Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog (13 page)

Very soon after this a new conviction, no less unshakable, appeared.

“Sytnikov! He’s a terrible man, give him profit at any price, he’s sold his soul to the devil for it. It’s true what they say, that he married for money and then poisoned his wife. And the reason I’m an obstacle to him is clear enough, too! The Goryaev wasteland! He’s been badgering me for ages to let him have it, wants to set up a commercial wharf there—it’s a very convenient spot. But I told him I wouldn’t sell. I won’t have him ruining my view with his barges! But he’s not one just to let something go. His law is that everything has to be the way he wants. Otherwise he thinks life isn’t worth living. He finished off his wife and now he wants to finish me off, too! Once I’m gone, Petka and Nainka will sell him everything here, let alone the wasteland, and they’ll be up and off to the big cities and foreign parts. So Donat has good reason to despatch me to the next world as soon as possible. Well, curse the lot of them!” The old woman raised a feeble hand in a gesture of disdainful dismissal. “I was right to change my will two days ago. I left everything I have to the Englishwoman. I only wanted to give them a scare, but now I’ll leave it like that. If they don’t want me around, then they can have Janet for their mistress. She’ll keep them all on their toes.”

At first Pelagia listened very attentively to the sick woman’s confused talk, comparing it with her own thoughts and observations, but every new hypothesis was even more outrageous than the ones before it.

The final one completely abandoned the ground of common sense.

“Kirya Krasnov,” Marya Afanasievna rapped out as soon as Tanya brought the nun to the bedroom for another visit. “Cunning, the devil, but makes himself out to be a fool. Why does he come trailing around here every day? He wants money from me. This autumn his estate’s going under the hammer, with all his wonderful telegraphs. He says: ‘I’ll die then.’ And he will die, he will for sure. What will he do with himself without Krasnovka? He goes around moaning all the time. Give him one and a half thousand to pay his interest! I told him: I won’t give it to you. I’ve already given you money more than once. That’s enough. So he’s decided to take his revenge on me. I know what he’s thinking: If I’m going to die, then you’re not going to live, either, you old witch!”

Pelagia began admonishing the sick woman—to bring her back to her senses and also in case, God forbid, she might really go and die, it was sinful to leave the earth in a state of such bitterness.

“Marya Afanasievna, perhaps if you lent Kirill Nifontovich the money, he would calm down? What do a thousand and a half rubles mean to you? You can’t take them with you to the next world; money will be no use there.”

This simple argument had its effect on Tatishcheva.

“Yes, yes,” she muttered, looking at Zakusai as he slept, and the fevered look in her eyes softened. “What good is it to me; it will all go to Miss Wrigley anyway. I’ll give it to him. Let him carry on with his foolish pranks for one more year. I’ll give him two thousand.”

“And this business with the will is wrong,” the nun continued, encouraged by her success. “Miss Wrigley is a worthy individual, of course, but would it be fair to treat Pyotr Georgievich and Naina Georgievna like that? After all, they are not to blame that you raised them in idleness and did not teach them to do anything useful. And you would be ashamed to look Stepan Trofimovich in the eye in the next world. All those years he devoted to you, all of his best years. And you say yourself that he has greatly increased your fortune. Surely it is a sin?”

“It is, mother,” Tatishcheva confessed in a pitiful voice. “You’re quite right. I was angry, I got carried away. And I ought to leave something to my other relatives as well as my grandchildren. Hey, Tanya! Go and call her…Tanya, have them send to the town for Korsh. I want him to come to change my will.”

DURING THE INTERVALS between summonses to the widow’s bedroom, Pelagia spent most of her time strolling in the park. She also spent quite a lot of that time in a plank hut that stood not far from the edge of the cliff. Here there were mattocks, spades, saws, rakes, hoes, and other garden implements from Gerasim’s arsenal, all of them painted blue. This was where the unknown villain had found the hatchet. Pelagia picked up some lumps of dried earth from the floor and rubbed them in her fingers, squatted down and crept around outside the little building, but she did not discover any clues. The hut did not have a lock; anyone at all could have taken the little axe, and there were no tracks to be found either outside or inside. There was nothing to be done but wait to see what would happen next.

In two days she walked the entire length and breadth of the park. She also came across the famous English lawn, a little square of neatly trimmed grass that someone really had trampled very thoroughly only recently, but the short, springy stems had already begun to straighten up and it was clear that this oasis of civilization would soon be restored to its former glory. From here it was only a stone’s throw to the River, there was a fresh breeze blowing, and beside the lawn a little aspen tree that was withering away swayed branches that were still green but no longer alive. The nun came here often—as she sat in the white arbor above the high, steep bluff, finishing the belt for Sister Emilia, she would freeze motionless for long moments, looking at the wide River, at the sky, at the marshes on the far bank. And it was good to wander through the clearings, along the overgrown pathways, where the air trembled with the humming of bees and the rustling of leaves.

But the calm was false, not genuine; in the electrified air of Drozdovka the nun could sense turmoil and hear a subtle ringing tone, as if somewhere someone were plucking a string stretched to its very breaking point. It was surprising that on the first day the estate had seemed almost like the Garden of Eden to her. Though Pelagia did not deliberately spy or eavesdrop on anyone, every now and again she found herself an inadvertent witness to certain scenes that were difficult to understand and the perplexed observer of the obscure relationships between the locals. It was obvious that the nervous conversation she had partly overheard by chance from her window was entirely in keeping with the order of things here.

On the morning of her third day, Pelagia was slowly wandering at random through the bushes, screwing up her eyes against the sunlight filtering through the foliage, when she suddenly saw a clearing ahead of her, and Shiryaev and Poggio standing in it, their backs to the bushes. They were both wearing wide-brimmed hats and canvas smocks and holding sketchbooks. She didn’t want to distract them from their artistic endeavors by calling out, but she wanted to take a look, especially after what had been said the previous day about Stepan Trofimovich’s talent.

The sister raised herself up on tiptoes, sticking her head out of the raspberry thickets. On Arkadii Sergeevich’s sheet of paper she saw a sketch of the old oak that towered up at the far end of the clearing, and it was an amazing likeness, a real pleasure to look at. But, alas, she found Stepan Trofimovich’s work a disappointment. The colors were simply dashed on any old way: It could have been an oak, or it could have been some wood goblin with a huge, overgrown head covered in shaggy hair, and Shiryaev handled his brush in a peculiar fashion, as if he was simply playing the fool, dabbing aimlessly again and again. Poggio painted with fine strokes, taking great care. The nun liked his work much more. Only it was boring to look at—Stepan Trofimovich’s daub proved far more interesting to study. In general it was a rather touching scene: old friends immersing themselves in the pastime that they loved and not even talking, because they already knew all they needed to know about art and about each other.

Suddenly Shiryaev swung his hand through the air more boldly than usual and a shower of green blots spattered across his sketch.

“This is intolerable!” he exclaimed, turning toward his friend. “Pretending, discussing the play of light and shade, talking about nature, when all the time I hate you! I hate you!”

Poggio turned toward him just as sharply, and the old comrades suddenly looked like two cocks squaring up for a fight.

Horror-struck, Pelagia squatted down on her haunches in fright. It would be just too shameful for a nun to be caught spying.

She stopped watching, but she listened—she could not help it, she was afraid of rustling the leaves if she backed away.

“Have you been with Naina?” (That was Stepan Trofimovich.) “You have, admit it!”

The word “been” carried the force of a special meaning that made Pelagia blush and regret very much her impetuous decision to look at the sketches.

“Such questions are not asked and such admissions are not made,” Arkadii Sergeevich answered in the same tone. “It is none of your business.”

Stepan Trofimovich choked: “You destroyer, you devil! You pollute and defile everything with your very breath! All these years I have loved her. We talked, we dreamed. I promised her that when…when I was free, I would take her away to Moscow. She would become an actress, I would take up painting again, and we would know what happiness is. But she no longer wishes to be an actress!”

“But she does wish to be an artist!” Poggio said mockingly. “At least, until just recently she did. What it is she wants now, I do not know.”

Shiryaev was not listening, he was shouting incoherently about something that had clearly been bothering him for some time.

“You’re a scoundrel. You don’t even love her. If you did, I would be hurt, but I would put up with it. But you did it because you were bored!”

There was a loud noise, a crack of fabric tearing. Pelagia parted the bushes with her hands, afraid that matters might go as far as murder. They were very close to that: Stepan Trofimovich had grabbed Arkadii Sergeevich by the collar with both hands.

“Yes, because I was bored,” Poggio wheezed in a strangled voice. “At first. But now I have lost my head. She doesn’t want me anymore. A week ago she was imploring me to take her away to Paris, she was talking about a studio in an attic with a view of the Boulevard des Capucines, about sunsets over the Seine. Then suddenly everything changed. She became cold and strange. And I am going out of my mind. Yesterday…yesterday I said to her: ‘Fine, let’s go. To hell with everything. Let it be Paris, the attic, the boulevard—everything just as you wish.’ Let go of me, I can’t breathe.”

Shiryaev unclenched his fingers and asked in torment: “And what did she say?”

“She burst out laughing. I…I was beside myself. I threatened her. I have something to threaten her with…You do not need to know about it. You’ll find out later, when it makes no difference anymore.” Poggio gave an unpleasant laugh. “Oh, I understand perfectly well what’s going on. You and I, Styopa, are no longer required, we’ve been retired without a pension. A more interesting character has turned up. But I won’t let myself be treated like some snot-nosed schoolboy! If she only knew what women have thrown themselves at my feet! I’ll trample her into the mud! I’ll make her come away with me!”

“You villain, don’t you dare threaten her! I’ll squash you like a worm!”

So saying, Stepan Trofimovich took his former classmate by the throat again, this time more firmly than before. The easels went flying to the ground, the men grappled with each other and tumbled over into the thick grass.

“Lord, Lord, do not allow this,” Sister Pelagia began intoning quietly and jumped to her feet, since under the circumstances there was no need to be afraid of any rustling, then ran about twenty steps away and began shouting: “Zakusai-ai! Is that you making that noise over there? You naughty boy! Running off like that again!”

The commotion in the clearing ceased instantly. Pelagia did not go in that direction—there was no point in embarrassing people—but she carried on shouting for a little while and stamped her feet as she moved away through the bushes. It was enough that those two gamecocks had come to their senses and reassumed their human form. For sin had been very close.

She decided not to walk around the park anymore, but sit quietly in the library instead.

But would you believe it, she had merely leaped out of the frying pan into the fire…

NO SOONER HAD she made herself comfortable in the spacious, empty room with the tall bookcases crammed full of gold-tooled spines, pulling her feet up into the immense leather armchair and opening a volume of Pascal’s
Lettres provinciales
that smelled deliciously of olden times, when the door creaked and someone came in, but who exactly she could not see, because of the tall back of her chair.

“We can say what we have to say here,” said Sytnikov’s calm, confident voice. “In this house hardly anyone ever looks into the library; we shan’t be disturbed.”

Pelagia was about to clear her throat or stick her head out, but she was not quick enough. Another voice (it was Naina Georgievna) spoke words in the wake of which she could only have placed everyone in an awkward position by revealing her presence.

“Are you going to offer me your hand and your heart again, Donat Abramovich?”

She has bewitched everyone here, thought Pelagia with a shake of her head, feeling sorry for the staid, composed industrialist who, if the mocking tone of the question was anything to go by, had no reason to expect his feelings to be reciprocated.

“I am afraid not,” said Sytnikov, no less calmly than before. There was a leathery creak—they had obviously sat down on the divan. “Now I can only offer you my heart.”