“In Heaven’s name! what’s the matter, then?” she asked; and I replied that to me it seemed haunted by the people whom I once knew.
Her shriek might have been heard on the Nevsky, as she fell against an old serving woman, who was just entering the room, and kept her mistress from falling.
“Haunted? Explain! What do you mean? What do you know of the people who once lived here? I was told by the proprietor, of whom I rented it a year ago, that it was perfectly respectable every way. There isn’t a more first-class house in St. Petersburg. Do you think I would have anything that was not first-class—I, who wasn’t brought up to keep boarders?”
“Of course not,” I said, taking a chair and removing my hat, for the day was very warm.
The woman’s manner was so offensive that I resolved to tell her the truth about her first-class house, and was rather anxious to see the effect, especially as her first question to us, after learning that we were Americans, was to ask if we sympathized with the anarchists, of whom America was full, and who were always killing a President or somebody, just like the nihilists. She detested them, she said, and would not have one in her house, if she knew it. She did have one, as she found after he had left, and she burned sulphur candles in his room for two days, to remove the taint. Her servants were all loyal to the government, such as it was. She thought it might be improved, but it was the duty of its citizens to stand by it. All this she had said, and more, and I was wondering if she knew that nihilists had occupied her house, and were now in Siberia.
“Did you ever hear of the Scholaskies?” I asked, when I could get in a word.
“Scholaskies?” she repeated. “The name sounds familiar. Alex!” and she turned to the old woman, against whom she was still propped, and who seemed to be her prime factor. “Alex,” she screamed, saying, apologetically to us, “She is deaf as a post,” “Alex, did you ever hear of the Scholaskies?”
The old woman shook her head, and Mrs. Browne continued, in Russian, which she had no idea I understood: “This American woman speaks as if the Scholaskies had something to do with this house—this room. Think hard!”
The old woman looked at my friend, Mrs. Whitney, and myself curiously, as if we were some rare specimens, while she seemed to be thinking, and her tan-colored face wrinkled up into folds; then she shook her head again, and Mrs. Browne said to me: “Alex never heard of them; but, then, she has only been a year here from Moscow, have you, Alex?”
Alex didn’t answer, and the question was screamed into her ear.