“You see what sort of news we have,” the mother spread her arms, pointing at her daughters, “like clouds coming over; the clouds pass, and we have our music again. Before, when we were military, we had many such guests. I’m not comparing, dear father. If someone loves someone, let him love him. The deacon’s wife came once and said: ‘Alexander Alexandrovich is a man of excellent soul, but Nastasya,’ she said, ‘Nastasya Petrovna is a hellcat.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we all have our likes, and you’re a little pile, but you smell vile.’ And you need to be kept in your place,’ she said. ‘Ah, you black sword,’ I said to her, ‘who are you to teach me?”I’m letting in fresh air,’ she said, ‘yours is foul.”Go and ask all the gentlemen officers,’ I told her, ‘whether the air in me is foul or otherwise.’ And from that time on it’s been weighing on my heart, and the other day I was sitting here, like now, and saw the same general come in who visited us in Holy Week: ‘Tell me, now, Your Excellency,’ I said to him, ‘can a noble lady let in free air?”Yes,’ he said to me, ‘you should open the window or the door, because that the air in here is not clean.’ And it’s always like that! What’s wrong with my air? The dead smell even worse. ‘I’m not spoiling your air,’ I tell them, ‘I’ll order some shoes and go away.’ My dear ones, my darlings, don’t reproach your own mother! Nikolai llyich, dear father, don’t I please you? I have only one thing left—that Ilyushechka comes home from school and loves me. Yesterday he brought me an apple. Forgive me, my dears, forgive me, my darlings, forgive your own mother, I’m quite lonely, and why is my air so offensive to you?”
And the poor woman suddenly burst into sobs, tears streamed from her eyes. The captain quickly leaped to her side.
“Mama, mama, darling, enough, enough! You’re not lonely. Everyone loves you, everyone adores you!” and he again began kissing both her hands and tenderly caressing her face with his palms; and taking a napkin, he suddenly began wiping the tears from her face. Alyosha even fancied that there were tears shining in his eyes, too. “Well, sir, did you see? Did you hear, sir?” he suddenly turned somehow fiercely to Alyosha, pointing with his hand to the poor, feebleminded woman.
“I see and hear,” murmured Alyosha. “Papa, papa! How can you ... with him ... stop it, papa!” the boy suddenly cried, rising in his bed and looking at his father with burning eyes.
“Enough of your clowning, showing off your stupid antics, which never get anywhere...!” Varvara Nikolaevna shouted from the same corner, quite furious now, and even stamping her foot.
“You are perfectly justified, this time, to be so good as to lose your temper, Varvara Nikolaevna, and I shall hasten to satisfy you. Put on your hat, Alexei Fyodorovich, and I’ll take my cap—and let us go, sir. I have something serious to tell you, only outside these walls. This sitting girl here—she’s my daughter, sir, Nina Nikolaevna, I forgot to introduce her to you—is God’s angel in the flesh ... who has flown down to us mortals ... if you can possibly understand that ...”
“He’s twitching all over, as if he had cramps,” Varvara Nikolaevna went on indignantly.
“And this one who is now stamping her little foot and has just denounced me as a clown—she, too, is God’s angel in the flesh, sir, and rightly calls me names. Let us go, Alexei Fyodorovich, we must bring this to an end, sir...”
And seizing Alyosha’s arm, he led him from the room and straight outside.
Chapter 7:
“The air is fresh, sir, and in my castle it is indeed not clean, not in any sense. Let’s walk slowly, sir. I should very much like to enlist your interest, sir.”
“And I, too, have some extraordinary business with you ... .”Alyosha remarked, “only I don’t know how to begin.”
“Didn’t I know that you must have some business with me, sir? Without some business, you would never come to call on me. Unless you came, indeed, only to complain about the boy, sir? But that is improbable. By the way, about the boy, sir: I couldn’t explain everything in there, but here I will describe that scene to you. You see, the whiskbroom used to be thicker, sir, just a week ago—I’m referring to my beard, sir; my beard is nicknamed a whiskbroom, mostly by the schoolboys, sir. Well, and so, sir, your good brother, Dmitri Fyodorovich, dragged me by my beard that day, he dragged me out of the tavern to the square, and just then the schoolboys were getting out of school, and Ilyusha with them. When he saw me in such a state, sir, he rushed up to me: ‘Papa,’ he cried, ‘papa! ‘ He caught hold of me, hugged me, tried to pull me away, crying to my offender: ‘Let go, let go, it’s my papa, my papa, forgive him’—that was what he cried: ‘Forgive him!’ And he took hold of him, too, with his little hands, and kissed his hand, that very hand, sir ... I remember his face at that moment, I have not forgotten it, sir, and I will not forget it...!”
