At the drawing-room door facing me stood my mother, as though rooted to
the spot. Behind her, peered several scared female faces. The butler,
two footmen, and a page, with his mouth wide open with astonishment,
were packed together in the doorway of the hall. In the middle of the
dining-room, covered with mire, dishevelled, tattered, and soaking
wet--so wet that steam rose all round and water was running in little
streams over the floor--knelt, shaking ponderously, as it were, at the
last gasp … the very monster I had seen dashing across the yard! And
who was this monster? Harlov! I came up on one side, and saw, not his
face, but his head, which he was clutching, with both hands in the
hair that blinded him with filth. He was breathing heavily, brokenly;
something positively rattled in his throat--and in all the bespattered
dark mass, the only thing that could be clearly distinguished was the
tiny whites of the eyes, straying wildly about. He was awful! The
dignitary came into my mind whom he had once crushed for comparing him
to a mastodon. Truly, so might have looked some antediluvian creature
that had just escaped another more powerful monster, attacking it in
the eternal slime of the primeval swamps.
‘Martin Petrovitch!’ my mother cried at last, and she clasped her
hands. ‘Is that you? Good God! Merciful heavens!’
‘I … I …’ we heard a broken voice, which seemed with effort and
painfully to dwell on each sound. ‘Alas! It is I!’
‘But what has happened to you? Mercy upon us!’
‘Natalia Nikolaev … na … I have … run straight … to you … from home …
on foot.…’
‘Through such mud! But you don’t look like a man. Get up; sit down,
anyway.… And you,’ she turned to the maid-servants, ‘run quick for
cloths. And haven’t you some dry clothes?’ she asked the butler.
The butler gesticulated as though to say, Is it likely for such a
size?… ‘But we could get a coverlet,’ he replied, ‘or, there’s a new
horse-rug.’
‘But get up, get up, Martin Petrovitch, sit down,’ repeated my mother.
‘They’ve turned me out, madam,’ Harlov moaned suddenly, and he flung
his head back and stretched his hands out before him. ‘They’ve turned
me out, Natalia Nikolaevna! My own daughters, out of my own home.…’
My mother sighed and groaned.
‘What are you saying? Turned you out! What wickedness! what
wickedness!’ (She crossed herself.) ‘But do get up, Martin Petrovitch,
I beg you!’
Two maid-servants came in with cloths and stood still before Harlov.
It was clear they did not know how to attack this mountain of filth.
‘They have turned me out, madam, they have turned me out!’ Harlov kept
repeating meanwhile. The butler returned with a large woollen coverlet,
and he, too, stood still in perplexity. Souvenir’s little head was
thrust in at a door and vanished again.
‘Martin Petrovitch! get up! Sit down! and tell me everything properly,’
my mother commanded in a tone of determination.
Harlov rose.… The butler tried to assist him but only dirtied his
hand, and, shaking his fingers, retreated to the door. Staggering
and faltering, Harlov got to a chair and sat down. The maids again
approached him with their cloths, but he waved them off with his hand,
and refused the coverlet. My mother did not herself, indeed, insist; to
dry Harlov was obviously out of the question; they contented themselves
with hastily wiping up his traces on the floor.