THE PARTY

I

AFTER the festive dinner with its eight courses and its endless
conversation, Olga Mihalovna, whose husband's name-day was being
celebrated, went out into the garden. The duty of smiling and talking
incessantly, the clatter of the crockery, the stupidity of the
servants, the long intervals between the courses, and the stays she
had put on to conceal her condition from the visitors, wearied her
to exhaustion. She longed to get away from the house, to sit in the
shade and rest her heart with thoughts of the baby which was to be
born to her in another two months. She was used to these thoughts
coming to her as she turned to the left out of the big avenue into
the narrow path. Here in the thick shade of the plums and cherry-trees
the dry branches used to scratch her neck and shoulders; a spider's
web would settle on her face, and there would rise up in her mind
the image of a little creature of undetermined sex and undefined
features, and it began to seem as though it were not the spider's
web that tickled her face and neck caressingly, but that little
creature. When, at the end of the path, a thin wicker hurdle came
into sight, and behind it podgy beehives with tiled roofs; when in
the motionless, stagnant air there came a smell of hay and honey,
and a soft buzzing of bees was audible, then the little creature
would take complete possession of Olga Mihalovna. She used to sit
down on a bench near the shanty woven of branches, and fall to
thinking.