Chapter Six
I
MY HOPES WERE not fully realized; I didn’t find them alone: though Versilov wasn’t there, my mother was sitting with Tatyana Pavlovna—an outsider after all. Half of my magnanimous mood fell off of me at once. It’s astonishing how quick I am to turn about on such occasions; a hair or a grain of sand is enough to disperse the good and replace it with the bad. But my bad impressions, to my regret, are not so soon driven out, though I’m not rancorous. As I entered, it flashed in me that my mother at once and hastily broke off the thread of her conversation with Tatyana Pavlovna, which seemed quite animated. My sister had returned from work just a minute before me and had not come out of her little closet yet.
This apartment consisted of three rooms. The one in which everyone usually sat, our middle room, or drawing room, was rather large and almost decent. There were soft red sofas in it, though very shabby ones (Versilov couldn’t stand slipcovers), rugs of some sort, several tables and needless little tables. Then to the right was Versilov’s room, small and narrow, with one window; in it stood a pathetic writing table, on which several unused books and forgotten papers were scattered, and in front of the table, a no less pathetic soft armchair, with a broken spring sticking out at an angle, which often made Versilov groan and curse. His bed was made up in this same study, on a soft and also shabby sofa; he hated this study of his and, it seems, did nothing in it, but preferred to sit idly in the drawing room for hours at a time. To the left of the drawing room was exactly the same sort of room, in which my mother and sister slept. The entrance to the drawing room was from the corridor, which ended with the entrance to the kitchen, where lived the cook Lukerya, who, when she cooked, mercilessly filled the whole apartment with the smoke of burnt oil. There were moments when Versilov loudly cursed his life and his fate because of this kitchen smoke, and in that alone I fully sympathized with him; I also hate such smells, though they did not penetrate to me: I lived upstairs in a little room under the roof, which I climbed to by an extremely steep and creaky little staircase. Noteworthy in my place were the fan-window, the terribly low ceiling, the oilcloth sofa, on which Lukerya spread a sheet and put a pillow for me at night, while the rest of the furniture was just two objects—the simplest plank table and a wicker chair with a hole in it.
However, our place still preserved the remains of a certain former comfort; in the drawing room, for instance, there was a rather good china lamp, and on the wall hung a fine, big engraving of the Dresden Madonna31 and just opposite on the other wall, an expensive photograph, of huge dimensions, showing the cast bronze doors of the Florentine cathedral.32 In a corner of the same room hung a big case with old family icons, one of which (of All Saints) had a big gilt-silver casing, the same one they had wanted to pawn, and another (of the Mother of God) a velvet casing embroidered with pearls. Before the icons hung an icon lamp that was lit for every feast. Versilov was obviously indifferent to the icons, in the sense of their meaning, and merely winced sometimes, visibly restraining himself, at the light of the icon lamp reflected in the gilt casing, complaining slightly that it hurt his eyes, but all the same he did not keep my mother from lighting it.