FullReads

XIII

I remember I happened to be present at a conversation with David over the fence, on the very day of her mother’s death.

“Mother died this morning at daybreak,” she said, first looking round with her dark expressive eyes and then fixing them on the ground.

“Cook undertook to get a coffin cheap but she’s not to be trusted; she may spend the money on drink, even. You might come and look after her, Davidushka, she’s afraid of you.”

“I will come,” answered David. “I will see to it. And how’s your father?”

“He cries; he says: ‘you must spoil me, too.’ Spoil must mean bury. Now he has gone to sleep.” Raissa suddenly gave a deep sigh. “Oh, Davidushka, Davidushka!” She passed her half-clenched fist over her forehead and her eyebrows, and the action was so bitter … and as sincere and beautiful as all her actions.

“You must take care of yourself, though,” David observed; “you haven’t slept at all, I expect…. And what’s the use of crying? It doesn’t help trouble.”

“I have no time for crying,” answered Raissa.

“That’s a luxury for the rich, crying,” observed David.

Raissa was going, but she turned back.

“The yellow shawl’s being sold, you know; part of mother’s dowry. They are giving us twelve roubles; I think that is not much.”

“It certainly is not much.”

“We shouldn’t sell it,” Raissa said after a brief pause, “but you see we must have money for the funeral.”

“Of course you must. Only you mustn’t spend money at random. Those priests are awful! But I say, wait a minute. I’ll come. Are you going? I’ll be with you soon. Goodbye, darling.”

“Good-bye, Davidushka, darling.”

“Mind now, don’t cry!”

“As though I should cry! It’s either cooking the dinner or crying. One or the other.”

“What! does she cook the dinner?” I said to David, as soon as Raissa was out of hearing, “does she do the cooking herself?”

“Why, you heard that the cook has gone to buy a coffin.”

“She cooks the dinner,” I thought, “and her hands are always so clean and her clothes so neat…. I should like to see her there at work in the kitchen…. She is an extraordinary girl!”

I remember another conversation at the fence. That time Raissa brought with her her little deaf and dumb sister. She was a pretty child with immense, astonished-looking eyes and a perfect mass of dull, black hair on her little, head (Raissa’s hair, too, was black and hers, too, was without lustre). Latkin had by then been struck down by paralysis.

“I really don’t know what to do,” Raissa began. “The doctor has written a prescription. We must go to the chemist’s; and our peasant (Latkin had still one serf) has brought us wood from the village and a goose. And the porter has taken it away, ‘you are in debt to me,’ he said.”

“Taken the goose?” asked David.

“No, not the goose. He says it is an old one; it is no good for anything; he says that is why our peasant brought it us, but he is taking the wood.”

“But he has no right to,” exclaimed David.

“He has no right to, but he has taken it. I went up to the garret, there we have got a very, very old trunk. I began rummaging in it and what do you think I found? Look!”

She took from under her kerchief a rather large field glass in a copper setting, covered with morocco, yellow with age. David, as a connoisseur of all sorts of instruments, seized upon it at once.

“It’s English,” he pronounced, putting it first to one eye and then to the other. “A marine glass.”

“And the glasses are perfect,” Raissa went on. “I showed it to father; he said, ‘Take it and pawn it to the diamond-merchant’! What do you think, would they give us anything for it? What do we want a telescope for? To look at ourselves in the looking-glass and see what beauties we are? But we haven’t a looking-glass, unluckily.”