Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog (10 page)

Meanwhile Pelagia examined the other people who were in the bedroom with a surreptitious sideways glance.

The young man and young woman were probably the widow’s grandson and granddaughter. His name was Pyotr Georgievich, and she was Naina Georgievna, both with the surname Telianov, from their father. They were surely the ones who would benefit most from the will.

Pelagia tried to imagine this man with clear eyes and dark hair, who was shifting from one foot to the other, in the act of sprinkling poison into the poor dogs’ food. She failed. Nor did she wish to think evil of the young woman, who was a striking beauty—tall and haughtily majestic, with the corners of her mouth turned down capriciously.

There was also a man in a jacket and Russian shirt, with a simple, open face, whose pince-nez and short little reddish-brown beard suited him remarkably badly. It was not clear who he was.

“His Grace has sent you a letter,” said Pelagia, holding the missive out to Tatishcheva.

“Why didn’t you say so? Give it to me.”

Marya Afanasievna took a closer look at the nun. Evidently taking note of her spectacles and her composed demeanor, she rephrased her request.

“Let me have it, mother, I’ll read it. And you all go and have supper. Stop hanging around me pretending to be concerned. Let the holy mother have supper, too. Tanya, you make up a room for her, the corner room where that Spasyonny stayed just recently. That will be quite neat, his name meaning ‘saved’ and her being saved too because she’s a bride of Christ. If Vladimir Lvovich comes as he threatened to, put that Spasyonny in the empty wing. He won’t be missed, the repulsive man.”

AS SHE SETTLED Pelagia into the bright, tidy room on the ground floor with a window looking out onto the garden, the garrulous Tanya told the guest about this person Spasyonny who had stayed here earlier. Pelagia knew about Spasyonny (how could she not have known about him, when in recent weeks all the talk in the episcopal see had been of nothing but the synodical inspector and his associates?), but she listened attentively. Then Tanya moved on almost immediately to talk about Bubentsov’s Circassian—how frightening he looked, but how he was still a human being after all and really all he wanted was a kind word.

“When I met him in the yard that evening, it made me shudder. And he looked at me with those black eyes of his, and suddenly grabbed me right here. I went weak all over, and he…” Tanya said, holding a half-fluffed pillow in her hands and speaking in a half-whisper, then she suddenly recollected who she was talking to. “Oh, holy mother, what am I saying! You can’t listen to such things, you’re a nun.”

Pelagia smiled at the sweet girl. She washed after her journey and cleaned her habit with a damp brush to remove the dust of the road. Then she stood at the window for a while, gazing out into the garden. It was quite wonderfully lovely, even though it was neglected. Or perhaps it was lovely because it was neglected?

Suddenly she heard voices somewhere nearby. First a man’s voice, muffled and choking with powerful emotion: “I swear I will do it! After this it will be impossible for you to live here in any case! I shall make you go away!”

The number of amorous speeches that Sister Pelagia had heard in her life was very few, but still it was enough for her to tell immediately that this was the voice of a man madly in love.

“If I do go away, then it won’t be with you,” said a girl’s voice, even nearer than the first one. “And we’ll see whether I go away at all.”

You poor thing, Pelagia thought about the man, she doesn’t love you.

Beginning to feel curious, she gently pushed the window frame open and cautiously stuck her head out.

Her room was at the end, and the corner of the house was just to the right of the window. The girl was standing right on the very corner, only half-visible from the back. From the pink dress Pelagia realized immediately that it was Naina Georgievna. But it was a pity that the man was out of sight around the corner.

Just at that moment she heard a bell ring—the summons to supper.

THE TABLE WAS laid on the spacious veranda, with a balustrade and steps leading down into the garden with its trees, beyond which she could divine the wide expanse of the River, bearing its waters past the high bank at Drozdovka.

Pelagia saw quite a number of new faces and could not immediately make out who was who, but the meal and the tea-drinking that followed it lasted for a long time, so that little by little everything became clear.

In addition to those already known to the nun (the brother and sister, the photographic artist Arkadii Sergeevich Poggio, and the neighboring landowner Kirill Nifontovich Krasnov), also sitting at the table were the man in a Russian shirt she had seen earlier (that same one, with the plain yet somehow attractive appearance), another bearded man with a face like a peasant’s, but wearing a tweed suit, and a shriveled creature of the female sex in a clumsy hat decorated with imitation paradise apples.

The plain-looking man turned to be the manager of the estate, Stepan Trofimovich Shiryaev. The bearded man in tweed was Donat Abramovich Sytnikov, a well-known rich businessman from a long line of Zavolzhie Old Believers, who had recently bought a summer house quite nearby. In total contrast, not only was the shriveled creature not from Zavolzhie, she was not even Russian, and her name was Miss Wrigley. What role she filled at Drozdovka was not entirely clear, but it seemed most likely that Miss Wrigley belonged to that extensive estate of French, English, and German women who have raised their Russian charges, taught them what they were able, and become permanent residents under their masters’ roofs because it has simply become impossible to imagine the family without them.

At the beginning of supper an unpleasant shock awaited Sister Pelagia.

Marya Afanasievna came out to dine, leading Zakidai and Zakusai on a leash and leaning on Tanya’s shoulder. The bishop’s letter had evidently brought the general’s widow some relief, but her mood was not in the least improved. His Grace always said that what some sick people needed was not to have medicines stuffed into them, but to be made thoroughly angry. We must assume that this was the method he had applied in this particular case.

Father and son were led off to one side, where a bowl of marrow bones stood waiting for the former and a bowl of goose liver for the latter. There was a sound of crunching and champing and the two rumps, large and small, began rhythmically wagging their white stumpy tails.

“Tell me, Miss Wrigley, why are you wearing a conservatory on your hat?” Tatishcheva asked, looking around the table, clearly in search of someone with whom to find fault. “A fine ingénue she makes. But then she’s a rich heiress now, isn’t she? Time to be thinking of fiancés.”

Pelagia pricked up her ears and examined the Englishwoman more closely than before. She noted the vivacity of her expression, the thinness of her lips, the cunning wrinkles around her eyes.

Miss Wrigley was not at all cowed by this sudden attack and parried the thrust without the slightest servility, speaking Russian with hardly any accent at all.

“It is never too late to be thinking of fiancés. Even at your age, Marya Afanasievna. You spend so much time kissing that Zakidai of yours, you really ought to have legitimized your relations long ago. What kind of example is that to set little Naina?”

From the laugh that ran rapidly around the table, Pelagia realized that their hostess’s bark was worse than her bite and her tyranny more appearance than substance.

Having been rebuffed by the Englishwoman, the general’s widow turned her wrathful gaze on the nun.

“A fine bishop you have, and I a fine nephew. I could die here; the whole thing’s no more than a joke to him. Why are you gaping like that, mother?” she asked Pelagia furiously, speaking once more in a familiar tone. “Allow me to introduce you, gentlemen. You see before you a latter-day Vidoq in a nun’s habit. She’s the one who is going to save me, she is going to unmask the criminal. My thanks to my nephew Misha for going to so much trouble, I’m so grateful. Just listen to what he writes here.”

Marya Afanasievna took out the ill-starred letter, put on her spectacles, and began reading out loud: “…And in order that you, dear aunt, might feel completely reassured, I am sending to you my trusted assistant, Sister Pelagia. She is an individual of acute intellect and will quickly discover the truth concerning whoever it is that finds your dear dogs a hindrance. If any of those close to you truly wish you harm, which I should prefer not to believe, then Pelagia will expose and denounce the wretch.”

The table fell quiet, but Pelagia did not see whose face bore what expression, for she was sitting there utterly mortified and bright red, with her nose stuck into her plate of burbot soufflé.

She continued to feel embarrassed for a long time, and tried to attract as little attention as possible. But in any case, no one attempted to strike up a conversation with her. Her only confidant in the ostracism to which she was subjected, either deliberately or by chance, was the impudent Zakidai, who crept under the table and stuck his wrinkled nose out from under the tablecloth straight onto Pelagia’s knees. Zakidai had already emptied his bowl of marrow bones and now he had determined with unerring precision who among the diners at the table was the most vulnerable to extortion.

The eldest of the breed of white bulldogs gazed up unblinkingly at the nun, inclining his round head slightly to one side and wrinkling his Socratic brow. Although Pelagia was hungry, she felt guilty eating while facing this stare that pierced her very soul. She slyly removed a piece of soufflé from her fork and lowered her hand under the tablecloth. Her fingers were enveloped in a mist of hot breath and tickled by a rough tongue. The fish disappeared.

Meanwhile the conversation around the table had moved on to an interesting topic, the subject of talent and genius.

“Ever since I was little, what people have always said about me is ‘he is a talent, a talent,’” Poggio said, narrowing his eyes wryly. “When I was still young and foolish, it used to make me feel proud, but when I grew wiser, I started thinking it over: Only a talent? Why is Raphael a genius and I am only a talent? What is the difference between him and me? I went to Italy and saw Raphael’s
Madonna
—he is obviously a genius. But then I look at my canvases, and everything seems to be as it should. Original, and subtle, more subtle than Raphael’s work, far more subtle. And you can see straight off that it’s very talented, begging your pardon for my immodesty, but not work of a
ge-ni-us,
” he said, pronouncing the syllables separately, and he made a sound with his lips, as if he had let the air out of a balloon. “That is why I gave up painting, because I had talent but not genius. I make photographic pictures now, and they say that they are good ones,
talented.
But that is all right. There are no geniuses in photographic art as yet, and Raphael will not be standing in my light.” Arkadii Sergeevich gave an ironic laugh. “But take Styopa here, when we were at the academy together, I should say that he showed signs of genius. You ought not to have given up painting, Stepan. I saw you make a quick watercolor sketch only recently. The technique was rusty, of course, but such boldness of attack. Little pieces like that go for big money in the Parisian salons now, and you saw the way things were going twenty years ago. Tell me, when you took up the brush again after all those years—did it not make your heart sing?”

Stepan Trofimovich Shiryaev answered moodily and unwillingly, looking down at the tablecloth: “Whether it did or it didn’t—what’s the difference? I just dashed off the watercolor for want of anything else to do. We’ve already mown the hay, and it’s too soon to reap…What’s the good of remembering the past? Things worked out as they did, and so be it. Talent or genius, it makes no damned difference. You have to do the task that you’re set to do. And the more diligently you do it, the better.”

Pelagia thought that Shiryaev seemed to be angry with Poggio about something, and the latter did seem a little put out by this rebuff. Attempting to move the conversation on to humorous ground, he turned to the nun and asked with exaggerated politeness: “And what does the holy church have to say on the matter of genius and talent?”

The theme of the conversation was one that the nun found interesting, and she liked the parties involved in discussing it, so she did not try to avoid an answer.

“Concerning the church’s position, it would be better for you to ask one of the hierarchs, but to my own humble understanding the entire meaning of life on earth lies in discovering the genius in oneself.”

“Life’s meaning lies in that?” Arkadii Sergeevich asked in surprise. “And not in God? This is a fine holy sister.”

“I think that there is genius hidden in everyone, a little hole through which God is visible,” Pelagia began to explain. “But it is rare for anyone to discover this opening in themselves. Everybody gropes for it like blind kittens, but they keep missing. If a miracle occurs, then someone realizes straightaway that this is what he came into the world for, and after that he lives with a calm confidence and cannot be distracted by anybody else, and that is genius. But talents are encountered far more frequently. They are people who have not found that little magic window, but are close to it and are nourished by the reflected glow of its miraculous light.”