The samovar was most welcome, and in fact the samovar is the most essential thing in Russia, especially at times of particularly awful, sudden, and eccentric catastrophes and misfortunes; even the mother was induced to drink two cups — though, of course, only with much urging and almost compulsion. And yet I can honestly say that I have never seen a bitterer and more genuine sorrow that that poor mother’s.

After the first paroxysms of sobbing and hysterics she was actually eager to talk, and I listened greedily to her story. There are unhappy people, especially women, who must be allowed to talk as freely as possible when they are in trouble. Moreover, there are characters too, blurred so to speak by sorrow, who all their life long have suffered, have suffered terribly much both of great sorrow and of continual worry about trifles, and who can never be surprised by anything, by any sort of sudden calamity, and who, above all, never, even beside the coffin of their dearest, can forget the rules of behaviour for propitiating people, which they have learnt by bitter experience. And I don’t criticize it: there is neither the vulgarity of egoism nor the insolence of culture in this; there is perhaps more genuine goodness to be found in these simple hearts than in heroines of the loftiest demeanour, but the long habit of humiliation, the instinct of self-preservation, the years of timid anxiety and oppression, leave their mark at last. The poor girl who had died by her own hand was not like her mother in this. They were alike in face, however, though the dead girl was decidedly good-looking. The mother was not a very old woman, fifty at the most; she, too, was fair, but her eyes were sunken, her cheeks were hollow, and she had large yellow, uneven teeth. And indeed everything had a tinge of yellowness: the skin on her hands and face was like parchment; her dark dress had grown yellow with age, and the nail on the forefinger of her right hand¹ had been, I don’t know why, carefully and tidily plastered up with yellow wax.

The poor woman’s story was in parts quite disconnected. I will tell it as I understood it and as I remember it.

¹ This must be an error on Dostoevsky’s part. Russian women sometimes plaster with wax the forefinger of the left hand to protect it from being pricked in sewing.— Translator’s Note.

5

They had come from Moscow. She had long been a widow —“the widow of an official, however.” Her husband had been in the government service, but had left them practically nothing “except a pension of two hundred roubles.” But what are two hundred roubles? Olya grew up, however, and went to the high school —“and how well she did, how good she was at her lessons; she won the silver medal when she left” (at this point, of course, prolonged weeping). The deceased husband had lost a fortune of nearly four thousand roubles, invested with a merchant here in Petersburg. This merchant had suddenly grown rich again. “I had papers, I asked advice; I was told, ‘Try, and you will certainly get it. . . .’ I wrote, the merchant agreed: ‘Go yourself,’ I was told. Olya and I set off, and arrived a month ago. Our means were small: we took this room because it was the smallest of all and, as we could see ourselves, in a respectable house, and that’s what mattered most to us. We were inexperienced women; every one takes advantage of us. Well, we paid you for one month. With one thing and another, Petersburg is ruinous. Our merchant gives us a flat refusal —‘I don’t know you or anything about you’; and the paper I had was not regular, I knew that. Then I was advised to go to a celebrated lawyer; he was a professor, not simply a lawyer but an expert, so he’d be sure to tell me what to do. I took him my last fifteen roubles. The lawyer came out to me, and he did not listen to me for three minutes: ‘I see,’ says he, ‘I know,’ says he. ‘If the merchant wants to,’ says he, ‘he’ll pay the money; if he doesn’t want to, he won’t, and if you take proceedings you may have to pay yourself, perhaps; you had far better come to terms.’ He made a joke, then, out of the Gospel: ‘Make peace,’ said he, ‘while your enemy is in the way with you, lest you pay to the uttermost farthing.’ He laughed as he saw me out. My fifteen roubles were wasted! I came back to Olya; we sat facing one another. I began crying. Olya did not cry; she sat there, proud and indignant. She has always been like that with me; all her life, even when she was tiny, she was never one to moan, she was never one to cry, but she would sit and look fierce; it used to make me creep to look at her. And — would you believe it?— I was afraid of her, I was really quite afraid of her; I’ve been so for a long time past. I often wanted to grieve, but I did not dare before her. I went to the merchant for the last time. I cried before him freely: he said it was all right, and would not even listen. Meanwhile I must confess that, not having reckoned on being here for so long, we had been for some time without a penny. I began taking our clothes one by one to the pawnbroker’s; we have been living on what we have pawned. I stripped myself of everything; she gave me the last of her linen, and I cried bitterly at taking it. She stamped, then she jumped up and ran off to the merchant herself. He was a widower; he talked to her. ‘Come at five o’clock the day after to-morrow,’ says he, ‘perhaps I shall have something to say to you.’ She came home quite gay: ‘He says he may have something to say to me.’ Well, I was pleased too, but yet I somehow felt a sort of chill at my heart. ‘Something will come of it,’ I thought, but I did not dare to question her. Two days later she came back from the merchant’s, pale and trembling all over, and threw herself on her bed. I saw what it meant, and did not dare to question her. And — would you believe it?— the villain had offered her fifteen roubles. ‘If I find you pure and virtuous I’ll hand you over another forty.’ He said that to her face — he wasn’t ashamed to. At that she flew at him, so she told me; he thrust her out, and even locked himself in the next room. And meanwhile I must confess, to tell the truth, we had nothing to eat. We brought out a jacket lined with hare-fur; we sold it. She went to a newspaper and put in an advertisement at once: she offered lessons in all subjects and in arithmetic. ‘If they’ll only pay thirty kopecks,’ she said. And in the end I began to be really alarmed at her: she would sit for hours at the window without saying a word, staring at the roof of the house opposite, and then she would suddenly cry out, ‘If I could only wash or dig!’ She would say one sentence like that and stamp her foot. And there was no one we knew here, no one we could go to: I wondered what would become of us. And all the while I was afraid to talk to her. One day she fell asleep in the daytime. She waked up, opened her eyes, and looked at me; I was sitting on the box, and I was looking at her too. She got up, came to me without saying a word, and threw her arms round me. And we could not help crying, both of us; we sat crying and clinging to each other. It was the first time in her life I had seen her like that. And just as we were sitting like that, your Nastasya came in and said, ‘There’s a lady inquiring for you.’ This was only four days ago. The lady came in; we saw she was very well dressed, though she spoke Russian, it seemed to me, with a German accent. ‘You advertised that you give lessons,’ she said. We were so delighted then, we made her sit down. She laughed in such a friendly way: ‘It’s not for me,’ she said, but my niece has small children; and if it suits you, come to us, and we will make arrangements.’ She gave an address, a flat in Voznessensky Street. She went away. Dear Olya set off the same day; she flew there. She came back two hours later; she was in hysterics, in convulsions. She told me afterwards: ‘I asked the porter where flat No. so-and-so was.’ The porter looked at her and said, ‘And what do you want to go to that flat for?’ He said that so strangely that it might have made one suspicious, but she was so self-willed, poor darling, so impatient, she could not bear impertinent questions. ‘Go along, then,’ he said, and he pointed up the stairs to her and went back himself to his little room. And what do you think! She went in, asked for the lady, and on all sides women ran up to her at once — horrid creatures, rouged; they rushed at her, laughing. ‘Please come in, please come in,’ they cried; they dragged her in. Some one was playing the piano. ‘I tried to get away from them,’ she said, ‘but they would not let me go.’ She was frightened, her legs gave way under her. They simply would not let her go; they talked to her coaxingly, they persuaded her, they uncorked a bottle of porter, they pressed it on her. She jumped up trembling, screamed at the top of her voice ‘Let me go, let me go!’ She rushed to the door; they held the door, she shrieked. Then the one who had been to see us the day before ran up and slapped my Olya twice in the face and pushed her out of the door: ‘You don’t deserve to be in a respectable house, you skinny slut!’ And another shouted after her on the stairs: ‘You came of yourself to beg of us because you have nothing to eat, but we won’t look at such an ugly fright!’ All that night she lay in a fever and delirious and in the morning her eyes glittered; she got up and walked about. ‘Justice,’ she cried, ‘she must be brought to justice!’ I said nothing, but I thought, ‘If you brought her up how could we prove it?’ She walked about with set lips, wringing her hands and tears streaming down her face. And her whole face seemed darkened from that time up to the very end. On the third day she seemed better; she was quiet and seemed calmer. And then at four o’clock in the afternoon M. Versilov came to us. And I must say I can’t understand, even now, how Olya, who was always so mistrustful, was ready to listen to him almost at the first word. What attracted us both more than anything was that he had such a grave, almost stern air; he spoke gently, impressively, and so politely — more than politely, respectfully even — and yet at the same time he showed no sign of trying to make up to us: it was plain to see he had come with a pure heart. ‘I read your advertisement in the paper,’ said he. ‘You did not word it suitably, madam, and you may damage your prospects by that.’ And he began explaining — I must own I did not understand — something about arithmetic, but I saw that Olya flushed and seemed to brighten up altogether. She listened and talked readily (and, to be sure, he must be a clever man!); I heard her even thank him. He questioned her so minutely about everything, and it seemed that he had lived a long time in Moscow, and it turned out that he knew the head mistress of the high school. ‘I will be sure to find you lessons,’ said he, ‘for I know a great many people here, and I can, in fact, apply to many influential people, so that if you would prefer a permanent situation we might look out for that. . . . Meanwhile,’ said he, ‘forgive me one direct question: can I be of some use to you at once? It will be your doing me a favour, not my doing you one,’ said he, ‘if you will allow me to be of use to you in any way. Let it be a loan,’ said he, ‘and as soon as you have a situation, in a very short time, you will be able to repay me. Believe me, on my honour,’ said he, ‘if ever I were to come to poverty and you had plenty of everything I would come straight to you for some little help. I would send my wife and daughter’ . . . at least, I don’t remember all his words, only I was moved to tears, for I saw that Olya’s lips were trembling with gratitude too. ‘If I take it,’ she answered him, ‘it is because I trust an honourable and humane man, who might have been my father. . . .’ That was very well said by her, briefly and with dignity. ‘A humane man,’ said she. He stood up at once: ‘I will get you lessons and a situation without fail. I will set to work this very day, for you have quite a satisfactory diploma too. . . .’ I forgot to say that he looked through all her school certificates when he first came in; she showed them to him, and he examined her in several subjects. . . . ‘You see, he examined me, mamma,’ Olya said to me afterwards, ‘and what a clever man he is,’ she said; ‘it is not often one speaks to such a well-educated, cultured man. . . .’ And she was quite radiant. The money — sixty roubles, lay on the table: ‘Take it, mamma,’ said she; ‘when I get a situation we will pay it back as soon as possible. We will show that we are honest and that we have delicacy: he has seen that already, though.’ Then she paused. I saw her draw a deep breath. ‘Do you know, mamma,’ she said to me suddenly, ‘if we had been coarse we should perhaps have refused to take it through pride, but by taking it now we only show our delicacy of feeling and that we trust him completely, out of respect for his grey hair, don’t we?’ At first I did not quite understand: ‘But why, Olya, not accept the benevolence a wealthy and honourable man if he has a good heart too?’ She scowled at me. ‘No, mamma,’ she said, ‘that’s not it; I don’t want benevolence, but his humanity is precious. And it would have been better really not to have taken the money at all, since he has promised to get me a situation; that’s enough . . . though we are in need.’ ‘Well, Olya,’ said I, ‘our need is so great that we could not have refused it.’ I actually laughed. Well, I was pleased, but an hour later she turned to me: ‘Don’t spend that money yet, mamma,’ said she resolutely. ‘What?’ said I. ‘I mean it,’ she said, and she broke off and said no more. She was silent all the evening, only at two o’clock in the night I waked up and heard Olya tossing in her bed: ‘Are you awake, mamma?’ ‘Yes, I am awake.’ ‘Do you know, he meant to insult me.’ ‘What nonsense, what nonsense,’ I said. ‘There is no doubt of it,’ she said; ‘he is a vile man; don’t dare to spend a farthing of his money.’ I tried to talk to her. I burst out crying, in bed as I was. She turned away to the wall. ‘Be quiet,’ she said, ‘let me go to sleep!’ In the morning I looked at her; she was not like herself. And you may believe it or not, before God I swear she was not in her right mind then! From the time that she was insulted in that infamous place there was darkness and perplexity in her heart . . . and in her brain. Looking at her that morning, I had misgivings about her; I was alarmed. I made up my mind I would not say a word to contradict her. ‘He did not even leave his address, mamma,’ she said. ‘For shame, Olya,’ I said; ‘you listened to him last night; you praised him and were ready to shed tears of gratitude.’ That was all I said, but she screamed and stamped. ‘You are a woman of low feelings,’ she said, ‘brought up in the old slavish ideas. . . .’ And then, without a word, she snatched up her hat, ran out. I called after her. I wondered what was the matter with her, where she had run. She had run to the address bureau to find out where Versilov lived. ‘I’ll take him back the money today and fling it in his face; he meant to insult me,’ she said, ‘like Safronov (that is the merchant), but Safronov insulted me like a coarse peasant, but he like a cunning Jesuit.’ And just then, unhappily, that gentleman knocked at the door: ‘I hear the name of Versilov,’ he said; ‘I can tell you about him.’ When she heard Versilov’s name she pounced on him. She was in a perfect frenzy; she kept talking away. I gazed at her in amazement. She was always a silent girl and had never talked to anyone like that, and with a perfect stranger too. Her cheeks were burning, her eyes glittered. . . . And he said at once: ‘You are perfectly right, madam. Versilov,’ said he, ‘is just like the generals here, described in the newspapers; they dress themselves up with all their decorations and go after all the governesses who advertise in the papers. Sometimes they find what they want, or, if they don’t, they sit and talk a little, make bushels of promises and go away, having got diversion out of it, anyway.’ Olya actually laughed, but so bitterly, and I saw the gentleman take her hand and press it to his heart. ‘I am a man of independent means, madam,’ said he, ‘and might well make a proposal to a fair maiden, but I’d better,’ said he, ‘kiss your little hand to begin with. . . .’ And he was trying to kiss her hand. How she started! But I came to the rescue, and together we turned him out of the room. Then, towards evening, Olya snatched the money from me and ran out. When she came back she said, ‘I have revenged myself on that dishonourable man, mamma.’ ‘Oh, Olya, Olya,’ I said, ‘perhaps we have thrown away our happiness. You have insulted a generous, benevolent man!’ I cried — I was so vexed with her I could not help it. She shouted at me. ‘I won’t have it, I won’t have it!’ she cried; ‘if he were ever so honest, I don’t want his charity! I don’t want anyone to pity me!’ I went to bed with no thought of anything. How many times I had looked on that nail in your wall where once there had been a looking-glass — it never entered my head, never; I never thought of it yesterday and I’d never thought of it before; I had no inkling of it, and I did not expect it of Olya at all. I usually sleep heavily and snore; it’s the blood going to my head, and sometimes it goes to my heart. I call out in my sleep so that Olya wakes me up at night. ‘What is the matter with you, mamma?’ she would say; ‘you sleep so heavily there’s no waking you.’ ‘Oh, Olya,’ I said, ‘I do, I do.’ That’s how I must have slept this night, so that, after waiting a bit, she got up without fear of waking me. The strap, a long one from our trunk, had been lying about all that month where we could see it; only yesterday morning I had been thinking of tidying it away. And the chair she must have kicked away afterwards, and she had put her petticoat down beside it to prevent its banging on the floor. And it must have been a long time afterwards, a whole hour or more afterwards, that I waked up and called ‘Olya, Olya’; all at once I felt something amiss, and called her name. Either because I did not hear her breathing in her bed, or perhaps I made out in the dark that the bed was empty — anyway, I got up suddenly and felt with my hand; there was no one in the bed and the pillow was cold. My heart sank; I stood still as though I were stunned; my mind was a blank. ‘She’s gone out,’ I thought. I took a step, and by the bed I seemed to see her standing in the corner by the door. I stood still and gazed at her without speaking, and through the darkness she seemed to look at me without stirring. . . . ‘But why has she got on a chair,’ I wondered. ‘Olya,’ I whispered. I was frightened. ‘Olya, do you hear?’ But suddenly, as it were, it all dawned upon me. I went forward, held out both arms and put them round her, and she swayed in my arms; I swayed and she swayed with me. I understood and would not understand. . . . I wanted to cry out, but no cry came. . . . Ach! I fell on the floor and shrieked. . . .”