Where?”
“In Switzerland.
I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been in Italy and in Paris too.”
I was surprised.
“And do you remember it all, Nellie?”
“I remember a great deal.”
“How is it you know Russian so well, Nellie?
“Mother used to teach me Russian even then.
She was Russian because her mother was Russian. But grandfather was English, but he was just like a Russian too.
And when we came to Russia a year and a half ago I learnt it thoroughly.
Mother was ill even then.
Then we got poorer and poorer.
Mother was always crying.
At first she was a long time looking for grandfather here in Petersburg, and always crying and saying that she had behaved badly to him. How she used to cry!
And when she knew grandfather was poor she cried more than ever.
She often wrote letters to him, and he never answered.”
“Why did your mother come back here?
Was it only to see her father?”
“I don’t know.
But there we were so happy.” And Nellie’s eyes sparkled.
“Mother used to live alone, with me.
She had one friend, a kind man like you. He used to know her before she went away.
But he died out there and mother came back . . .”
“So it was with him that your mother went away from your grandfather?”
“No, not with him.
Mother went away with someone else, and he left her . . .”
“Who was he, Nellie?”
Nellie glanced at me and said nothing.
She evidently knew the name of the man with whom her mother had gone away and who was probably her father.
It was painful to her to speak that name even to me.
I did not want to worry her with questions.
Hers was a strange character, nervous and fiery, though she suppressed her impulses, lovable, though she entrenched herself behind a barrier of pride and reserve.
Although she loved me with her whole heart, with the most candid and ingenuous love, almost as she had loved the dead mother of whom she could not speak without pain, yet all the while I knew her she was rarely open with me, and except on that day she rarely felt moved to speak to me of her past; on the contrary, she was, as it were, austerely reserved with me, but on that day through convulsive sobs of misery that interrupted her story, she told me in the course of several hours all that most distressed and tortured her in her memories, and I shall never forget that terrible story, but the greater part of it will be told later....
It was a fearful story.
It was the story of a woman abandoned and living on after the wreck of her happiness, sick, worn out and forsaken by everyone, rejected by the last creature to whom she could look – her father, once wronged by her and crazed by intolerable sufferings and humiliations.
It was the story of a woman driven to despair, wandering through the cold, filthy streets of Petersburg, begging alms with the little girl whom she regarded as a baby; of a woman who lay dying for months in a damp cellar, while her father, refusing to forgive her to the last moment of her life, and only at the last moment relenting, hastened to forgive her only to find a cold corpse instead of the woman he loved above everything on earth.
It was a strange story of the mysterious, hardly comprehensible relations of the crazy old man with the little grandchild who already understood him, who already, child as she was, understood many things that some men do not attain to in long years of their smooth and carefully guarded lives.
It was a gloomy story, one of those gloomy and distressing dramas which are so often played out unseen, almost mysterious, under the heavy sky of Petersburg, in the dark secret corners of the vast town, in the midst of the giddy ferment of life, of dull egoism, of clashing interests, of gloomy vice and secret crimes, in that lowest hell of senseless and abnormal life....
But that story will be told later....
Part III
Chapter I
TWILIGHT had fallen, the evening had come on before I roused myself from the gloomy nightmare and came back to the present.
“Nellie,” I said, “you’re ill and upset, and I must leave you alone, in tears and distress.
My dear!
Forgive me, and let me tell you that there’s someone else who has been loved and not forgiven, who is unhappy, insulted and forsaken.
She is expecting me.
And I feel drawn to her now after your story, so that I can’t bear not to see her at once, this very minute.”
I don’t know whether she understood all that I said.
I was upset both by her story and by my illness, but I rushed to Natasha’s.
It was late, nine o’clock, when I arrived.