Part 5 (2/2)
CATHERINE. Ah; but you didn't tell them that we have an electric bell in it? I have had one put up.
PETKOFF. What's an electric bell?
CATHERINE. You touch a b.u.t.ton; something tinkles in the kitchen; and then Nicola comes up.
PETKOFF. Why not shout for him?
CATHERINE. Civilized people never shout for their servants. I've learnt that while you were away.
PETKOFF. Well, I'll tell you something I've learnt, too.
Civilized people don't hang out their was.h.i.+ng to dry where visitors can see it; so you'd better have all that (indicating the clothes on the bushes) put somewhere else.
CATHERINE. Oh, that's absurd, Paul: I don't believe really refined people notice such things.
(Someone is heard knocking at the stable gates.)
PETKOFF. There's Sergius. (Shouting.) Hollo, Nicola!
CATHERINE. Oh, don't shout, Paul: it really isn't nice.
PETKOFF. Bos.h.!.+ (He shouts louder than before.) Nicola!
NICOLA (appearing at the house door). Yes, sir.
PETKOFF. If that is Major Saranoff, bring him round this way.
(He p.r.o.nounces the name with the stress on the second syllable--Sarah-noff.)
NICOLA. Yes, sir. (He goes into the stable yard.)
PETKOFF. You must talk to him, my dear, until Raina takes him off our hands. He bores my life out about our not promoting him--over my head, mind you.
CATHERINE. He certainly ought to be promoted when he marries Raina. Besides, the country should insist on having at least one native general.
PETKOFF. Yes, so that he could throw away whole brigades instead of regiments. It's no use, my dear: he has not the slightest chance of promotion until we are quite sure that the peace will be a lasting one.
NICOLA (at the gate, announcing). Major Sergius Saranoff! (He goes into the house and returns presently with a third chair, which he places at the table. He then withdraws.)
(Major Sergius Saranoff, the original of the portrait in Raina's room, is a tall, romantically handsome man, with the physical hardihood, the high spirit, and the susceptible imagination of an untamed mountaineer chieftain. But his remarkable personal distinction is of a characteristically civilized type. The ridges of his eyebrows, curving with a ram's-horn twist round the marked projections at the outer corners, his jealously observant eye, his nose, thin, keen, and apprehensive in spite of the pugnacious high bridge and large nostril, his a.s.sertive chin, would not be out of place in a Paris salon. In short, the clever, imaginative barbarian has an acute critical faculty which has been thrown into intense activity by the arrival of western civilization in the Balkans; and the result is precisely what the advent of nineteenth-century thought first produced in England: to-wit, Byronism. By his brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but of himself, to live up to his imaginative ideals, his consequent cynical scorn for humanity, the jejune credulity as to the absolute validity of his ideals and the unworthiness of the world in disregarding them, his wincings and mockeries under the sting of the petty disillusions which every hour spent among men brings to his infallibly quick observation, he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air, the mysterious moodiness, the suggestion of a strange and terrible history that has left him nothing but undying remorse, by which Childe Harold fascinated the grandmothers of his English contemporaries.
Altogether it is clear that here or nowhere is Raina's ideal hero. Catherine is hardly less enthusiastic, and much less reserved in shewing her enthusiasm. As he enters from the stable gate, she rises effusively to greet him. Petkoff is distinctly less disposed to make a fuss about him.)
PETKOFF. Here already, Sergius. Glad to see you!
CATHERINE. My dear Sergius!(She holds out both her hands.)
SERGIUS (kissing them with scrupulous gallantry). My dear mother, if I may call you so.
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