Now she no longer looked like a bundle. She was a small, thin brunette of about twenty, slender as a little snake, with an elongated white face and wavy hair. Her nose was long, sharp, her chin also long and sharp, her eyelashes long, the corners of her mouth sharp, and, thanks to this overall sharpness, the expression of her face seemed prickly. Drawn tightly into a black dress, with masses of lace at the neck and sleeves, with sharp elbows and long pink fingers, she resembled the portraits of medieval English ladies. The serious, concentrated expression of her face increased this resemblance still more…
The brunette looked around the room, glanced sidelong at the man and the girl, and, shrugging her shoulders, went to sit by the window. The dark windows were trembling from the damp west wind. Big flakes of snow, sparkling white, settled on the window glass, but disappeared at once, carried off by the wind. The wild music was becoming ever louder…
After a long silence, the little girl suddenly stirred and said, angrily rapping out each word:
“Lord! Lord! I’m so unhappy! Unhappier than anybody!”
The man got up and, with a guilty step not at all suited to his enormous height and big beard, went mincing over to the girl.
“You’re not asleep, sweetie?” he said in an apologetic voice. “What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything! My shoulder hurts! You’re a bad man, Papa, and God will punish you! You’ll see, he’ll punish you!”
“My darling, I know your shoulder hurts, but what can I do, sweetie?” the man said, in the tone in which drunken men apologize to their stern spouses. “Your shoulder hurts from traveling, Sasha. Tomorrow we’ll arrive, get some rest, and it will go away…”
“Tomorrow, tomorrow…You say ‘tomorrow’ every day. We’ll be traveling for another twenty days!”
“But, sweetie, a father’s word of honor, we’ll arrive tomorrow. I never lie, and it’s not my fault if we’ve been held up by a blizzard!”
“I can’t take any more! I can’t, I can’t!”
Sasha sharply kicked her foot and filled the room with unpleasant, high-pitched crying. Her father waved his hand and gave the brunette a lost look. She shrugged her shoulders and hesitantly went over to Sasha.
“Listen, my dear,” she said, “why cry? True, it’s not nice that your shoulder hurts, but what can be done?”
“You see, madam,” the man began quickly, as if apologizing, “we haven’t slept for two nights, and we’ve been traveling in disgusting conditions. So, of course, she’s sick and languishing…And then, too, you know, we happened to have a drunken coachman, and our suitcase was stolen…a blizzard all the time, but why cry, madam? Then again, this sleeping sitting up has tired me, and it’s as if I’m drunk. By God, Sasha, it’s sickening even without you, and then you go crying!”
The man shook his head, waved his hand, and sat down.
“Of course, you shouldn’t cry,” said the brunette. “Only nursing babies cry. If you’re sick, my dear, you should get undressed and go to sleep…Let’s get undressed!”
Once the girl was undressed and calmed down, there was silence again. The brunette sat by the window and looked around perplexedly at the room, the icon, the stove…Apparently, it all seemed strange to her—the room, the girl with her fat nose, in her short boy’s undershirt, and the girl’s father. This strange man was sitting in the corner, bewildered, like a drunk man, glancing around and rubbing his face with his palm. He said nothing, blinked his eyes, and, looking at his guilty figure, it was hard to suppose that he would soon start talking. But he was the first to start talking. He stroked his knees, coughed, then chuckled and said:
“A comedy, by God…I look and don’t believe my eyes: why the devil has fate driven us to this vile inn? What did it mean to show by it? Life sometimes performs such a salto mortale that you’re left staring and blinking in perplexity. Are you going far, madam?”
“No, not far,” replied the brunette. “I’m going from our estate, some fifteen miles from here, to our farmstead, to my father and brother. I’m Ilovaiskaya myself, and the farmstead is called Ilovaiskoe, it’s eight miles on from here. Such unpleasant weather!”
“Couldn’t be worse!”
The lame boy came in and stuck a new candle stub in the pomade jar.
“Serve up the samovar for us, laddie,” the man turned to him.
“Who drinks tea now?” the lame boy smirked. “It’s a sin to drink before the liturgy.”3
“Never mind, laddie, it’s not you who’ll burn in hell, it’s us…”
Over tea the new acquaintances got to talking. Miss Ilovaiskaya learned that her interlocutor’s name was Grigory Petrovich Likharev, that he was the brother of the Likharev who was marshal of the nobility in one of the neighboring districts,4 and that he himself had been a landowner, but had been “ruined in good time.” Likharev learned that Miss Ilovaiskaya was named Marya Mikhailovna, that her father’s estate was enormous, but that the management fell to her alone, because her father and brother looked at life through their fingers, were carefree and overly fond of borzois.
“At the farmstead my father and brother are all by themselves,” said Miss Ilovaiskaya, waving her fingers (she had the habit of waving her fingers in front of her prickly face during a conversation and of licking her lips with her sharp tongue after each phrase). “They’re men, carefree folk, and won’t move a finger for themselves! I suppose no one will give them Christmas dinner. We have no mother, and our servants are such that they won’t even spread a tablecloth properly without me. Just imagine their situation now! They’ll go without Christmas dinner, and I have to sit here all night. How strange it all is!”
Miss Ilovaiskaya shrugged her shoulders, took a sip from the cup, and said:
“There are feasts that have their own smell. At Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas there’s a particular smell in the air. Even unbelievers love these feasts. My brother, for instance, says there is no God, but at Easter he’s the first to run to church.”
Likharev raised his eyes to Miss Ilovaiskaya and laughed.
“They say there is no God,” Miss Ilovaiskaya went on, also laughing, “but why then, tell me, do all the famous writers, scholars, and intelligent people in general, become believers toward the end of their lives?”
“Anyone who was unable to believe at a young age, madam, will not believe when he’s old, even if he’s a writer ten times over.”
Judging by his cough, Likharev had a bass voice, but, probably from fear of talking loudly or from excessive shyness, he spoke in a tenor. After a brief silence, he sighed and said:
“As I understand it, faith is a spiritual capacity. It’s like a talent: you have to be born with it. Insofar as I can judge by myself, by the people I’ve met in my time, by all that goes on around me, Russian people possess this capacity in the highest degree. Russian life is an uninterrupted series of beliefs and infatuations, and as for unbelief or denial, Russia, if you wish to know, hasn’t caught a whiff of it. If a Russian man doesn’t believe in God, it means he believes in something else.”
Likharev accepted a cup of tea from Miss Ilovaiskaya, swigged half of it at once, and went on:
“I’ll tell you about myself. Nature put into my soul an extraordinary ability to believe. For half my life (don’t let me spook you!) I’ve belonged to the ranks of the atheists and nihilists, but there hasn’t been a single hour of my life when I haven’t believed. Usually all talents reveal themselves in early childhood, and so my ability already made itself known when I was still knee-high. My mother liked her children to eat a lot, and when she fed me, she used to say: ‘Eat! The main thing in life is soup!’ I believed, I ate that soup, ate it ten times a day, ate like a shark, to the point of loathing and passing out. My nanny told fairy tales, and I believed in house goblins, in wood demons, in all sorts of devilry. I used to steal rat poison from my father, pour it on gingerbread, and carry it up to the attic, so that the house goblins would eat it and drop dead. And when I learned to read and understand what I read, then things really took off! I fled to America, I became a highway robber, I asked to be taken to a monastery, I hired other boys to torture me for the sake of Christ. And notice, my belief was always active, not dead. If I ran away to America, I didn’t go alone, I seduced another fool like myself to go with me, and I was glad when I was freezing outside the city gate and when they flogged me; and when I became a highway robber, I never failed to come back with a bloodied mug. A most troubled childhood, I assure you! And when I was sent to school and showered there with all sorts of truths, like that the earth moves around the sun, and that the color white is not white, but consists of seven colors, my poor little head was in a whirl! Everything went topsy-turvy in me: Joshua, who stopped the sun, and my mother, who rejected lightning rods on behalf of the prophet Elijah,5 and my father, who was indifferent to the truths I learned. My enlightenment inspired me. I went around the house and stables like a lunatic, preaching my truths, horrified by ignorance, burning with hatred for anyone who saw white as merely white…However, this is all nonsense and childishness. My serious, so to speak, masculine passions began at the university. Did you study anywhere, madam?”