terrible and distasteful to him.
Chapter 22
Alexey Alexandrovitch had forgotten the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, but
she had not forgotten him. At the bitterest moment of his lonely despair she
came to him, and without waiting to be announced, walked straight into his
study. She found him as he was sitting with his head in both hands.
“J’ai forcé la consigne,” she said, walking in with rapid steps and
breathing hard with excitement and rapid exercise. “I have heard all!
Alexey Alexandrovitch! Dear friend!” she went on, warmly squeezing his
hand in both of hers and gazing with her fine pensive eyes into his.
Alexey Alexandrovitch, frowning, got up, and disengaging his hand,
moved her a chair.
“Won’t you sit down, countess? I’m seeing no one because I’m unwell,
countess,” he said, and his lips twitched.
“Dear friend!” repeated Countess Lidia Ivanovna, never taking her eyes
off his, and suddenly her eyebrows rose at the inner corners, describing a
triangle on her forehead, her ugly yellow face became still uglier, but
Alexey Alexandrovitch felt that she was sorry for him and was preparing to
cry. And he too was softened; he snatched her plump hand and proceeded to
kiss it.
“Dear friend!” she said in a voice breaking with emotion. “You ought not
to give way to grief. Your sorrow is a great one, but you ought to find
consolation.”
“I am crushed, I am annihilated, I am no longer a man!” said Alexey
Alexandrovitch, letting go her hand, but still gazing into her brimming eyes.
“My position is so awful because I can find nowhere, I cannot find within
me strength to support me.”
“You will find support; seek it—not in me, though I beseech you to
believe in my friendship,” she said, with a sigh. “Our support is love, that
love that He has vouchsafed us. His burden is light,” she said, with the look
of ecstasy Alexey Alexandrovitch knew so well. “He will be your support
and your succor.”
Although there was in these words a flavor of that sentimental emotion at
her own lofty feelings, and that new mystical fervor which had lately gained
ground in Petersburg, and which seemed to Alexey Alexandrovitch
disproportionate, still it was pleasant to him to hear this now.
“I am weak. I am crushed. I foresaw nothing, and now I understand
nothing.”
“Dear friend,” repeated Lidia Ivanovna.
“It’s not the loss of what I have not now, it’s not that!” pursued Alexey
Alexandrovitch. “I do not grieve for that. But I cannot help feeling
humiliated before other people for the position I am placed in. It is wrong,
but I can’t help it, I can’t help it.”
“Not you it was performed that noble act of forgiveness, at which I was
moved to ecstasy, and everyone else too, but He, working within your
heart,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, raising her eyes rapturously, “and so
you cannot be ashamed of your act.”
Alexey Alexandrovitch knitted his brows, and crooking his hands, he
cracked his fingers.
“One must know all the facts,” he said in his thin voice. “A man’s
strength has its limits, countess, and I have reached my limits. The whole
day I have had to be making arrangements, arrangements about household
matters arising” (he emphasized the word arising) “from my new, solitary
position. The servants, the governess, the accounts…. These pinpricks have
stabbed me to the heart, and I have not the strength to bear it. At dinner …
yesterday, I was almost getting up from the dinner-table. I could not bear
the way my son looked at me. He did not ask me the meaning of it all, but
he wanted to ask, and I could not bear the look in his eyes. He was afraid to
look at me, but that is not all….” Alexey Alexandrovitch would have
referred to the bill that had been brought him, but his voice shook, and he
stopped. That bill on blue paper, for a hat and ribbons, he could not recall
without a rush of self-pity.
“I understand, dear friend,” said Lidia Ivanovna. “I understand it all.
Succor and comfort you will find not in me, though I have come only to aid
you if I can. If I could take from off you all these petty, humiliating cares …
I understand that a woman’s word, a woman’s superintendence is needed.
You will intrust it to me?”
Silently and gratefully Alexey Alexandrovitch pressed her hand.
“Together we will take care of Seryozha. Practical affairs are not my
strong point. But I will set to work. I will be your housekeeper. Don’t thank
me. I do it not from myself….”
“I cannot help thanking you.”
“But, dear friend, do not give way to the feeling of which you spoke—
being ashamed of what is the Christian’s highest glory: he who humbles
himself shall be exalted. And you cannot thank me. You must thank Him,
and pray to Him for succor. In Him alone we find peace, consolation,
salvation, and love,” she said, and turning her eyes heavenwards, she began
praying, as Alexey Alexandrovitch gathered from her silence.
Alexey Alexandrovitch listened to her now, and those expressions which
had seemed to him, if not distasteful, at least exaggerated, now seemed to
him natural and consolatory. Alexey Alexandrovitch had disliked this new
enthusiastic fervor. He was a believer, who was interested in religion
primarily in its political aspect, and the new doctrine which ventured upon
several new interpretations, just because it paved the way to discussion and
analysis, was in principle disagreeable to him. He had hitherto taken up a
cold and even antagonistic attitude to this new doctrine, and with Countess
Lidia Ivanovna, who had been carried away by it, he had never argued, but
by silence had assiduously parried her attempts to provoke him into
argument. Now for the first time he heard her words with pleasure, and did
not inwardly oppose them.
“I am very, very grateful to you, both for your deeds and for your words,”
he said, when she had finished praying.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna once more pressed both her friend’s hands.
“Now I will enter upon my duties,” she said with a smile after a pause, as
she wiped away the traces of tears. “I am going to Seryozha. Only in the
last extremity shall I apply to you.” And she got up and went out.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna went into Seryozha’s part of the house, and
dropping tears on the scared child’s cheeks, she told him that his father was
a saint and his mother was dead.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna kept her promise. She did actually take upon
herself the care of the organization and management of Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s household. But she had not overstated the case when
