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“Whose shade?” Velchaninov asked, after a brief pause.
“Natalia Vassilievna’s, sir.”
Velchaninov stood on the rug and himself peeked through the hall into the other room, the door to which was always left open. There were no curtains on the windows there, only blinds, and so it was much brighter.
“There’s nothing in that room, and you are drunk—lie down!” Velchaninov said, lay down, and wrapped himself in the blanket. Pavel Pavlovich did not say a word and lay down as well.
“And have you ever seen a shade before?” Velchaninov suddenly asked, some ten minutes later.
“I think I did once, sir,” Pavel Pavlovich responded weakly and also after a while. Then silence fell again.
Velchaninov could not have said for certain whether he slept or not, but about an hour went by—and suddenly he turned over again: was it some kind of rustling that awakened him?—he did not know that either, but it seemed to him that amid the perfect darkness something was standing over him, white, not having reached him yet, but already in the middle of the room. He sat up in bed and stared for a whole minute.
“Is that you, Pavel Pavlovich?” he said in a weakened voice. His own voice, sounding suddenly in the silence and darkness, seemed somehow strange to him.
There came no reply, but there was no longer any doubt that someone was standing there.
“Is that you… Pavel Pavlovich?” he repeated more loudly, even so loudly that if Pavel Pavlovich had been peacefully asleep in his bed, he could not have failed to wake up and reply.
But again there came no reply, and instead it seemed to him that this white and barely distinguishable figure moved still closer to him. Then a strange thing happened: something in him suddenly as if came unhinged, just as earlier, and he shouted with all his might in the most absurd, enraged voice, choking on almost every word:
“If you, you drunken buffoon—dare merely to think—that you can—frighten me—I’ll turn to the wall, cover my head with the blanket, and not turn around once during the whole night—to prove to you how greatly I value—even if you stand there till morning… buffoonishly… and I spit on you!”
And, having spat furiously in the direction of the presumed Pavel Pavlovich, he suddenly turned to the wall, wrapped himself, as he had said, in the blanket, and as if froze in that position without moving. A dead silence fell. Whether the shade was moving closer or remained where it was—he could not tell, but his heart was pounding—pounding—pounding… At least five full minutes went by; and suddenly, from two steps away, came the weak, quite plaintive voice of Pavel Pavlovich:
“Alexei Ivanovich, I got up to look for…” (and he named a most necessary household object). “I didn’t find it there where I was… I wanted to look quietly by your bed, sir.”
“Then why were you silent… when I shouted!” Velchaninov asked in a faltering voice, after waiting for about half a minute.
“I was frightened, sir. You shouted so… I got frightened, sir.”
“It’s in the corner to the left, toward the door, in the cupboard, light a candle…”
“I’ll do without a candle, sir…” Pavel Pavlovich said humbly, going to the corner. “Do forgive me, Alexei Ivanovich, for troubling you so… I suddenly felt so drunk, sir…”
But the man made no reply. He went on lying face to the wall and lay like that for the whole night without turning once. Did he really want so much to keep his word and show his scorn?—He himself did not know what was happening to him; his nervous disorder turned, finally, almost into delirium, and for a long time he could not fall asleep. Waking up the next morning past nine o’clock, he suddenly gave a start and sat up in bed as if he had been pushed—Pavel Pavlovich was no longer in the room! All that was left was an empty, unmade bed, but the man himself had slipped away at daybreak.
“I just knew it!” Velchaninov slapped himself on the forehead.
X
AT THE CEMETERY
The doctor’s apprehensions proved justified, and Liza suddenly grew worse—much worse than Velchaninov and Klavdia Petrovna could have imagined the day before. In the morning Velchaninov found the sick girl still conscious, though all burning with fever; he insisted later that she smiled at him and even gave him her hot little hand. Whether this was true or he unwittingly invented it for himself as a consolation—he had no time to check; by nightfall the sick girl was already unconscious, and so it continued throughout her illness. On the tenth day after her move to the country, she died.
This was a sorrowful time for Velchaninov; the Pogoreltsevs even feared for him. The greater part of these difficult days he lived with them. In the very last days of Liza’s illness, he spent whole hours sitting alone somewhere in a corner, apparently not thinking of anything; Klavdia Petrovna would come over to distract him, but he responded little, at times clearly finding it burdensome to talk with her. Klavdia Petrovna had not even expected that “all this would produce such an impression” on him. Most of all he was distracted by the children; with them he even laughed at times; but almost every hour he would get up from his chair and go on tiptoe to look at the sick girl. At times it seemed to him that she recognized him. He had no more hope for recovery than anyone else, yet he would not go far from the room in which Liza lay dying, and usually sat in the room next door.
A couple of times, however, during these days as well, he suddenly displayed an extreme activity: he would suddenly get up, rush to Petersburg to see doctors, invite the most famous ones, gather consultations. The second, and last, of these consultations took place on the eve of the sick girl’s death. Some three days prior to that, Klavdia Petrovna had talked insistently with Velchaninov about the necessity of finally discovering the whereabouts of Mr. Trusotsky: “In case of a calamity, Liza could not even be buried without him.” Velchaninov mumbled that he would write him. Then old Pogoreltsev a
Finally, Liza died, on a beautiful summer evening, together with the setting sun, and only then did Velchaninov seem to recover himself. When the dead girl was prepared, dressed in a festive white dress from one of Klavdia Petrovna’s daughters, and laid out on the table in the drawing room,9 with flowers in her little folded hands—he went up to Klavdia Petrovna and, flashing his eyes, a
He knew where to find Pavel Pavlovich; he had gone to Petersburg not for doctors only. At times during those days it had seemed to him that if he were to bring her father to the dying Liza, she, on hearing his voice, would recover herself; then, like a desperate man, he would start looking for him. Pavel Pavlovich’s quarters were still in the rooming house, but there was no point even in asking there. “He doesn’t spend the night or even come home for three days in a row,” Marya Sysoevna reported, “and when by chance he comes back drunk, he spends less than an hour and then drags himself off again—quite haywire.” A floorboy from the Pokrovsky Hotel told Velchaninov, among other things, that Pavel Pavlovich once used to visit some girls on Voznesensky Prospect. Velchaninov immediately found the girls. Showered with gifts and treats, these persons at once remembered their visitor, chiefly by the crape on his hat, and straight away denounced him, of course, for not coming to them anymore. One of them, Katya, undertook “to find Pavel Pavlovich whenever you like, because he never leaves Mashka Prostakova, and there’s no bottom to his money, and this Mashka isn’t Prostakova, she’s Shystakova, and she’s been in the hospital, and if she, Katya, wanted to, she could pack her off to Siberia at once, she’d only have to say the word.” Katya, however, did not find him that time, but gave a firm promise for the next time. It was in her assistance that Velchaninov now placed his hopes.