FullReads

“Well, and afterwards…. Did you see her?”

“Afterwards … I don’t know, I had no thought to spare for her…. You jumped in …”

David was suddenly roused. “Alyosha, darling, go to her at once, tell her I am all right, that there’s nothing the matter with me. Tomorrow I shall be with them. Go as quickly as you can, brother, for my sake!”

David held out both hands to me…. His red hair, by now dry, stuck up in amusing tufts…. But the softened expression of his face seemed the more genuine for that. I took my cap and went out of the house, trying to avoid meeting my father and reminding him of his promise.

XXI

“Yes, indeed,” I reflected as I walked towards the Latkins’, “how was it that I did not notice Raissa? What became of her? She must have seen….”

And all at once I remembered that the very moment of David’s fall, a terrible piercing shriek had rung in my ears.

“Was not that Raissa? But how was it I did not see her afterwards?”

Before the little house in which Latkin lodged there stretched a waste-ground overgrown with nettles and surrounded by a broken hurdle. I had scarcely clambered over the hurdle (there was no gate anywhere) when the following sight met my eyes: Raissa, with her elbows on her knees and her chin propped on her clasped hands, was sitting on the lowest step in front of the house; she was looking fixedly straight before her; near her stood her little dumb sister with the utmost composure brandishing a little whip, while, facing the steps with his back to me, old Latkin, in torn and shabby drawers and high felt boots, was trotting and prancing up and down, capering and jerking his elbows. Hearing my footsteps he suddenly turned round and squatted on his heels–then at once, skipping up to me, began speaking very rapidly in a trembling voice, incessantly repeating, “Tchoo–tchoo–tchoo!” I was dumbfoundered. I had not seen him for a long time and should not, of course, have known him if I had met him anywhere else. That red, wrinkled, toothless face, those lustreless round eyes and touzled grey hair, those jerks and capers, that senseless halting speech! What did it mean? What inhuman despair was torturing this unhappy creature? What dance of death was this?

“Tchoo–tchoo,” he muttered, wriggling incessantly. “See Vassilyevna here came in tchoo–tchoo, just now…. Do you hear? With a trough on the roof” (he slapped himself on the head with his hand), “and there she sits like a spade, and she is cross-eyed, cross-eyed, like Andryushka; Vassilyevna is cross-eyed” (he probably meant to say dumb), “tchoo! My Vassilyevna is cross-eyed! They are both on the same cork now. You may wonder, good Christians! I have only these two little boats! Eh?”

Latkin was evidently conscious that he was not saying the right thing and made terrible efforts to explain to me what was the matter. Raissa did not seem to hear what her father was saying and the little sister went on lashing the whip.

“Good-bye, diamond-merchant, good-bye, good-bye,” Latkin drawled several times in succession, making a low bow, seeming delighted at having at last got hold of an intelligible word.

My head began to go round.

“What does it all mean?” I asked of an old woman who was looking out of the window of the little house.

“Well, my good gentleman,” she answered in a sing-song voice, “they say some man–the Lord only knows who–went and drowned himself and she saw it. Well, it gave her a fright or something; when she came home she seemed all right though; but when she sat down on the step–here, she has been sitting ever since like an image, it’s no good talking to her. I suppose she has lost her speech, too. Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”

“Good-bye, good-bye,” Latkin kept repeating, still with the same bow.

I went up to Raissa and stood directly facing her.