Chapter 46 second quarter

Five years later, after spending the early summer at our estate near St. Petersburg, my mother, brother, and I happened to be visiting a dreary old aunt whose strangely bleak country house was near a summer resort on the Baltic coast.One afternoon I was concentrating on the ecstasy of unrolling a rare misshapen leopard butterfly belly up, the silver stripes on the underside of its hindwing fused with a well-proportioned metallic sheen. Looks good, suddenly a servant came in and informed that the old lady wanted me to go.In the living room, I found her talking to two shy youths in college uniforms.The blond was Timofey Pnin, and the tawny was Grigory Belushkin.They came to ask my aunt for permission to put on a play using an empty barn on her estate.It was Arthur Schnitzler's "Flirting" in three acts translated into Russian.A half-professional actor in the province, Oncharov, known chiefly through some faded newspaper clippings, assisted in the rehearsal of the play.Would I like to take part in the show?I was sixteen, shy and haughty, and declined to play the unnamed gentleman in the first act.The meeting ended in this mutual embarrassment, which was not relieved by Pnin or Belushkin knocking over a glass of pear kvass, and then I went to play with my butterflies.Two weeks later, I was kind of forced to go to that show.The barn was filled with dachniki (holiday tourists) and crippled soldiers from a nearby hospital.I went with my brother, and sitting next to me was the steward of my aunt's estate, Robert Karlovich Horne, a jovial, straightforward fellow born in Riga, born To the bloodshot blue porcelain eyes, there is always enthusiastic applause where applause should not be applauded.I still remember the scent of the fir branches that were used as decorations, and the bright eyes of the children in the village peeking at the play through the cracks in the walls.The front row is so close to the stage that when the deceived husband pulls out a stack of love letters to his wife from the dragoon and student Fritz Roberheimer and throws them in Fritz's face, you It was clearly seen that they were some old postcards, and the stamps on the corners had been cut off.I'm sure Timofey Pnin is playing the small part of the angry gentleman (although, of course, he could be playing something else in later acts); The black wig that was parted from the waist completely changed his face. Even though I was a little happy to see him appear, I couldn't believe it was him.The young lover Fritz, who was doomed to die in a duel, not only had a furtive and mysterious love affair with the gentleman's wife, the lady in black velvet, but also played with a naive Viennese girl Christine's heart.Frieze is played by a chubby forty-year-old Oncharov, with warm pink and brown oil paint on his face, pounding his chest with his hands as loud as dust on a carpet.He disdained to memorize the lines and was full of impromptu words, which almost made Fritz's partner Theodore Kaiser (played by Grigory Belushkin) confused and difficult to answer.A rich real spinster to whom Oncharov indulges is disproportionately assigned to play the violinist's daughter, Christine Welling.Theodore's young lover, Miche Schrager, a little hatter, was played by Belushkin's sister, a pretty girl with a thin neck and soft eyes, who received the most applause that evening.