Next morning when we were approaching Sevastopol, it was damp,
unpleasant weather; the ship rocked. Shamohin sat on deck with me,
brooding and silent. When the bell rang for tea, men with their
coat-collars turned up and ladies with pale, sleepy faces began
going below; a young and very beautiful lady, the one who had been
so angry with the Customs officers at Volotchisk, stopped before
Shamohin and said with the expression of a naughty, fretful child:
"Jean, your birdie's been sea-sick."
Afterwards when I was at Yalta I saw the same beautiful lady dashing
about on horseback with a couple of officers hardly able to keep
up with her. And one morning I saw her in an overall and a Phrygian
cap, sketching on the sea-front with a great crowd admiring her a
little way off. I too was introduced to her. She pressed my hand
with great warmth, and looking at me ecstatically, thanked me in
honeyed cadences for the pleasure I had given her by my writings.
"Don't you believe her," Shamohin whispered to me, "she has never
read a word of them."
When I was walking on the sea-front in the early evening Shamohin
met me with his arms full of big parcels of fruits and dainties.
"Prince Maktuev is here!" he said joyfully. "He came yesterday with
her brother, the spiritualist! Now I understand what she was writing
to him about! Oh, Lord!" he went on, gazing up to heaven, and
pressing his parcels to his bosom. "If she hits it off with the
prince, it means freedom, then I can go back to the country with
my father!"
And he ran on.
"I begin to believe in spirits," he called to me, looking back.
"The spirit of grandfather Ilarion seems to have prophesied the
truth! Oh, if only it is so!"
----
The day after this meeting I left Yalta and how Shamohin's story
ended I don't know.