“All right then, we’ll get to the bottom of this thing tomorrow morning,” Nanny decided. And in anticipation of morning she locked Feklusha up in a dark closet, from which her sobbing could be heard for a long while afterward. The next morning, the investigation began.
Maria Vasilievna was a seamstress who had been living in our house for many years. She was not a serf but a freewoman and enjoyed greater respect than the rest of the servants. She had her own room, in which she dined on food from the master’s table. She held herself very proudly in general and kept apart from all the other servants. She was highly regarded in our house because she was such a complete mistress of her craft. People said of her that she had “golden hands.” She was, I imagine, getting on toward forty by then. Her face was thin and sickly-looking, with huge dark eyes. She was homely, but I recall that the grownups always said of her the she looked distingue, that “you’d never take her for an ordinary seamstress.” She dressed immaculately and kept her room in perfect order, even with certain pretensions to elegance. There were always pots of geraniums on her windowsill, her walls were hung with cheap pictures and, on the shelf in the corner, various porcelain articles were set out which I highly admired as a child—a swan with a gilt beak, a lady’s slipper painted all over with pink flowers.
We children found Maria Vasilievna especially interesting because there was a story connected with her. In her youth she had been a beautiful, strapping young woman, a serf in the household of a certain landowner’s widow who had a grown son, an Army officer. This son came home on leave and presented Maria Vasilievna with a few silver coins. By ill luck the mistress entered the serf-girls’ room at that very moment, and she saw the money in Maria Vasilievna’s hands.
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“Where did you get it?” she asked, and Maria Vasilievna took such a fright that instead of answering, she swallowed the coins. She became ill at once. Her face turned black, and she fell choking on the floor. They barely managed to save her life. She was ill for a very long time, and her beauty and freshness vanished forever. Shortly after this episode the old mistress died, and the young master gave Maria Vasilievna her freedom.
We children were entranced by this story of the swallowed coins, and we often hung around Maria Vasilievna begging her to tell us how it had all happened. She used to visit the nursery rather often, even though she and Nanny were not on the best of terms. And we too loved to run to her room, especially at twilight, when she willy-nilly had to put her sewing aside. She would sit down by the window then and, leaning her head on her hand, would begin singing various sentimental, old-fashioned romances in a plaintive voice: “Among the Even Plains” or “Black Flower, Sad Flower.”
Her singing was terribly dismal but I loved listening to it, even though it always made me feel sad afterwards. Sometimes it would be interrupted by terrible attacks of coughing, which had been tormenting her for many years and which threatened to tear her dry, flat chest apart.
When, on the morning after the incident with Feklusha, Nanny asked Maria Vasilievna, “Is it true that you gave the girl some jam?” the seamstress, as might have been expected, responded with an expression of astonishment.
“Whatever have you got into your head, Naniushka?” she answered in an offended tone. “Would I pamper the brat like that? Why, I don’t even have any jam for myself!”
So now it was all clear. And yet Feklusha’s insolence was so great that she went on insisting she was innocent in spite of the seamstress’s categorical assertion.
“Maria Vasilievna! As God is watching—did you forget? You called me last night yourself, yes, you did, you praised me for heating up the irons, and you gave me the jam,” she kept on repeating in a desperate voice breaking with sobs, and shaking all over as if in a fever.
“You must be sick and raving, Feklusha,” Maria Vasilievna answered calmly, her pale, bloodless face betraying no trace of emotion. And now neither Nanny nor anyone else in the household had any further doubt of Fek-lusha’s guilt. The culprit was taken away and locked into a closet far from all the other rooms.
“Sit there without food or water, you nasty thing, until you confess!” Nanny said, turning the key in the heavy lock.
This event, it goes without saying, raised a commotion all through the house. Every one of the servants thought up some pretext to come running to
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Nanny to discuss the interesting new development. There was a regular club meeting going on in our nursery all day.
Feklusha had no father. Her mother lived in the village and came to our house to help our laundress with the washing. Naturally, she soon found out what had happened and came at a run to the nursery with noisy and profuse complaints and protestations that her daughter was innocent. But Nanny was quick to quiet her down. “Don’t make such a big noise, lady! Just wait a little bit, and we’ll get to the bottom of things, we’ll find out where that daughter of yours stashed the stolen goods!” she said so harshly and with such a meaningful look that the poor laundress lost her courage and took herself off.
Popular opinion was decidedly against Feklusha. “If she snitched the jam that means she snitched the rest of the stuff too,” everyone said. The general indignation against the girl ran particularly high because these mysterious and repeated disappearances had been hanging like a heavy burden over all the servants for many weeks. Each one feared in his heart that he might be suspected, God forbid. Therefore the unmasking of the thief was a relief to everyone.
But just the same, Feklusha would not confess.
Nanny went to visit her prisoner several times in the course of the day, but she kept stubbornly repeating her refrain, “I didn’t steal anything. God will punish Maria Vasilievna for harming a fatherless child.”
Toward evening my mother came into the nursery.
“Aren’t you being a trifle too harsh with the miserable girl, Nanny?” she said with some concern. “How can you leave a child without food all day?”
But Nanny would not hear of clemency. “What are you thinking of, my lady? To take pity on such a one as that! Didn’t she almost manage to bring honest people under suspicion, the low, nasty thing!” she asserted with such conviction that my mother was unable to go on insisting and left without lightening the young criminal’s lot by one iota.
The next day came. And Feklusha still refused to confess. Her judges were already beginning to feel a certain uneasiness when suddenly Nanny went to see our mother at dinnertime, with an expression of triumph on her face.
“Our little bird has sung!” she said happily.
“In that case,” Mama very naturally asked, “where are the stolen things?”
“She still won’t tell us where she hid them, the nasty thing!” Nanny replied. “She prattles all kinds of rubbish. She says, ‘I forgot.’ But just let her sit under lock and key for another hour or two—and maybe it’ll all come back to her!”
And indeed Feklusha made a full confession toward evening, describing in great detail how she had stolen all these articles with the object of selling them later. Since no convenient occasion had presented itself, however, she
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had kept them hidden for a long time under the thick matting in the corner of her little closet. But then, when she saw that the disappearances had been noticed and that the thief was being hunted in earnest, she got scared. First she thought she would simply put the things back where they belonged, but then she was afraid to try that. So she wrapped them all up in a bundle inside her apron and threw them into a deep pond on the other side of our estate.
Everybody wanted so desperately to find some solution to this painful affair that Feklusha’s tale was not subjected to very close scrutiny. After some lamentation over the needless loss of the articles, all satisfied themselves with her explanation.
The culprit was released from
detention and a short, just sentence was pronounced over her. It was decided to give her a good hiding and then send her back to the village to her mother. Despite her tears and her mother’s protests, this sentence was carried out immediately. Afterwards another girl was sent to serve the nursery in Feklusha’s place.
Several weeks passed. Little by little order was restored in the household, and everyone began to forget what had happened. But then one evening, when everything was quiet in the house and Nanny, having put us to bed, was getting ready to retire for the night herself, the door to the nursery opened softly. The laundress Aleksandra, Feklusha’s mother, was standing there. She alone had stubbornly resisted admitting the obvious and continued to maintain without surcease that her daughter had been “harmed for nothing.” There had already been several strong altercations with Nanny on this point, until Nanny finally gave up and forbade her to come into the nursery any more, deciding that it was useless to try to reason with a stupid peasant woman.
But this time Aleksandra had such a strange and meaningful expression on her face that Nanny took one look at her and immediately realized that she was not there to repeat her usual empty complaints, but that some truly new and important event had occurred. “Now you just look here, Naniushka— look what a thing I am going to show you,” Aleksandra said mysteriously. And, looking cautiously around the room to make sure that no outsider was there, she drew out from under her apron and handed over to Nanny a mother-of-pearl penknife—our beloved knife, that very knife supposedly among the stolen loot Feklusha had thrown into the pond.
When she saw the knife, Nanny spread her hands helplessly. “Wherever did you find it?” she asked.
“That’s just the point—where I found it,” Aleksandra slowly drawled out her answer. She said nothing for a few seconds, evidently taking pleasure in Nanny’s discomfiture. Finally she said ponderously, “That gardener of ours, Filip Matveevich, gave me his old pants to darn, and I found the knife inside the pocket.”
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This Filip Matveevich was a German who held one of the leading positions in the servants’ aristocracy. He received a rather large salary, was a bachelor, and although to the unprejudiced eye might have seemed no more than a fat German, no longer young and rather repulsive with his typical reddish squared-off sidewhiskers, still our female servants regarded him as a handsome fellow. Hearing Aleksandra’s strange testimony, Nanny couldn’t take it in for the first minute or two.
“But how could Filip Matveevich get hold of the children’s penknife?” she asked in confusion. “After all, he practically never goes into the nursery! And anyway, how could it be possible that a man like Filip Matveevich would take to stealing things from the children?”
Aleksandra gazed at Nanny in silence with a long, mocking stare. Then she bent down right to her ear, and whispered several sentences in which the name of Maria Vasilievna was repeated more than once. Little by little a ray of light began to penetrate into Nanny’s mind.
“Tut, tut, tut . . . so that’s how it is!” she said, waving her hands helplessly. “Akh, you humble one, you! Oh, you no-good woman, you!” she exclaimed, filled with indignation. “Just you wait, we’ll make you come clean!”
It turned out (as I was later told) that Aleksandra had been nurturing suspicions of Maria Vasilievna for a long time and had observed that the seamstress was carrying on a secret love affair with the gardener.
“Well, then,” she told Nanny, “judge for yourself. Would a fine lad like Filip Matveevich love an old woman like that just for nothing? She was probably buying him with presents.”
And indeed she soon became convinced that Maria Vasilievna was giving the gardener both gifts and money. Where then was she getting these things? And so she set up a regular system of espionage over the unsuspecting Maria Vasilievna. The penknife was only the final link in a long chain of evidence.
The story was turning out to be more fascinating and diverting than would have been possible to predict. Within Nanny had suddenly awakened that passionate detective instinct which so often slumbers in old women’s hearts and incites them to rush fervently into investigating all sorts of complicated affairs which do not concern them in the least. And in this particular instance, Nanny’s zeal was spurred even more because she felt that she had deeply wronged Feklusha, and she burned with the desire to atone post-haste. Right then and there she and Aleksandra formed a defensive and offensive union against Maria Vasilievna.
Since both women were filled with moral certainty of the seamstress’s guilt, they resolved upon an extreme measure: to get hold of her keys and (seizing an opportunity when she would be away) to open up her trunk.
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The thought is sister to the act. Alas! Their assumptions, as it turned out, were entirely correct. The contents of the trunk fully confirmed their suspicions and proved beyond any possible doubt that the hapless Maria Vasilievna was the perpetrator of all the petty thefts which had caused so much commotion during the past weeks.
“What a low, nasty thing she is! She even palmed the jam off on poor Fek-lusha to take attention away from herself and throw all the blame on the girl! Oh, the shameless woman! A little child, and she has no pity for her!” said Nanny in disgust and horror, completely forgetting her own role in the episode and how her own cruelty had forced poor Feklusha to give false testimony against herself.
One can picture the indignation of all the servants and of the household in general when the appalling truth was revealed and made known to all.
At first, in the heat of his anger, our father threatened to send for the police and have Maria Vasilievna put in prison. But in view of the fact that she was already a middle-aged, sickly woman who had lived in our house for so many years, he soon softened and decided merely to dismiss her and send her back to Petersburg.
One might think that Maria Vasilievna herself should have been satisfied with this sentence. She was such an expert needlewoman that she need never have feared going hungry in Petersburg. And what kind of position could she have held in our household after such an episode? All the rest of the servants had previously envied and disliked her for her pride and arrogance. She was aware of this and knew also how cruelly she would have to atone for her former grandeur.
Strange as it may seem, however, she was not only unhappy with my father’s decision but, on the contrary, started begging his mercy. Some kind of feline attachment to our house came to the fore, perhaps, to her old familiar place in the world.
“I don’t have long to live—I feel that I shall die soon,” she said. “How can I go and live among strangers before I die?”
But Nanny, reminiscing with me many years later, when I was quite grown up, had an entirely different explanation. “It was just more than she could stand to leave us, because Filip Matveevich was staying on, and she knew that once she went away she would never see him again. If she, who lived her whole life as an honest woman, could do such a shabby thing in her old age, then she evidently loved him so much she couldn’t stand it!”
As far as Filip Matveevich was concerned, he managed to come out of the water quite dry. It may be that he was really telling the truth when he maintained that in accepting presents from Maria Vasilievna he had no knowledge of where they had come from. In any case, since it was difficult to find a good
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gardener and our garden and vegetable plot could not be left to the whim of fate, it was decided to keep him on, at least for a time.
I do not know whether Nanny was right about the reasons impelling Maria Vasilievna to cling so stubbornly to her place in our house. Be that as it may, she went to my father on the day designated for her departure and threw herself sobbing at his feet.
“Better to let me stay on without pay, punish me like a serf—but please don’t drive me away!”
My father was touched by this deep attachment
to our household. But, on the other hand, he feared that if he forgave Maria Vasilievna, the rest of the servants would be demoralized. He was in great perplexity as to what to do when suddenly a plan came into his head.
“Listen here,” he told her. “Stealing is a great sin, but I could have forgiven you anyway if your guilt consisted only in your thievery. But an innocent girl suffered because of what you did. Just think of it! On account of you Feklusha was subjected to such shame—a public whipping! For her sake, I cannot forgive you. If you truly wish to stay on with us, I can give my consent only on one condition: that you beg Feklusha’s pardon and kiss her hand in the presence of all the servants. If you’re willing to go that far, all right then—stay here!”
No one believed that Maria Vasilievna would consent to such a condition. How could she, a proud one like her, apologize publicly to a serf and kiss her hand? But suddenly, to everyone’s astonishment, Maria Vasilievna agreed to do it.
Within an hour after her decision all the household was assembled in the entrance hall of our house to view the curious spectacle: Maria Vasilievna kissing Feklusha’s hand. My father had demanded precisely that: that the event should take place with solemnity and in public. There was a large crowd. Everyone wanted to watch. The master and mistress were there too, and we children also asked permission to come.
I will never forget the scene which followed. Feklusha, embarrassed by the honor which had so unexpectedly fallen to her lot and fearful, perhaps, that Maria Vasilievna might avenge herself later for this compulsory humiliation, went up to the master and begged him to relieve her and Maria Vasilievna of the hand-kissing.
The Russian Century Page 6