To my surprise Shatov spoke aloud, just as though she were not in the room.
"Good day, Shatushka!" Mlle. Lebyadkin said genially.
"I've brought you a visitor, Marya Timofyevna," said Shatov.
"The visitor is very welcome.
I don't know who it is you've brought, I don't seem to remember him." She scrutinised me intently from behind the candle, and turned again at once to Shatov (and she took no more notice of me for the rest of the conversation, as though I had not been near her).
"Are you tired of walking up and down alone in your garret?" she laughed, displaying two rows of magnificent teeth.
"I was tired of it, and I wanted to come and see you."
Shatov moved a bench up to the table, sat down on it and made me sit beside him.
"I'm always glad to have a talk, though you're a funny person, Shatushka, just like a monk.
When did you comb your hair last?
Let me do it for you." And she pulled a little comb out of her pocket. "I don't believe you've touched it since I combed it last."
"Well, I haven't got a comb," said Shatov, laughing too.
"Really?
Then I'll give you mine; only remind me, not this one but another."
With a most serious expression she set to work to comb his hair. She even parted it on one side; drew back a little, looked to see whether it was right and put the comb back in her pocket.
"Do you know what, Shatushka?" She shook her head. "You may be a very sensible man but you're dull.
It's strange for me to look at all of you. I don't understand how it is people are dull.
Sadness is not dullness.
I'm happy."
"And are you happy when your brother's here?"
"You mean Lebyadkin?
He's my footman.
And I don't care whether he's here or not.
I call to him:
'Lebyadkin, bring the water!' or 'Lebyadkin, bring my shoes!' and he runs. Sometimes one does wrong and can't help laughing at him.
"That's just how it is," said Shatov, addressing me aloud without ceremony. "She treats him just like a footman. I've heard her myself calling to him,
'Lebyadkin, give me some water!' And she laughed as she said it. The only difference is that he doesn't fetch the water but beats her for it; but she isn't a bit afraid of him.
She has some sort of nervous fits, almost every day, and they are destroying her memory so that afterwards she forgets everything that's just happened, and is always in a muddle over time.
You imagine she remembers how you came in; perhaps she does remember, but no doubt she has changed everything to please herself, and she takes us now for different people from what we are, though she knows I'm 'Shatushka.'
It doesn't matter my speaking aloud, she soon leaves off listening to people who talk to her, and plunges into dreams. Yes, plunges.
She's an extraordinary person for dreaming; she'll sit for eight hours, for whole days together in the same place.
You see there's a roll lying there, perhaps she's only taken one bite at it since the morning, and she'll finish it to-morrow.
Now she's begun trying her fortune on cards...."
"I keep trying my fortune, Shatushka, but it doesn't come out right," Marya Timofyevna put in suddenly, catching the last word, and without looking at it she put out her left hand for the roll (she had heard something about the roll too very likely).
She got hold of the roll at last and after keeping it for some time in her left hand, while her attention was distracted by the conversation which sprang up again, she put it back again on the table unconsciously without having taken a bite of it.
"It always comes out the same, a journey, a wicked man, somebody's treachery, a death-bed, a letter, unexpected news. I think it's all nonsense. Shatushka, what do you think?
If people can tell lies why shouldn't a card?" She suddenly threw the cards together again.
"I said the same thing to Mother Praskovya, she's a very venerable woman, she used to run to my cell to tell her fortune on the cards, without letting the Mother Superior know.
Yes, and she wasn't the only one who came to me.
They sigh, and shake their heads at me, they talk it over while I laugh.
'Where are you going to get a letter from, Mother Praskovya,' I say, 'when you haven't had one for twelve years?'
Her daughter had been taken away to Turkey by her husband, and for twelve years there had been no sight nor sound of her.
Only I was sitting the next evening at tea with the Mother Superior (she was a princess by birth), there was some lady there too, a visitor, a great dreamer, and a little monk from Athos was sitting there too, a rather absurd man to my thinking.
What do you think, Shatushka, that monk from Athos had brought Mother Praskovya a letter from her daughter in Turkey, that morning—so much for the knave of diamonds—unexpected news!
We were drinking our tea, and the monk from Athos said to the Mother Superior,
'Blessed Mother Superior, God has blessed your convent above all things in that you preserve so great a treasure in its precincts,' said he.
'What treasure is that?' asked the Mother Superior.
'The Mother Lizaveta, the Blessed.'
This Lizaveta the Blessed was enshrined in the nunnery wall, in a cage seven feet long and five feet high, and she had been sitting there for seventeen years in nothing but a hempen shift, summer and winter, and she always kept pecking at the hempen cloth with a straw or a twig of some sort, and she never said a word, and never combed her hair, or washed, for seventeen years.
In the winter they used to put a sheepskin in for her, and every day a piece of bread and a jug of water.