Then suddenly he heard a cry, a new cry, which made Shatov start and jump up from his knees, the cry of a baby, a weak discordant cry.
He crossed himself and rushed into the room.
Arina Prohorovna held in her hands a little red wrinkled creature, screaming, and moving its little arms and legs, fearfully helpless, and looking as though it could be blown away by a puff of wind, but screaming and seeming to assert its full right to live. Marie was lying as though insensible, but a minute later she opened her eyes, and bent a strange, strange look on Shatov: it was something quite new, that look. What it meant exactly he was not able to understand yet, but he had never known such a look on her face before.
"Is it a boy?
Is it a boy?" she asked Arina Prohorovna in an exhausted voice.
"It is a boy," the latter shouted in reply, as she bound up the child.
When she had bound him up and was about to lay him across the bed between the two pillows, she gave him to Shatov for a minute to hold.
Marie signed to him on the sly as though afraid of Arina Prohorovna.
He understood at once and brought the baby to show her.
"How... pretty he is," she whispered weakly with a smile.
"Foo, what does he look like," Arina Prohorovna laughed gaily in triumph, glancing at Shatov's face.
"What a funny face!"
"You may be merry, Arina Prohorovna.... It's a great joy," Shatov faltered with an expression of idiotic bliss, radiant at the phrase Marie had uttered about the child.
"Where does the great joy come in?" said Arina Prohorovna good-humouredly, bustling about, clearing up, and working like a convict.
"The mysterious coming of a new creature, a great and inexplicable mystery; and what a pity it is, Arina Prohorovna, that you don't understand it."
Shatov spoke in an incoherent, stupefied and ecstatic way.
Something seemed to be tottering in his head and welling up from his soul apart from his own will.
"There were two and now there's a third human being, a new spirit, finished and complete, unlike the handiwork of man; a new thought and a new love... it's positively frightening.... And there's nothing grander in the world."
"Ech, what nonsense he talks!
It's simply a further development of the organism, and there's nothing else in it, no mystery," said Arina Prohorovna with genuine and good-humoured laughter.
"If you talk like that, every fly is a mystery.
But I tell you what: superfluous people ought not to be born.
We must first remould everything so that they won't be superfluous and then bring them into the world.
As it is, we shall have to take him to the Foundling, the day after to-morrow.... Though that's as it should be."
"I will never let him go to the Foundling," Shatov pronounced resolutely, staring at the floor.
"You adopt him as your son?"
"He is my son."
"Of course he is a Shatov, legally he is a Shatov, and there's no need for you to pose as a humanitarian.
Men can't get on without fine words.
There, there, it's all right, but look here, my friends," she added, having finished clearing up at last, "it's time for me to go.
I'll come again this morning, and again in the evening if necessary, but now, since everything has gone off so well, I must run off to my other patients, they've been expecting me long ago.
I believe you got an old woman somewhere, Shatov; an old woman is all very well, but don't you, her tender husband, desert her; sit beside her, you may be of use; Marya Ignatyevna won't drive you away, I fancy.... There, there, I was only laughing."
At the gate, to which Shatov accompanied her, she added to him alone.
"You've given me something to laugh at for the rest of my life; I shan't charge you anything; I shall laugh at you in my sleep!
I have never seen anything funnier than you last night."
She went off very well satisfied.
Shatov's appearance and conversation made it as clear as daylight that this man "was going in for being a father and was a ninny."
She ran home on purpose to tell Virginsky about it, though it was shorter and more direct to go to another patient.
"Marie, she told you not to go to sleep for a little time, though, I see, it's very hard for you," Shatov began timidly.
"I'll sit here by the window and take care of you, shall I?"
And he sat down, by the window behind the sofa so that she could not see him.
But before a minute had passed she called him and fretfully asked him to arrange the pillow.
He began arranging it.
She looked angrily at the wall.
"That's not right, that's not right.... What hands!"
Shatov did it again.
"Stoop down to me," she said wildly, trying hard not to look at him.
He started but stooped down.
"More... not so... nearer," and suddenly her left arm was impulsively thrown round his neck and he felt her warm moist kiss on his forehead.
"Marie!"