I mentioned at the beginning of my story that Grigory hated Adelaide Ivanovna, Fyodor Pavlovich’s first wife and the mother of his first son, Dmitri Fyodorovich, and that, on the contrary, he defended his second wife, the shrieker, Sofia Ivanovna, against his master himself and against all who might chance to speak a bad or flippant word about her. His sympathy for the unfortunate woman became something sacred to him, so that even twenty years later he would not suffer a slighting allusion to her from anyone at all, and would at once object to the offender. Outwardly Grigory was a cold and pompous man, taciturn, delivering himself of weighty, unfrivolous words. In the same way, it was impossible to tell at first glance whether he loved his meek, obedient wife or not, and yet he really did love her, and she, of course, knew it. This Marfa Ignatievna not only was not a stupid woman, but was even perhaps more intelligent than her husband, at least more reasonable than he in everyday things, and yet she submitted to him without a murmur and without complaint from the very beginning of their married life, and unquestionably respected his spiritual superiority. It was remarkable that all their life they spoke very little to each other, and then only of the most necessary daily things. Pompous and majestic Grigory always thought through all his affairs and concerns by himself, and Marfa Ignatievna had long ago understood once and for all that he had absolutely no need of her advice. She felt that her husband valued her silence and took it as a sign of her intelligence. He had never beaten her, save only once, and then slightly. In the first year of the marriage of Adelaide Ivanovna and Fyodor Pavlovich, one day in the village, the village girls and women, who were then still serfs, were gathered in the master’s yard to sing and dance. They began “In the Meadows,” and suddenly Marfa Ignatievna, then still a young woman, leaped out in front of the chorus and performed the “Russian dance” in a special manner, not as village women did it, but as she used to dance when she was a servant of the wealthy Miusovs, in their own household theater, where they were taught to dance by a dancing master invited from Moscow. Grigory saw his wife’s performance and, back home, an hour later, taught her a lesson by pulling her hair a little. There the beatings ended forever, and were not repeated even once in the rest of their life, and Marfa Ignatievna also foreswore dancing.
God did not grant them children; there was one baby, but it died. Grigory obviously loved children, and did not even conceal it, that is, he was not ashamed to show it. After Adelaida Ivanovna fled, he took charge of Dmitri Fyodorovich, then a three-year-old boy, and fussed over him for almost a year, combing his hair and even washing him in a tub himself. He took the same trouble over Ivan Fyodorovich, and then over Alyosha, for which he received a slap in the face; but I have already related all that. His own baby gave him only the joy of hope while Marfa Ignatievna was still pregnant. When it was born, it struck his heart with grief and horror. The fact is that the boy was born with six fingers. [73]Seeing this, Grigory was so mortified that he not only kept silent up to the very day of the baptism, but even went out to the garden especially to be silent. It was spring, and he spent all three days digging beds in the vegetable garden. On the third day they were to baptize the infant; by then Grigory had worked something out. Going into the cottage where the clergy and guests had gathered, including, finally, Fyodor Pavlovich himself, who came in person to be the godfather, he suddenly announced that “the baby oughtn’t to be baptized at all”—announced it not loudly or in many words, but speaking each word through his teeth, and only gazing dully and intently at the priest.
“Why not?” asked the priest with good-humored astonishment.
“Because ... it’s a dragon ... ,” Grigory muttered.
“A dragon? How is he a dragon?”
Grigory was silent for a while.
“A confusion of natures occurred ... ,” he muttered, rather vaguely but very firmly, apparently unwilling to say more.
There was laughter, and of course the poor baby was baptized. At the font, Grigory prayed zealously, yet he did not change his opinion about the newborn. However, he did not interfere in any way, but for the two weeks that the sickly boy lived, he scarcely ever looked at him, did not even want to notice him, and kept away from the house most of the time. When the child died of thrush two weeks later, he himself put him into the little coffin, looked at him with deep grief, and when his shallow little grave was covered with earth, he knelt and prostrated before it. For many years afterwards he never once mentioned his child, and Marfa Ignatievna never once recalled her child in his presence, and whenever she happened to talk with someone about her “baby,” she spoke in a whisper, even if Grigory Vasilievich was not present. As Marfa Ignatievna observed, ever since that little grave, he had mainly concerned himself with “the divine,” reading the Lives of the Saints, mostly silently and by himself, and each time putting on his big, round silver spectacles. He rarely read aloud, except during Lent. He loved the Book of Job, [74]and somewhere obtained a copy of the homilies and sermons of “Our God-bearing Father, Isaac the Syrian,” [75]which he read persistently over many years, understanding almost nothing at all of it, but perhaps precisely for that reason prizing and loving it all the more. Of late he had noticed and begun to take an interest in the Flagellants, [76]for which there was an opportunity in the neighborhood; he was apparently shaken, but did not deem it necessary to convert to the new faith. Assiduous reading in “the divine” certainly added to the pomposity of his physiognomy.
He was perhaps inclined to mysticism. And here, as if by design, the occasion of the arrival in the world of his six-fingered baby and its death coincided with another very strange, unexpected, and original occurrence, which left, as he himself once put it later, “a stamp” on his soul. It happened that on the very day when they buried their six-fingered infant, Marfa Ignatievna, awakened during the night, heard what sounded like the cry of a newborn baby. She was frightened and woke her husband. He listened and observed that it was more likely someone groaning, “possibly a woman.” He got up and dressed; it was a rather warm May night. Stepping out on the porch, he heard clearly that the groans were coming from the garden. But the garden was always locked from inside for the night, and it was impossible to get in except by that entrance, because the whole garden was surrounded with a high, sturdy fence. Grigory went back in, lighted a lantern, took the garden key, and paying no attention to the hysterical terror of his wife, who kept insisting that she heard a baby crying, and that it could only be her little boy crying and calling her, he silently went out to the garden. There he clearly recognized that the groans were coming from their bathhouse, which stood in the garden not far from the gate, and that they were indeed the groans of a woman. He opened the bathhouse door and was dumbfounded by what he saw: a local girl, a holy fool who roamed the streets and was known to the whole town as Stinking Lizaveta, had gotten into the bathhouse and just given birth to an infant. The infant was lying beside her, and she was dying beside him. She said nothing, for the simple reason that she had never been able to speak. But all this had better be explained separately.
Chapter 2: Stinking Lizaveta