The Torrents Of Spring

But Gemma’s image preserved Sanin like the three-fold armour of
which the poets sing.
Ten minutes later Maria Nikolaevna appeared again, escorted by her
husband. She went up to Sanin … and her walk was such that some eccentrics
of that – alas! – already, distant day, were simply crazy over her
walk alone. ‘That woman, when she comes towards one, seems as
though she is bringing all the happiness of one’s life to meet one,’ one of
them used to say. She went up to Sanin, and holding out her hand to
him, said in her caressing and, as it were, subdued voice in Russian, ‘You
will wait for me, won’t you? I’ll be back soon.’
Sanin bowed respectfully, while Maria Nikolaevna vanished behind
the curtain over the outside door; and as she vanished turned her head
back over her shoulder, and smiled again, and again left behind her the
same impression of grace.
When she smiled, not one and not two, but three dimples came out on
each cheek, and her eyes smiled more than her lips – long, crimson, juicy
lips with two tiny moles on the left side of them.
Polozov waddled into the room and again established himself in the
arm-chair. He was speechless as before; but from time to time a queer
smile puffed out his colourless and already wrinkled cheeks. He looked
like an old man, though he was only three years older than Sanin.
The dinner with which he regaled his guest would of course have satisfied
the most exacting gourmand, but to Sanin it seemed endless, insupportable!
Polozov ate slowly, ‘with feeling, with judgment, with deliberation’,
bending attentively over his plate, and sniffing at almost
every morsel. First he rinsed his mouth with wine, then swallowed it and
smacked his lips… . Over the roast meat he suddenly began to talk – but
of what? Of merino sheep, of which he was intending to order a whole
flock, and in such detail, with such tenderness, using all the while endearing
pet names for them. After drinking a cup of coffee, hot to boiling
point (he had several times in a voice of tearful irritation mentioned to
the waiter that he had been served the evening before with coffee, cold –
cold as ice!) and bitten off the end of a Havannah cigar with his crooked
yellow teeth, he dropped off, as his habit was, into a nap, to the intense
delight of Sanin, who began walking up and down with noiseless steps
on the soft carpet, and dreaming of his life with Gemma and of what
news he would bring back to her. Polozov, however, awoke, as he remarked
himself, earlier than usual – he had slept only an hour and a half
– and after drinking a glass of iced seltzer water, and swallowing eight
spoonfuls of jam, Russian jam, which his valet brought him in a dark-
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