"Mais c'est une dame, et très comme il faut,"
[clxxix]Stepan Trofimovich was resting from Anisim's attack, observing with pleasant curiosity his neighbor, the book-hawker, who, however, was drinking her tea from the saucer with sugar on the side.
[200]"Ce petit morceau de sucre ce n'est rien[clxxx]... There is in her something noble and independent and at the same time—quiet.
Le comme il faut tout pur,
[clxxxi]
He soon learned from her that she was Sofya Matveevna Ulitin, and actually lived in ——, where she had a widowed sister, a tradeswoman; she herself was also a widow, and her husband, a sublieutenant who had risen to that rank from sergeant major, had been killed at Sebastopol. [201]
"But you're so young, vous n'avez pas trente ans." [clxxxii]
"Thirty-four, sir," Sofya Matveevna smiled.
"So, you also understand French?"
"A little, sir; I lived in a noble house for four years after that and picked it up from the children there."
She told him that being left after her husband at the age of eighteen, she had stayed for a while in Sebastopol "as a sister of mercy," and had then lived in various places, sir, and now here she was going around selling the Gospel.
"Mais mon Dieu,it wasn't you who were involved in that strange, even very strange, story in our town?"
She blushed; it turned out to have been she.
" Ces vauriens, ces malheureux! [clxxxiii] . .." he tried to begin, in a voice trembling with indignation; a painful and hateful recollection echoed tormentingly in his heart. For a moment he became as if oblivious.
"Hah, she's gone again," he suddenly came to himself, noticing that she was no longer beside him. "She steps out frequently and is preoccupied with something, I notice she's even worried... Bah, je deviens égoïste .. ." [clxxxiv]
He looked up and again saw Anisim, this time in the most threatening circumstances. The whole cottage was filled with peasants, all apparently dragged there by Anisim. The proprietor was there, and the peasant with the cow, and another two peasants (they turned out to be coachmen), and some other half-drunk little man, dressed like a peasant but clean-shaven, who resembled a besotted tradesman and was talking more than anyone else. And they were all discussing him, Stepan Trofimovich. The peasant with the cow stood his ground, insisting that along the shore would be about a thirty-mile detour, and that it had to be by steamer-boat. The half-drunk tradesman and the proprietor hotly objected:
"Because, dear brother, if it's by steamer-boat, of course, His Excellency will have a closer way across the lake; that's right enough; except the way things are now, the steamer-boat may not even go."
"It will, it will, it'll go for another week," Anisim was the most excited of all.
"Maybe so! but it doesn't come on schedule, because it's late in the year, and sometimes they wait three days in Ustyevo."
"It'll come tomorrow, tomorrow at two o'clock it'll come on schedule. You'll get to Spasov still before evening, sir, right on schedule," Anisim was turning himself inside out.
"Mais qu 'est-ce qu 'il a, cet homme," [clxxxv]Stepan Trofimovich trembled, fearfully awaiting his fate.
The coachmen, too, stepped up and began bargaining; they were asking three roubles to Ustyevo. Others shouted that he wouldn't be doing badly, that it was the right price, just the same price they charged all summer for going from here to Ustyevo.
"But... it's also nice here... And I don't want to," Stepan Trofimovich started mumbling.
"Right, sir, it's just as you say, right now it's really nice in Spasov, and you'll make Fyodor Matveevich so glad."
"Mon Dieu, mes amis,all this is so unexpected for me."
At last Sofya Matveevna came back. But she sat on the bench quite crushed and sad.
"I'm not to be in Spasov!" she said to the mistress.
"What, you're going to Spasov, too?" Stepan Trofimovich roused himself.
It turned out that a certain landowner, Nadezhda Yegorovna Svetlitsyn, had told her the day before to wait for her in Khatovo and promised to take her to Spasov, and here she had not come.
"What am I to do now?" Sofya Matveevna kept repeating.
"Mais, ma chère et nouvelle amie,[clxxxvi]
"But, are you also going to Spasov?"
"Mais que faire, et je suis enchanté![clxxxvii]I shall be extremely glad to take you there; they want to, I've already hired... Which of you did I hire?" Stepan Trofimovich suddenly wanted terribly much to go to Spasov.
A quarter of an hour later they were already getting into the covered britzka: he very animated and thoroughly pleased; she with her bag and a grateful smile beside him. Anisim helped them in.
"Have a good trip, sir," he was bustling with all his might around the britzka, "it was such gladness you caused us!" "Good-bye, good-bye, my friend, good-bye." "When you see Fyodor Matveevich, sir..." "Yes, my friend, yes ... Fyodor Petrovich ... and now good-bye."
II
You see, my friend—you will allow me to call you my friend,
n'est-ce pas?"
[clxxxviii]
"It seems you're unwell, sir," Sofya Matveevna was studying him keenly but respectfully.
"No, no, I just need to wrap myself up, and generally the wind is somehow fresh, even very fresh, but we'll forget that. I mainly wished to say something else.
Chère et incomparable amie,
[cxc]
"But that is very good, sir."
"Not always,
chère innocente. L'Evangile... Voyez-vous, désormais nous le prêcherons ensemble,
[cxci]and I'll willingly sell your handsome books. Yes, I feel there's perhaps an idea there,
quelque chose de très nouveau dans ce genre.
[cxcii]The people are religious, c
'est admis,
[cxciii]