The visitor was tall and thin, and wore a loosely-fitting white suit, and an extremely high collar. He stood on the threshold amazed, endeavouring to recognize Sarudine.
“Hallo! Pavel Lvovitsch! What brings you here?” cried Sarudine, as, crimson with annoyance, he advanced to greet him.
The newcomer entered in hesitating fashion, and the eyes of all were fixed on his dazzlingly white shoes picking their way through the beer- bottles, corks and cigarette-ends. So white and neat and scented was he, that, in all these clouds of smoke, and amid all these flushed, drunken fellows, he might have been likened to a lily in the marsh, had he not looked so frail and worn-out, and if his features had not been so puny, nor his teeth so decayed under his scanty, red moustache.
“Where have you come from? Have you been away a long while from Pitjer?”[1] said Sarudine, somewhat flurried, as he feared that “Pitjer” was not exactly the word which he ought to have used.
“I only got here yesterday,” said the gentleman in white, in a determined tone, though his voice sounded like the suppressed crowing of a cock. “My comrades,” said Sarudine, introducing the others. “Gentlemen, this is Mr. Pavel Lvovitsch Volochine.”
“We must make a note of that!” observed the tipsy Ivanoff, much to Sarudine’s horror.
“Pray sit down, Pavel Lvovitsch. Would you like some wine or some beer?”
Volochine sat down carefully in an arm-chair and his white, immaculate form stood out sharply against the dingy oil-cloth cover.
“Please don’t trouble. I just came to see you for a moment,” he said, somewhat coldly, as he surveyed the company.
“How’s that? I’ll send for some white wine. You like white wine, don’t you?” asked Sarudine, and he hurried out.
“Why on earth does the fool want to come here today?” he thought, irritably, as he sent the orderly to fetch wine. “This Volochine will say such things about me in Petersburg that I shan’t be able to get a footing in any decent house.”
Meanwhile Volochine was taking stock of the others with undisguised curiosity, feeling that he himself was immeasurably superior. There was a look in his little glassy, grey eyes of unfeigned interest, as if he were being shown a collection of wild beasts. He was specially attracted by Sanine’s height, his powerful physique, and his dress.