“No I have not seen her.  Stop!  I remember now.  Wasn’t she standing on the shore near the bridge?  Yes—­a black dress, a yellow handkerchief on her head—­that was she.”

“Well, you did see her?”

“I don’t know.  After that—­I—­you jumped in then.”

David became restless:  “Alexis, my dear friend, go to her at once:  tell her I’m well—­that there’s nothing the matter.  To-morrow I’ll go and see hen Go at once, please, to oblige me.”  He stretched out both arms toward me.  His red hair had dried into all sorts of funny ringlets, but his look of entreaty was only the more genuine.  I took my hat and left the house, trying to avoid my father’s eye lest I should remind him of his promise.

XXI.

And indeed I thought on my way to the Latkins how it was possible that I did not notice Raissa.  Where had she disappeared to?  She must have seen—­Suddenly I remembered that at the very moment David was falling a heartrending shriek had sounded in my ears.  Was it not she?  But in that case why did I not see her?  Before the hovel in which Latkin lived was an empty space covered with nettles and surrounded by a broken, tottering fence.  I had hardly got over this fence—­for there was no gate or entrance—­before my eyes were greeted with this sight:  On the lowest step in front of the house sat Raissa, her elbows on her knees and holding her chin in her folded hands:  she was looking straight out into vacancy.  Near her stood her little dumb sister, playing quietly with a whip, and before the steps, with his back to me, was Latkin in a shabby, torn jacket, his feet in felt slippers, bending over her and brandishing his elbows and stalking about.  When he heard my steps he turned round, leant down on the tips of his toes, and then suddenly sprang at me and began to speak with unusual speed in a quivering voice and with an incessant “Choo, choo, choo!” I was amazed.  It was long since I had seen him, and I should scarcely have known him if I had met him anywhere else.  This wrinkled, red, toothless face, these small, round, dull eyes, this tangled gray hair, these contortions and motions, this senseless, wandering talk,—­what does it all mean?  What cruel suffering torments this unhappy being?  What a dance of death is this!

“Choo, choo, choo,” he muttered, bending over continually:  “see them, the Wassilievna—­she’s just come, with a trou—­a trough on the roof” (he struck his head with his hand), “and she sits there like a shovel, and cross, cross as Andruscha, the cross Wassilievna” (he meant, probably, “mute").  “Choo; my cross Wassilievna!  Now they are both on one last—­just see her!  I have only these two doctors.”

Latkin was evidently aware that he was not saying what he meant, and he made every effort to explain matters to me.  Raissa, apparently, did not hear what he was saying, and her little sister went on snapping her whip.  My head grew confused.  “What does it all mean?” I asked of an old woman who was looking out of the window of the house.