Why, it was there, in Paris, at Mme. Joubert’s, we broke an English pierglass.”
“What did you break?”
A pierglass.
There was a lookingglass over the whole wall and Karp Vassilitch was that drunk that he began jabbering Russian to Mme. Joubert.
He stood by that pierglass and leaned his elbow against it.
And Joubert screamed at him in her own way, that the pierglass cost seven hundred francs (that is four hundred roubles), and that he’d break it!
He grinned and looked at me. And I was sitting on a sofa opposite, and a beauty beside me, not a mug like this one here, but a stunner, that’s the only word for it.
He cries out, ‘ Stepan Terentyitch, hi, Stepan Terentyitch!
We’ll go halves, shall we? ‘ And I said
‘Done!’ And then he banged his fist on the lookingglass, crash!
The glass was all in splinters.
Joubert squealed and went for him straight in the face:
‘What are you about, you ruffian? ‘ (In her own lingo, that is.)
‘Mme. Joubert,’ says he, ‘here’s the price of it and don’t disperse my character.’ And on the spot he forked out six hundred and fifty francs.
They haggled over the other fifty.”
At that moment a terrible, piercing shriek was heard two or three rooms away from the one in which we were.
I shuddered, and I, too, cried out.
I recognized that shriek : it was the voice of Elena.
Immediately after that pitiful shriek we heard other outcries, oaths, a scuffle, and finally the loud, resonant, distinct sound of a slap in the face.
It was probably Mitroshka inflicting retribution in his own fashion.
Suddenly the door was violently flung open and Elena rushed into the room with a white face and dazed eyes in a white muslin dress, crumpled and torn, and her hair, which had been carefully arranged, dishevelled as though by a struggle.
I stood facing the door, and she rushed straight to me and flung her arms round me.
Everyone jumped up.
Everybody was alarmed.
There were shouts and exclamations when she appeared. Then Mitroshka appeared in the doorway, dragging after him by the hair his fat enemy, who was in a hopelessly dishevelled condition.
He dragged him up to the door and flung him into the room.
“Here he is!
Take him!” Mitroshka brought out with an air of complete satisfaction.
“I say,” said Masloboev, coming quietly up to me and tapping me on the shoulder, “take our cab, take the child with you and drive home; there’s nothing more for you to do here.
We’ll arrange the rest tomorrow.”
I did not need telling twice.
I seized Elena by the arm and took her out of that den.
I don’t know how things ended there – No one stopped us. Mme. Bubnov was panicstricken.
Everything had passed so quickly that she did not know how to interfere.
The cab was waiting for us, and in twenty minutes we were at my lodgings.
Elena seemed halfdead.
I unfastened the hooks of her dress, sprinkled her with water, and laid her on the sofa.
She began to be feverish and delirious.
I looked at her white little face, at her colourless lips, at her black hair, which had been done up carefully and pomaded, though it had come down on one side, at her whole getup, at the pink bows which still remained here and there on her dress – and I had no doubt at all about the revolting facts.
Poor little thing!
She grew worse and worse.
I did not leave her, and I made up my mind not to go to Natasha’s that evening.
From time to time Elena raised her long, arrowlike eyelashes to look at me, and gazed long and intently as though she recognize me.
It was late, past midnight, when at last she fell asleep.
I slept on the floor not far from her.
Chapter VIII
I GOT up very early.
I had waked up almost every half hour through the night, and gone up to look intently at my poor little visitor.
She was in a fever and slightly delirious.
But towards morning she fell into a sound sleep.