The Christmas Tree and a Wedding by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The other day I saw a wedding. But no! I'd better tell you about the Christmas tree. The wedding was all right; I liked it very much, but the other affair was much better. I don't know how it was that, looking at the wedding, I should have remembered the Christmas tree. It happened like this. Exactly five years ago, on New Year's Eve, I was invited to a children's party. The person who had invited me was a well-known business man, a man of good connections, a man with an influential circle of acquaintances, a man who knew all there was to know about pulling strings, so that there was good reason to believe that the children's party was merely an excuse for the parents to get together and have a talk about other interesting matters in an innocent, casual, unpremeditated sort of way. I was a stranger there; I had no interesting matters to discuss, and for that reason I spent the evening more or less as I pleased. There was another man there who, too, apparently had neither friends nor relations and who, like me, just happened to be present on that happy family occasion. He was the first to catch my eye-a tall, spare man, very serious, very decently dressed. But it was quite evident that he was in no mood for fun or happy family occasions. Indeed, whenever he found himself alone in some corner he left off smiling at once and knit his bushy, black brows. Apart from our host, he did not know a single soul at the party. One could see that he was terribly bored, but he kept up valiantly and to the bitter end the part of a perfectly happy man who was having a really good time. I found out afterwards that he was from the provinces and had come up to town on some extremely important and highly complicated business. He had brought a letter of introduction to our host who extended his patronage to him by no means con amore, and who invited him to his children's party out of mere courtesy. There were no card games, no one offered him a cigar, no one engaged him in conversation, having, perhaps, recognised at a distance the sort of awkward customer he was, and for that reason the poor fellow, not knowing what to do with his hands, was forced to spend the whole evening stroking his whiskers. His whiskers were indeed extremely handsome. But he stroked them with such enthusiasm that one could not help feeling that his whiskers were brought into the world first, and the gentleman himself was only afterwards attached to them in order to stroke them.

In addition to this odd character who took part in this extraordinary manner in the family celebration of our host (the proud father of five strapping boys), there was another man in the room who aroused my curiosity. But he was a person of quite a different sort. He was a man of consequence. His name was Julian Mastakovich. From the first glance it was obvious that he was on the same terms with our host as our host was with the gentleman who was stroking his whiskers. Our host and hostess overwhelmed him with compliments, danced attendance on him, offered him drinks, fawned upon him, took their visitors up to him to be introduced, but did not take him to be introduced to anybody. I noticed the glint of a tear in our host's eye when Julian Mastakovich observed apropos of the party that he did not often spend his time so pleasantly. I don't know why, but I felt overawed in the presence of so important a personage and, consequently, having admired the children, I withdrew to a small drawing-room, which was completely deserted, and sat down in the arbour of flowers arranged by our hostess which occupied almost half the room.