The Adolescent

Now I’ll make a résumé. By the day and hour of my going out after my illness, Lambert stood on the two following points (this I now know for certain): first, to take a promissory note from Anna Andreevna for no less than thirty thousand in exchange for the document; and then to help her frighten the prince, abduct him, and suddenly get him married to her—in short, something like that. Here a whole plan had even been formed; they were only waiting for my help, that is, for the document itself.

The second plan: to betray Anna Andreevna, abandon her, and sell the paper to Mme. Akhmakov, if it proved more profitable. Here account was also taken of Bjoring. But Lambert had not yet gone to Mme. Akhmakov, but had only tracked her down. Also waiting for me.

Oh, he did need me, that is, not me but the document! Concerning me, he had also formed two plans. The first consisted in acting in concert with me, if it really was impossible otherwise, and going halves with me, after first subjecting me morally and physically. But the second plan was much more to his liking; it consisted in hoodwinking me like a little boy and stealing the document from me, or even simply taking it from me by force. He loved this plan and cherished it in his dreams. I repeat: there was one circumstance owing to which he had almost no doubt of the success of the second plan, but, as I’ve already said, I will explain it later. In any case, he was waiting for me with convulsive impatience: everything depended on me, all the steps and what to decide on.

And I must do him justice: for a while he controlled himself, despite his hot temper. He didn’t come to my house during my illness—he came only once and saw Versilov; he didn’t disturb or frighten me, he preserved an air of the most total detachment before me, up to the day and hour of my going out. With regard to the fact that I might give away, or tell about, or destroy the document, he was at ease. From what I had said at his place, he was able to conclude how much I myself valued secrecy and how afraid I was that someone might learn of the document. And that I would go to him first, and to no one else, on the first day of my recovery, he did not doubt in the least: Nastasya Egorovna came to see me partly on his orders, and he knew that my curiosity and fear were already aroused, that I wouldn’t be able to stand it . . . And besides, he took every measure, might even know the day of my going out, so that there was no way I could turn my back on him, even if I wanted to.

But if Lambert was waiting for me, then maybe Anna Andreevna was waiting for me still more. I’ll say directly: Lambert might have been partly right in preparing to betray her, and the fault was hers. In spite of their undoubted agreement (in what form I don’t know, but I have no doubt of it), Anna Andreevna down to the very last minute was not fully candid with him. She didn’t open herself all the way. She hinted to him about all agreements and all promises on her part—but only hinted; she listened, maybe, to his whole plan in detail, but gave only silent approval. I have firm grounds for concluding so, and the reason was that she was waiting for me. She liked better to have dealings with me than with the scoundrel Lambert—that was an unquestionable fact for me! I understand that; but her mistake was that Lambert finally understood it as well. And it would have been too disadvantageous for him if she, bypassing him, wheedled the document out of me, and we entered into an agreement. Besides, at that time he was already certain of the solidity of the “affair.” Another in his place would have been afraid and would still have had doubts; but Lambert was young, bold, with a most impatient desire for gain, had little knowledge of people, and undoubtedly regarded them all as base; such a man could have no doubts, especially as he had already elicited all the main confirmations from Anna Andreevna.

A last and most important little word: did Versilov know anything by that day and had he already participated then in some, however remote, plans with Lambert? No, no, no, not yet then, though perhaps a fateful little word had been dropped . . . But enough, enough, I’m running too far ahead.

Well, and what about me? Did I know anything, and what did I know by the day I went out? At the beginning of this entrefilet I announced that I knew nothing by the day I went out, that I learned about it all much later and even at a time when everything was already accomplished. That’s true, but is it fully? No, it’s not; I undoubtedly already knew something, knew even all too much, but how? Let the reader remember the dream! If there could be such a dream, if it could burst from my heart and formulate itself that way, it meant that I—didn’t know, but anticipated—an awful lot of those things I have just explained and actually learned only “when everything was already over.” There was no knowledge, but my heart throbbed with anticipations, and evil spirits already possessed my dreams. And this was the man I was eager to see, knowing full well what sort of man he was and even anticipating the details! And why was I eager to see him? Imagine: now, in this very moment as I write, it seems to me that I knew in all its details why I was eager to see him, whereas at the time, again, I still knew nothing. Maybe the reader will understand that. But now—to business, fact by fact.

II

IT BEGAN, STILL two days before my going out, with Liza coming home in the evening all in alarm. She was awfully insulted; and indeed something insufferable had happened to her.

I’ve already mentioned her relations with Vasin. She went to him not only to show us that she didn’t need us, but also because she really appreciated Vasin. Their acquaintance had already begun in Luga, and it had always seemed to me that Vasin was not indifferent to her. In the misfortune that struck her, it was natural that she might wish for advice from a firm, calm, always elevated mind, which she supposed Vasin to have. Besides, women are not great masters at evaluating the male mind, if they like the man, and they gladly take paradoxes for strict deductions, if they agree with their own wishes. What Liza liked in Vasin was his sympathy with her position, and, as it had seemed to her from the first, his sympathy for the prince as well. Besides, suspecting his feelings towards her, she could not help appreciating his sympathy for his rival. The prince, whom she herself had told that she sometimes went to Vasin for advice, had taken this news with extreme uneasiness from the very first; he had begun to be jealous. This had offended her, so that she had deliberately continued her relations with Vasin. The prince said nothing, but was gloomy. Liza herself confessed to me (very long afterwards) that she had very soon stopped liking Vasin; he was calm, and precisely this eternal, smooth calm, which she had liked so much in the beginning, later seemed rather unsightly to her. It seemed he was practical, and, indeed, several times he gave her advice that appeared good, but all this advice, as if on purpose, turned out to be unfeasible. He sometimes judged too haughtily and without the least embarrassment before her—becoming less embarrassed as time went on, which she ascribed to his growing and involuntary contempt for her position. Once she thanked him for being constantly good-natured with me and for talking with me as with an equal, though he was so superior to me in intelligence (that is, she conveyed my own words to him). He replied:

“That’s not so, and it’s not for that. It’s because I don’t see any difference in him from the others. I don’t consider him either stupider than the smart ones or wickeder than the good ones. I’m the same with everybody, because in my eyes everybody’s the same.”

“You mean you really can’t see any differences?”

“Oh, of course, they’re all different from each other in some way, but in my eyes the differences don’t exist, because the differences between people are of no concern to me; for me they’re all the same and it’s all the same, and so I’m equally nice to everybody.”

“And you don’t find it boring?”

“No, I’m always content with myself.”

“And you don’t desire anything?”

“Of course I do, but not very much. I need almost nothing, not a rouble more. Myself in golden clothes and myself as I am—it’s all the same; golden clothes will add nothing to Vasin. Morsels don’t tempt me: can positions or honors be worth the place I’m worth?”

Liza assured me on her honor that he once uttered this literally. However, it’s impossible to judge like that here; one must know the circumstances under which it was uttered.

Liza gradually came to the conclusion that his attitude towards the prince was indulgent maybe only because everybody was the same to him and “differences did not exist,” and not at all out of sympathy for her. But in the end he began somehow visibly to lose his indifference, and his attitude towards the prince changed to one not only of condemnation, but also of scornful irony. This made Liza angry, but Vasin wouldn’t let up. Above all, he always expressed himself so softly, he even condemned without indignation, but simply made logical deductions about her hero’s total nonentity; but in this logic lay the irony. Finally he deduced for her almost directly all the “unreasonableness” of her love, all the stubborn forcedness of this love. “You erred in your feelings, and errors, once recognized, ought unfailingly to be corrected.”

This was just on that very day. Liza got up indignantly in order to leave, but what did this reasonable man do and how did he end? With a most noble air and even with feeling, he offered her his hand. Liza at once called him a fool to his face and left.

To suggest betraying an unfortunate man because this unfortunate man was “not worthy” of her and, above all, to suggest it to a woman who was pregnant by this unfortunate man—there’s the mind of these people! I call that being awfully theoretical and completely ignorant of life, which comes from a boundless self-love. And on top of all that, Liza discerned in the clearest way that he was even proud of his act, if only because, for example, he already knew about her pregnancy. With tears of indignation she hurried to the prince, and he—he even outdid Vasin: it would seem he might have been convinced after she told him that there was no point in being jealous now; but it was here that he went out of his mind. However, jealous people are all like that! He made an awful scene and insulted her so much that she decided to break all relations with him at once.

She came home, however, still keeping hold of herself, but she couldn’t help telling mama. Oh, that evening they became close again, absolutely as before: the ice was broken; they both naturally wept their fill, embracing each other as they used to do, and Liza apparently calmed down, though she was very gloomy. She sat that evening with Makar Ivanovich, not saying a word, but not leaving the room either. She listened very hard to what he was saying. Since the occasion with the little bench, she had become extremely and somehow timidly respectful towards him, though she still remained taciturn.

But this time, Makar Ivanovich somehow gave the conversation an unexpected and astonishing turn. I’ll note that in the morning Versilov and the doctor had spoken very frowningly of his health. I’ll also note that for several days preparations had been under way in our house for the celebration of mama’s birthday, which was to take place in five days, and we often spoke of it. Apropos of that day, Makar Ivanovich for some reason suddenly embarked on reminiscences and recalled mama’s childhood and the time when she still “couldn’t stand on her little legs.” “She never left my arms,” the old man recalled. “I used to teach her to walk, I’d put her in the corner three steps away and call her, and she comes swaying to me across the room, and she’s not afraid, she laughs, and when she reaches me, she throws her arms around my neck and embraces me. I also told you fairy tales, Sofya Andreevna; you were a great lover of fairy tales; for two hours you’d sit on my knee listening. They marveled in the cottage: ‘See how attached she is to Makar.’ Or else I’d take you to the forest, find a raspberry bush, sit you down there, and start cutting wooden whistles for you. We’d have a good walk, and I’d carry you back in my arms—the baby’s asleep. And once you got frightened by a wolf, ran to me all trembling, and there wasn’t any wolf.”

“That I remember,” said mama.

“Do you really?”

“I remember a lot. From as early as I can remember myself in life, ever since then I’ve seen your love and mercy over me,” she said in a heartfelt voice and suddenly blushed all over.

Makar Ivanovich paused briefly.

“Forgive me, little children, I’m going. Now the term of my life is upon me. In my old age I have found comfort from all sorrows. Thank you, my dears.”

“Come now, Makar Ivanovich, dear heart,” Versilov exclaimed, somewhat alarmed, “the doctor told me today that you were incomparably better . . .”

Mama was listening fearfully.

“Well, what does he know, your Alexander Semyonych?” Makar Ivanovich smiled. “He’s a dear man, but no more than that. Come, friends, do you think I’m afraid to die? Today, after my morning prayer, I had the feeling in my heart that I wouldn’t leave here anymore; it was told me. Well, and what of it, blessed be the name of the Lord; only I’d like to have a good look at you all again. The much-suffering Job, too, was comforted, looking at his new children, but that he forgot the former ones, and that he could have forgotten them—is impossible!¹⁵ Only over the years sorrow seems to mingle with joy and turn into a bright sighing. That’s how it is in the world: every soul is both tested and comforted. I’ve decided, little children, to tell you a word or two, not much,” he went on with a gentle, beautiful smile, which I will never forget, and suddenly turned to me: “You, my dear, be zealous for the holy Church, and if the time calls for it, also die for her; but wait, don’t be frightened, not now,” he smiled. “Now maybe you’re not thinking of it, but later maybe you will. Only there’s this as well: whatever good you intend to do, do it for God, and not for the sake of envy. Hold firmly to what you do, and don’t give up out of any sort of faintheartedness; and do it gradually, without rushing or throwing yourself about; well, that’s all you need, save maybe also getting used to praying every day and steadfastly. I say it just so, in case you remember it one day. I was going to say something to you, too, Andrei Petrovich, sir, but God will find your heart even without me. And it’s long ago now that you and I stopped talking of such things, ever since that arrow pierced my heart. And now, as I’m going, I’ll just remind you . . . of what you promised then . . .”

He almost whispered the last words, looking down.

“Makar Ivanovich!” Versilov said in embarrassment, and got up from his chair.

“Well, well, don’t be embarrassed, sir, I’m only reminding you . . . It’s I who am guiltiest of all before God in this matter; for, though you were my master, I still shouldn’t have condoned this weakness. So you, too, Sofya, don’t trouble your soul too much, for your whole sin is mine, and in you, as I think, there was hardly any understanding then, and perhaps in you also, sir, along with her,” he smiled, his lips trembling with some sort of pain, “and though I might have taught you then, my spouse, even with a rod, and so I should have, I pitied you as you fell down before me in tears and concealed nothing . . . and kissed my feet. I recall that, my beloved, not as a reproach to you, but only as a reminder to Andrei Petrovich . . . for you yourself, sir, remember your nobleman’s promise, and marriage covers everything . . . I’m saying it in front of the children, sir, my dear heart.”

He was extremely agitated, and looked at Versilov as if expecting words of confirmation from him. I repeat, all this was so unexpected that I sat motionless. Versilov was even no less agitated than he was: he silently went over to mama and embraced her tightly; then mama, also silently, went up to Makar Ivanovich and bowed down at his feet.

In short, the scene turned out to be stupendous; this time there was only our family in the room, not even Tatyana Pavlovna was there. Liza somehow straightened up in her place and listened silently; suddenly she rose and said firmly to Makar Ivanovich:

“Bless me, too, Makar Ivanovich, for a great torment. Tomorrow my whole fate will be decided . . . and so pray for me today.”

And she left the room. I know that Makar Ivanovich already knew everything about her from mama. But that evening for the first time I saw Versilov and mama together; till then I had just seen his slave beside him. There was an awful lot that I didn’t know or hadn’t noticed yet in this man, whom I had already condemned, and therefore I went back to my room in confusion. And it must be said that precisely by that time all my perplexities about him had thickened; never yet had he seemed so mysterious and unfathomable as precisely at that time; but that’s just what the whole story I’m writing is about. All in good time.

“However,” I thought to myself then, as I was going to bed, “it turns out that he gave his ‘nobleman’s word’ to marry mama in case she was left a widow. He said nothing about it when he told me earlier about Makar Ivanovich.”

The next day Liza was gone the whole day, and coming back quite late, she went straight to Makar Ivanovich. At first I didn’t want to go in, so as not to bother them, but I soon noticed that mama and Versilov were already there, and I went in. Liza was sitting next to the old man and weeping on his shoulder, and he, with a sad face, was silently stroking her head.

Versilov explained to me (later in my room) that the prince insisted on having his way and proposed to marry Liza at the first opportunity, before the decision of the court. It was hard for Liza to decide on it, though she now almost had no right not to. Besides, Makar Ivanovich had “ordered” her to marry. Of course, all this would have come out right later by itself, and she would undoubtedly have married on her own, without any orders and hesitations, but at the present moment she was so insulted by the one she loved, and so humiliated by this love even in her own eyes, that it was hard for her to decide. But, besides the insult, there was a new circumstance mixed into it, which I couldn’t have begun to suspect.

“Have you heard that all those young people from the Petersburg side were arrested last night?” Versilov added suddenly.

“What? Dergachev?” I cried.

“Yes, and Vasin also.”

I was struck, especially on hearing about Vasin.

“But is he mixed up with anything? My God, what will happen to them now? And, as if on purpose, at the very time when Liza was accusing Vasin so! . . . What do you think may happen to them? It’s Stebelkov! I swear to you, it’s Stebelkov!”

“Let’s drop it,” said Versilov, looking at me strangely (precisely as one looks at an uncomprehending and unsuspecting man). “Who knows what they’ve got there, and who knows what will happen to them? There’s something else: I hear you want to go out tomorrow. Won’t you be going to Prince Sergei Petrovich?”

“First thing—though, I confess, it’s very hard for me. Why, do you have some message for him?”

“No, nothing. I’ll see him myself. I’m sorry for Liza. And what advice can Makar Ivanovich give her? He himself understands nothing in people or in life. There’s another thing, my dear” (he hadn’t called me “my dear” for a long time), “there are also . . . certain young men here . . . one of whom is your former schoolmate, Lambert . . . It seems to me they’re all great scoundrels . . . I say it just to warn you . . . Anyhow, of course, all that is your business, I understand that I have no right . . .”

“Andrei Petrovich,” I seized his hand without thinking and almost in inspiration, as often happened with me (we were almost in the dark), “Andrei Petrovich, I’ve been silent—you’ve seen that, I’ve kept silent up to now, and do you know why? To avoid your secrets. I’ve simply resolved never to know them. I’m a coward, I’m afraid that your secrets will tear you out of my heart completely, and I don’t want that. And if so, then why should you know my secrets? Let it be all the same to you, wherever I may go! Isn’t it so?”

“You’re right, but not a word more, I beg you!” he said, and left my room. Thus we accidentally had a bit of a talk. But he only added to my agitation before my new step in life the next day, so that I spent the whole night constantly waking up. But I felt good.

III

THE NEXT DAY, though I left the house at ten o’clock in the morning, I tried as hard as I could to leave on the quiet, without saying good-bye or telling anybody—to slip away, as they say. Why I did that I don’t know, but if even mama had seen me going out and started talking to me, I would have answered with something angry. When I found myself outside and breathed the cold outdoor air, I shuddered from a very strong sensation—almost an animal one, and which I’d call carnivorous. Why was I going, where was I going? It was completely indefinite and at the same time carnivorous . I felt frightened and joyful—both at once.

“And will I dirty myself today, or not?” I thought dashingly to myself, though I knew all too well that today’s step, once taken, would be decisive and irreparable for my whole life. But there’s no use speaking in riddles.

I went straight to the prince’s prison. For three days already I had had a note from Tatyana Pavlovna to the warden, and he gave me an excellent reception. I don’t know whether he’s a good man, and I don’t think it matters; but he allowed me to meet with the prince and arranged it in his own room, kindly yielding it to us. The room was like any room—an ordinary room in the government apartment of an official of a known sort—that also, I think, we can omit describing. So the prince and I were left alone.

He came out to me in some half-military housecoat, but with a very clean shirt, a fancy necktie, washed and combed, and along with that terribly thin and yellow. I noticed this yellowness even in his eyes. In short, his looks were so changed that I even stopped in perplexity.

“How changed you are!” I cried.

“Never mind! Sit down, my dear,” he half-foppishly showed me to an armchair and sat down facing me. “Let’s go on to the main thing: you see, my dear Alexei Makarovich . . .”

“Arkady,” I corrected.

“What? Ah, yes—well, well, it makes no difference. Ah, yes!” he suddenly realized, “excuse me, dear heart, let’s go on to the main thing . . .”

In short, he was in a terrible hurry to go on to something. He was all pervaded with something, from head to foot, with some sort of main idea, which he wished to formulate and present to me. He talked terribly much and quickly, with strain and suffering, explaining and gesticulating, but in the first moments I understood decidedly nothing.

“To put it briefly” (he had already used the phrase “to put it briefly” ten times before then), “to put it briefly,” he concluded, “if I have troubled you, Arkady Makarovich, and summoned you so insistently yesterday through Liza, then, though things are ablaze, still, since the essence of the decision should be extraordinary and definitive, we . . .”

“Excuse me, Prince,” I interrupted, “did you summon me yesterday? Liza told me precisely nothing.”

“What!” he cried, suddenly stopping in great bewilderment, even almost in fright.

“She told me precisely nothing. Last night she came home so upset that she didn’t even manage to say a word to me.”

The prince jumped up from his chair.

“Can this be true, Arkady Makarovich? In that case, it’s . . . it’s...”

“But, anyhow, what of it? Why are you so disturbed? She simply forgot or something . . .”

He sat down, but it was as if stupefaction came over him. The news that Liza hadn’t told me anything simply crushed him. He suddenly began speaking quickly and waving his arms, but again it was terribly difficult to understand.

“Wait!” he said suddenly, falling silent and holding up his finger. “Wait, it’s . . . it’s . . . unless I’m mistaken . . . these are—tricks, sir! . . .” he murmured with a maniac’s smile. “And it means that . . .”

“It means precisely nothing!” I interrupted. “And I only don’t understand why such an empty circumstance torments you so . . . Ah, Prince, since that time, ever since that night—remember . . .”

“Since what night, and what of it?” he cried fussily, obviously vexed that I had interrupted him.

“At Zershchikov’s, where we saw each other for the last time—well, before your letter? You were also terribly disturbed then, but between then and now there’s such a difference that I’m even horrified at you . . . Or don’t you remember?”

“Ah, yes,” he said, in the voice of a worldly man, and as if suddenly recalling, “ah, yes! That evening . . . I heard . . . Well, how is your health, and how are you now after all this, Arkady Makarovich? . . . But, anyway, let’s go on to the main thing. You see, I am essentially pursuing three goals; there are three tasks before me, and I . . .”

He quickly began speaking again about his “main thing.” I realized, finally, that I saw before me a man who ought at least to have a napkin with vinegar put to his head at once, if not to have his blood let. His whole incoherent conversation, naturally, turned around his trial, around the possible outcome; also around the fact that the regimental commander himself had visited him and spent a long time talking him out of something, but that he had not obeyed; around a note he had just written and submitted somewhere; around the prosecutor; about the fact that he would probably be stripped of his rights and exiled somewhere to the northern reaches of Russia; about the possibility of becoming a colonist and earning back his rights in Tashkent;¹⁶ that he would teach his son (the future one, from Liza) this, and pass on that, “in the back-woods, in Arkhangelsk, in Kholmogory.”¹⁷ “If I wished for your opinion, Arkady Makarovich, then believe me, I value so much the feeling . . . If you only knew, if you only knew, Arkady Makarovich, my dear, my brother, what Liza means to me, what she has meant to me here, now, all this time!” he cried suddenly, clutching his head with both hands.

“Sergei Petrovich, can it be that you’ll ruin her and take her away? To Kholmogory!” suddenly burst from me irrepressibly. Liza’s lot with this maniac all her life suddenly presented itself to my consciousness clearly and as if for the first time. He looked at me, stood up again, took a step, turned around, and sat down again, still holding his head with his hands.

“I keep dreaming of spiders!” he said suddenly.

“You’re terribly agitated, Prince, I’d advise you to lie down and send for the doctor at once.”

“No, excuse me, that can wait. I mainly asked you to come so that I could explain to you about the marriage. The marriage, you know, will take place right here in the church, I’ve already said so. Approval has been granted, and they even encourage . . . As for Liza . . .”

“Prince, have mercy on Liza, my dear,” I cried, “don’t torment her now at least, don’t be jealous!”

“What!” he cried, looking at me point-blank, his eyes almost popping out, and his face twisted into some sort of long, senselessly questioning smile. It was clear that the words “don’t be jealous” for some reason struck him terribly.

“Forgive me, Prince, it was inadvertent. Oh, Prince, I’ve come to know an old man recently, my nominal father . . . Oh, if you could see him you’d be calmer . . . Liza also appreciates him so.”

“Ah, yes, Liza . . . ah, yes, it’s your father? Or . . . pardon, mon cher,⁶⁸ something like that . . . I remember . . . she told me . . . a little old man . . . To be sure, to be sure. I also knew a little old man . . . Mais passons,⁶⁹ the main thing, in order to clarify the whole essence of the moment, we must . . .”

I got up to leave. It was painful for me to look at him.

“I do not understand!” he uttered sternly and imposingly, seeing that I had gotten up to leave.

“It’s painful for me to look at you,” I said.

“Arkady Makarovich, one word, one word more!” He suddenly seized me by the shoulders with a completely different look and gesture, and sat me down in the armchair. “Have you heard about those . . . you understand?” he leaned towards me.

“Ah, yes, Dergachev. It must be Stebelkov!” I cried, unable to restrain myself.

“Yes, Stebelkov and . . . you don’t know?”

He stopped short and again stared at me with the same popping eyes and the same long, convulsive, senselessly questioning smile, which spread wider and wider. His face gradually grew pale. It was as if something suddenly shook me: I remembered Versilov’s look the day before, when he was telling me about Vasin’s arrest.

“Oh, can it be?” I cried fearfully.

“You see, Arkady Makarovich, this is why I summoned you, in order to explain . . . I wanted . . .” he was whispering quickly.

“It was you who denounced Vasin!” I cried.

“No, you see, there was this manuscript. Before the very last day, Vasin gave it to Liza . . . for safekeeping. And she left it here for me to look at, and then it so happened that they quarreled the next day . . .”

“You turned the manuscript over to the authorities!”

“Arkady Makarovich! Arkady Makarovich!”

“And so you,” I cried, jumping up and rapping out the words, “you, with no other motive, with no other purpose, but solely because the unfortunate Vasin is your rival, solely out of jealousy, you gave the manuscript entrusted to Liza . . . gave it to whom? To whom? To the prosecutor?”

But he didn’t have time to answer, and he hardly would have answered anything, because he stood before me like an idol, still with the same morbid smile and fixed gaze; but suddenly the door opened and Liza came in. She almost fainted, seeing us together.

“You here? So you are here?” she cried with a suddenly distorted face and seizing me by the hands. “So you . . . know?”

But she had already read in my face that I “knew.” I quickly and irrepressibly embraced her, tightly, tightly! And only at that moment did I grasp for the first time, in its full force, what hopeless, endless grief, with no dawn, lay forever over the whole destiny of this . . . voluntary seeker of suffering!

“But is it possible to speak with him now?” she suddenly tore herself away from me. “Is it possible to be with him? Why are you here? Look at him! Look! And is it possible, is it possible to judge him?”

Endless misery and commiseration were in her face as she exclaimed this, pointing to the unfortunate man. He was sitting in the armchair, covering his face with his hands. And she was right: this was a man in high delirium and irresponsible; and maybe for three days now he had already been irresponsible. That same morning he had been put in the hospital, and by evening he had come down with brain fever.

IV

FROM THE PRINCE, whom I left then with Liza, I went at around one o’clock to my former apartment. I forgot to mention that it was a damp, dull day, with the beginnings of a thaw and with a warm wind, capable of upsetting even an elephant’s nerves. The landlord met me rejoicing, hustling and bustling, something I terribly dislike precisely at such moments. I treated him drily and went straight to my room, but he followed me, and though he didn’t dare ask any questions, curiosity simply shone in his eyes, and at the same time he looked as if he even had some right to be curious. I had to treat him politely for my own good; but though it was all too necessary for me to find out a thing or two (and I knew I would), still I was loath to start asking questions. I inquired after his wife’s health, and we went to see her. She met me courteously, though with an extremely businesslike and taciturn air; this reconciled me a little. Briefly, this time I learned some quite wondrous things.

Well, naturally, Lambert had been there, but then he had come twice more and “looked the rooms all over,” saying he might rent them. Nastasya Egorovna had come several times, God alone knew why. “She was also very curious,” the landlord added, but I didn’t gratify him, I didn’t ask what she was curious about. In general, I didn’t ask any questions, it was he who spoke, and I pretended to be rummaging in my suitcase (in which there was almost nothing left). But the most vexing thing was that he also decided to play mysterious and, noticing that I refrained from asking questions, also thought it his duty to become more clipped, almost enigmatic.

“The young lady was also here,” he added, looking at me strangely.

“What young lady?”

“Anna Andreevna. She came twice; got acquainted with my wife. Very nice person, very agreeable. Such an acquaintance one can appreciate only too well, Arkady Makarovich . . .” And, having brought that out, he even took a step towards me: so much did he want me to understand something.

“Twice, really?” I was surprised.

“The second time she came with her brother.”

“Meaning with Lambert,” occurred to me involuntarily.

“No, sir, not with Mr. Lambert,” he guessed at once, as if jumping into my soul with his eyes, “but with her brother, the real one, the young Mr. Versilov. A kammerjunker,¹⁸ it seems?”

I was very embarrassed; he looked on, smiling terribly affectionately.

“Ah, there was someone else here asking for you—that mamzelle, the Frenchwoman, Mamzelle Alphonsine de Verdaigne. Ah, how well she sings, and she also declaims beautifully in verse! She was on her way in secret to see Prince Nikolai Ivanovich then, in Tsarskoe, to sell him a little dog, she said, a rarity, black, no bigger than your fist . . .”

I begged him to leave me alone, excusing myself with a headache. He instantly satisfied me, not even finishing the phrase, and not only without the least touchiness, but almost with pleasure, waving his hand mysteriously and as if saying, “I understand, sir, I understand,” and though he didn’t say it, instead he left the room on tiptoe, he gave himself that pleasure. There are very vexatious people in this world.

I sat alone, thinking things over for about an hour and a half—not thinking things over, however, but just brooding. Though I was confused, I was not in the least surprised. I even expected something more, some still greater wonders. “Maybe they’ve already performed them by now,” I thought. I had been firmly and long convinced, still at home, that their machine was wound up and running at full speed. “It’s only me they lack, that’s what,” I thought again, with a sort of irritable and agreeable smugness. That they were waiting for me with all their might—and setting something up to happen in my apartment—was clear as day. “Can it be the old prince’s wedding? The beaters are all after him. Only will I allow it, gentlemen, that’s the thing,” I concluded again with haughty satisfaction.

“Once I start, I’ll immediately get drawn into the whirlpool again, like a chip of wood. Am I free now, this minute, or am I no longer free? Going back to mama tonight, can I still say to myself, as in all these past days, ‘I am on my own’?”

That was the essence of my questions or, better, of the throbbings of my heart, during that hour and a half that I spent then in the corner on the bed, my elbows resting on my knees, my head propped in my hands. But I knew, I already knew even then, that all these questions were complete nonsense, and I was drawn only by her—her and her alone! At last I’ve said it straight out and written it with pen on paper, for even now, as I write, a year later, I still don’t know how to call my feeling of that time by its name!

Oh, I felt sorry for Liza, and there was a most unhypocritical pain in my heart! Just by itself this feeling of pain for her might, it seems, have restrained and effaced, at least for a time, the carnivorousness in me (again I mention that word). But I was drawn by boundless curiosity and a sort of fear, and some other feeling as well—I don’t know which; but I know, and already knew then, that it was not good. Maybe I yearned to fall at her feet, or maybe I wanted to give her over to every torment and “quickly, quickly” prove something to her. No pain and no compassion for Liza could stop me now. Well, could I get up and go home . . . to Makar Ivanovich?

“But is it really impossible simply to go to them, find out everything from them, and suddenly go away from them forever, passing unharmed by the wonders and monsters?”

At three o’clock, catching myself and realizing that I was almost late, I quickly went out, caught a cab, and flew to Anna Andreevna.

Chapter Five

I

AS SOON AS I was announced, Anna Andreevna dropped her sewing and hurriedly came out to meet me in her front room—something that had never happened before. She held out both hands to me and quickly blushed. Silently she led me to her room, sat down to her handwork again, sat me down beside her; but she didn’t take her sewing now, but went on examining me with the same warm concern, not saying a word.

“You sent Nastasya Egorovna to me,” I began directly, somewhat burdened by this all-too-spectacular concern, though it pleased me.

She suddenly spoke, not answering my question.

“I’ve heard everything, I know everything. That terrible night . . . Oh, how you must have suffered! Is it true, is it true that you were found unconscious in the freezing cold?”

“You got that . . . from Lambert . . .” I murmured, reddening.

“I learned everything from him right then; but I’ve been waiting for you. Oh, he came to me so frightened! At your apartment . . . where you were lying ill, they didn’t want to let him in to see you . . . and they met him strangely . . . I really don’t know how it was, but he told me all about that night; he said that, having just barely come to your senses, you mentioned me to him and . . . your devotion to me. I was moved to tears, Arkady Makarovich, and I don’t even know how I deserved such warm concern on your part, and that in such a situation as you were in! Tell me, is Mr. Lambert your childhood friend?”

“Yes, but this incident . . . I confess, I was imprudent, and maybe told him far too much then.”

“Oh, I would have learned of this black, terrible intrigue even without him! I always, always had a presentiment that they would drive you to that. Tell me, is it true that Bjoring dared to raise his hand against you?”

She spoke as if it was only because of Bjoring and her that I had wound up under the wall. And it occurred to me that she was right, but I flared up:

“If he had raised his hand against me, he wouldn’t have gone unpunished, and I wouldn’t be sitting in front of you now unavenged,” I replied heatedly. Above all, it seemed to me that she wanted to provoke me for some reason, to rouse me up against somebody (however, it was clear whom); and all the same I succumbed.

“If you say you had a presentiment that they would drive me to that, then on Katerina Nikolaevna’s part, of course, there was only a misunderstanding . . . though it’s also true that she was all too quick in exchanging her good feelings towards me for this misunderstanding . . .”

“That’s precisely it, that she was all too quick!” Anna Andreevna picked up, even in some sort of rapture of sympathy. “Oh, if you knew what an intrigue they’ve got there now! Of course, Arkady Makarovich, it’s hard for you now to understand all the ticklishness of my position,” she said, blushing and looking down. “Since that same morning when we saw each other last, I have taken a step that not every person can understand and grasp as one with your as-yet-uncontaminated mind, with your loving, unspoiled, fresh heart would understand it. Rest assured, my friend, that I am capable of appreciating your devotion to me, and I will repay you with eternal gratitude. In society, of course, they will take up stones against me, and they already have. But even if they were right, from their vile point of view, which of them could, which of them dared even then to condemn me? I have been abandoned by my father since childhood; we Versilovs—an ancient, highborn Russian family—are all strays, and I eat other people’s bread on charity. Wouldn’t it be natural for me to turn to the one who ever since childhood has replaced my father, whose kindness towards me I have seen for so many years? God alone can see and judge my feelings for him, and I do not allow society to judge me for the step I’ve taken! And when, on top of that, there is the darkest, most perfidious intrigue, and a daughter conspires to ruin her own trusting, magnanimous father, can that be endured? No, let me even ruin my reputation, but I will save him! I am ready to live in his house simply as a nurse, to watch over him, to sit by his sickbed, but I will not give the triumph to cold, loathsome society calculation!”

She spoke with extraordinary animation, very possibly half-affected, but nevertheless sincere, because it could be seen to what degree she had been wholly drawn into this affair. Oh, I could feel that she was lying (though sincerely, because one can also lie sincerely) and that she was now bad; but it’s astonishing how it happens with women: this air of respectability, these lofty forms, this unapproachability of social heights and proud chastity—all this threw me off, and I began to agree with her in everything, that is, while I sat with her; at least I didn’t dare contradict her. Oh, man is decidedly in moral slavery to woman, especially if he is magnanimous! Such a woman can convince a magnanimous man of anything. “She and Lambert—my God!” I thought, looking at her in bewilderment. However, I’ll say all: even to this day I don’t know how to judge her; indeed God alone could see her feelings, and besides, a human being is such a complex machine that in some cases there’s no figuring him out, and all the more so if that being is—a woman.

“Anna Andreevna, precisely what do you expect of me?” I asked, however, rather resolutely.

“How’s that? What does your question mean, Arkady Makarovich?”

“It seems to me by all . . . and by certain other considerations . . .” I explained, getting confused, “that you sent to me expecting something from me. So what was it precisely?”

Not answering my question, she instantly began speaking again, just as quickly and animatedly:

“But I cannot, I’m too proud to enter into discussions and deals with unknown persons like Mr. Lambert! I’ve been waiting for you, not for Mr. Lambert. My position is extreme, terrible, Arkady Makarovich! Surrounded by that woman’s schemes, I’m obliged to be devious—and it’s unbearable for me. I almost stoop to intrigues, and I’ve been waiting for you as for a savior. I cannot be blamed that I look eagerly around me to find at least one friend, and so I couldn’t help rejoicing over a friend: one who, even on that night, nearly frozen, could remember me and repeat only my name alone, is of course devoted to me. So I’ve been thinking all this time, and therefore I put my hopes in you.”

She looked into my eyes with impatient inquiry. And here again I lacked the courage to dissuade her and to explain to her directly that Lambert had deceived her and that I had never told him then that I was so especially devoted to her, and hadn’t remembered “only her name alone.” Thus, by my silence, it was as if I confirmed Lambert’s lie. Oh, I’m sure she herself understood very well that Lambert had exaggerated and even simply lied to her, solely in order to have a decent pretext for coming to see her and establishing contacts with her; and if she looked into my eyes as though convinced of the truth of my words and of my devotion, then, of course, she knew that I wouldn’t have dared deny it, so to speak, out of delicacy and on account of my youth. But, anyhow, whether this guess of mine is right or wrong—I don’t know. Maybe I’m terribly depraved.

“My brother will stand up for me,” she pronounced suddenly with ardor, seeing that I didn’t want to reply.

“I was told that you came to my apartment with him,” I murmured in embarrassment.

“But poor Prince Nikolai Ivanovich has almost nowhere to escape to now from the whole intrigue, or, better, from his own daughter, except to your apartment, that is, to a friend’s apartment; for he does have the right to consider you at least a friend! . . . And then, if only you want to do something for his benefit, you can do it—if only you can, if only there is magnanimity and courage in you . . . and, finally, if it’s true that you can do something. Oh, it’s not for me, not for me, but for a poor old man, who alone loved you sincerely, who managed to become attached to you in his heart as to his own son, and who longs for you even to this day! For myself I expect nothing, even from you—if even my own father has played such a perfidious, such a malicious escapade with me!”

“It seems to me that Andrei Petrovich . . .” I tried to begin.

“Andrei Petrovich,” she interrupted with a bitter smile, “Andrei Petrovich, to my direct question, answered me then on his word of honor that he never had the least intentions towards Katerina Nikolaevna, which I fully believed when taking my step; and yet it turned out that he was calm only until the first news about some Mr. Bjoring.”

“It’s not that!” I cried. “There was a moment when I, too, believed in his love for this woman, but it’s not that . . . and even if it was that, it would seem he could be perfectly calm now . . . since this gentleman has been dismissed.”

“What gentleman?”

“Bjoring.”

“Who told you about his dismissal? This gentleman has perhaps never been in so strong a position,” she smiled caustically; it even seemed to me that she gave me a mocking look.

“Nastasya Egorovna told me,” I murmured in embarrassment, which I was unable to conceal and which she noticed only too well.

“Nastasya Egorovna is a very sweet person, and I certainly cannot forbid her to love me, but she has no means of knowing what doesn’t concern her.”

My heart was wrung; and since she was counting precisely on firing my indignation, indignation did boil up in me, not against that woman, but so far only against Anna Andreevna herself. I got up from my place.

“As an honest man, I must warn you, Anna Andreevna, that your expectations . . . concerning me . . . may prove vain in the highest degree . . .”

“I expect you to stand up for me,” she looked at me firmly, “for me, who am abandoned by everyone . . . your sister, if you want that, Arkady Makarovich!”

Another moment and she would have started crying.

“Well, it would be better not to, because ‘maybe’ nothing will happen,” I babbled with an inexpressibly heavy feeling.

“How am I to take your words?” she asked somehow too warily.

“Like this, that I will leave you all and—basta! ” I suddenly exclaimed almost in fury. “And as for the document—I’ll tear it up! Farewell!”

I bowed to her and left silently, at the same time almost not daring to glance at her; but I had not yet reached the bottom of the stairs when Nastasya Egorovna overtook me with a folded half-page of note paper. Where Nastasya Egorovna had come from, and where she had been sitting while I was talking with Anna Andreevna—I can’t even comprehend. She didn’t say a single word, but only handed me the paper and ran back. I unfolded it: Lambert’s address was written on it legibly and clearly, and it had been prepared, obviously, several days earlier. I suddenly remembered that on the day when Nastasya Egorovna had come to see me, I had let slip to her that I didn’t know where Lambert lived, but in the sense that “I didn’t know and didn’t want to know.” But by that time I had already learned Lambert’s address through Liza, whom I had asked especially to make inquiries at the information bureau. Anna Andreevna’s escapade seemed to me too resolute, even cynical: despite my refusal to assist her, she, as if not believing me a whit, was sending me straight to Lambert. It became only too clear to me that she had already learned all about the document—and from whom else if not from Lambert, to whom she was therefore sending me to arrange things?

“Decidedly every last one of them takes me for a little boy with no will or character, with whom anything can be done!” I thought with indignation.

II

NEVERTHELESS I WENT to Lambert’s anyway. How could I overcome my curiosity at that time? Lambert, it turned out, lived very far away, in Kosoy Lane, by the Summer Garden, incidentally in the same furnished rooms; but the other time, when I had fled from him, I had been so oblivious of the way and the distance that, when I got his address from Liza four days earlier, I was even surprised and almost didn’t believe he lived there. While still going up the stairs, I noticed two young men at the door to his rooms, on the third floor, and thought they had rung before me and were waiting to be let in. As I came up the stairs, they both turned their backs to the door and studied me carefully. “These are furnished rooms, and they, of course, are going to see other lodgers,” I frowned as I approached them. It would have been very unpleasant for me to find somebody at Lambert’s. Trying not to look at them, I reached out my hand for the bell-pull.

“Atanday,”⁷⁰ one of them shouted at me.

“Please wait to ring,” the other young man said in a ringing and gentle little voice, drawing the words out somewhat. “We’ll finish this, and then we can all ring together if you like.”

I stopped. They were both still very young men, about twenty or twenty-two years old; they were doing something strange there by the door, and in surprise I tried to grasp what it was. The one who had shouted atanday was a very tall fellow, about six foot six, not less, gaunt and haggard, but very muscular, with a very small head for his height, and a strange, sort of comically gloomy expression on his somewhat pockmarked but not at all stupid and even pleasant face. His eyes looked with a somehow excessive intentness, and even a sort of unnecessary and superfluous resolution. He was quite vilely dressed, in an old quilted cotton overcoat with a small, shabby raccoon collar, too short for his height—obviously from someone else’s back—and vile, almost peasant boots, and with a terribly crumpled, discolored top hat on his head. In all he was clearly a sloven: his gloveless hands were dirty, and his long nails were in mourning. His comrade, on the contrary, was foppishly dressed, judging by his light polecat coat, his elegant hat, and the light, fresh gloves on his slender fingers; he was the same height as I, but with an extremely sweet expression on his fresh and young little face.

The long fellow was pulling off his necktie—a completely tattered and greasy ribbon or almost tape—and the pretty boy, having taken from his pocket another new, black tie, just purchased, was tying it around the neck of the long fellow, who obediently and with a terribly serious face, was stretching out his very long neck, throwing his overcoat back from his shoulders.

“No, it’s impossible if the shirt’s so dirty,” the young man thus occupied said. “There not only won’t be any effect, but it will seem still dirtier. I told you to put on a collar . . . I can’t do it . . . Maybe you can?” he suddenly turned to me.

“Do what?” I asked.

“Here, you know, tie his necktie. You see, it has to be done in some way so that his dirty shirt doesn’t show, otherwise there’ll be no effect, no matter what. I just bought him a necktie from Filipp, the barber, for a rouble.”

“Was it that rouble?” the long one murmured.

“Yes, that one; now I don’t even have a kopeck. So you can’t do it? In that case we’ll have to ask Alphonsinka.”

“To see Lambert?” the long one suddenly asked me abruptly.

“To see Lambert,” I replied with no less resolution, looking him in the eye.

“Dolgorowky?” ¹⁹ he repeated in the same tone and the same voice.

“No, not Korovkin,” I replied just as abruptly, having misheard.

“Dolgorowky?! ” the long one almost shouted, repeating himself, and coming at me almost menacingly. His comrade burst out laughing.

“He’s saying Dolgorowky, not Korovkin,” he clarified. “You know how the French in the Journal des débats often distort Russian last names . . .”

“In the Indépendance,” ²⁰ the long one grunted.

“. . . Well, in the Indépendance, too, it makes no difference. Dolgoruky, for instance, is written Dolgorowky, I’ve read it myself, and V—v is always Comte Wallonie f.”

“Doboyny! ” cried the long one.

“Yes, there’s also some Doboyny. I read it myself and we both laughed: some Russian Mme. Doboyny, abroad . . . only, you see, why mention them all?” he suddenly turned to the long one.

“Excuse me, are you Mr. Dolgoruky?”

“Yes, I’m Dolgoruky, but how do you know?”

The long one suddenly whispered something to the pretty boy, who frowned and made a negative gesture; but the long one suddenly turned to me:

“Monsieur le prince, vous n’avez pas de rouble d’argent pour nous, pas deux, mais un seul, voulez-vous?”⁷¹

“Ah, how vile you are!” cried the boy.

“Nous vous rendons,”⁷² the long one concluded, pronouncing the French words crudely and awkwardly.

“He’s a cynic, you know,” the boy smiled to me. “And do you think he doesn’t know how to speak French? He speaks like a Parisian, and he’s only mocking those Russians who want to speak French aloud among themselves in society, but don’t know how . . .”

“Dans les wagons,”⁷³ the long one clarified.

“Well, yes, in railway carriages, too—ah, what a bore you are, there’s nothing to clarify! A nice fancy to pretend you’re a fool.”

Meanwhile I took out a rouble and offered it to the long one.

“Nous vous rendons,” the man said, pocketing the rouble, and, suddenly turning to the door, with a perfectly immobile and serious face he began banging on it with the toe of his enormous, crude boot and, above all, without the slightest irritation.

“Ah, you’re going to have a fight with Lambert again!” the boy observed uneasily. “You’d better ring!”

I rang, but the long one still went on banging with his boot.

“Ah, sacré . . .”⁷⁴; Lambert’s voice suddenly came from behind the door, and he quickly opened it.

“Dites donc, voulez-vous que je vous casse la tête, mon ami!” he shouted at the long one.

“Mon ami, voilà Dolgorowky, l’autre mon ami,” ⁷⁵ the long one pronounced importantly and seriously, looking point-blank at Lambert, who had turned red with anger. As soon as he saw me, he was as if all transformed at once.

“It’s you, Arkady! At last! So you’re well now, you’re well at last?”

He seized me by the hands, pressing them hard; in short, he was so sincerely delighted that I instantly felt terribly pleased, and even began to like him.

“You’re the first one I’m calling on!”

“Alphonsine!” cried Lambert.

The woman instantly leaped out from behind the screen.

“Le voilà!”⁷⁶

“C’est lui!”⁷⁷ exclaimed Alphonsine, clasping her hands, and, spreading them wide again, she rushed to embrace me, but Lambert came to my defense.

“No, no, no, down!” he shouted at her as if she were a puppy. “You see, Arkady, a few of us fellows have arranged to have dinner at the Tartar’s today. I won’t let you off, come with us. We’ll have dinner; I’ll chase these boys out at once—and then we can talk as much as we like. But do come in! We’re leaving right away, just stay for a little minute . . .”

I went in and stood in the middle of that room, looking around and remembering. Lambert was hastily changing his clothes behind the screen. The long one and his comrade also came in with us, despite Lambert’s words. We all remained standing.

“Mlle. Alphonsine, voulez-vous me baiser?”⁷⁸ the long one grunted.

“Mlle. Alphonsine,” the younger one made a movement, pointing to the little tie, but she fell fiercely on them both.

“Ah, le petit vilain! ” she cried to the younger one. “Ne m’approcher pas, ne me salissez pas, et vous, le grand dadais, je vous flanque à la porte tous les deux, savez-vous cela!” ⁷⁹;

The younger one, in spite of her waving him away scornfully and squeamishly, as if she really was afraid to dirty herself by touching him (which I couldn’t understand, because he was so pretty and turned out to be so well dressed when he threw off his fur coat)—the younger one began begging her insistently to tie the necktie on his long friend, after first tying one of Lambert’s clean collars on him. She almost started beating them, she was so indignant at this suggestion, but Lambert, having heard it, cried to her from behind the screen that she shouldn’t hamper them and should do as she was asked, “otherwise they won’t leave you alone,” he added, and Alphonsine instantly seized the collar and began tying it on the long one, now without the slightest squeamishness. Just as on the stairs, the man stretched his neck out for her while she tied it.

“Mlle. Alphonsine, avez-vous vendu votre bologne?”⁸⁰ he asked.

“Qu’est-ce que ça, ma bologne?”⁸¹

The younger one explained that ma bologne signified her little Bolognese lap dog.

“Tiens, quel est ce baragouin?”⁸²

“Je parle comme une dame russe sur les eaux minérales,”⁸³; observed le grand dadais, his neck still stretched out.

“Qu’est-ce que ça qu’une dame russe sure les eaux minérales et . . . où est donc votre jolie montre, que Lambert vous a donné?” she suddenly turned to the younger one.

“What, no watch again?” Lambert echoed irritably from behind the screen.

“We ate it up!” le grand dadais grunted.

“I sold it for eight roubles. It was gilded silver, and you told me it was gold. Ones like that, in a shop now, cost only sixteen roubles,” the younger one replied to Lambert, justifying himself with reluctance.

“We must put an end to this!” Lambert went on still more irritably. “I don’t buy you clothes, my young friend, and give you beautiful things, so that you can waste it all on your long friend . . . What’s this tie you’ve bought?”

“That was only a rouble; it wasn’t yours. He didn’t have any tie at all, and he still needs to buy a hat.”

“Nonsense!” Lambert was now angry indeed. “I gave him enough for a hat as well, and he up and bought oysters and champagne. He smells; he’s a sloven; he can’t be taken anywhere. How can I take him to dinner?”

“In a cab,” the dadais grunted. “Nous avons un rouble d’argent que nous avons prêté chez notre nouvel ami.”⁸⁴

“Don’t give them anything, Arkady!” Lambert cried again.

“Excuse me, Lambert, I demand outright that you give me ten roubles here and now,” the boy suddenly became angry and even turned all red, which made him twice as good-looking, “and don’t you ever dare to say foolish things, as you just did to Dolgoruky. I demand ten roubles, one rouble to give back to Dolgoruky right now, and the rest to buy Andreev a hat at once—you’ll see for yourself.”

Lambert came from behind the screen:

“Here’s three yellow notes, three roubles, and nothing more till Tuesday, and don’t you dare . . . or else . . .”

Le grand dadais snatched the money from him.

“Dolgorowky, here’s the rouble, nous vous rendons avec beaucoup de grâce.⁸⁵ Petya, let’s go!” he cried to his comrade, and then, holding up the two notes, waving them and looking point-blank at Lambert, he suddenly screamed with all his might:

“Ohé, Lambert! où est Lambert, as-tu vu Lambert?”⁸⁶

“Don’t you dare, don’t you dare!” Lambert also screamed in the most terrible wrath. I saw that there was something previous in all this, totally unknown to me, and I gazed in astonishment. But the long one wasn’t frightened in the least by Lambert’s wrath; on the contrary, he screamed still louder: “Ohé, Lambert! ” and so on. With this shouting they went out to the stairs. Lambert started after them, but then came back.

“Eh, soon I’ll thr-r-row them out on their ears! They cost more than they bring in . . . Come on, Arkady! I’m late. There’s yet another necessary man . . . waiting for me . . . Also a brute . . . They’re all brutes! Tghrash, tghrash!” he cried again and almost ground his teeth; but all at once he came fully to his senses. “I’m glad you finally came. Alphonsine, not a step from the house! Let’s go!”

By the porch, a smart trotter was waiting for him. We got in; but even all the way he still couldn’t recover from some sort of fury against those young men and calm down. I marveled that it was so serious, and that, besides, they were all so irreverent with Lambert, while he all but even cowered before them. To me, by an ingrown old impression from childhood, it always seemed that everyone must fear Lambert, so that, despite all my independence, I myself probably cowered before Lambert at that moment.

“I tell you, they’re all terrible tghrash,” Lambert couldn’t calm down. “Would you believe it, that tall, vile one tormented me three days ago, in good society. He stands in front of me and shouts: ‘Ohé, Lambert! ’ In good society! Everybody laughs and knows that it’s to get money from me—can you imagine. I gave it. Oh, they’re scoundrels! Would you believe it, he was a junker²¹ in a regiment and got thrown out, and, can you imagine, he’s educated; he was brought up in a good home, can you imagine! He has thoughts, he could . . . Eh, the devil! And he’s strong as Hercule. He’s useful, but not very. And you can see he doesn’t wash his hands. I recommended him to a certain lady, an old noble lady, saying that he had repented and wanted to kill himself from remorse, and he came to her, sat down, and whistled. And the other, the pretty one, is a general’s son; the family’s ashamed of him, I pulled him out of a trial, I saved him, and this is how he repays me. There are no people here! On their ears, on their ears!”

“They know my name; did you speak to them about me?”

“I had the stupidity. Please sit through dinner, brace yourself . . . Another awful canaille is coming. This one is really an awful canaille, and he’s terribly cunning; they’re all scum here; not a single honest man! Well, so we’ll finish—and then . . . What do you like to eat? Well, it makes no difference, they have good food there. I’m paying, don’t worry. It’s a good thing you’re well dressed. I can give you money. Come any time. Imagine, I wined and dined them here, there was cabbage pie every day; that watch he sold, it’s the second time. The little one, Trishatov—you saw him, Alphonsine even scorns to look at him and forbids him to come near her—and suddenly, in a restaurant, in front of some officers, he says, ‘I’ll have snipe.’ I gave him snipe! Only I’ll get my revenge.”

“Remember, Lambert, how we drove to a tavern in Moscow, and in the tavern you stabbed me with a fork, and how you had five hundred roubles then?”

“Yes, I remember! Eh, the devil, I do! I like you . . . Believe that. Nobody likes you, but I do; I’m the only one, remember . . . The one who’s coming, the pockmarked one, is the most cunning canaille; don’t say anything to him if he starts talking, and if he starts asking questions, answer with nonsense, keep mum . . .”

At any rate, on account of his excitement, he didn’t ask me anything on the way. I even felt offended that he was so sure of me and didn’t even suspect any mistrust in me; it seemed to me that he had the stupid notion that he could still order me around. “And besides, he’s terribly uneducated,” I thought, going into the restaurant.

III

I USED TO go to this restaurant on Morskaya²² before, during the time of my infamous decadence and depravity, and therefore the impression of these rooms, these waiters, looking me over and recognizing me as a familiar visitor, the impression, finally, of this mysterious company of Lambert’s friends, in which I had so suddenly found myself and to which I already seemed to belong indivisibly, and above all—the dark foreboding that I was voluntarily heading for some sort of vileness and would undoubtedly end up in bad business—it was as if all this suddenly pierced me. There was a moment when I almost left; but the moment passed and I stayed.

That “pockmarked one” Lambert was so afraid of for some reason was already waiting for us. He was a small man with one of those stupidly businesslike appearances, a type I’ve hated almost since childhood; about forty-five years old, of medium height, with some gray in his hair, with a face clean-shaven to the point of vileness, and with small, regular, gray, trimmed side-whiskers in the form of two little sausages on the two cheeks of an extremely flat and wicked face. Naturally, he was dull, serious, taciturn, and even, as is usual with all these wretched little people, for some reason arrogant. He scrutinized me very attentively but didn’t say a word, and Lambert was so stupid that, in seating us at the same table, he felt no need to introduce us, so that the man might have taken me for one of Lambert’s blackmailing associates. To those young people (who arrived almost at the same time as we did) he also said nothing all through dinner, but it could be seen, nevertheless, that he knew them closely. He talked about something only with Lambert, and then almost in a whisper, and then it was almost only Lambert who talked, while the pockmarked one just got off with fragmentary and angry ultimatums. He behaved superciliously, was spiteful and jeering, whereas Lambert, on the contrary, was in great agitation and evidently kept persuading him, probably trying to win him over to some venture. Once I reached for the bottle of red wine; the pockmarked one suddenly took a bottle of sherry and handed it to me, having not said a word to me till then.

“Try this,” he said, offering me the bottle. Here I suddenly realized that he must already know everything in the world about me—my story, and my name, and maybe why Lambert was counting on me. The thought that he might take me for someone in Lambert’s service infuriated me again, and Lambert’s face expressed a very strong and stupid alarm as soon as the man addressed me. The pockmarked one noticed it and laughed. “Lambert decidedly depends on everybody,” I thought, hating him at that moment with all my soul. Thus, though we sat through the whole dinner at one table, we were divided into two groups: the pockmarked one and Lambert nearer the window, facing each other, and I next to the greasy Andreev, with Trishatov facing me. Lambert hurried with the meal, urging the waiter to serve every minute. When champagne was served, he suddenly reached out his glass to me.

“To your health, let’s clink!” he said, interrupting his conversation with the pockmarked one.

“And will you allow me to clink with you?” The pretty Trishatov reached out his glass to me across the table. Before the champagne he had been somehow very pensive and silent. The dadais said nothing at all, but ate silently and a lot.

“With pleasure,” I replied to Trishatov. We clinked glasses and drank.

“And I won’t drink to your health,” the dadais suddenly turned to me, “not because I wish for your death, but so that you won’t drink anymore here today.” He uttered it gloomily and weightily. “Three glasses are enough for you. I see you’re looking at my unwashed fist?” he went on, displaying his fist on the table. “I don’t wash it, and rent it out to Lambert unwashed as it is, for crushing other people’s heads on occasions that Lambert finds ticklish.” And, having said that, he suddenly banged his fist on the table with such force that all the plates and glasses jumped. Besides us, there were people dining at four other tables in this room, all of them officers and various imposing-looking gentlemen. It was a fashionable restaurant; for a moment everybody stopped talking and looked at our corner. And it seems we had long been arousing some curiosity. Lambert turned all red.

“Hah, he’s at it again! I believe I asked you to behave yourself, Nikolai Semyonovich,” he said to Andreev in a fierce whisper. The man looked him over with a long and slow stare:

“I don’t want my new friend Dolgorowky to drink much wine here today.”

Lambert turned still more red. The pockmarked one listened silently, but with visible pleasure. For some reason he liked Andreev’s escapade. I was the only one who didn’t understand why I shouldn’t drink.

“He only does it to get money! You’ll get another seven roubles, do you hear, after dinner—only let us finish eating, don’t disgrace us,” Lambert rasped to him.

“Aha!” the dadais grunted victoriously. This quite delighted the pockmarked one, and he sniggered maliciously.

“Listen, you’re much too . . .” Trishatov said to his friend with uneasiness and almost with suffering, evidently wishing to restrain him. Andreev fell silent, but not for long; that was not how he reckoned. At a table about five steps away from us, two gentlemen were dining and having a lively conversation. They were both middle-aged gentlemen of an extremely ticklish appearance. One was tall and very fat, the other also very fat but small. They were talking in Polish about the current Parisian events. The dadais had long been glancing at them curiously and listening. The little Pole obviously struck him as a comic figure, and he hated him at once, after the manner of all bilious and liverish people, to whom this always happens suddenly even without any cause. Suddenly the little Pole spoke the name of the deputy Madier de Montjau,²³ but following the habit of a great many Poles, he pronounced it in a Polish manner, that is, with the stress on the next-to-last syllable, and it came out not as Madiér de Montjáu, but as Mádier de Móntjau. That was all the dadais needed. He turned to the Poles and, drawing himself up importantly, suddenly said distinctly and loudly, as though asking them a question:

“Mádier de Móntjau?”

The Poles turned to him fiercely.

“What do you want?” the big fat Pole cried menacingly in Russian. The dadais bided his time.

“Mádier de Móntjau?” he suddenly repeated for the whole room to hear, without giving any further explanations, just as he had stupidly repeated “Dolgorowky?” as he came at me earlier by the door. The Poles jumped up from their places, Lambert jumped up from the table, rushed first to Andreev, but then abandoned him, leaped over to the Poles, and humbly began apologizing to them.

“They’re buffoons, panie,⁸⁷ buffoons!” the little Pole repeated contemptuously, all red as a carrot with indignation. “Soon it will be impossible to come here!” There was a stirring in the room, some murmuring was heard, but more laughter.

“Leave . . . please . . . let’s go now!” Lambert murmured, completely at a loss, trying somehow to get Andreev out of the room. Giving Lambert a searching look and figuring that at this point he could get money from him, the man agreed to follow him. It was probably not the first time he had used this shameless method to knock money out of Lambert. Trishatov also made as if to run after them, but looked at me and stayed.

“Ah, how nasty!” he said, covering his eyes with his slender fingers.

“Very nasty, sirs,” the pockmarked one whispered this time with a very angered air. Meanwhile Lambert came back almost completely pale and, with lively gesticulations, began whispering something to the pockmarked one. The latter meanwhile ordered the waiter to quickly serve coffee. He listened squeamishly; he evidently wanted to leave quickly. And, nevertheless, the whole incident was merely a schoolboy prank. Trishatov, with his cup of coffee, came over from his place and sat next to me.

“I like him very much,” he began, addressing me with such a candid air as though he had always been talking to me about it. “You wouldn’t believe how unhappy Andreev is. He ate and drank up his sister’s dowry, and ate and drank up everything they had, the year he served in the army, and I can see how he suffers now. And as for his not washing—it’s from despair. And he has terribly strange thoughts: he suddenly tells you that a scoundrel and an honest man are all the same and there’s no difference; and that there’s no need to do anything, either good or bad, or it’s all the same—you can do either good or bad, but the best thing of all is to lie there without taking your clothes off for a month at a time, drink, eat, sleep—and that’s all. But, believe me, he just says it. And you know, I even think he carried on like that just now because he wanted to finish completely with Lambert. He spoke of it yesterday. Believe me, sometimes at night or when he’s been sitting alone for a long time, he begins to weep, and, you know, when he weeps, it’s in some special way, as no one else weeps: he starts howling, howling terribly, and that, you know, is still more pitiful . . . And besides, he’s so big and strong, and suddenly—he’s just howling. Such a poor fellow, isn’t it so? I want to save him, but I’m such a nasty, lost little brat myself, you wouldn’t believe it! Will you let me in, Dolgoruky, if I ever come to see you?”

“Oh, do come, I even like you.”

“What on earth for? Well, but thank you. Listen, let’s drink another glass. Though—what’s the matter with me?—you’d better not drink. It’s true what he said, that you mustn’t drink more,” he suddenly winked at me significantly, “but I’ll drink even so. I’m all right now, but, believe me, I can’t restrain myself in anything. Just tell me I’m not to dine in restaurants anymore, and I’m ready for anything just to go and do it. Oh, we sincerely want to be honest, I assure you, only we keep postponing it.

And the years go by—all the best years!²⁴

And I’m terribly afraid he’ll hang himself. He’ll go and not tell anybody. He’s like that. Nowadays they all hang themselves; who knows—maybe there are a lot like us? I, for instance, simply can’t live without spare cash. The spare cash is much more important for me than the necessary. Listen, do you like music? I’m terribly fond of it. I’ll play something for you when I come to see you. I play the piano very well, and I studied for a long time. I studied seriously. If I were to write an opera, you know, I’d take the subject from Faust.²⁵ I like that theme very much. I keep creating the scene in the cathedral, just so, imagining it in my head. A Gothic cathedral, inside, choirs, hymns, Gretchen enters, and, you know, the choirs are medieval, so that you can just hear the fifteenth century. Gretchen is in grief, first there’s a recitative, quiet but terrible, tormenting, but the choirs rumble gloomily, sternly, indifferently:

Dies irae, dies illa! ²⁶

And suddenly—the devil’s voice, the devil’s song. He’s invisible, it’s just a song, alongside the hymns, together with the hymns, it almost coincides with them, and yet it’s quite different—it has to be done that way somehow. The song is long, tireless, it’s a tenor, it must be a tenor. He starts quietly, tenderly: ‘Remember, Gretchen, how you, still innocent, still a child, used to come with your mama to this cathedral and prattle out your prayers from an old book?’ But the song grows stronger, more passionate, more impetuous; the notes get higher: there are tears in it, anguish, tireless, hopeless, and, finally, despair: ‘There is no forgiveness, Gretchen, there is no forgiveness for you here!’ Gretchen wants to pray, but only cries burst from her breast—you know, when your breast is contracted with tears—but Satan’s song doesn’t stop, ever more deeply it pierces the soul, like a sharp point, ever higher—and suddenly it breaks off almost with a shout: ‘It’s all over, you are cursed!’ Gretchen falls on her knees, clasps her hands before her—and here comes her prayer, something very short, half recitative, but naïve, without any polish, something medieval in the highest degree, four lines, only four lines in all—there are several such notes in Stradella²⁷—and at the last note she swoons! Commotion. She’s lifted, borne up—and here suddenly a thundering choir. It’s like an assault of voices, an inspired chorus, victorious, overwhelming, something like our ‘Up-borne-by-the-an-gel-ichosts’²⁸—so that everything’s shaken to its foundations, and everything changes into an ecstatic, exultant, universal exclamation—‘Hosanna!’—as if it were the cry of the whole universe, and she’s borne up, borne up, and here the curtain falls! No, you know, if I could, I’d have done something! Only I can’t do anything now, but only keep dreaming. I keep dreaming and dreaming; my whole life has turned into a dream, I even dream at night. Ah, Dolgoruky, have you read Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop?”

“I have. What about it?”

“Do you remember . . . Wait, I’ll drink another glass . . . Do you remember that place at the end, when they—that crazy old man and that lovely thirteen-year-old girl, his granddaughter—after their fantastic flight and wanderings, finally find refuge somewhere on the edge of England, near some medieval Gothic cathedral, and the girl obtains some post there, showing the cathedral to visitors . . . And then, once, the sun is setting, and this child is standing on the porch of the cathedral, all bathed in the last rays, standing and watching the sunset with quiet, pensive contemplation in her child’s soul, a soul astonished as before some riddle, because the one and the other are like a riddle—the sun as God’s thought, and the cathedral as man’s thought . . . isn’t it so? Oh, I don’t know how to express it, only God likes such first thoughts from children . . . And there, next to her on the steps, this mad old man, the grandfather, stares at her with a fixed gaze . . . You know, there’s nothing special in this picture from Dickens, absolutely nothing, but you’ll never forget it, and this remains in all of Europe—why? Here is the beautiful! Here is innocence! Eh! I don’t know what it is, only it’s good. I was always reading novels in high school. You know, I have a sister in the country, only a year older than me . . . Oh, it’s all been sold there now, and there’s no longer any estate! We sat on the terrace, under our old lindens, and read that novel, and the sun was also setting, and suddenly we stopped reading and said to each other that we, too, would be good, and we, too, would be beautiful—I was preparing for the university then and . . . Ah, Dolgoruky, you know, each of us has his memories! . . .”

And suddenly he leaned his pretty little head on my shoulder—and wept. I felt very, very sorry for him. True, he had drunk a lot of wine, but he had talked so sincerely with me, like a brother, with such feeling . . . Suddenly, at that moment, a shout came from the street and a strong rapping of knuckles on our window (the windows here are one-piece, big, and it was on the ground floor as well, so that it’s possible to knock from the street). It was the ejected Andreev.

‘Ohé, Lambert! Où est Lambert? As-tu vu Lambert?” his wild shout resounded in the street.

“Ah, but he’s here! So he hasn’t gone?” exclaimed my boy, tearing from his place.

“The check!” Lambert rasped to the waiter. His hands even trembled with anger as he went to pay, but the pockmarked one wouldn’t let Lambert pay for him.

“But why? Didn’t I invite you, didn’t you accept the invitation?”

“No, permit me.” The pockmarked one took out his purse and, having calculated his share, paid separately.

“You offend me, Semyon Sidorych!”

“That’s how I want it, sir,” Semyon Sidorovich snapped and, taking his hat and not saying good-bye to anyone, walked out of the room alone. Lambert threw the money at the waiter and hastily ran out after him, even forgetting about me in his confusion. Trishatov and I went out after all the rest. Andreev was standing by the entrance like a milepost, waiting for Trishatov.

“Blackguard!” Lambert couldn’t keep from saying.

“Uh-uh!” Andreev growled at him, and with one swing of his arm he knocked off his round hat, which rolled along the pavement. The humiliated Lambert rushed to pick it up.

“Vingt-cinq roubles!”⁸⁸ Andreev showed Trishatov the banknote he had wrested from Lambert earlier.

“Enough,” Trishatov cried to him. “Why do you keep making a row? . . . And why did you skin him for twenty-five roubles? You only had seven coming.”

“What do you mean, skin him? He promised we’d dine in a private room with Athenian women, and he served up the pockmarked one instead of the women, and, besides that, I didn’t finish eating and froze in the cold a sure eighteen roubles’ worth. He had seven roubles outstanding, which makes exactly twenty-five for you.”

“Get the hell out of here, both of you!” yelled Lambert. “I’m throwing you both out, and I’ll tie you in little knots . . .”

“Lambert, I’m throwing you out, and I’ll tie you in little knots!” cried Andreev. “Adieu, mon prince,⁸⁹ don’t drink any more wine! Off we go, Petya! Ohé, Lambert! Où est Lambert? As-tu vu Lambert?” he roared one last time, moving off with enormous strides.

“So I’ll come to see you, may I?” Trishatov hastily babbled to me, hurrying after his friend.

Lambert and I remained alone.

“ Well . . . let’s go!” he uttered, as if he had difficulty catching his breath and even as if demented.

“Where should I go? I’m not going anywhere with you!” I hastened to cry in defiance.

“How do you mean, not going?” he roused himself up fearfully, coming to his senses all at once. “But I’ve only been waiting for us to be left alone!”

“But where on earth can we go?” I confess, I also had a slight ringing in my head from the three glasses of champagne and two of sherry.

“This way, over this way, you see?”

“But the sign says fresh oysters, you see? It’s a foul-smelling place . . .”

“That’s because you’ve just eaten, but it’s Miliutin’s shop; we won’t eat oysters, I’ll give you champagne . . .”

“I don’t want it! You want to get me drunk.”

“They told you that; they were laughing at you. You believe the scoundrels!”

“No, Trishatov is not a scoundrel. But I myself know how to be careful—that’s what!”

“So you’ve got your own character?”

“Yes, I’ve got character, a bit more than you have, because you’re enslaved to the first comer. You disgraced us, you apologized to the Poles like a lackey. You must have been beaten often in taverns?”

“But we have to have a talk, cghretin!” he cried with that scornful impatience which all but said, “And you’re at it, too?” “What, are you afraid or something? Are you my friend or not?”

“I’m not your friend, and you’re a crook. Let’s go, if only to prove that I’m not afraid of you. Ah, what a foul smell, it smells of cheese! What nastiness!”

Chapter Six

I

I ASK YOU once more to remember that I had a slight ringing in my head; if it hadn’t been for that, I would have talked and acted differently. In the back room of this shop one could actually eat oysters, and we sat down at a little table covered with a foul, dirty cloth. Lambert ordered champagne; a glass of cold, golden-colored wine appeared before me and looked at me temptingly; but I was vexed.

“You see, Lambert, what mainly offends me is that you think you can order me around now, as you used to at Touchard’s, while you yourself are enslaved by everybody here.”

“Cghretin! Eh, let’s clink!”

“You don’t even deign to pretend before me; you might at least conceal that you want to get me drunk.”

“You’re driveling, and you’re drunk. You have to drink more, and you’ll be more cheerful. Take your glass, go on, take it!”

“What’s all this ‘go on, take it’? I’m leaving, and that’s the end of it.”

And I actually made as if to get up. He became terribly angry.

“It’s Trishatov whispering to you against me: I saw the two of you whispering there. You’re a cghretin in that case. Alphonsine is even repulsed when he comes near her . . . He’s vile. I’ll tell you what he’s like.”

“You’ve already said it. All you’ve got is Alphonsine, you’re terribly narrow.”

“Narrow?” He didn’t understand. “They’ve gone over to the pockmarked one now. That’s what! That’s why I threw them out. They’re dishonest. That pockmarked villain will corrupt them, too. But I always demanded that they behave nobly.”

I sat down, took the glass somehow mechanically, and drank a gulp.

“I’m incomparably superior to you in education,” I said. But he was only too glad that I had sat down, and at once poured me more wine.

“So you’re afraid of them?” I went on teasing him (and at that point I was certainly more vile than he was himself ). “Andreev knocked your hat off, and you gave him twenty-five roubles for it.”

“I did, but he’ll pay me back. They’re rebellious, but I’ll tie them into . . .”

“You’re very worried about the pockmarked one. And you know, it seems to me that I’m the only one you’ve got left now. All your hopes are resting on me alone now—eh?”

“Yes, Arkashka, that’s so: you’re my only remaining friend; you put it so well!” he slapped me on the shoulder.

What could be done with such a crude man? He was totally undeveloped and took mockery for praise.

“You could save me from some bad things, if you were a good comrade, Arkady,” he went on, looking at me affectionately.

“In what way could I save you?”

“You know what way. Without me you’re like a cghretin, and you’re sure to be stupid, but I’d give you thirty thousand, and we’d go halves, and you yourself know how. Well, who are you, just look: you’ve got nothing—no name, no family—and here’s a pile all at once; and on such money you know what a career you can start!”

I was simply amazed at such a method. I had decidedly assumed he would dodge, but he began with such directness, such boyish directness, with me. I decided to listen to him out of breadth and . . . out of terrible curiosity.

“You see, Lambert, you won’t understand this, but I agree to listen to you because I’m broad,” I declared firmly and took another sip from the glass. Lambert at once refilled it.

“Here’s the thing, Arkady: if a man like Bjoring dared to heap abuse on me and strike me in front of a lady I adored, I don’t know what I’d do! But you took it, and I find you repulsive, you’re a dishrag!”

“How dare you say Bjoring struck me!” I cried, turning red. “It’s rather I who struck him, and not he me.”

“No, he struck you, not you him.”

“Lies, I also stepped on his foot!”

“But he shoved you with his arm and told the lackeys to drag you away . . . and she sat and watched from the carriage and laughed at you—she knows you have no father and can be insulted.”

“I don’t know, Lambert, we’re having a schoolboy conversation, which I’m ashamed of. You’re doing it to get me all worked up, and so crudely and openly, as if I were some sort of sixteen-year-old. You arranged it with Anna Andreevna!” I cried, trembling with anger and mechanically sipping wine all the while.

“Anna Andreevna is a rascal! She’ll hoodwink you, and me, and the whole world! I’ve been waiting for you, because you’re better able to finish with the other one.”

“What other one?”

“With Madame Akhmakov. I know everything. You told me yourself that she’s afraid of the letter you’ve got . . .”

“What letter . . . you’re lying . . . Have you seen her?” I muttered in confusion.

“I’ve seen her. She’s good-looking. Très belle,⁹⁰ and you’ve got taste.”

“I know you’ve seen her; only you didn’t dare to speak with her, and I want you also not to dare to speak of her.”

“You’re still little, and she laughs at you—that’s what! We had a pillar of virtue like her in Moscow! Oh, how she turned up her nose! But she trembled when we threatened to tell all, and she obeyed at once; and we took the one and the other: both the money and the other thing—you understand what? Now she’s back in society, unapproachable—pah, the devil, how high she flies, and what a carriage, and if only you’d seen in what sort of back room it all went on! You haven’t lived enough; if you knew what little back rooms they’ll venture into . . .”

“So I’ve thought,” I murmured irrepressibly.

“They’re depraved to the tips of their fingers; you don’t know what they’re capable of! Alphonsine lived in one such house; she found it quite repulsive.”

“I’ve thought about that,” I confirmed again.

“They beat you, and you feel sorry . . .”

“Lambert, you’re a villain, curse you!” I cried out, suddenly somehow understanding and trembling. “I saw it all in a dream, you stood there, and Anna Andreevna . . . Oh, curse you! Did you really think I was such a scoundrel? I saw it in a dream, because I just knew you were going to say it. And, finally, all this can’t be so simple that you’d tell me about it all so simply and directly!”

“Look how angry he is! Tut-tut-tut!” Lambert drawled, laughing and triumphant. “Well, brother Arkashka, now I’ve learned all I needed to know. That’s why I was waiting for you. Listen, it means you love her and want to take revenge on Bjoring—that’s what I needed to know. I suspected it all along, while I was waiting for you. Ceci posé, celà change la question.⁹¹ And so much the better, because she loves you herself. So get married, don’t delay, that’s the best. And you can’t possibly do otherwise, you’ve hit on the right thing. And then know, Arkady, that you have a friend—me, that is—whom you can saddle and ride on. This friend will help you and get you married; I’ll leave no stone unturned, Arkasha! And afterwards you can give your old friend thirty thousand for his labors, eh? But I will help you, don’t doubt that. I know all the fine points in these matters, and they’ll give you a whole dowry, and you’ll be a rich man with a career!”

Though my head was spinning, I looked at Lambert in amazement. He was serious, that is, not really serious, but I could see clearly that he fully believed in the possibility of getting me married, and even accepted the idea with rapture. Naturally, I also saw that he was trying to ensnare me like a little boy (I saw it right then for certain), but the thought of marrying her so pierced me through that, though I was astonished at Lambert’s ability to believe in such a fantasy, at the same time I rushed to believe it myself, though without losing even for a moment the awareness that, of course, it couldn’t be realized for anything. It somehow all sank in together.

“Can it be possible?” I babbled.

“Why not? You’ll show her the document—she’ll turn coward and marry you so as not to lose the money.”

I decided not to stop Lambert in his meanness, because he laid it out for me so simpleheartedly that he didn’t even suspect I might suddenly become indignant; but I murmured, nevertheless, that I wouldn’t want to marry only by force.

“Not for anything do I want to use force; how can you be so mean as to suppose that in me?”

“Ehh! She’ll marry you of herself: it won’t be your doing, she’ll get frightened herself and marry you. And she’ll also do it because she loves you,” Lambert caught himself.

“That’s a lie. You’re laughing at me. How do you know she loves me?”

“Absolutely. I know. And Anna Andreevna thinks so, too. I’m telling you seriously and truthfully that Anna Andreevna thinks so. And then I’ll also tell you another thing, when you come to my place, and you’ll see that she loves you. Alphonsine was in Tsarskoe; she also found things out there . . .”

“What could she have found out there?”

“Let’s go to my place. She’ll tell you herself, and you’ll be pleased. What makes you worse than another man? You’re handsome, you’re well bred . . .”

“Yes, I’m well bred,” I whispered, barely pausing for breath. My heart was throbbing and, of course, not from wine alone.

“You’re handsome. You’re well dressed.”

“Yes, I’m well dressed . . .”

“And you’re kind . . .”

“Yes, I’m kind.”

“Then why shouldn’t she agree? After all, Bjoring won’t take her without money, and you can deprive her of money—so she’ll get frightened; you’ll marry her, and that will be your revenge on Bjoring. You told me yourself that night, after you froze, that she was in love with you.”

“Did I tell you that? Surely I didn’t put it that way.”

“No, that way.”

“I was delirious. Surely I must also have told you then about the document?”

“Yes, you said you had this letter, and I thought: since he has such a letter, why should he lose what’s his?”

“This is all fantasy, and I’m by no means so stupid as to believe it,” I muttered. “First, there’s the difference in age, and, second, I have no name.”

“She’ll marry you; she can’t do otherwise when so much money’s to be lost—I’ll arrange that. And besides, she loves you. You know, that old prince is quite well disposed towards you; through his patronage you know what sort of connections you could make; and as for the fact that you have no name, nowadays that’s all unnecessary: once you’ve grabbed the money, you’ll get on, you’ll get on, and in ten years you’ll be such a millionaire that all Russia will be talking, and what name do you need then? You can buy up a baron in Austria. But once you marry her, you’ll have to keep her in hand. They need it good and proper. A woman, if she’s in love, likes to be kept in a tight fist. A woman likes character in a man. But once you frighten her with the letter, from that time on you’ll also show her your character. ‘Ah,’ she’ll say, ‘so young, but he’s got character.’”

I was sitting there as if bemused. Never would I have stooped to such a stupid conversation with anyone else. But here some sweet longing drew me into continuing it. Besides, Lambert was so stupid and mean that it was impossible to be ashamed before him.

“No, Lambert, you know,” I said suddenly, “as you like, but there’s a lot of nonsense here; I’m talking to you because we’re comrades, and there’s nothing for us to be ashamed of; but with anyone else I wouldn’t have demeaned myself for anything. And, above all, why do you insist so much that she loves me? You spoke very well about capital just now, but you see, Lambert, you don’t know high society: with them it all rests on the most patriarchal, familial, so to speak, relations, so that now, when she still doesn’t know my abilities and how far I may get in life—now in any case she’ll be ashamed. But I won’t conceal from you, Lambert, that there is indeed one point here which may give hope. You see: she might marry me out of gratitude, because then I’d rid her of a certain man’s hatred. And she’s afraid of that man.”

“Ah, you mean your father? And what, does he love her very much?” Lambert suddenly roused himself with extraordinary curiosity.

“Oh, no!” I cried. “And how frightening you are, and at the same time how stupid, Lambert! I mean, if he was in love with her, how could I want to marry her? After all, a son and a father—that would be shameful. It’s mama he loves, mama, and I saw him embrace her, and before that I myself thought he loved Katerina Nikolaevna, but now I know clearly that he maybe loved her once, but for a long time now he’s hated her . . . and wanted revenge, and she’s afraid, because, I’ll tell you, Lambert, he’s terribly frightening once he starts on revenge. He almost turns into a madman. When he’s angry with her, he can go to any lengths. It’s an enmity of the old kind over lofty principles. In our time we spit on all general principles; in our time it’s not general principles, it’s only special cases. Ah, Lambert, you understand nothing, you’re as stupid as my big toe: I’m talking to you about these principles, but you surely understand none of it. You’re terribly uneducated. Do you remember beating me? I’m now stronger than you—do you know that?”

“Arkashka, let’s go to my place! We’ll spend the evening and drink another bottle, and Alphonsine will play the guitar and sing.”

“No, I won’t go. Listen, Lambert, I have an ‘idea.’ If things don’t work out and I don’t get married, then I’ll go into my idea; but you have no idea.”

“All right, all right, you’ll tell me, let’s go.”

“I’m not going!” I got up. “I don’t want to and I won’t. I’ll come to see you, but you’re a scoundrel. I’ll give you the thirty thousand—so be it, but I’m purer and higher than you . . . I can see that you want to deceive me in everything. And about her I even forbid you to think: she’s higher than everyone, and your plans are so base that I’m even surprised at you, Lambert. I want to get married—that’s another matter, but I don’t need capital, I despise capital. If she gives me her capital on her knees, I won’t take it . . . But getting married, getting married, that’s—another matter. And you know, you said it well about keeping her in a tight fist. To love, to love passionately, with all a man’s magnanimity, which can never be found in a woman, but also to be despotic—that’s a good thing. Because, Lambert, you know what—women love despotism. You know women, Lambert. But you’re astonishingly stupid in everything else. And, you know, Lambert, you’re not at all as vile as you seem, you’re—simple. I like you. Ah, Lambert, why are you such a knave? Otherwise we could live so merrily! You know, Trishatov’s a dear man.”

I babbled these last incoherent phrases when we were already in the street. Oh, I’m recalling it all in detail, to let the reader see that, for all my raptures and for all my vows and promises to be regenerated for the better and to seek seemliness, I could fall so easily then, and into such mire! And I swear, if I weren’t fully and completely certain that I’m not at all like that now and that I have developed my character through practical life, I would not have confessed all this to the reader for anything.

We came out of the shop, and Lambert supported me, putting his arm lightly around me. Suddenly I looked at him and saw almost the same expression in his eyes—intent, scrutinizing, terribly attentive, and at the same time sober in the highest degree—as on that morning when I was freezing and he led me to a cab, with his arm around me in exactly the same way, and listened, all ears and eyes, to my incoherent babble. People who are getting drunk, but are not quite drunk yet, can suddenly have moments of the fullest sobriety.

“I won’t go to your place for anything!” I uttered firmly and coherently, looking at him mockingly and pushing him away with my hand.

“Ah, come on, I’ll tell Alphonsine to make tea, come on!”

He was terribly certain that I wouldn’t escape; he held and supported me with relish, like a dear little victim, and I, of course, was just what he needed, precisely that evening and in that condition! Why—will be explained later.

“I’m not going!” I repeated. “Cabbie!”

Just then a cab came trotting up, and I hopped into the sledge.

“Where are you going? What’s with you?” yelled Lambert, in terrible alarm, seizing my fur coat.

“And don’t you dare follow me,” I cried, “don’t try to overtake me!” At that moment the cab started, and my coat was torn from Lambert’s hand.

“You’ll come anyway!” he shouted after me in an angry voice.

“I’ll come if I want to—by my own will!” I turned to him from the sledge.

II

HE DIDN’T PURSUE ME, of course, because there happened to be no other cab at hand, and I managed to disappear from his sight. I drove only as far as the Haymarket, and there I got out and dismissed the sledge. I wanted terribly to go by foot. I felt no fatigue, no great drunkenness, but was just full of vigor; there was an influx of strength, there was an extraordinary ability for any undertaking, and an endless number of pleasant thoughts in my head.

My heart was pounding intensely and distinctly—I could hear each beat. And everything seemed so nice to me, everything was so easy. Walking past the guardhouse on the Haymarket, I wanted terribly to go up to the sentry and kiss him. There was a thaw, the square turned black and smelly, but the square, too, I liked very much.

“I’ll go to Obukhovsky Prospect now,” I thought, “then turn left and come out in the Semyonovsky quarter, I’ll make a detour, it’s excellent, it’s all excellent. My fur coat’s unbuttoned—why doesn’t anybody take it off me, where are the thieves? They say there are thieves in the Haymarket, let them come, maybe I’ll give them my fur coat. What do I need a fur coat for? A fur coat is property. La propriété, c’est le vol.⁹²²⁹ But anyhow, what nonsense, and how good everything is. It’s good that there’s a thaw. Why frost? There’s no need at all for frost. It’s also good to talk nonsense. What was it I said to Lambert about principles? I said there are no general principles, but only special cases. That’s nonsense, that’s arch-nonsense! I said it on purpose, to show off. It’s a bit shameful, but anyhow—never mind, I’ll smooth it over. Don’t be ashamed, don’t torment yourself, Arkady Makarovich. Arkady Makarovich, I like you. I even like you very much, my young friend. It’s too bad you’re a little knave . . . and . . . and . . . ah, yes . . . ah!”

I suddenly stopped, and again my whole heart was wrung in ecstasy:

“Lord! What was it he said? He said she loves me. Oh, he’s a crook, he told a lot of lies here; it was so that I’d go and spend the night with him. But maybe not. He said Anna Andreevna thought so, too . . . Bah! Nastasya Egorovna could also find out a thing or two here: she pokes around everywhere. And why didn’t I go to his place? I’d learn everything. Hm! he’s got a plan, and I anticipated it all to the last stroke. A dream. It’s broadly conceived, Mr. Lambert, only you’re wrong, it won’t be that way. But maybe it will! Maybe it will! And can he really get me married? But maybe he can. He’s naïve and credulous. He’s stupid and impudent, like all practical people. Stupidity and impudence, joined together, are a great force. And confess that you were in fact afraid of Lambert, Arkady Makarovich! What does he need honest people for? He says it so seriously: there’s not one honest man here! And you yourself—who are you? Eh, never mind me! Don’t scoundrels need honest people? In knavery, honest people are more needed than anywhere else. Ha, ha! You’re the only one who didn’t know that before, Arkady Makarovich, with your total innocence. Lord! What if he really gets me married!”

I paused again. Here I must confess one stupidity (since it happened so long ago), I must confess that I had already wanted to marry long before—that is, I didn’t want to and it would never have happened (and it won’t in the future, I give my word), but already more than once and long before then I had dreamed of how nice it would be to get married—that is, terribly many times, especially on going to sleep each night. This began with me when I was almost sixteen. I had a schoolmate, Lavrovsky, the same age as me—such a nice, quiet, pretty boy, though not distinguished in any way. I hardly ever spoke to him. Suddenly one day we were sitting next to each other alone, and he was very pensive, and suddenly he says to me, “Ah, Dolgoruky, what do you think about getting married now? Really, when should one get married if not now? Now would be the very best time, and yet it’s quite impossible!” And he said it so candidly. And I suddenly agreed with him wholeheartedly, because I myself had dreamed of something like it. Then we came together for several days in a row and kept talking about it, as if in secret, though only about that. And then, I don’t know how it happened, but we drifted apart and stopped talking. But ever since then I began to dream. This, of course, would not be worth recalling, but I only wanted to show how far back these things can sometimes go . . .

“There’s only one serious objection here,” I went on dreaming as I walked. “Oh, of course, the insignificant difference in age would be no obstacle, but there’s this: she’s such an aristocrat, and I’m—simply Dolgoruky! Awfully nasty! Hm! Surely Versilov, once he’s married my mother, could ask the authorities for permission to adopt me . . . for the father’s services, so to speak . . . He was in the service, so of course there were services; he was an arbiter of the peace . . . Oh, devil take it, what vileness!”

I suddenly exclaimed that and suddenly stopped for the third time, but now as if squashed on the spot. All the painful feeling of humiliation from the consciousness that I could wish for such a disgrace as a change of name through adoption, this betrayal of my whole childhood—all this in almost one instant destroyed my whole previous mood, and all my joy vanished like smoke. “No, I won’t tell this to anyone,” I thought, blushing terribly. “I stooped so low because I’m . . . in love and stupid. No, if Lambert is right about anything, it’s that nowadays all this foolishness is simply not required, and that the main thing in our age is the man himself, and then his money. That is, not his money, but his power. With my capital I’ll throw myself into the ‘idea,’ and in ten years all Russia will be talking, and I’ll have my revenge on everyone. And there’s no need to be ceremonious with her, here again Lambert is right. She’ll turn coward and simply marry me. In the simplest and most banal way, she’ll accept and marry me. ‘You don’t know, you don’t know in what sort of back room it went on!’” Lambert’s words came to my mind. “And that’s so,” I confirmed, “Lambert is right in everything, a thousand times righter than I, and Versilov, and all these idealists! He’s a realist. She’ll see that I have character and say, ‘Ah, he has character!’ Lambert is a scoundrel, and all he wants is to fleece me of thirty thousand, and yet he’s the only friend I’ve got. There is no other friendship and cannot be, that was all invented by impractical people. And I don’t even humiliate her; do I humiliate her? Not a bit: women are all like that! Can there be a woman without meanness? That’s why she needs to have man over her, that’s why she was created a subordinate being. Woman is vice and temptation, and man is nobility and magnanimity. And so it will be unto ages of ages. And never mind that I’m preparing to use the ‘document.’ That won’t prevent either nobility or magnanimity. Schillers in a pure form don’t exist—they’ve been invented. Never mind a little dirt, if the goal is splendid! Afterwards it will all be washed away, smoothed over. And now it’s only—breadth, it’s only—life, it’s only—life’s truth—that’s what they call it now!”

Oh, again I repeat: may I be forgiven for citing to the last line all this drunken raving from that time. Of course, this is only the essence of my thoughts from that time, but I believe I did speak in those very words. I had to cite them, because I sat down to write in order to judge myself. And what am I to judge, if not that? Can there be anything more serious in life? Wine is no justification. In vino veritas.⁹³

Dreaming thus and all buried in fantasy, I didn’t notice that I had finally reached home, that is, mama’s apartment. I didn’t even notice how I entered the apartment; but as soon as I stepped into our tiny front hall, I understood at once that something extraordinary had happened. In the rooms they were talking loudly, exclaiming, and mama could be heard weeping. In the doorway I was almost knocked off my feet by Lukerya, who ran swiftly from Makar Ivanovich’s room to the kitchen. I threw off my coat and went into Makar Ivanovich’s room, because everyone was crowded there.

There stood Versilov and mama. Mama lay in his arms, and he pressed her tightly to his heart. Makar Ivanovich was sitting, as usual, on his little bench, but as if in some sort of strengthlessness, so that Liza had to support him by the shoulders with her arms to keep him from falling; and it was even obvious that he was all leaning over so as to fall. I swiftly stepped closer, gave a start, and realized that the old man was dead.

He had only just died, about a minute before my arrival. Ten minutes earlier he had felt as much himself as ever. Only Liza was with him; she was sitting with him and telling him about her grief, and he was stroking her hair as the day before. Suddenly he trembled all over (Liza told us), made as if to stand up, made as if to cry out, and silently began to fall towards the left. “Heart failure!” said Versilov. Liza cried out for the whole house to hear, and it was then that they came running—all that about a minute before my arrival.

“Arkady!” Versilov shouted to me. “Run instantly to Tatyana Pavlovna’s. She should certainly be at home. Ask her to come at once. Take a cab. Quickly, I beg you!”

His eyes were flashing—I remember that clearly. I didn’t notice in his face anything like pure pity, tears—only mama, Liza, and Lukerya were weeping. On the contrary, and this I recall very well, what was striking in his face was some extraordinary excitement, almost ecstasy. I ran for Tatyana Pavlovna.

The way, as is known from the foregoing, wasn’t long. I didn’t take a cab, but ran all the way without stopping. There was confusion in my mind, and also even almost something ecstatic. I realized that a radical event had happened. The drunkenness had disappeared completely in me, to the last drop, and along with it all ignoble thoughts, by the time I rang at Tatyana Pavlovna’s.

The Finnish woman unlocked the door: “Not at home!” and wanted to lock it at once.

“What do you mean, not at home?” I burst into the front hall by force. “It can’t be! Makar Ivanovich is dead!”

“Wha-a-at?” Tatyana Pavlovna’s cry suddenly rang out through the closed door of her drawing room.

“Dead! Makar Ivanovich is dead! Andrei Petrovich asks you to come this minute.”

“No, you’re lying! . . .”

The latch clicked, but the door opened only an inch: “What is it, tell me!”

“I don’t know myself, I just arrived and he was already dead. Andrei Petrovich says it’s heart failure!”

“At once, this minute. Run, tell them I’ll be there. Go on, go on, go on! Well, what are you standing there for?”

But I saw clearly through the half-opened door that someone had come out from behind the curtain that screened Tatyana Pavlovna’s bed and was standing there in the room behind Tatyana Pavlovna. Mechanically, instinctively, I seized the latch and would not let her close the door.

“Arkady Makarovich! Is it really true that he’s dead?” the familiar, soft, smooth, metallic voice rang out, at which everything began to tremble in my soul all at once: in the question something could be heard that had penetrated and stirred her soul.

“In that case,” Tatyana Pavlovna suddenly abandoned the door, “in that case—settle it between you as you like. You want it that way!”

She rushed impetuously out of the apartment, putting on her kerchief and coat as she ran, and started down the stairs. We were left alone. I threw off my coat, stepped in, and closed the door behind me. She stood before me as she had when we met the other time, with a bright face, a bright gaze, and, as then, reached both hands out to me. As if cut down, I literally fell at her feet.

III

I WAS BEGINNING to weep, I don’t know why; I don’t remember how she sat me down beside her, I only remember, in a memory that is priceless for me, how we sat next to each other, hand in hand, and talked impetuously: she was asking about the old man and his death, and I was telling her about him—so that one might have thought I was weeping over Makar Ivanovich, whereas that would have been the height of absurdity; and I know that she could never have supposed in me such a thoroughly childish banality. At last I suddenly recollected myself and felt ashamed. Now I suppose that I wept then solely out of ecstasy, and I think she understood it very well herself, so that with regard to this memory I’m at peace.

It suddenly seemed very strange to me that she should keep asking like that about Makar Ivanovich.

“Did you know him?” I asked in surprise.

“For a long time. I’ve never seen him, but he has played a role in my life, too. At one time the man I’m afraid of told me a great deal about him. You know who that man is.”

“I only know now that ‘the man’ was much nearer to your soul than you revealed to me before,” I said, not knowing myself what I meant to express by it, but as if in reproach and frowning deeply.

“You say he was kissing your mother just now? Embracing her? You saw it yourself ?” she went on asking without listening to me.

“Yes, I saw it; and, believe me, it was all sincere and magnanimous in the highest degree!” I hastened to confirm, seeing her joy.

“God grant it!” She crossed herself. “Now he’s unbound. That beautiful old man only bound his life. With his death, duty and . . . dignity will resurrect in him again, as they already resurrected once. Oh, he’s magnanimous before all else, he’ll give peace to the heart of your mother, whom he loves more than anything on earth, and he himself will finally be at peace, and thank God—it’s high time.”

“Is he very dear to you?”

“Yes, very dear, though not in the sense in which he himself would wish and in which you’re asking.”

“So are you afraid now for him or for yourself ?” I asked suddenly.

“Well, these are intricate questions, let’s drop them.”

“Let’s drop them, of course; only I was ignorant of that, all too much so, maybe; but let it be, you’re right, everything’s new now, and if anyone is resurrected, it’s me first of all. I’ve been mean in my thoughts before you, Katerina Nikolaevna, and maybe no more than an hour ago I committed a meanness against you in deed as well, but you know, here I am sitting next to you, and I feel no remorse. Because everything has vanished now, and everything is new, and that man who was plotting a meanness against you an hour ago, I don’t know and do not want to know!”

“Come to your senses,” she smiled, “it’s as if you’re slightly delirious.”

“And how can a man possibly judge himself sitting next to you,” I went on, “whether he’s honest or mean? You’re like the sun, unattainable . . . Tell me, how could you come out to me after all that’s happened? If you knew what happened an hour ago, only an hour? What sort of dream was coming true?”

“I probably know everything,” she smiled gently. “You wanted to take revenge on me for something just now, swore to ruin me, and certainly would have killed or beaten anyone who uttered even one bad word about me in your presence.”

Oh, she was smiling and joking; but it was only from her immeasurable kindness, because her whole soul was filled at that moment, as I later realized, with such enormous care of her own and such strong and powerful feeling, that she could talk with me and answer my trifling, irksome questions only as one answers a little boy who has asked some importunate, childish question, in order to get rid of him. I suddenly understood that and felt ashamed, but I was no longer able to stop.

“No,” I cried, losing control of myself, “no, I didn’t kill the one who spoke badly of you, but, on the contrary, I even seconded him!”

“Oh, for God’s sake, don’t, there’s no need, don’t tell me anything,” she suddenly reached her hand out to stop me, and even with a sort of suffering in her face, but I had already jumped up from my seat and stood before her in order to speak everything out, and if I had spoken it out, what happened later wouldn’t have happened, because it would certainly have ended with my confessing everything and returning the document to her. But she suddenly laughed:

“Don’t, don’t say anything, no details! I know all your crimes myself. I’ll bet you wanted to marry me or something like that, and were just talking it over with one of your accomplices, a former schoolmate of yours . . . Ah, it seems I’ve guessed right!” she cried, peering gravely into my face.

“How . . . how could you guess?” I stammered like a fool, terribly struck.

“Well, what else! But enough, enough! I forgive you, only stop talking about it,” she waved her hand again, now with visible impatience. “I’m a dreamer myself, and if you knew what means I resort to in my dreams when nothing holds me back! Enough, you keep confusing me. I’m very glad that Tatyana Pavlovna left; I wanted very much to see you, and with her here it would be impossible to speak as we’re doing now. It seems I’m guilty before you for what happened then. Right? Am I right?”

“You, guilty? But I betrayed you to him then and—what can you have thought of me! I’ve been thinking about that all this time, all these days, ever since then, every moment, thinking and feeling.” (I wasn’t lying to her.)

“You needn’t have tormented yourself so much, I understood only too well then how it all happened; you simply blurted out to him in joy that you were in love with me and that I . . . well, that I had listened to you. That’s twenty years old for you. You do love him more than anything in the world, you’re looking for a friend, an ideal in him? I understood that only too well, but it was too late. Oh, yes, I was the guilty one then: I should have sent for you right then and put you at ease, but I was vexed; and I requested that you not be received in the house; and what came of it was that scene at the front door, and then that night. And you know, all this time, just like you, I’ve dreamed of meeting you secretly, only I didn’t know how to arrange it. And what do you think I feared most? That you would believe his slander against me.”

“Never!” I cried.

“I value our former meetings; your youth is dear to me, and even, perhaps, this sincerity itself . . . For I’m a most serious character. I’m the most serious and scowling character of all modern women, know that . . . ha, ha, ha! We’ll talk our fill some other time, but now I’m a bit out of sorts, I’m agitated and . . . it seems I’m in hysterics. But at last, at last, he will let me live in the world, too!”

This exclamation escaped involuntarily; I understood that at once and didn’t want to pick it up, but I trembled all over.

“He knows I’ve forgiven him!” she suddenly exclaimed again, as if to herself.

“Could you really have forgiven him that letter? And how can he know that you’ve forgiven him?” I exclaimed, no longer restraining myself.

“How does he know? Oh, he knows,” she went on answering me, but looked as if she had forgotten me and was talking to herself. “He’s come to his senses now. And how could he not know I’ve forgiven him, since he knows my soul by heart? He knows I’m somewhat of the same sort as he.”

“You?”

“Well, yes, he’s aware of that. Oh, I’m not passionate, I’m calm: but, like him, I also want everybody to be good . . . He does love me for something after all.”

“Then how is it he said you have all the vices?”

“He just said that; he’s keeping another secret to himself. And isn’t it true that the way he wrote his letter is terribly funny?”

“Funny?” (I was listening to her with all my might; I suppose she really was as if in hysterics and . . . maybe wasn’t speaking for me at all; but I couldn’t keep myself from asking.)

“Oh, yes, funny, and how I’d laugh if . . . if I wasn’t afraid. Though I’m not such a coward, don’t think it; but on account of that letter I didn’t sleep all that night, it’s written as if with some sort of sick blood . . . and after such a letter, what’s left? I love life, I’m terribly afraid for my life, I’m terribly pusillanimous about it . . . Ah, listen!” she suddenly roused herself. “Go to him! He’s alone now, he can’t be there all the time, he must have gone somewhere alone. Find him quickly, you must, run to him quickly, show him you’re his loving son, prove to him that you’re a dear, kind boy, my student, whom I . . . Oh, God grant you happiness! I don’t love anyone, and it’s better that way, but I wish everyone happiness, everyone, and him first, and let him know of it . . . even right now, I’d be very pleased . . .”

She got up and suddenly disappeared behind the portière; tears glistened on her cheeks at that moment (hysterical, after laughing). I remained alone, agitated and confused. I positively did not know to what to ascribe such agitation in her, which I could never have supposed in her. It was as if something contracted in my heart.

I waited five minutes, and finally ten; I was suddenly struck by the profound silence, and I ventured to peek through the door and call out. At my call, Marya appeared and declared to me in the most calm voice that the lady had long since dressed and gone out by the back door.

Chapter Seven

I

THAT WAS ALL I needed. I grabbed my fur coat and, putting it on as I went, ran outside, thinking, “She told me to go to him, but where am I going to get him?”

But, apart from everything else, I was struck by the question, “Why does she think something’s come now and he will give her peace? Of course, because he’s going to marry mama, but what about her? Is she glad that he’s marrying mama, or, on the contrary, is that what makes her unhappy? Is that why she’s in hysterics? Why can’t I resolve this?”

I note this second thought that flashed in me then literally, as a reminder: it’s important. That evening was fateful. And here, perhaps, against one’s will, one comes to believe in predestination: I hadn’t gone a hundred steps in the direction of mama’s apartment, when I suddenly ran into the man I was looking for. He seized my shoulder and stopped me.

“It’s you!” he cried joyfully and at the same time as if in the greatest astonishment. “Imagine, I went to your place,” he spoke quickly, “looking for you, asking for you—you’re the only one I need now in the whole universe! Your official told me God knows what lies; but you weren’t at home, and I left, even forgetting to ask him to tell you to run to me at once—and what then? I was going along in the unshakable conviction that fate couldn’t help sending you now, when I need you most, and here you’re the first one I meet! Let’s go to my place. You’ve never been to my place.”

In short, the two of us had been looking for each other, and something similar, as it were, had happened to each of us. We walked on, hurrying very much.

On the way he just uttered a few short phrases about having left mama with Tatyana Pavlovna, and so on. He led me, holding on to my arm. He lived not far away, and we got there quickly. I had, in fact, never been to his place. It was a small apartment of three rooms, which he rented (or, more correctly, Tatyana Pavlovna rented) solely for that “nursing baby.” This apartment had always been under Tatyana Pavlovna’s supervision, and was inhabited by a nanny with the baby (and now also by Nastasya Egorovna); but there had always been a room for Versilov as well—namely, the very first one, by the front door, rather spacious and rather well and plushly furnished, a sort of study for bookish and scribal occupations. In fact, there were many books on the table, in the bookcase, and on the shelves (while at mama’s there were almost none at all); there were pages covered with writing, there were tied-up bundles of letters—in short, it all had the look of a corner long lived in, and I know that, before as well, Versilov had sometimes (though rather rarely) moved to this apartment altogether and stayed in it even for weeks at a time. The first thing that caught my attention was a portrait of mama that hung over the desk, in a magnificent carved frame of costly wood—a photograph, taken abroad, of course, and, judging by its extraordinary size, a very costly thing. I hadn’t known and had never heard of this portrait before, and the main thing that struck me was the extraordinary likeness in the photograph, a spiritual likeness, so to speak—in short, as if it was a real portrait by an artist’s hand, and not a mechanical print. As soon as I came in, I stopped involuntarily before it.

“Isn’t it? Isn’t it?” Versilov suddenly repeated over me.

That is, “Isn’t it just like her?” I turned to look at him and was struck by the expression of his face. He was somewhat pale, but with an ardent, intense gaze, as if radiant with happiness and strength. I had never known him to have such an expression.

“I didn’t know you loved mama so much!” I suddenly blurted out, in rapture myself.

He smiled blissfully, though there was a reflection as if of some suffering in his smile, or, better, of something humane, lofty . . . I don’t know how to say it; but highly developed people, it seems to me, cannot have triumphant and victoriously happy faces. Without answering me, he took the portrait from the rings with both hands, brought it close, kissed it, then quietly hung it back on the wall.

“Notice,” he said, “it’s extremely rare that photographic copies bear any resemblance, and that’s understandable: it’s extremely rare that the original itself, that is, each of us, happens to resemble itself. Only in rare moments does a human face express its main feature, its most characteristic thought. An artist studies a face and divines its main thought, though at the moment of painting it might be absent from the face. A photograph finds the man as he is, and it’s quite possible that Napoleon, at some moment, would come out stupid, and Bismarck tenderhearted. But here, in this portrait, the sun, as if on purpose, found Sonya in her main moment—of modest, meek love and her somewhat wild, timorous chastity. And how happy she was then, when she was finally convinced that I was so eager to have her portrait! This picture was taken not so long ago, but all the same she was younger and better looking then; though there were already those sunken cheeks, those little wrinkles on her forehead, that timorous shyness in her eyes, which seems to be increasing in her more and more with the years. Would you believe it, my dear? I can hardly imagine her now with a different face, and yet once she was young and lovely! Russian women lose their looks quickly, their beauty is fleeting, and in truth that’s not only owing to the ethnographic properties of the type, but also to the fact that they’re capable of loving unreservedly. A Russian woman gives everything at once if she loves—moment and destiny, present and future. They don’t know how to economize, they don’t lay anything aside, and their beauty quickly goes into the one they love. Those sunken cheeks—that is also a beauty gone into me, into my brief bit of fun. You’re glad I loved your mother, and maybe you didn’t even believe I loved her? Yes, my friend, I loved her very much, yet I did her nothing but harm . . . There’s another portrait here—look at it as well.”

He took it from the desk and handed it to me. It was also a photograph, of an incomparably smaller size, in a slender oval wooden border—the face of a girl, thin and consumptive and, for all that, beautiful; pensive and at the same time strangely devoid of thought. Regular features, of a type fostered over generations, yet leaving a painful impression: it looked as though this being had suddenly been possessed by some fixed idea, tormenting precisely because it was beyond this being’s strength.

“This . . . this is the girl you wanted to marry there and who died of consumption . . . her stepdaughter?” I said somewhat timidly.

“Yes, wanted to marry, died of consumption, her stepdaughter. I knew you knew . . . all that gossip. However, apart from gossip, you couldn’t have known anything here. Let the portrait be, my friend, this is a poor madwoman and nothing more.”

“Quite mad?”

“Or else an idiot. However, I think she was mad as well. She had a child by Prince Sergei Petrovich (out of madness, not out of love; that was one of Sergei Petrovich’s meanest acts); the child is here now, in the other room, I’ve long wanted to show it to you. Prince Sergei Petrovich didn’t dare to come here and look at the baby; I made that stipulation with him while we were still abroad. I took it under my care with your mama’s permission. With your mama’s permission I also wanted then to marry that . . . unfortunate woman . . .”

“Was such permission possible?” I uttered hotly.

“Oh, yes! she gave it to me. One gets jealous of a woman, and that was not a woman.”

“Not a woman for anybody except mama! Never in my life will I believe that mama wasn’t jealous!” I cried.

“And you’re right. I realized it only when it was all over—that is, when she had given her permission. But let’s drop it. The affair didn’t work out on account of Lydia’s death, and maybe it wouldn’t have worked out even if she had remained alive, but even now I don’t let mama see the child. It was merely an episode. My dear, I’ve long been waiting for you to come here. I’ve long been dreaming of how we’d get together here. Do you know how long? For two years now.”

He looked at me sincerely and truthfully, with an unreserved warmth of heart. I seized his hand:

“Why were you so slow, why didn’t you invite me long ago? If you knew what has happened . . . and what wouldn’t have happened if you had called me long ago! . . .”

At that moment the samovar was brought in, and Nastasya Egorovna suddenly brought in the baby, asleep.

“Look at him,” said Versilov. “I love him, and I had him brought now on purpose, so that you could also look at him. Well, take him away again, Nastasya Egorovna. Sit down to the samovar. I’m going to imagine that we’ve lived like this forever and have come together every evening, never parting. Let me look at you; sit like this, so that I can see your face! How I love your face! How I kept imagining your face to myself, as I was waiting for you to come from Moscow! You ask why I didn’t send for you long ago? Wait, maybe now you’ll understand.”

“But can it be only this old man’s death that has loosened your tongue now? It’s strange . . .”

But though I did say that, I still looked at him with love. We talked like two friends in the highest and fullest sense of the word. He had brought me here to explain, to recount, to justify something to me; and yet everything was already explained and justified before any words. Whatever I was to hear from him now, the result had already been achieved, and we both happily knew it and looked at each other that way.

“It’s not exactly this old man’s death,” he replied, “not only his death; there’s something else now that has hit on the same spot . . . May God bless this moment and our life, for a long time to come! Let’s talk, my dear! I keep getting broken up, diverted, I want to talk about one thing and get sidetracked into a thousand other details. That always happens when one’s heart is full . . . But let’s talk; the time has come, and I’ve long been in love with you, my boy . . .”

He leaned back in his armchair and looked me over once more.

“How strange! How strange it is to hear that!” I repeated, drowning in ecstasy.

And then, I remember, in his face there suddenly flashed the usual wrinkle—as if of sadness and mockery together—which I knew so well. He controlled himself and, as if with a certain strain, began.

II

“HERE’S THE THING, Arkady: if I had invited you earlier, what would I have said to you? In this question lies my whole answer.”

“That is, you mean to say that you’re now mama’s husband and my father, while then . . . You wouldn’t have known before what to say about my social position? Is that it?”

“That’s not the only thing I wouldn’t have known what to say about, my dear; there’s much here that I would have had to pass over in silence. There’s even much here that’s ridiculous and humiliating, because it looks like a trick—really, like a most farcical trick. Well, how could we have understood each other before, if I understood myself only today, at five o’clock in the afternoon, exactly two hours before Makar Ivanovich’s death? You look at me with unpleasant perplexity? Don’t worry, I’ll explain the trick; but what I said is quite right: life is all wanderings and perplexities, and suddenly—the resolution, on such-and-such a day, at five o’clock in the afternoon! It’s even offensive, isn’t it? In the still-recent old days I’d have been quite offended.”

I was actually listening in painful perplexity; there was a strong presence of the former Versilovian wrinkle, which I had no wish to encounter that evening, after the words that had been spoken. Suddenly I exclaimed:

“My God! You got something from her . . . at five o’clock today?”

He looked at me intently and was evidently struck by my exclamation, and maybe also by my saying “from her.”

“You’ll learn everything,” he said with a pensive smile, “and, of course, I won’t conceal from you what you need to know, because that’s what I brought you here for; but let’s set it aside for now. You see, my friend, I’ve long known that we have children who brood about their families from childhood on, who are outraged by the unseemliness of their fathers and their surroundings. I noticed these brooders while I was still in school, and concluded then that it was all because they became envious very early on. Note, however, that I myself was one of these brooding children, but . . . excuse me, my dear, I’m surprisingly distracted. I only wanted to say how constantly I’ve been afraid for you here almost all this time. I always imagined you as one of those little beings who are conscious of their giftedness and given over to solitude. Like you, I also never cared for my comrades. Woe to those beings who are left only to their own powers and dreams, and with a passionate, all too premature, and almost vengeful longing for seemliness—precisely ‘vengeful.’ But enough, my dear, I’m digressing again . . . Even before I began to love you, I had already imagined you and your solitary, wild dreams . . . But enough; in fact, I’ve forgotten what I started to say. However, all that still had to be spoken out. But before, before, what could I have said to you? Now I see your gaze upon me and know that it’s my son looking at me; while even yesterday I couldn’t have believed I’d ever be sitting and talking with my boy as I am today.”

He was indeed becoming very distracted, but at the same time was as if touched by something.

“Now I have no need for dreams and reveries, now you are enough for me! I will follow you!” I said, giving myself to him with all my soul.

“Follow me? But my wanderings have just ended, and just today as it happens. You’re too late, my dear. Today is the finale of the last act, and the curtain is coming down. This last act dragged on for a long time. It began very long ago—when I fled abroad for the last time. I abandoned everything then, and know, my dear, that I unmarried your mother then, and told her so myself. You should know that. I explained to her then that I was going away forever, and that she would never see me again. Worst of all, I even forgot to leave her any money then. Nor did I think of you for a minute. I left with the intention of remaining in Europe, my dear, and never coming home. I emigrated.”

“To Herzen?³⁰ To take part in foreign propaganda? You’ve probably taken part in some conspiracy all your life?” I cried, not restraining myself.

“No, my friend, I never took part in any conspiracy. But your eyes are even flashing; I like your exclamations, my dear. No, I simply left then from yearning. From a sudden yearning. This was the yearning of a Russian nobleman—I truly can’t put it any better. A nobleman’s yearning—and nothing more.”

“Serfdom . . . the emancipation of the people?”³¹ I murmured, breathless.

“Serfdom? You think I was yearning for serfdom? Couldn’t bear the emancipation of the people? Oh, no, my friend, it was we who were the emancipators. I emigrated without any spite. I had just been an arbiter of the peace and had struggled with all my might; I had struggled disinterestedly, and didn’t even leave because I had gotten too little reward for my liberalism. None of us got anything then—that is, again, the ones like me. I left rather in pride than in repentance, and, believe me, quite far from thinking it was time to end my life as a humble bootmaker. Je suis gentilhomme avant tout et je mourrai gentilhomme! ⁹⁴ But even so I felt sad. There are maybe about a thousand men of our sort in Russia; maybe no more, in fact, but that’s quite enough for an idea not to die. We are the bearers of an idea, my dear! . . . My friend, I’m talking in some strange hope that you’ll understand all this gibberish. I invited you on a whim of my heart: I’ve long been dreaming of how I might say something to you . . . to you, precisely to you! But, anyhow . . . anyhow . . .”

“No, speak,” I cried, “I see sincerity in your face again . . . So what, did Europe resurrect you then? And what was your ‘nobleman’s yearning’? Forgive me, dear heart, I still don’t understand.”

“Did Europe resurrect me? But I myself was going then to bury her!”

“To bury her?” I repeated in surprise.

He smiled.

“Arkady, my friend, my soul has waxed tender now, and my spirit is stirred. I’ll never forget my first moments in Europe that time. I had lived in Europe before, but that was a special time, and I had never arrived there with such inconsolable sadness and . . . such love as at that time. I’ll tell you one of my first impressions then, one of the dreams I had then, an actual dream. It was still in Germany. I had just left Dresden and, in my absentmindedness, had missed the station at which I should have changed direction and wound up on another branch line. They got me off at once; it was past two in the afternoon, a bright day. It was a little German town. They directed me to a hotel. I had to wait: the next train came through at eleven o’clock at night. I was even pleased to have an adventure, because I was in no particular hurry. I was wandering, my dear, just wandering. The hotel turned out to be wretched and small, but it was all covered in greenery and surrounded with beds of flowers, as always there. I was given a little room and, as I had spent the whole night on the road, I fell asleep after dinner, at four o’clock in the afternoon.

“I dreamed a dream that was completely unexpected for me, because I had never had one like it. In Dresden, in the gallery, there’s a painting by Claude Lorrain—Acis and Galatea³² according to the catalog, but I’ve always called it The Golden Age, I don’t know why myself. I had seen it before, and then, some three days earlier, I had noticed it once again in passing. I saw this painting in my dream, but not as a painting, but as if it were something happening. However, I don’t know precisely what I dreamed; it was exactly as in the painting—a corner of the Greek archipelago, and time, too, seemed to have shifted back three thousand years; gentle blue waves, islands and rocks, a flowering coast, a magic panorama in the distance, the inviting, setting sun—words can’t express it. Here European mankind remembered its cradle, and the thought of it seemed to fill my soul with a kindred love. This was the earthly paradise of mankind: the gods came down from heaven and were united with people . . . Oh, beautiful people lived here! They woke up and fell asleep happy and innocent; the meadows and groves were filled with their songs and merry shouts; a great surplus of untouched forces went into love and simplehearted joy. The sun poured down warmth and light on them, rejoicing over its beautiful children . . . A wonderful reverie, a lofty delusion of mankind! The golden age—the most incredible dream of all that have ever been, but for which people have given all their lives and all their strength, for which prophets have died and been slain, without which the peoples do not want to live and cannot even die! And it was as if I lived through this whole feeling in my dream; the cliffs and the sea and the slanting rays of the setting sun—it was as if I could still see it all when I woke up and opened my eyes, literally wet with tears. I remember that I was glad. A feeling of happiness unknown to me before went through my heart, even to the point of pain; this was an all-human love. It was already full evening; a sheaf of slanting rays came in the window of my little room, breaking through the greenery of the plants on the windowsill, pouring its light over me. And then, my friend, and then—this setting sun of the first day of European mankind, which I had seen in my dream, turned for me as soon as I woke up, in reality, into the setting sun of the last day of European mankind! At that time especially it was as if a death knell could be heard over Europe. I’m not just speaking of the war, or of the Tuileries;³³ I knew even without that that it would all pass away, the whole countenance of the old European world—sooner or later; but as a Russian European I couldn’t accept it. Yes, they had just burned the Tuileries then . . . Oh, don’t worry, I know it was ‘logical,’ and I understand only too well the irresistibility of the current idea, but as a bearer of the highest Russian cultural thought I couldn’t accept it, because the highest Russian thought is the all-reconciliation of ideas. And who in the whole world could understand such a thought then? I wandered alone. I’m not talking about myself personally—I’m talking about Russian thought. There, there was strife and logic; there the Frenchman was only a Frenchman, and the German only a German, and that with a greater intensity than at any time in their entire history; meaning that a Frenchman never did more harm to France, or a German to his Germany, than at that time! In the whole of Europe then there wasn’t a single European! I alone among all those pétroleurs³⁴ could tell them to their faces that their Tuileries was a mistake, and I alone among all the avenging conservatives could tell the avengers that the Tuileries, though a crime, still had its logic. And that was so, my boy, because I alone, as a Russian, was then the only European in Europe. I’m not talking about myself—I’m talking about all of Russian thought. I wandered, my friend, I wandered and knew firmly that I had to keep silent and wander. But still I felt sad. My boy, I cannot help respecting my nobility. It seems you’re laughing?”

“No, I’m not laughing,” I said in a deeply moved voice, “I’m not laughing at all. You’ve shaken my heart with your vision of the golden age, and be assured that I’m beginning to understand you. But most of all I’m glad that you respect yourself so much. I hasten to tell you so. That’s something I never expected of you!”

“I’ve already told you that I like your exclamations, my dear,” he smiled again at my naïve exclamation and, getting up from his armchair, began pacing the room without noticing it. I also got up. He went on speaking in his strange language, but with deeply penetrating thought.

III

“YES, MY BOY, I repeat to you that I can’t help respecting my nobility. Over the centuries we have developed a high cultural type never seen before, which does not exist anywhere else in the world—the type of universal suffering for all. It’s a Russian type, but since it’s taken from the highest cultural stratum of the Russian people, that means I have the honor of belonging to it. It preserves in itself the future of Russia. There are perhaps only a thousand of us—maybe more, maybe less—but the whole of Russia has lived up to now only to produce this thousand. Too few, they’ll say, indignant that so many centuries and so many millions of people have been spent for a thousand men. In my opinion, it’s not too few.”

I listened with strained attention. A conviction was emerging, the tendency of a whole lifetime. This “thousand men” betrayed him in such high relief! I felt that his expansiveness with me came from some external shock. He made all these ardent speeches while loving me; but the reason why he suddenly began speaking, and why he wished to speak this way precisely with me, still remained unknown to me.

“I emigrated,” he went on, “and I didn’t regret anything I left behind. I had served Russia then with all that was in my power, while I lived there; having left, I also continued to serve her, but only expanded the idea. But serving her in that way, I served her far more than if I had been merely a Russian, as a Frenchman then was merely a Frenchman, and a German a German. In Europe that has not yet been understood. Europe created noble types of the Frenchman, the Englishman, the German, but of her future man she still knows almost nothing. And it seems she doesn’t want to know yet. And that’s understandable: they’re not free, and we are free. I, with my Russian yearning, was the only free man in Europe then.

“Make note of a strange thing, my friend: any Frenchman can serve not only his France, but even mankind, solely on condition that he remains most of all a Frenchman; the same applies to the Englishman and the German. Only the Russian, even in our time, that is, long before the general summing up, is capable of becoming most Russian precisely only when he is most European. That is our most essential national distinction from all the rest, and in this respect Russia is like nowhere else. In France I’m a Frenchman, with a German I’m a German, with an ancient Greek a Greek, and by that very fact I’m most Russian. By that very fact I am a real Russian, and I serve Russia most, for I put forward her chief thought. I am a pioneer of that thought. I emigrated then, but did I leave Russia? No, I continued to serve her. Granted, I did nothing in Europe; granted, I went only to wander (and I knew I went only to wander), but it was enough that I went with my thought and my consciousness. I took my Russian yearning there. Oh, it wasn’t only the blood of that time that alarmed me so much, and not even the Tuileries, but all that was bound to follow. They’re doomed to go on fighting for a long time, because they’re still all too German and all too French, and they haven’t finished their work in those roles. But I regret the destruction on the way. For a Russian, Europe is as precious as Russia; for him, every stone in her is dear and beloved. Europe was just as much our fatherland as Russia. Oh, even more! It’s impossible to love Russia more than I do, but I never reproached myself for the fact that Venice, Rome, Paris, the treasures of their science and art, their whole history—are dearer to me than Russia. Oh, Russians cherish those old foreign stones, those wonders of God’s old world, those fragments of holy wonders; and they’re even dearer to us than to them! They have other thoughts and other feelings now, and they’ve ceased to cherish the old stones . . . A conservative there merely struggles for existence; and the pétroleur acts up only over the right to a crust of bread. Russia alone lives not for herself, but for thought, and you must agree, my friend, with the portentous fact that, for almost a hundred years, Russia has lived decidedly not for herself, but for Europe alone! And they? Oh, they are doomed to terrible torments before they reach the Kingdom of God.”

I confess, I listened in great confusion; even the tone of his speech alarmed me, though I couldn’t help being struck by the thoughts. I had a morbid fear of falseness. Suddenly I remarked to him in a stern voice:

“You just said ‘the Kingdom of God.’ I’ve heard you preached God there, and wore chains?”

“Let my chains be,” he smiled, “that’s something else entirely. I was not yet preaching anything then, but I was yearning for their God—that’s true. They proclaimed atheism then . . . a small bunch of them, but that makes no difference; these were only the front-runners, but this was their first executive step—that’s the important thing. Here again it’s their logic; but there is always anguish in logic. I was of a different culture, and my heart couldn’t accept it. The ingratitude with which they parted with the idea, the whistling and mudslinging were unbearable to me. The bootishness of the process alarmed me. However, reality always smacks of the boot, even with the brightest striving towards the ideal, and I, of course, should have known that. But even so, I was a man of a different type: I was free in choosing, but they were not—and I wept, wept for them, wept over the old idea, and maybe wept real tears, without any pretty words.”

“You believed so strongly in God?” I asked mistrustfully.

“My friend, that question is perhaps superfluous. Let’s suppose I didn’t believe very much, but still I couldn’t help yearning for the idea. I couldn’t help imagining to myself at times how man was going to live without God and whether it would ever be possible. My heart always decided it was impossible; but a certain period was perhaps possible . . . For me, there is even no doubt that it will come; but here I’ve always imagined another picture to myself . . .”

“Which?”

True, he had said earlier that he was happy; of course, there was a good deal of rapturousness in his words; that is how I take much of what he said then. Without doubt, respecting this man as I do, I will not venture now to set down on paper all that we talked about then; but I will present here several strokes from the strange picture I managed to coax out of him. Above all, always and all the time before then, I had been tormented by these “chains,” and I wanted to clear them up—that was why I persisted. Several fantastic and extremely strange ideas that he uttered then have remained in my heart forever.

“I imagine to myself, my dear,” he began with a pensive smile, “that the battle is over and the fighting has subsided. After the curses, the mudslinging and whistling, a calm has come, and people are left alone, as they wished: the great former idea has left them; the great source of strength that had nourished and warmed them till then is departing, like that majestic, inviting sun in Claude Lorrain’s painting, but it already seemed like the last day of mankind. And people suddenly realized that they remained quite alone, and at once felt a great orphancy. My dear boy, I’ve never been able to imagine people ungrateful and grown stupid. The orphaned people would at once begin pressing together more closely and lovingly; they would hold hands, understanding that they alone were now everything for each other. The great idea of immortality would disappear and would have to be replaced; and all the great abundance of the former love for the one who was himself immortality, would be turned in all of them to nature, to the world, to people, to every blade of grass. They would love the earth and life irrepressibly and in the measure to which they gradually became aware of their transient and finite state, and it would be with a special love now, not as formerly. They would begin to observe and discover such phenomena and secrets in nature as they had never supposed before, because they would look at nature with new eyes, the eyes with which a lover looks at his beloved. They would wake up and hasten to kiss each other, hurrying to love, conscious that the days were short, and that that was all they had left. They would work for each other, and each would give all he had to everyone, and would be happy in that alone. Every child would know and feel that each person on earth was like a father and mother to him. ‘Tomorrow may be my last day,’ each of them would think, looking at the setting sun, ‘but all the same, though I die, they will all remain, and their children after them’—and this thought that they would remain, loving and trembling for each other in the same way, would replace the thought of a meeting beyond the grave. Oh, they would hasten to love, in order to extinguish the great sadness in their hearts. They would be proud and brave for themselves, but would become timorous for one another. Each would tremble for the life and happiness of each. They would become tender to each other and would not be ashamed of it, as now, and would caress each other like children. Meeting each other, they would exchange deep and meaningful looks, and there would be love and sadness in their eyes . . .

“My dear,” he suddenly broke off with a smile, “this is all a fantasy, even quite an incredible one; but I have imagined it only too often, because all my life I’ve been unable to live without it and not to think of it. I’m not talking about my faith: I have no great faith, I’m a deist, a philosophical deist, like all the thousand of us, as I suppose, but . . . but it’s remarkable that I’ve always ended my picture with a vision, as in Heine, of ‘Christ on the Baltic Sea.’³⁵ I couldn’t do without him, I couldn’t help imagining him, finally, amidst the orphaned people. He would come to them, stretch out his arms to them, and say, ‘How could you have forgotten me?’ And here it would be as if a veil fell from everyone’s eyes, and the great exultant hymn of the new and last resurrection would ring out . . .

“Let’s drop it, my friend; and my ‘chains’ are nonsense; don’t worry about them. And here’s another thing: you know that I’m modest and sober of speech; if I fell to talking now, it’s . . . from various feelings, and because it’s with you; I’ll never say it to anyone else. I add that to reassure you.”

But I was even touched; the falseness I had feared wasn’t there, and I was especially glad, because it became clear to me that he really was yearning and suffering and really, undoubtedly, had loved much—and for me that was the most precious thing of all. I told him so with enthusiasm.

“But you know,” I suddenly added, “it seems to me that despite all your yearning, you must have been extremely happy then.”

He laughed gaily.

“You’re particularly apt in your observations today,” he said. “Well, yes, I was happy, and how could I be unhappy with such yearning? There’s no one freer and happier than a Russian European wanderer from our thousand. I say it, truly, without laughing, and there’s much that’s serious here. Yes, I wouldn’t exchange my yearning for any other happiness. In this sense I’ve always been happy, my dear, all my life. And out of happiness I came to love your mama then for the first time in my life.”

“How, for the first time in your life?”

“Precisely so. In my wandering and yearning, I suddenly came to love her as never before, and sent for her at once.”

“Oh, tell me about that, too, tell me about mama!”

“But that’s why I invited you, and, you know,” he smiled gaily, “I was afraid you’d forgiven me mama on account of Herzen or some sort of little conspiracy . . .”

Chapter Eight

I

SINCE WE WENT on talking all evening then and sat till it was night, I won’t quote the whole conversation, but will just set down something that explained to me, finally, one mysterious point in his life.

I’ll begin by saying that for me there’s no doubt that he loved mama, and if he abandoned her and “unmarried” her when he went away, it was, of course, because he had become too bored or something of the sort, which, however, happens with everyone in the world, but which is always hard to explain. Abroad, however, after a long while, he suddenly began to love mama again from afar, that is, in thought, and sent for her. “Whimsicality,” they may say, but I say something else: in my opinion, here was all that can possibly be serious in human life, despite the apparent slip-slop, which I, perhaps, partly make allowances for. But I swear that I put this European yearning of his beyond question and not only on a par with, but incomparably higher than, any contemporary practical activity in the building of railroads. His love for mankind I acknowledge as a most sincere and profound feeling, without any tricks; and his love for mama as something completely unquestionable, though maybe a bit fantastic. Abroad, “in yearning and happiness,” and, I’ll add, in the strictest monastic solitude (this particular information I received later through Tatyana Pavlovna), he suddenly remembered mama—remembered precisely her “sunken cheeks”—and sent for her at once.

“My friend,” escaped him, among other things, “I suddenly realized that my serving the idea did not free me, as a moral and reasonable being, from the duty of making at least one person happy in practice during the course of my life.”

“Can such a bookish thought really have been the cause of it all?” I asked in perplexity.

“It’s not a bookish thought. However, perhaps it is. Here, though, everything comes together, for I did love your mama really, sincerely, not bookishly. If I hadn’t loved her so much, I wouldn’t have sent for her, but would have ‘made happy’ some passing German man or woman, once I had thought up the idea. And I would set it down as a commandment for any developed man to make at least one being happy in his life, unfailingly and in something, but to do it in practice, that is, in reality; just as I would set it down as a law or an obligation for every peasant to plant at least one tree in his life, in view of the deforestation of Russia; though one tree would be too little, he can be ordered to plant a tree every year. The superior and developed man, pursuing a superior thought, sometimes departs entirely from the essential, becomes ridiculous, capricious, and cold, I’d even simply say stupid, and not only in practical life, but, in the end, even stupid in his theories. Thus, the duty of occupying oneself with the practical, and of making at least one existing being happy, would in fact set everything right and refresh the benefactor himself. As a theory, it’s very funny; but if it became a practice and turned into a custom, it wouldn’t be stupid at all. I experienced it for myself: as soon as I began to develop this idea of a new commandment—at first, naturally, as a joke—I suddenly began to realize the full extent of my love for your mother, which lay hidden in me. Till then I had never realized that I loved her. While I lived with her I merely enjoyed her, while she had her good looks, but then I became capricious. Only in Germany did I realize that I loved her. It began with her sunken cheeks, which I could never remember and sometimes couldn’t even see without a pain in my heart—a literal pain, real, physical. There are painful memories, my dear, which cause actual pain; nearly everyone has them, only people forget them; but it happens that they suddenly remember later, even only some feature, and then they can’t get rid of it. I began to recall a thousand details of my life with Sonya; in the end they came to my memory of themselves, pouring in a mass, and all but tormented me while I waited for her. Most of all I was tormented by the memory of her eternal abasement before me, and of her eternally considering herself infinitely inferior to me in all respects—imagine, even the physical. She became ashamed and blushed when I sometimes looked at her hands and fingers, which were not at all aristocratic. And not her fingers only, she was ashamed of everything in herself, despite the fact that I loved her beauty. She had always been shy with me to the point of wildness, but the bad thing was that a glimpse of some sort of fear, as it were, showed in this shyness. In short, she considered herself a worthless or even almost indecent thing next to me. Truly, once in a while, at the beginning, I sometimes thought she still considered me her master and was afraid, but it wasn’t that at all. And yet I swear she was better able than anyone else to understand my shortcomings, and never in my life have I met a woman with such a subtle and discerning heart. Oh, how unhappy she was in the beginning, while she was still so good looking, when I demanded that she dress up. There was self-love in it, and also some other offended feeling: she realized that she could never be a lady, and that wearing clothes that weren’t for her only made her ridiculous. As a woman, she didn’t want to feel ridiculous in her clothes, and she realized that every woman had to wear dresses that were hers—something that thousands and hundreds of thousands of women will never realize, so long as they’re dressed fashionably. She was afraid of my mocking look—that’s what it was! But it was especially sad for me to recall her deeply astonished look, which I often caught on me during all our time. It bespoke a perfect understanding of her fate and of the future in store for her, so that it even made me feel bad, though, I confess, I didn’t get into any conversations with her then, and treated it all somehow condescendingly. And, you know, she wasn’t always so timorous and wild as she is now; even now it happens that she suddenly gets as merry and pretty as a twenty-year-old; and then, when she was young, she sometimes liked very much to chatter and laugh, in her own company, of course—with the girls, with the women of the household; and how startled she’d be when I unexpectedly found her laughing sometimes, how quickly she’d blush and look at me timorously! Once, not long before I left for abroad, that is, almost on the eve of my unmarrying her, I came into her room and found her alone, at the little table, without any work, leaning her elbow on the table, and deep in thought. It almost never happened with her that she would sit like that, without work. By then I had long ceased to caress her. I managed to approach very softly, on tiptoe, and suddenly embrace and kiss her . . . She jumped up—and I’ll never forget that rapture, that happiness on her face, and suddenly it all changed quickly to a blush, and her eyes flashed. Do you know what I read in that flashing glance? ‘You’re giving me charity—that’s what!’ She sobbed hysterically, under the pretext that I had frightened her, but even then I fell to thinking. And in general, all such recollections are a very hard thing, my friend. It’s the same as how, in a great artist’s poems, there are sometimes such painful scenes that you remember them with pain all your life afterwards—for instance, Othello’s last monologue in Shakespeare, Evgeny at Tatyana’s feet, or the escaped convict meeting a child, a little girl, on a cold night, by a well, in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.³⁶ It pierces your heart once, and the wound remains forever after. Oh, how I waited for Sonya and how I wanted to embrace her quickly! I dreamed with convulsive impatience of a whole new program of life; I dreamed of destroying gradually, through methodical effort, this constant fear she had of me in her soul, of explaining her own worth to her and everything in which she was even superior to me. Oh, I knew only too well then that I always began to love your mother as soon as we parted, and always cooled towards her when we came together again; but here it wasn’t that, this time it wasn’t that.”

I was surprised. “And she?” the question flashed in me.

“Well, and how was your meeting with mama then?” I asked warily.

“Then? But I didn’t meet her then at all. She barely got as far as Königsberg then, and she stayed there, while I was on the Rhine. I didn’t go to her, but told her to stay and wait. We saw each other much later, oh, a long time later, when I went to ask her permission to marry . . .”

II

HERE I’LL CONVEY the essence of the matter, that is, only what I myself could take in; and he also began telling me things incoherently. His speech suddenly became ten times more incoherent and disorderly, just as he reached this point.

He met Katerina Nikolaevna suddenly, precisely when he was expecting mama, at the most impatient moment of expectation. They were all on the Rhine then, at the waters, all taking the cure. Katerina Nikolaevna’s husband was almost dying by then, or at least he had already been sentenced to death by the doctors. From the first meeting she struck him as with some sort of sorcery. It was a fatum.⁹⁵ It’s remarkable that, writing it down and recalling it now, I don’t remember him once using the word “love” or saying he was “in love” in his account then. The word fatum I do remember.

And it certainly was a fatum. He did not want it, “did not want to love.” I don’t know whether I can convey it clearly; only his whole soul was indignant precisely at the fact that this could have happened to him. All that was free in him was annihilated at once in the face of this meeting, and the man was forever fettered to a woman who wanted nothing at all to do with him. He had no wish for this slavery of passion. I will say straight out now: Katerina Nikolaevna is a rare type of society woman—a type which maybe doesn’t exist in that circle. It is the type of the simple and straightforward woman in the highest degree. I’ve heard, that is, I know for certain, that this was what made her irresistible in society when she appeared in it (she often withdrew from it completely). Versilov, naturally, did not believe then, on first meeting her, that she was that way, but believed precisely the opposite, that is, that she was a dissembler and a Jesuit. Skipping ahead, I will quote here her own opinion of him: she maintained that he couldn’t think of her in any other way, “because an idealist, when he runs his head into reality, is always inclined, before anybody else, to assume all sorts of vileness.” I don’t know whether that is true of idealists in general, but of him, of course, it was fully true. Here, perhaps, I’ll set down my own opinion as well, which flashed through my mind as I listened to him then: it occurred to me that he loved mama with a more humane and generally human love, so to speak, than the simple love with which one loves women in general, and, as soon as he met a woman whom he loved with that simple love, he immediately refused that love—most likely because he was unaccustomed to it. However, maybe this is a wrong thought; of course, I didn’t say it to him. It would have been indelicate; and I swear, he was in such a state that he almost had to be spared: he was agitated; at some points of his story he suddenly just broke off and was silent for several minutes, pacing the room with an angry face.

She soon penetrated his secret then. Oh, maybe she also flirted with him on purpose. Even the most shining women are mean on such occasions; that is their irrepressible instinct. It ended with an embittered break between them, and it seems he wanted to kill her; he frightened her and maybe would have killed her; “but it all suddenly turned to hatred.” A strange period ensued. He suddenly came up with the strange thought of tormenting himself with discipline, “the same sort that monks exercise. Gradually and by methodical practice, you overcome your will, beginning with the most ridiculous and petty things, and ending by overcoming your will entirely and becoming free.” He added that among monks this is a serious matter, because it has been raised to the level of a science through a thousand years of experience. But the most remarkable thing was that he came up with this idea of “discipline” then, not at all in order to get rid of Katerina Nikolaevna, but in the fullest certainty that he not only did not love her anymore, but even hated her in the highest degree. He believed in his hatred of her to such an extent that he even suddenly thought of falling in love with and marrying her stepdaughter, who had been deceived by the prince, persuaded himself completely of this new love, and got the poor idiot girl to fall in love with him irresistibly, making her completely happy by this love during the last months of her life. Why, instead of her, he didn’t remember then about mama, who was waiting for him all the while in Königsberg, remained unclear to me . . . On the contrary, he suddenly and entirely forgot about mama, didn’t even send her money to live on, so that it was Tatyana Pavlovna who saved her then. Suddenly, however, he went to mama to “ask her permission” to marry that girl, under the pretext that “such a bride isn’t a woman.” Oh, maybe this is all merely the portrait of a “bookish man,” as Katerina Nikolaevna said of him afterwards; however, why is it that these “paper people” (if it’s true that they are paper) are able to suffer in such a real way and reach the point of such tragedies? Though then, that evening, I thought somewhat differently, and was shaken by a certain thought:

“All your development, all your soul came to you through suffering and through your whole life’s struggle—while all her perfection came to her gratis. There’s inequality here . . . Women are outrageous in that,” I said, not at all to ingratiate myself with him, but with fervor and even with indignation.

“Perfection. Her perfection? Why, there’s no perfection in her!” he said suddenly, all but astonished at my words. “She’s a most ordinary woman, she’s even a trashy woman . . . But she’s obliged to have every perfection!”

“Why obliged?”

“Because, having such power, she’s obliged to have every perfection!” he cried spitefully.

“The saddest thing is that you’re so tormented even now!” suddenly escaped me involuntarily.

“Now? Tormented?” he repeated my words again, stopping before me as if in some perplexity. And then suddenly a quiet, long, thoughtful smile lit up his face, and he raised his finger before him as if reflecting. Then, recovering completely, he snatched an unsealed letter from the table and flung it down before me.

“Here, read it! You absolutely must know everything . . . and why did you let me rummage around so much in that old rubbish! . . . I’ve only defiled and embittered my heart! . . .”

I’m unable to express my astonishment. It was a letter from her to him, written that day, received at around five o’clock in the afternoon. I read it almost trembling with excitement. It wasn’t long, but was written so directly and candidly that, as I read it, it was as if I could see her before me and hear her words. Truthfully in the highest degree (and therefore almost touchingly), she confessed to him her fear and then simply entreated him “to leave her in peace.” In conclusion, she informed him that she was now positively going to marry Bjoring. Until that occasion, she had never written to him.

And here is what I understood then from his explanations:

As soon as he read this letter earlier, he suddenly sensed a most unexpected phenomenon in himself: for the first time in those fateful two years, he felt neither the slightest hatred for her nor the slightest shock, similar to the way he had “gone out of his mind” not long ago at the mere rumor about Bjoring. “On the contrary, I sent her a blessing from my whole heart,” he said to me with deep feeling. I listened to these words with delight. It meant that everything there was in him of passion, of torment, had disappeared all at once, of itself, like a dream, like a two-year-long enchantment. Still not believing himself, he rushed to mama—and what then: he came in precisely at the moment when she became free, and the old man who had bequeathed her to him the day before died. These two coincidences shook his soul. A little later he rushed to look for me—and his thinking of me so soon I will never forget.

Nor will I forget the end of that evening. This man became all and suddenly transformed again. We sat late into the night. About how all this “news” affected me, I will tell later, in its place, but now—just a few concluding words about him. Reflecting now, I understand that what charmed me most then was his humility, as it were, before me, his so-truthful sincerity before such a boy as I! “It was all fumes, but blessings on it!” he cried. “Without that blindness I might never have discovered in my heart so wholly and forever my sole queen, my sufferer—your mother!” I make special note of these rapturous words that escaped him uncontrollably, with a view to what followed. But then he conquered and overcame my soul.

I remember, towards the end we became terribly merry. He ordered champagne brought, and we drank to mama and to “the future.” Oh, he was so full of life and so bent on living! But it wasn’t the wine that made us terribly merry; we drank only two glasses each. I don’t know why, but towards the end we laughed almost uncontrollably. We started talking about totally unrelated things; he got to telling jokes, and so did I. Neither our laughter nor our jokes were the least bit spiteful or jeering, we were simply merry. He kept refusing to let me go: “Stay, stay a while longer!” he repeated, and I stayed. He even went out to see me off; it was a lovely evening, there was a slight frost.

“Tell me, have you already sent her a reply?” I suddenly asked quite inadvertently, pressing his hand for the last time at the intersection.

“Not yet, no, and it makes no difference. Come tomorrow, come early . . . And another thing: drop Lambert altogether, and tear up the ‘document,’ and soon. Good-bye!”

Having said that, he suddenly left. I remained standing there, and in such confusion that I didn’t dare call him back. The expression “the document” especially staggered me; from whom could he have learned of it, and in such a precise expression, if not from Lambert? I returned home in great confusion. And how could it happen, the thought flashed in me suddenly, that such a “twoyear-long enchantment ” could vanish like a dream, like fumes, like a phantom?

Chapter Nine

I

BUT I WOKE UP the next morning feeling fresher and heartier. I even reproached myself, involuntarily and sincerely, for the certain levity and haughtiness, as it were, with which I recalled listening yesterday to certain parts of his “confession.” If it was partially disordered, if certain revelations were as if somewhat fumy and even incoherent, he hadn’t really been prepared for an oration when he invited me to his place yesterday. He only did me a great honor, turning to me as to an only friend at such a moment, and I will never forget it. On the contrary, his confession was “touching,” however much I may be laughed at for the expression, and if there was an occasional flash of the cynical or even of something seemingly ridiculous, I was too broad not to understand and not to allow for realism—without, however, besmirching the ideal. Above all, I had finally comprehended this man, and I even felt partly sorry and as if vexed that it had all turned out so simple. In my heart I had always placed this man extremely high, in the clouds, and had unfailingly clothed his destiny in something mysterious, so that I naturally wished that the key wouldn’t fit the lock so easily. However, in his meeting with her and in his two-year-long suffering there was also much that was complicated: “He refused the fatum of life; what he needed was freedom, not slavery to the fatum; through slavery to the fatum he had been obliged to offend mama, who was sitting in Königsberg . . .” Besides, I considered this man, in any case, a preacher: he bore the golden age in his heart and knew the future of atheism; and then the meeting with her had shattered everything, perverted everything! Oh, I didn’t betray her, but still I took his side. Mama, I reasoned, for instance, wouldn’t hinder anything in his destiny, not even marriage to mama. That I understood; that was quite other than the meeting with that one. True, all the same, mama would not have given him peace, but that would even have been better: such people ought to be judged differently, and let their life always be like that; and there’s nothing unseemly in it; on the contrary, it would be unseemly if they settled down, or generally became similar to all average people. His praise of the nobility and his words, “Je mourrai gentilhomme,” didn’t confound me in the least; I perceived what sort of gentilhomme he was; he was the type who gives everything away and becomes the herald of world citizenship and the main Russian thought of the “all-unification of ideas.” And though that, too, was even all nonsense, that is, the “all-unification of ideas” (which, of course, is unthinkable), still there was one good thing, that all his life he had worshipped an idea, and not the stupid golden calf. My God! I, I myself, when I conceived my “idea”—was I bowing down to the golden calf? Was it money I wanted then? I swear I wanted only the idea! I swear I wouldn’t have a single chair or sofa upholstered in velvet, and if I had a hundred million, I’d eat the same bowl of beef soup as now!

I was dressing and hurrying to him irrepressibly. I will add: concerning his outburst yesterday about the “document,” I was also five times more at ease than yesterday. First, I hoped to clarify things with him, and, second, so what if Lambert had filtered through to him and they had talked something over? But my chief joy was in one extraordinary sensation; this was the thought that he “didn’t love her” now; I believed in that terribly, and felt as if someone had rolled an awful stone off my heart. I even remember the flash of a certain surmise then: precisely the ugliness and senselessness of his last fierce outburst at the news about Bjoring and the sending of that insulting letter then; precisely that extremity could also have served as a prophecy and precursor of the most radical change in his feelings and of his approaching return to common sense. It must have been almost as with an illness, I thought, and he precisely had to reach the opposite extreme—a medical episode and nothing more! This thought made me happy.

“And let her, let her dispose of her fate as she likes, let her marry her Bjoring as much as she likes, only let him, my father, my friend, not love her anymore,” I exclaimed. However, there was in it a certain secret of my own feelings, but I don’t wish to smear it around here in my notes.

Enough of that. And now I will tell all the horror that followed, and all the machinations of the facts, without any discussions.

II

AT TEN O’CLOCK, just as I was ready to go out—to see him, of course—Nastasya Egorovna appeared. I asked her joyfully if she was coming from him, and heard with vexation that it was not from him at all, but from Anna Andreevna, and that she, Nastasya Egorovna, had “left the apartment at first light.”

“Which apartment?”

“The same one as yesterday. Yesterday’s apartment, the one with the little baby, is rented in my name now, and Tatyana Pavlovna pays . . .”

“Ah, well, it makes no difference to me!” I interrupted with vexation. “Is he at home at least? Will I find him in?”

And to my astonishment I heard from her that he had left the premises even before she had—meaning that she had left “at first light,” and he still earlier.

“Well, so now he’s come back?”

“No, sir, he certainly hasn’t come back, and he may not come back at all,” she said, looking at me with the same keen and furtive eye, and not taking it off me, just as she had done when she visited me while I lay sick. What mainly made me explode was that here again some secrets and stupidities emerged, and that these people apparently couldn’t do without secrets and slyness.

“Why did you say he certainly won’t come back? What are you implying? He went to mama’s, that’s all!”

“I d-don’t know, sir.”

“And why were you so good as to come?”

She told me that she had come now from Anna Andreevna, who was sending for me and expected me at once, otherwise “it would be too late.” This further mysterious phrase drove me completely beside myself.

“Why too late? I don’t want to go and I won’t go! I won’t let myself be taken over again! I spit on Lambert—tell her that, and that if she sends Lambert to me, I’ll chuck him out—just tell her that!”

Nastasya Egorovna was terribly frightened.

“Ah, no, sir!” she stepped towards me, pressing her hands together as if entreating me, “take your time before you go hurrying so. This is an important matter, very important for you yourself, and also for the lady, and for Andrei Petrovich, and for your mama, for everybody . . . Do go to Anna Andreevna at once, because she simply can’t wait any longer . . . I assure you on my honor . . . and then you can make your decision.”

I stared at her in amazement and disgust.

“Nonsense, nothing will happen, I won’t go!” I cried stubbornly and gleefully. “Now everything will be a new way! And how can you understand that? Good-bye, Nastasya Egorovna, I purposely won’t go, I purposely won’t ask you any questions. You only throw me off. I don’t want to enter into your riddles.”

But as she wouldn’t leave and went on standing there, I grabbed my coat and hat and went out myself, leaving her there in the middle of the room. There were no letters or papers in my room, and previously I had almost never locked my door when I left. But before I reached the front door, my landlord, Pyotr Ippolitovich, came running down the stairs after me, hatless and in his uniform.

“Arkady Makarovich! Arkady Makarovich!”

“What is it now?”

“Have you no orders on leaving?”

“None.”

He looked at me with a stabbing glance and with evident uneasiness.

“Concerning the apartment, for instance?”

“What about the apartment? Didn’t I send you the money on time?”

“No, sir, I’m not talking about money,” he suddenly smiled a long smile and went on stabbing me with his glance.

“What’s the matter with you all?” I finally cried, almost totally ferocious. “What are you after?”

He waited for another few seconds, as if he still expected something from me.

“Well, so you can give the orders later . . . if you’re not in the mood now,” he murmured, with an even longer grin. “Go on, sir, and I myself have my duties.”

He ran upstairs to his apartment. Of course, all that could set one to thinking. I’m purposely not leaving out the slightest stroke from all that petty nonsense, because every little stroke of it later went into the final bouquet, where it found its proper place, as the reader will ascertain. But it was true that they really threw me off then. If I was so agitated and annoyed, it was precisely because I again heard in their words that tiresome tone of intrigue and riddling that reminded me of the old days. But to continue.

Versilov turned out not to be at home, and he had indeed gone out at first light. “To mama’s, of course,” I stubbornly stood my ground. I asked no questions of the nanny, a rather stupid woman, and there was no one else in the apartment. I ran to mama’s, and, I confess, I was so worried that halfway there I grabbed a cab. He hadn’t been at mama’s since last evening. Only Tatyana Pavlovna and Liza were with mama. As soon as I came in, Liza started preparing to leave.

They were all sitting upstairs in my “coffin.” In our drawing room downstairs, Makar Ivanovich was laid out on the table,³⁷ and some old man was measuredly reading the psalter over him. I won’t describe anything now that is not directly related to the matter, but will just observe that the coffin, which they had already had time to make and was standing right there in the room, was not simple, though black, but was lined with velvet, and the shroud on the deceased was an expensive one—a magnificence not suited to the old man or his convictions, but such was the express wish of both mama and Tatyana Pavlovna.

Naturally, I didn’t expect to find them cheerful; but the peculiarly oppressive anguish, with concern and uneasiness, that I read in their eyes, struck me immediately, and I instantly concluded that “here, surely, the deceased is not the only cause.” All this, I repeat, I remember perfectly well.

Despite all, I embraced mama tenderly and asked at once about him. An alarmed curiosity instantly flashed in mama’s eyes. I hastily mentioned that he and I had spent the whole last evening together, till late into the night, but that today he hadn’t been at home since daybreak, whereas just yesterday he had invited me himself, as we were parting, to come today as early as possible. Mama made no reply, and Tatyana Pavlovna, seizing the moment, shook her finger at me.

“Good-bye, brother,” Liza suddenly cut off, quickly going out of the room. I naturally went after her, but she had stopped right at the front door.

“I thought it might occur to you to come down,” she said in a quick whisper.

“Liza, what’s going on here?”

“I don’t know myself, only there’s a lot of something. Probably the dénouement of the ‘eternal story.’ He hasn’t come, but they have some sort of information about him. They won’t tell you, don’t worry, and you won’t ask, if you’re smart; but mama is crushed. I didn’t ask about anything either. Good-bye.”

She opened the door.

“But, Liza, what about you?” I sprang after her into the hallway. Her terribly crushed, desperate air pierced my heart. She gave me a look, not so much angry as even almost somehow embittered, grinned biliously, and waved her hand.

“If he died—it would be a godsend!” she flung at me from the stairs, and went out. She said this of Prince Sergei Petrovich, who at the time was lying in delirium and unconscious. “Eternal story! What eternal story?” I thought with defiance, and then suddenly I absolutely wanted to tell them at least part of my impressions yesterday from his night confession, and the confession itself. “They think something bad about him now—let them know all!” flew through my head.

I remember that I managed somehow very deftly to begin my story. Their faces instantly showed a terrible curiosity. This time Tatyana Pavlovna simply fastened her eyes on me, but mama was more restrained; she was very serious, but a light, beautiful, though somehow quite hopeless smile came to her face and almost never left it all the while I was talking. I spoke well, of course, though I knew that for them it was almost incomprehensible. To my surprise, Tatyana Pavlovna did not pick on me, did not insist on exactitude, did not try to catch me up, as she was accustomed to do whenever I began saying something. She only pressed her lips occasionally and narrowed her eyes, as if making an effort to comprehend. At times it even seemed to me that they understood everything, but that was all but impossible. I talked, for instance, about his convictions, but, above all, about his rapture yesterday, about his rapture over mama, about his love for mama, about how he kissed her portrait . . . Listening to that, they exchanged quick and silent glances, and mama turned all red, though they both went on being silent. Then . . . then, of course, I couldn’t touch on the main point before mama, that is, the meeting with her and all the rest, and, above all, her letter to him yesterday and his moral “resurrection” after the letter; but that was the main thing, so that all his feelings yesterday, with which I had thought to gladden mama, naturally remained incomprehensible, though, of course, through no fault of my own, because all that could be told, I told beautifully. I ended in total perplexity; their silence remained unbroken, and it became very oppressive for me to be with them.

“Surely he’s come back by now, or maybe he’s sitting at my place and waiting,” I said, and got up to leave.

“Go, go!” Tatyana Pavlovna firmly agreed.

“Have you been downstairs?” mama asked me in a half-whisper, as I was taking my leave.

“Yes, I bowed down to him and prayed for him. Such a calm, seemly face he has, mama! Thank you, mama, for not sparing on his coffin. First I found it strange, but then I thought at once that I would have done the same myself.”

“Will you come to church tomorrow?” she asked, and her lips trembled.

“What are you asking, mama?” I was surprised. “I’ll come to the panikhida³⁸ today, too, and I’ll come again; and . . . besides, tomorrow is your birthday, mama, my dearest! He didn’t live the three days till then!”

I left in painful astonishment. How could she ask such questions—whether I’d come to the funeral at the church or not? “And if it’s so about me, then what do they think about him?”

I knew that Tatyana Pavlovna would come running after me, and I purposely lingered in the front doorway; but she, having overtaken me, pushed me out onto the stairway with her hand, came out after me, and closed the door behind her.

“Tatyana Pavlovna, you mean you don’t expect Andrei Petrovich either today or tomorrow? I’m alarmed . . .”

“Quiet. Much it matters that you’re alarmed. Speak—what was it you didn’t finish saying when you told about yesterday’s balderdash?”

I found no need to conceal it, and, almost annoyed with Versilov, told her all about Katerina Nikolaevna’s letter to him yesterday, and about the effect of the letter, that is, his resurrection into a new life. To my surprise, the fact of the letter didn’t surprise her in the least, and I guessed that she already knew about it.

“You’re not lying?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Well, now,” she smiled venomously, as if pondering, “resurrected! Just what he’d do! Is it true that he kissed the portrait?”

“It’s true, Tatyana Pavlovna.”

“Did he kiss it with feeling, without pretending?”

“Pretending? Does he ever pretend? Shame on you, Tatyana Pavlovna; you have a coarse soul, a woman’s soul.”

I said it heatedly, but it was as if she didn’t hear me. She again seemed to be figuring something out, despite the intense cold on the stairway. I was wearing a fur coat, but she was wearing only a dress.