FullReads

* * * * *

The next day the ball in the Hall of Nobility took place. Sophia’s father called on me and reminded me of the engagement I had made with his daughter. At ten o’clock I was standing by her side in the middle of a ballroom lighted up by a number of copper lamps, and was preparing to execute the not very complicated steps of the French quadrille to the resounding blare of the military band. Crowds of people were there; the ladies were especially numerous and very pretty; but the first place among them would certainly have been given to my partner, if it had not been for the rather strange, even rather wild look in her eyes. I noticed that she hardly ever blinked; the unmistakable expression of sincerity in her eyes did not make up for what was extraordinary in them. But she had a charming figure, and moved gracefully, though with constraint. When she waltzed, and, throwing herself a little back, bent her slender neck towards her right shoulder, as though she wanted to get away from her partner, nothing more touchingly youthful and pure could be imagined. She was all in white, with a turquoise cross on a black ribbon.

I asked her for a mazurka, and tried to talk to her. But her answers were few and reluctant, though she listened attentively, with the same expression of dreamy absorption which had struck me when I first met her. Not the slightest trace of desire to please, at her age, with her appearance, and the absence of a smile, and those eyes, continually fixed directly upon the eyes of the person speaking to her, though they seemed at the same time to see something else, to be absorbed with something different…. What a strange creature! Not knowing, at last, how to thaw her, I bethought me of telling her of my adventure of the previous day.

* * * * *

She heard me to the end with evident interest, but was not, as I had expected, surprised at what I told her, and merely asked whether he was not called Vassily. I recollected that the old woman had called him ‘Vassinka.’ ‘Yes, his name is Vassily,’ I answered; ‘do you know him?’

‘There is a saintly man living here called Vassily,’ she observed; ‘I wondered whether it was he.’

‘Saintliness has nothing to do with this,’ I remarked; ‘it’s simply the action of magnetism–a fact of interest for doctors and students of science.’

I proceeded to expound my views on the peculiar force called magnetism, on the possibility of one man’s will being brought under the influence of another’s will, and so on; but my explanations–which were, it is true, somewhat confused–seemed to make no impression on her. Sophie listened, dropping her clasped hands on her knees with a fan lying motionless in them; she did not play with it, she did not move her fingers at all, and I felt that all my words rebounded from her as from a statue of stone. She heard them, but clearly she had her own convictions, which nothing could shake or uproot.

‘You can hardly admit miracles!’ I cried.

‘Of course I admit them,’ she answered calmly. ‘And how can one help admitting them? Are not we told in the gospel that who has but a grain of faith as big as a mustard seed, he can remove mountains? One need only have faith–there will be miracles!’

‘It seems there is very little faith nowadays,’ I observed; ‘anyway, one doesn’t hear of miracles.’

‘But yet there are miracles; you have seen one yourself. No; faith is not dead nowadays; and the beginning of faith …’