Chapter 4

OUR FAMILY CIRCLE

PAPA was seldom at home that spring. Yet, whenever he was so, he
seemed extraordinarily cheerful as he either strummed his
favourite pieces on the piano or looked roguishly at us and made
jokes about us all, not excluding even Mimi. For instance, he
would say that the Tsarevitch himself had seen Mimi at the rink,
and fallen so much in love with her that he had presented a
petition to the Synod for divorce; or else that I had been
granted an appointment as secretary to the Austrian ambassador--
a piece of news which he imparted to us with a perfectly grave
face. Next, he would frighten Katenka with some spiders (of which
she was very much afraid), engage in an animated conversation
with our friends Dubkoff and Nechludoff, and tell us and our
guests, over and over again, his plans for the year. Although
these plans changed almost from day to day, and
were for ever contradicting one another, they seemed so
attractive that we were always glad to listen to them, and
Lubotshka, in particular, would glue her eyes to his face, so as
not to lose a single word. One day his plan would be that he
should leave my brother and myself at the University, and go and
live with Lubotshka in Italy for two years. Next, the plan would
be that he should buy an estate on the south coast of the Crimea,
and take us for an annual visit there; next, that we should
migrate en masse to St. Petersburg; and so forth. Yet, in
addition to this unusual cheerfulness of his, another change had
come over him of late--a change which greatly surprised me. This
was that he had had some fashionable clothes made--an olive-
coloured frockcoat, smart trousers with straps at the sides, and
a long wadded greatcoat which fitted him to perfection. Often,
too, there was a delightful smell of scent about him when he came
home from a party--more especially when he had been to see a lady
of whom Mimi never spoke but with a sigh and a face that seemed
to say: "Poor orphans! How dreadful! It is a good thing that SHE
is gone now!" and so on, and so on. From Nicola (for Papa never
spoke to us of his gambling) I had learnt that he (Papa) had been
very fortunate in play that winter, and so had won an
extraordinary amount of money, all of which he had placed in the
bank after vowing that he would play no more that spring.
Evidently, it was his fear of being unable to resist again doing
so that was rendering him anxious to leave for the country as
soon as possible. Indeed, he ended by deciding not to wait until
I had entered the University, but to take the girls to Petrovskoe
immediately after Easter, and to leave Woloda and myself to
follow them at a later season.

All that winter, until the opening of spring,