That evening Nelly was particularly dispirited, even preoccupied with something – as though she’d had a bad dream and was brooding over it. But she was absolutely delighted with Masloboyev’s present and kept looking with relish at the flowers which were placed in front of her in a vase.
“So you love flowers a lot, Nelly, do you?” Ikhmenev asked. “Leave it to me!” he added with animation. “Tomorrow… well, you’ll see for yourself!…”
“I do,” Nelly replied, “and I remember we used to greet Mummy with flowers. When we were still out there.” (Out there now stood for abroad.) “Mummy was very ill once for a whole month. Heinrich and I agreed that when she got up and came out of her bedroom for the first time, which she hadn’t done for a whole month, we’d deck out all the rooms with flowers. That’s what we did. Mummy said one evening that she’d definitely join us for breakfast the next morning. We got up really early. Heinrich brought lots of flowers and we decorated the whole room with green leaves and garlands. There was ivy too, and these really broad leaves – I don’t know what you call them – and other kinds of leaves too, the ones that cling to everything, and there were also large white flowers, and narcissi, which I love more than any other flowers, and roses, really lovely roses, and heaps and heaps of flowers. We hung them all out in garlands and stood them in pots, and there were flowers like whole trees in large tubs. We stood them in corners and around Mummy’s chair, and when Mummy came out, she was amazed and delighted, and Heinrich was happy… I still remember it…”
That night Nelly was somehow particularly frail and on edge. The doctor kept eyeing her anxiously. But she was very keen to talk. And she talked for a long time of her former life out there till it grew dark. We did not interrupt her. Out there she had travelled a lot with Mummy and Heinrich, and memories came flooding back to her vividly. She spoke rapturously of blue skies, of huge snow and ice-capped mountains that she had seen and passed through, of high waterfalls; of the Italian lakes and valleys, of flowers and trees, of country people, of their dress and their swarthy faces and dark eyes; she spoke of various encounters they had had and incidents they had witnessed; and also of large cities and palaces, of a tall church with a dome, which would suddenly light up with various colours; and of a hot southern city with blue skies and a blue sea… Never before had Nelly recounted to us her reminiscences in such detail. We listened to her with rapt concentration. Up till then we knew only the reverse side of her recollections, garnered in a bleak, gloomy city, with its depressing soul-destroying atmosphere, its pestilential air, its priceless palaces always covered in grime, its dim, miserly sunlight and its evil, half-crazed people who had brought so much suffering upon her and her mother. And I could picture them both of a dark dank evening huddled together in their miserable bed in a dingy basement, clinging to their memories of the past, of their deceased Heinrich and the marvels of foreign lands… I also thought of Nelly recalling all this when she was already on her own, without her mother, with the violent and unspeakably cruel Bubnova trying to break her and force her into an immoral act…
But finally Nelly began to feel ill and we took her back. Nikolai Sergeich was very nervous and lamented the fact that she had been allowed to speak for so long. She fell into a kind of torpor. She had had such attacks before on a number of occasions. After it passed, Nelly firmly demanded to see me. She had something to say to me in private. She was so insistent that on this occasion the doctor himself ensured that her wish was acceded to and everyone left the room.
“This is what I am going to tell you, Vanya,” Nelly said after the two of us were left on our own, “I know they think I’m going with them, but I’m not, because I can’t. I shall stay with you for the time being. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
I tried to reason with her. I told her that the Ikhmenevs loved her so much; that they looked upon her as their own daughter; that everyone would miss her very much; that on the contrary she would find life difficult with me and that even though I loved her very much, it couldn’t be helped, we’d have to part.
“No, that’s not right!” Nelly replied firmly. “Because I dream about Mummy a lot and she tells me not to go with them but to stay here. She says I’ve sinned a lot, leaving Granddad on his own, and she cries every time she says it. I want to stay behind and look after Granddad, Vanya.”
“But you know your granddad is already dead, Nelly,” I said in surprise.
She thought a while and looked at me intently.
“Tell me, Vanya, once more,” she said, “how did Granddad die? Tell me everything and leave nothing out.”
I was amazed at her demand; however, I began to recount in every detail what happened. I suspected that she was either distraught or at least still unable to think quite lucidly after the seizure.
She listened attentively to my story, and I recall the morbidly feverish glint in her dark eyes as they followed me intently throughout my story. It was already dark in the room.
“No, Vanya, he’s not dead!” she said decisively, having heard out everything to the end and thought a little. “Mummy often speaks to me about Granddad, and when I said to her yesterday that Granddad was dead, she was very upset and burst into tears and said to me he wasn’t, that I’d been deliberately told to believe so, but that he was really walking about begging – ‘Like the two of us did previously,’ Mummy said, ‘and he always walks in the same place where we both met him the first time, when I fell in front of him and Azorka recognized me…’”
“That was a dream, Nelly, a sick dream, because you’re ill yourself now,” I said to her.
“I too thought it was only a dream,” Nelly said, “and didn’t tell anyone. You were the only one I was going to tell about it. But today, when I fell asleep after you didn’t come, I dreamt of Granddad himself. He was sitting at home, waiting for me, and he was so frightening and so thin, and said he hadn’t eaten for two days, neither had Azorka, and he was very angry with me and told me off. He also told me that he had completely run out of snuff, and that he couldn’t live without it. He did actually tell me this once, Vanya, after Mummy was already dead when I came to see him. He was very ill then and could hardly understand a thing. So when I heard this from him today, I thought, I’ll go and stand on the bridge till I get enough to buy him some bread, boiled potatoes and snuff. And it was just as if I was standing there begging, and Granddad walking around nearby, approaching slowly to see how much I’d got, and in the end taking it all from me – ‘That’ll be for the bread, now for the snuff.’ I carried on begging, but he’d just come up and take it all away. I told him that I’d have given it to him just the same and wasn’t going to keep anything back for myself. ‘No, you’re stealing from me. Bubnova too tells me you’re a thief that’s why I’ll never let you come and live with me. There’s a five-kopeck piece missing, what have you done with it?’ I cried because he didn’t believe me, but he wouldn’t listen and just kept shouting, ‘You stole five kopecks!’ and then he started hitting me right there on the bridge, and it hurt. And I cried a lot… That’s when I thought to myself, Vanya, he must definitely be alive, and walking around somewhere alone, expecting me to join him…”
I again began to reason with her, and I thought I had finally succeeded in putting her mind at rest. She replied that she was afraid to fall asleep in case she saw her granddad again. In the end she gave me a big hug.
“All the same I can’t leave you, Vanya!” she said to me, pressing her face against mine. “Even if it wasn’t for Granddad, I still wouldn’t leave you.”
Everyone in the house was alarmed at Nelly’s seizure. I told the doctor in a low voice about her ranting and asked him to tell me once and for all what he thought of her illness.
“No one can tell anything yet,” he replied thoughtfully. “For the time being I’m hypothesizing, racking my brains and watching, but… no one can tell anything. There’s no possibility of recovery. She will die
. I haven’t told them that because you asked me not to, but I’m sorry for them and I’ll suggest holding a consultation tomorrow at the latest. Perhaps the illness will take a different turn after the consultation. But I couldn’t be more sorry for this little girl if she were my own daughter… Dear, sweet child! And such a lively mind too!”
Nikolai Sergeich was particularly agitated.
“Look here, Vanya, this is what I propose,” he said. “She adores flowers. Now then, why don’t we organize the same kind of welcome for her with flowers when she wakes up tomorrow as she was telling us today she and that Heinrich had done for her mother… She was so excited about it…”
“Excited – that’s the trouble,” I replied. “Excitement is the last thing she needs now…”
“Yes, but pleasurable excitement is quite another matter! Take it from me, my friend, listen to the voice of experience, pleasurable excitement is all right. Pleasurable excitement can effect a cure, bring her back to health…”
In a word, Ikhmenev was so taken with his own idea that he was quite over the moon. It was impossible to contradict him. I turned to the doctor for advice, but before the latter had time to gather his wits, Ikhmenev had already grabbed his hat and dashed off to execute his plan.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” he said to me as he turned to leave, “there’s a nursery close by – very well stocked. They’ve a flower sale on, you can get some real bargains!… Amazing how cheap! Explain it to Anna Andreyevna, or she’ll be upset at the expense… There now… Yes! One more thing, my boy – where are you off to now? You’ve cleared the deck, you’ve finished your work, so why rush back home? Stay the night with us, upstairs, in the garret – remember, like you did before? Your mattress and your bedding – it’s all still there, nothing’s been touched. You’ll sleep the sleep of the just. Aye! Do stay. We’ll wake up nice and early tomorrow, they’ll fetch the flowers, and together we’ll have the whole room decked out by eight o’clock. Natasha will lend us a hand too. Let’s face it, she’s got more taste than you or I… Well, what do you say? Will you stay?”
It was decided I’d stay the night. Ikhmenev saw to everything. The doctor and Masloboyev said goodbye and left. The Ikhmenevs went to bed early, at eleven o’clock. Before leaving, Masloboyev seemed to have something on his mind and wanted to speak to me, but changed his mind. However, after bidding goodnight to the old couple and withdrawing to my garret, I was surprised to see him again. He was sitting at the table waiting for me as he leafed through a book.
“I came back, Vanya, because it’s better to say it all now. Take a seat. You see, it’s all very silly really, I feel like kicking myself in fact…”
“What’s the matter?”
“That bastard Prince of yours will be the end of me. He made my blood boil two weeks ago and I still can’t get over it.”
“What was that? Are you still in touch with the Prince?”
“Well, there you go, ‘What was that?’ – as though something, God knows what, has happened. You, Vanya, are just like my Alexandra Semyonovna and all the rest of the insufferable women folk… Can’t abide them!… A chicken only has to flap its wings and immediately, ‘What was that?’”
“All right, don’t get excited.”
“I’m not, but you must take everything as it comes, not exaggerate matters… that’s what.”
He paused a little as though he still had a bone to pick with me. I did not interrupt him.
“You see, my friend,” he began again, “I hit upon a trail… that is I didn’t hit on anything nor was there any kind of a trail either, it just seemed to me that… that is by putting two and two together it occurred to me that Nelly is… maybe… Well, in a word, the Prince’s legitimate daughter.”
“Really!”
“There you go again, ‘Really!’ It’s just impossible to talk to people like you!” he exclaimed with a frantic gesture of his hand. “Did I say anything definite to you, you feather-head! Did I say, she was a fully fledged legitimate daughter of his? Did I or did I not?”
“Come, come, Masloboyev,” I interrupted him, bursting with excitement. “For Heaven’s sake, keep your hair on and come to the point, will you? I promise I’ll listen. Try to understand how important this is and what the consequences—”
“Consequences, he says, but of what? Where’s the evidence? It’s not that simple, and I’m talking to you in confidence now. As to the reason why I brought all this up – I’ll tell you later. Suffice it to say there is a reason. So shut up and listen, and remember it’s all between you and me…
“You see, these are the facts of the matter. It all goes back to last winter, even before Smith’s death, as soon as the Prince got back from Warsaw. That is, he had started the ball rolling even much earlier, the previous year, but at the time he was trying to find out one thing, and later it turned into something else. The main thing, however, was that his trail had gone cold. It was thirteen years since he’d parted from the Smith woman and dropped her, but all these thirteen years he had kept track of her without letting up. He knew she was living with that Heinrich who cropped up in the conversation today, he knew that Nelly was with her and knew she was ill. In a word he knew everything, only suddenly he lost track of her. And evidently this happened soon after Heinrich’s death, when she decided to move to St Petersburg. In St Petersburg, of course, he’d have soon found her no matter under what name she had returned to Russia. But the trouble was that his foreign agents had fed him false information – they assured him that she was living in some out-of-the-way one-horse town in southern Germany. They themselves got it wrong through sheer incompetence, mistaking someone else for her. This went on for a year or so. After a year had gone by, the Prince began to have his doubts – certain facts had led him even earlier to suspect the woman wasn’t the one. The question then arose: where had the real bird flown? And it occurred to him (though he had nothing concrete to go on) that she might be in St Petersburg. So, while the search went on abroad, he instigated another one here, but apparently didn’t care to make it too official and got in touch with yours truly through someone’s recommendation – there’s a fellow, they said, does things on the side – well, and so on and so forth…
“Well, he put me in the picture, but he muddied the waters, the son of a bitch! His story was full of holes and ambiguities. There were inconsistencies one on top of another, and he kept repeating the same old things, and altering his story as he went along… Well, it was just what you’d expect – trying to be too clever by half. Of course, I went along with all his claptrap – in a word, your humble servant. But, following an old and trusted rule of mine that is yet firmly grounded in Nature’s law (Nature never betrayed anyone), I argued, first – was I given the right piece of information? Secondly – might there not be concealed behind what he had said something else entirely? For in the latter case, as no doubt even you, my dear boy, would readily surmise with that poetic mind of yours, he was short-changing me. Since one piece of information may be priced at one rouble say, but another at four times as much, I’d have had to have been a prize idiot to let go for a rouble what was worth four. I began to delve and dig deeper, and little by little the picture started to emerge – some things I managed to extract from him, others from certain other people; as regards the rest – I worked it out for myself. No doubt you’ll ask me, why exactly did I decide to act in that way? I will reply: only because the Prince appeared to get altogether too ruffled, too afraid of something. Since, if you thought about it, what was there to be afraid of? He took his mistress away from her father, she got pregnant and he abandoned her. What’s so surprising about that? A charming, pleasant prank and nothing more. Hardly anything for the likes of the Prince to be perturbed about! But perturbed he was… This was what aroused my suspicion. I came across some highly interesting clues, my friend, incidentally through Heinrich. He died, of course, but one of his cousins (she’s now here
in St Petersburg married to a baker) who was madly in love with him from way back and who had continued to love him for all of fifteen years, despite her fat Teutonic baker of a hubby and the eight kids she bore him in passing – from this cousin, I repeat, I managed by way of various highly sophisticated stratagems to glean a very important fact. Heinrich, in typical German fashion, had written her letters and had kept a diary, and before his death had sent her some of his papers. The silly woman missed all that was important in his letters and took in only the bits about the moon, about ‘Ach, du lieber Augustin!’ and, I think, about Wieland.* But I obtained important evidence and in the letters came upon fresh leads. For instance, I found out about Mr Smith, about the money his daughter had purloined from him, about the Prince who had got his hands on it. Finally, picking my way through the various pronouncements and allegorical allusions in the letters, I managed to glimpse the real truth – mind you, Vanya, nothing specific, you understand! Heinrich, the silly fool, bless him, was concealing things deliberately and speaking in riddles – well then, what with the riddles and one thing and another, gradually the light began to dawn. You realize: the Prince was married to the Smith woman! But where? How? Precisely when? Abroad or here? The whereabouts of the documents? Not a clue. Take it from me, Vanya old chap, I was tearing my hair with frustration and didn’t stop searching for days on end!
“At last I tracked down old Smithy too, but he went and died on me. Never even had a chance to clap my eyes on him in the flesh. Then, by coincidence, I suddenly discovered that a woman I had been keeping my eye on died on Vasìlevsky Island. I made enquiries and – came upon the right track. I rushed to Vasìlevsky and, if you remember, that’s where I happened to run into you. I found out a heap of things on that occasion. In a word, Nelly too helped me a great deal—”
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