The Gambler and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky & Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Author:Fyodor Dostoyevsky & Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141943572
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

At the top of the steps of the hotel’s wide porch, carried up the stairs in a chair and surrounded by footmen, maidservants and numerous obsequious hotel staff, and in the presence of the hotel manager himself, who had come out to greet the exalted guest arriving with such fuss and noise, with her own servants and with so many trunks and cases, sat – Grandmother! Yes, it was she herself, the formidable and rich, seventy-five-year-old Antonida Vasilyevna Tarasevichev, landowner and grand lady of Moscow, la baboulinka, about whom telegrams had been dispatched and received, who was dying and did not die, and who suddenly, in person, appeared among us out of the clear blue sky. Although she had lost the use of her legs and was carried in a chair, as always these last five years, she was her usual animated, quick-tempered, complacent self, sitting up straight, loudly and commandingly shouting, scolding everybody – well, she was exactly the same as the couple of times I had the honour of seeing her after entering the general’s household as tutor. Naturally, I stood before her dumbstruck with amazement. She had made me out with her lynx eyes a hundred paces away, when she was being carried in her chair, and she had recognized me and hailed me by name and patronymic,1 which, as was usually the case with her, she had remembered once and for all. ‘And this is the woman they had expected to see in her coffin, buried and leaving behind an inheritance,’ flashed through my mind, ‘but she’ll outlive us all and the whole hotel! But, my God, what’s going to happen to them now, what’s going to happen to the general! She’ll turn the whole hotel upside down!’

‘Well, my dear fellow, why are you standing there, just staring at me with big eyes!’ Grandmother continued to shout at me. ‘Don’t you know how to bow and say hello? Or have you become too proud and don’t want to? Or maybe you don’t recognize me? Do you hear that, Potapych,’ she turned to a grey old man, in tails with a white tie and a rosy bald spot, her butler, who had accompanied her on the journey, ‘do you hear that, he doesn’t recognize me! They’ve buried me! They sent telegram after telegram: is she dead or not? I know everything, you see! And, as you see, I am alive and kicking.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Antonida Vasilyevna, why would I wish you any harm?’ I answered gaily, after coming to my senses. ‘I was merely surprised … And how could one not be surprised, it’s so unexpected …’

‘And what’s there for you to be so surprised about? I got on the train and off I went. It’s comfortable on the train, there’s no jolting. Have you been out for a walk or something?’

‘Yes, I took a walk to the casino.’

‘It’s nice here,’ Grandmother said, as she had a look around, ‘it’s warm and the trees are lush.

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