Afrossinia looked round her with the same placid indifference as if the scene were the Neva and the Peter and Paul fortress.
“Yes, it is warm; though we are on the water we don’t seem to feel the damp,” she replied with a suppressed yawn.
He closed his eyes, and before him rose a vision of a room in Viasemski’s house in Petersburg; it was a spring evening, slanting rays of the setting sun flooded the room; the servant girl Afrossinia, in a well tucked-up skirt and barefooted, bending low over her work, scrubbing the floor. She is a simple peasant girl, one of those whom village lads call as “firm, plump and white as a well-washed turnip.” Yet sometimes looking at her he would recall an ancient Dutch picture he had seen in his father’s collection at Peterhof, “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” a naked red-haired witch, goat-legged with split hoofs like a faun. In the face of Afrossinia with its too full lips, its slightly turned up nose, its large, lucid, languishing, almond-shaped eyes, there was something wild, innocently shameless, almost goat-like. To his mind would come the sayings of old writers about the fatal fascination of women: Sin began with woman, and through her we all die; to fall into her arms in love is to fall into the fire. He could not tell how it happened, but he loved her almost at first sight with a rude tender love, strong as death.
Here, on the Gulf of Naples she had remained the same Afrossinia as of old; here she was cracking with her teeth little nuts and spitting the shells in the silvered waves, just as she used to crack sunflower seeds in Petersburg, sitting in the kitchen among her fellow-servants on feast-days. Only now, dressed in the French fashion with beauty spots, and “robe ronde,” she appeared yet more alluring and innocently shameless. No wonder she was stared at by the two soldiers and even by the elegant Count Esterhazy himself, who always escorted the Tsarevitch on all his expeditions from the St. Elmo fortress. Alexis loathed these leers of men, ever drawn to her like flies to honey.
“How now, Æsop, are you tired of this life, and longing to get home?” she asked in a drawling sing-song voice, turning to her neighbour, a tiny, ugly creature, a naval apprentice, Alexis Yourov—Æsop was only his nickname.
“Ah, Mistress Afrossinia, I find life here very hard. The instruction is so difficult that we might well spend all the rest of our life in trying to master it, and then without success. One is really baffled to know where to begin first, the language or the sciences. In Venice our lads, my messmates, are positively starving to death; their allowance is only three kopecks a day; and really they have been so neglected that they have neither drink nor meat, nor any clothes left, but walk about the streets in disgusting fashion, half in rags! We are left here like mere cattle. But my chief complaint is, that I can’t stand the sea, it makes me sick. I am not a seafaring man. It will be my death, unless some one takes pity on me. I would gladly walk back to Petersburg to escape the sea. I would rather beg my way than go by water—may it please his Majesty!”
“Ah, my friend, you will only drop from the frying pan into the fire. You won’t escape your dose of the lash at Petersburg for deserting your apprenticeship,” remarked the Tsarevitch.
“A bad job, Æsop. What will become of you, poor orphan? Where will you go?” asked Afrossinia.
“What choice is left for me? I must either go hang myself, or become a monk on Mount Athos!”
Alexis gazed at him with compassion; he involuntarily compared his own lot with that of the sailor deserter.