A Gentle Creature by Fyodor Dostoevsky

THE ‘details' I had learned about her I can recount in a very few words: her father and mother had died a considerable time before, three years previously, and she had been left in the hands of some disorganized aunts of hers. And that's putting it mildly. One aunt was a widow, with a numerous family, six children in descending order of age. The other was an old maid, awful woman. They were both awful. The father had been an official but only in the clerical grade, and his title was non-hereditary. In a word: the situation was made for me. I had appeared as it were from some higher world: I was a retired staff captain from a crack regiment, a hereditary nobleman, of independent means, so forth. As for the pawnbroking business, the aunts could only have a respectful attitude towards that. She had been a slave to those aunties for three years, but had nevertheless passed some sort of exam, contrived to pass it, found leisure indeed to pass it despite her pitiless daily round of toil, and that certainly was a good indication of aspirations towards the lofty and noble on her part. After all, why did I intend to marry her? Still, never mind me, that can wait… It's irrelevant anyway!

She tutored the aunties' children, made underclothes, and ended up not only washing clothes but scrubbing floors too, with that chest of hers. They even used to beat her, just like that, and begrudged her a crust of bread. In the end they were considering selling her. Ugh! I'll omit the sordid details. Later she told me all about it. The fat shopkeeper next door, owner of two grocery stores besides, had been keeping an eye on all this for a year or more. He had buried two wives already and was on the look-out for a third, so he was running the rule over her: ‘She's a quiet sort of girl', thought he, ‘grown up in poverty; I'll marry her for the sake of the children.' And he did indeed have children. He started making advances, and opened negotiations with the aunts. He was a man of 50, and she was horrified. That was when she started frequenting my premises to finance the advertisements in the The Voice. At length, she asked her aunts to allow her just the briefest time to think the matter over. They gave her precisely that and no more; they kept on at her: ‘We don't know where the next meal is coming from ourselves, and that's without an extra mouth to feed.' I was well aware that all this was going on and that same day, after the morning's incident, I made my decision. That evening, the grocer turned up with a fifty-kopek pound of sweets from the shop; she was sitting with him when I summoned Lukeriya from the kitchen and told her to whisper that I was at the front gate and had something very urgent to tell her. I was feeling pleased with myself. In fact I had been in a frightfully good mood all that day.