II. Лизавета смердящая

This Lizaveta the Reeking was a wench of very small stature, "a little over two arshins," as many of the devout old women of our little town fondly recalled of her after her death.

Her face, that of a twenty-year-old, healthy, broad, and ruddy, was utterly idiotic; the gaze of her eyes was fixed and disagreeable, though meek.

All her life, summer and winter alike, she went barefoot and in nothing but a coarse hempen shift.

Her nearly black hair, extraordinarily thick and curled like a ram's fleece, sat upon her head in the form of some enormous cap.

What is more, it was always grimed with earth and mud, with little leaves, splinters, and shavings stuck in it, for she always slept on the bare ground and in the mire.

Her father was a homeless, ruined, and sickly townsman named Ilya, a heavy drinker who for many years had lived as a sort of hired hand sponging off some well-to-do householders, townsfolk like himself.

Lizaveta's mother had died long before.

Forever ailing and spiteful, Ilya beat Lizaveta inhumanly whenever she came home.

But she came rarely, for she lived off the whole town as a holy fool, one of God's own.

Ilya's householders, and Ilya himself, and even many of the compassionate folk of the town — chiefly the merchants and their wives — tried more than once to dress Lizaveta more decently than in a single shift, and toward winter they always put a sheepskin coat on her and shod her feet in boots; but as a rule, letting them put everything on her without a word of protest, she would walk off and somewhere — most often on the porch of the cathedral church — would unfailingly strip off everything that had been given her, kerchief or skirt, sheepskin or boots, leave it all on the spot, and go off barefoot and in nothing but her shift as before.

It once happened that the new governor of our province, passing through our little town on a tour of inspection, was deeply offended in his finest feelings at the sight of Lizaveta, and though he understood that she was a "holy fool," as had indeed been reported to him, he nonetheless pointed out that a young wench roaming about in nothing but a shift was an offense to decency, and that henceforth there should be no more of it.

But the governor departed, and Lizaveta was left just as she was.

At last her father died, and by that very fact she became, as an orphan, even dearer to all the devout people of the town.

Indeed, everyone seemed positively to love her; even the boys did not tease or torment her — and our boys, especially at school, are a rowdy lot.

She would walk into houses where she was unknown, and no one drove her out; on the contrary, everyone would pet her and give her a copper.

If they gave her a copper, she would take it and at once carry it off and drop it into some church or prison alms-box.

If they gave her a bun or a roll at the market, she would invariably go and hand the bun or roll to the first child she met, or else she would stop one of our very richest ladies and give it to her — and the ladies even accepted it gladly.

She herself fed on nothing but black bread and water.

She might wander into some rich shop and sit down; costly wares would be lying there, money too, and the owners were never on their guard with her, knowing that even if you laid out thousands in her presence and forgot about it, she would not take so much as a kopeck of it.

She rarely went into church, but slept either on the church porches or, having clambered over someone's wattle fence (we still have many wattle fences instead of board ones even to this day), in someone's vegetable garden.

Home — that is, to the house of the householders her late father had lived with — she would turn up about once a week, and in winter she came every day, but only for the night, sleeping either in the entryway or in the cowshed.

People marveled that she could endure such a life, but she had grown so used to it; small though she was in stature, she was of an uncommonly sturdy build.

Some of the gentry among us insisted that she did all this out of pride alone, but it somehow did not hold together: she could not speak so much as a word, and only now and then would she stir her tongue a little and low — what pride could there be in that?

Now it so happened that one day (this was a good while ago), on a bright and warm September night, at the full moon and very late by our reckoning, a tipsy band of our revelling gentry, some five or six young bucks, was making its way home from the club "by the back ways."

On both sides of the lane ran a wattle fence, behind which stretched the vegetable gardens of the adjoining houses; the lane itself came out onto the little footbridge over our stinking, long puddle that we are sometimes pleased to call a river.

By the wattle fence, amid the nettles and the burdock, our company caught sight of Lizaveta asleep.

The drunken gentlemen stopped over her with guffaws and began making jokes with all the obscenity they could muster.

It suddenly entered the head of one young squire to put a thoroughly eccentric question on an impossible theme: "Could anyone at all, said he, reckon such a beast for a woman — just now, say, and so forth."

With proud disgust they all decided that one could not.

But Fyodor Pavlovitch happened to be in this little knot, and he sprang up in an instant and decided that one could indeed reckon her for a woman, even very much so, and that there was in this even something of a special, piquant kind, and so forth, and so forth.

True, at that time he was even all too studiously courting his role as a buffoon among us, fond of leaping up and amusing the gentlemen — with apparent equality, of course, though in fact a perfect boor before them.

It was precisely the very time when he had received word from Petersburg of the death of his first wife, Adelaida Ivanovna, and when, with crepe on his hat, he drank and behaved so disgracefully that some in the town, even of the most dissolute, were revolted at the sight of him.

The band, of course, roared with laughter at this unexpected opinion; one of them even began egging Fyodor Pavlovitch on, but the rest fell to spitting all the more, though still with excessive merriment, and at last they all went off their separate ways.

Afterward Fyodor Pavlovitch swore on oath that he too had gone off then together with all the rest; perhaps that is precisely how it was — no one knows it for certain and no one ever did — but some five or six months later the whole town began to speak, with sincere and extraordinary indignation, of Lizaveta's walking about with child, asking and inquiring: whose was the sin, who was the offender?

It was just then that a strange rumor suddenly spread through the whole town, that the offender was this very Fyodor Pavlovitch.

Where did this rumor come from?

Of that band of carousing gentlemen, only one member happened still to be in the town by that time, and he at that an elderly and respectable civil councillor, a man with a family and grown daughters, who would by no means have spread such a thing about even if there had been something to it; the other members, some five men, had scattered by that time.

But the rumor pointed straight at Fyodor Pavlovitch and went on pointing.

Of course, he did not much trouble to contest it: to some petty little merchants or townsmen he would not even deign to reply.

In those days he was proud and conversed only within his own company of officials and gentry, whom he so amused.

It was precisely at this time that Grigory stood up energetically and with all his might for his master, and not only defended him against all these slanders but entered into wrangling and disputes on his behalf and won many over.

“She is herself to blame, the low creature,” he would say with conviction, and the offender was none other than "Karp the Screw" (so was called a certain dread convict, well known to the town at the time, who had by then escaped from the provincial prison and was living secretly in our town).

This conjecture seemed plausible; Karp was remembered — remembered precisely as having prowled about the town on those very nights toward autumn and robbed three people.

But this whole affair and all this talk, far from turning the general sympathy away from the poor holy fool, only made everyone protect and guard her all the more.

Kondratyeva, a merchant's wife and a well-to-do widow, even arranged things so that toward the end of April she took Lizaveta into her own house, with the intention of not letting her out until the birth itself.

They watched her unsleepingly, but it so fell out that, despite all the vigilance, Lizaveta, on the very last day, in the evening, suddenly slipped away in secret from Kondratyeva's and found herself in Fyodor Pavlovitch's garden.

How, in her condition, she clambered over the high, stout fence of the garden remained something of a riddle.

Some maintained that she had been "carried over," others that she had been "carried away."