from childhood – come
now, have you been long abroad? And where have you been up till now?
Only don’t walk so fast, we’re in no hurry.’
‘I came here from Italy, where I spent several months.’
‘Ah, you feel, it seems, a special attraction towards everything Italian.
It’s strange you didn’t find your lady-love there. Are you fond of art? of
pictures? or more of music?’
‘I am fond of art… . I like everything beautiful.’
‘And music?’
‘I like music too.’
‘Well, I don’t at all. I don’t care for anything but Russian songs – and
that in the country and in the spring – with dancing, you know … red
shirts, wreaths of beads, the young grass in the meadows, the smell of
smoke … delicious! But we weren’t talking of me. Go on, tell me.’
Maria Nikolaevna walked on, and kept looking at Sanin. She was tall –
her face was almost on a level with his face.
He began to talk – at first reluctantly, unskilfully – but afterwards he
talked more freely, chattered away in fact. Maria Nikolaevna was a very
good listener; and moreover she seemed herself so frank, that she led
others unconsciously on to frankness. She possessed that great gift of ‘intimateness’
– le terrible don de la familiarité – to which Cardinal Retz refers.
Sanin talked of his travels, of his life in Petersburg, of his youth… . Had
Maria Nikolaevna been a lady of fashion, with refined manners, he
would never have opened out so; but she herself spoke of herself as a
‘good fellow,’ who had no patience with ceremony of any sort; it was in
those words that she characterised herself to Sanin. And at the same time
this ‘good fellow’ walked by his side with feline grace, slightly bending
towards him, and peeping into his face; and this ‘good fellow’ walked in
the form of a young feminine creature, full of the tormenting, fiery, soft
and seductive charm, of which – for the undoing of us poor weak sinful
men – only Slav natures are possessed, and but few of them, and those
never of pure Slav blood, with no foreign alloy. Sanin’s walk with Maria
Nikolaevna, Sanin’s talk with Maria Nikolaevna lasted over an hour.
And they did not stop once; they kept walking about the endless
102