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“You don’t remember?”
“How not remember, I remember everything, sir…”
“You see, Pavel Pavlovich, I thought it over and explained it to myself in exactly the same way,” Velchaninov said conciliatorily, “and besides, I was somewhat irritable myself yesterday and… overly impatient with you, which I freely admit. Sometimes I don’t feel myself quite well, and your unexpected arrival in the night…”
“Yes, in the night, in the night!” Pavel Pavlovich shook his head as if surprised and disapproving. “And what on earth prompted me! I wouldn’t have come in for anything if you yourself hadn’t opened the door, sir; I’d have gone away. I came to you about a week ago, Alexei Ivanovich, and didn’t find you at home, but afterward I might never have come another time, sir. All the same, I also have a touch of pride, Alexei Ivanovich, though I’m aware that I’m in… such a state. We met in the street, too, but I kept thinking: well, and what if he doesn’t recognize me, what if he turns away, nine years are no joke—so I didn’t dare approach. And yesterday I came trudging from the Petersburg side, and forgot the time, sir. All on account of this” (he pointed to the bottle) “and from emotion, sir. Stupid! very, sir! and if it was a man not like you—because you did come to me even after yesterday, remembering old times—I’d even have lost hope of renewing the acquaintance.”
Velchaninov listened attentively. The man seemed to be speaking sincerely and even with a certain dignity; and yet he had not believed a thing from the very moment he set foot in the place.
“Tell me, Pavel Pavlovich, you’re not alone here, then? Whose girl is it that I just found with you?”
Pavel Pavlovich was even surprised and raised his eyebrows, but the look he gave Velchaninov was bright and pleasant.
“Whose girl, you ask? But that’s Liza!” he said with an affable smile.
“What Liza?” Velchaninov murmured, and something as if shook in him. The impression was too unexpected. Earlier, when he came in and saw Liza, he was surprised, but felt decidedly no presentiment, no special thought in himself.
“Why, our Liza, our daughter Liza!” Pavel Pavlovich went on smiling.
“How, daughter? You mean you and Natalia… and the late Natalia Vassilievna had children?” Velchaninov asked mistrustfully and timidly, somehow in a very soft voice.
“But, how’s that, sir? Ah, my God, but who indeed could you have learned it from? What’s the matter with me! It was after you that God granted us!”
Pavel Pavlovich even jumped up from his chair in some excitement, also as if pleasant, however.
“I never heard a thing,” Velchaninov said and—paled.
“Indeed, indeed, who could you have learned it from, sir!” Pavel Pavlovich repeated in a tenderly slack voice. “We had lost all hope, my late wife and I, you remember it yourself, and suddenly God blessed us, and what came over me then—he alone knows that! exactly a year after you, it seems, or not, not a year after, much less, wait, sir: you left us then, unless memory deceives me, in October or even November?”
“I left T———at the begi
“In September was it? hm… what’s the matter with me?” Pavel Pavlovich was very surprised. “Well, if so, then permit me: you left on the twelfth of September, and Liza was born on the eighth of May, so that makes it September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April—after eight months and something, there, sir! and if only you knew how my late wife…”
“But show me… call her…” Velchaninov babbled in some sort of breaking voice.
“Certainly, sir!” Pavel Pavlovich bustled, interrupting at once what he had intended to say, as altogether u
Perhaps a whole three or four minutes went by; there was quick and rapid whispering in the little room, and the sounds of Liza’s voice were faintly heard. “She’s begging not to be brought out,” Velchaninov thought. They finally came out.
“Here, sir, she’s all embarrassed,” Pavel Pavlovich said, “she’s so bashful, so proud, sir… just like her late mother!”
Liza came out without tears now, her eyes lowered, her father leading her by the hand. She was a tall, slim, and very pretty little girl. She quickly raised her large blue eyes to the guest, looked at him with curiosity, but sullenly, and at once lowered her eyes again. There was in her gaze that child’s seriousness, as when children, left alone with a stranger, go into a corner and from there keep glancing, seriously and mistrustfully, at the new, first-time visitor; but perhaps there was also another thought, as if no longer a child’s—so it seemed to Velchaninov. Her father brought her over to him.
“This nice man used to know Mama, he was our friend, don’t be shy, give him your hand.”
The girl bowed slightly and timidly offered her hand.
“Natalia Vassilievna wanted not to teach her to curtsy in greeting but simply to bow slightly in the English ma
Velchaninov knew he was studying him, but he no longer cared at all about concealing his excitement; he was sitting motionlessly on the chair, holding Liza’s hand in his, and gazing intently at the child. But Liza was very preoccupied with something and, forgetting her hand in the visitor’s hand, would not take her eyes off her father. She listened timorously to everything he said. Velchaninov recognized those large blue eyes at once, but most of all he was struck by the astonishing, remarkably tender whiteness of her face and the color of her hair; these signs were all too significant for him. The shape of the face and the curve of the lips, on the other hand, distinctly resembled Natalia Vassilievna. Pavel Pavlovich meanwhile had long since begun telling something, with extraordinary ardor and feeling, it seemed, but Velchaninov did not hear him at all. He caught only one last phrase:
“… so that you ca
“And Natalia Vassilievna?” asked Velchaninov.
“Natalia Vassilievna?” Pavel Pavlovich’s face twisted. “You know her, remember, sir, she didn’t like to say much, but when she was bidding farewell to her on her deathbed… it all got said there, sir! And I just said to you ‘on her deathbed’; and yet suddenly, the day before she died, she got excited, angry—said they wanted to finish her off with medications, that she just had a simple fever, and that both our doctors knew nothing, and that as soon as Koch (remember, our staff physician, a little old man) came back, she’d be out of bed in two weeks! Not only that, just five hours before passing away, she remembered that we had to be sure and visit her aunt in three weeks, for her name day, on her estate, Liza’s godmother, sir…”
Velchaninov suddenly got up from his chair, still without letting go of Liza’s hand. It seemed to him, incidentally, that in the burning glance the girl directed at her father there was something reproachful.
“She’s not sick?” he asked somehow strangely, hurriedly.
“Seems not, sir, but… our circumstances here came together this way,” Pavel Pavlovich said with rueful concern. “She’s a strange child to begin with, a nervous one, after her mother’s death she was sick for two weeks, with hysterics, sir. Just now we’ve had such weeping, as you came in, sir—do you hear, Liza, do you?—and over what? The whole thing is that I go away and leave her, so it means I no longer love her anymore as I loved her when Mama was alive—that’s what she accuses me of. Why should such a fantasy enter the head of a child, sir, who ought to be playing with toys? But there’s no one here for her to play with.”