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The paralysis that had attacked Latkin was of a rather peculiar kind.
"I did it without any hope of gain: I cut my own throat." My father was immovable, and Latkin never more set foot in the house. It seemed as if fate had determined to fulfill my father's last evil wishes. Soon after the breach between them, which took place about two years before my story began, Latkin's wife died: it is true, however, that she had for a long time been ill.
That time Raissa brought with her her little deaf and dumb sister. Latkin had by then been struck down by paralysis. "I really don't know what to do," Raissa began. "The doctor has written a prescription. And the porter has taken it away, 'you are in debt to me, he said." "Taken the goose?" asked David. "No, not the goose.
They are both on the same cork now. You may wonder, good Christians! I have only these two little boats! Eh?" Latkin was evidently conscious that he was not saying the right thing and made terrible efforts to explain to me what was the matter. Raissa did not seem to hear what her father was saying and the little sister went on lashing the whip.
No, it's not yet finished; only, in order to continue it, I must introduce a new person, and to introduce this new person I must go back a little. My father was for a long time on very friendly and even intimate terms with a former official, named Latkin, a poor man, slightly lame, with shy, queer manners one of those beings of whom people say the hand of God is upon them.
But something extraordinary must have cut short my aunt's eloquence at that moment: her voice suddenly broke off and in its place we heard another, feeble and husky with old age.... "Brother," this weak voice articulated, "Christian soul." We all turned round.... In the same costume in which I had just seen him, thin, pitiful and wild looking, Latkin stood before us like an apparition.
"They say some one Heaven knows who it was tried to drown himself, and she saw him. That frightened her, but she managed to get home: no one noticed anything strange, and she sat down there on the threshold, and since then she's sat there like an image, whether one speaks to her or not. It's as if she had no tongue." "Good-bye! good-bye!" repeated Latkin, still with the same gestures.
If Latkin had snatched a profitable job from my father, after the fashion of Nastasey, who replaced him later on, my father would have been no more indignant with him than with Nastasey, probably less.
His second daughter, a child of three years, became deaf and dumb one day from fright: a swarm of bees lit on her head. Latkin himself had a stroke of paralysis and fell into the most extreme misery. How he managed to scrape along at all, what he lived on, it was hard to imagine. He dwelt in a tumbledown hovel but a short distance from our house.
But, laughing gently, she flew over the ground. I of course hastened after her, while behind us was a sound of voices the aged one that of Latkin, and the childish cry that of the deaf mute. Raissa went straight to our house. "What a day this has been!" I thought to myself as I tried to keep up with the black dress that flew along in front of me.
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