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Chapter 3
A crowd of people, principally women, was thronging round the church
lighted up for the wedding. Those who had not succeeded in getting into
the main entrance were crowding about the windows, pushing, wrangling,
and peeping through the gratings.
More than twenty carriages had already been drawn up in ranks along the
street by the police. A police officer, regardless of the frost, stood at the
entrance, gorgeous in his uniform. More carriages were continually driving
up, and ladies wearing flowers and carrying their trains, and men taking off
their helmets or black hats kept walking into the church. Iside the church
both lusters were already lighted, and all the candles before the holy
pictures. The gilt on the red ground of the holy picture-stand, and the gilt
relief on the pictures, and the silver of the lusters and candlesticks, and the
stones of the floor, and the rugs, and the banners above in the choir, and the
steps of the altar, and the old blackened books, and the cassocks and
surplices--all were flooded with light. On the right side of the warm church,
in the crowd of frock coats and white ties, uniforms and broadcloth, velvet,
satin, hair and flowers, bare shoulders and arms and long gloves, there was
discreet but lively conversation that echoed strangely in the high cupola.
Every time there was heard the creak of the opened door the conversation
in the crowd died away, and everybody looked round expecting to see the
bride and bridegroom come in. But the door had opened more than ten
times, and each time it was either a belated guest or guests, who joined the
circle of the invited on the right, or a spectator, who had eluded or softened
the police officer, and went to join the crowd of outsiders on the left. Both
the guests and the outside public had by now passed through all the phases
of anticipation.
At first they imagined that the bride and bridegroom would arrive
immediately, and attached no importance at all to their being late. Then
they began to look more and more often towards the door, and to talk of
whether anything could have happened. Then the long delay began to be
positively discomforting, and relations and guests tried to look as if they
were not thinking of the bridegroom but were engrossed in conversation.
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The head deacon, as though to remind them of the value of his time,
coughed impatiently, making the window-panes quiver in their frames. In
the choir the bored choristers could be heard trying their voices and
blowing their noses. The priest was continually sending first the beadle and
then the deacon to find out whether the bridegroom had not come, more
and more often he went himself, in a lilac vestment and an embroidered
sash, to the side door, expecting to see the bridegroom. At last one of the
ladies, glancing at her watch, said, "It really is strange, though!" and all the
guests became uneasy and began loudly expressing their wonder and
dissatisfaction. One of the bridegroom's best men went to find out what had
happened. Kitty meanwhile had long ago been quite ready, and in her white
dress and long veil and wreath of orange blossoms she was standing in the
drawing-room of the Shtcherbatskys' house with her sister, Madame Lvova,
who was her bridal-mother. She was looking out of the window, and had
been for over half an hour anxiously expecting to hear from her best man
that her bridegroom was at the church.
Levin meanwhile, in his trousers, but without his coat and waistcoat, was
walking to and fro in his room at the hotel, continually putting his head out
of the door and looking up and down the corridor. But in the corridor there
was no sign of the person he was looking for and he came back in despair,
and frantically waving his hands addressed Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was
smoking serenely.
"Was ever a man in such a fearful fool's position?" he said.
"Yes, it is stupid," Stepan Arkadyevitch asserted, smiling soothingly. "But
don't worry, it'll be brought directly."
"No, what is to be done!" said Levin, with smothered fury. "And these fools
of open waistcoats! Out of the question!" he said, looking at the crumpled
front of his shirt. "And what if the things have been taken on to the railway
station!" he roared in desperation.
"Then you must put on mine."
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"I ought to have done so long ago, if at all."
"It's not nice to look ridiculous.... Wait a bit! it will come round."
The point was that when Levin asked for his evening suit, Kouzma, his old
servant, had brought him the coat, waistcoat, and everything that was
wanted.
"But the shirt!" cried Levin.
"You've got a shirt on," Konzma answered, with a placid smile.
Kouzma had not thought of leaving out a clean shirt, and on receiving
instructions to pack up everything and send it round to the Shtcherbatskys'
house, from which the young people were to set out the same evening, he
had done so, packing everything but the dress suit. The shirt worn since the
morning was crumpled and out of the question with the fashionable open
waistcoat. It was a long way to send to the Shtcherbatskys'. They sent out to
buy a shirt. The servant came back; everything was shut up--it was Sunday.
They sent to Stepan Arkadyevitch's and brought a shirt--it was impossibly
wide and short. They sent finally to the Shtcherbatskys' to unpack the
things. The bridegroom was expected at the church while he was pacing up
and down his room like a wild beast in a cage, peeping out into the
corridor, and with horror and despair recalling what absurd things he had
said to Kitty and what she might be thinking now.
At last the guilty Kouzma flew panting into the room with the shirt.
"Only just in time. They were just lifting it into the van," said Kouzma.
Three minutes later Levin ran full speed into the corridor, not looking at his
watch for fear of aggravating his sufferings.
"You won't help matters like this," said Stepan Arkadyevitch with a smile,
hurrying with more deliberation after him. "It will come round, it will come
round...I tell you."
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635
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