Poor Folk Anthology

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  He looked at me with a fateful smile.

  "Yes, yes!" I cried suddenly, as though coming to life again "let us go. I was only waiting for you… ."

  I may remark that I had never once thought of roulette during those hours.

  "But the baseness? The degradation of the action?" Prince Sergay asked suddenly.

  "Our going to roulette! Why that's everything," I cried, "money's everything. Why, you and I are the only saints, while Büring has sold himself, Anna Andreyevna's sold herself, and Versilov—have you heard that Versilov's a maniac? A maniac! A maniac!"

  "Are you quite well, Arkady Makarovitch? Your eyes are somehow strange."

  "You say that because you want to go without me! But I shall stick to you now. It's not for nothing I've been dreaming of play all night. Let us go, let us go!" I kept exclaiming, as though I had found the solution to everything.

  "Well, let us go, though you're in a fever, and there … "

  He did not finish. His face looked heavy and terrible. We were just going out when he stopped in the doorway.

  "Do you know," he said suddenly, "that there is another way out of my trouble, besides play?"

  "What way."

  "A princely way."

  "What's that? What's that?"

  "You'll know what afterwards. Only let me tell you I'm not worthy of it, because I have delayed too long. Let us go, but you remember my words. We'll try the lackey's way… . And do you suppose I don't know that I am consciously, of my own free will, behaving like a lackey?"

  6.

  I flew to the roulette table as though in it were concentrated all hopes of my salvation, all means of escape, and yet as I have mentioned already, I had not once thought of it before Prince Sergay's arrival. Moreover, I was going to gamble, not for myself but for Prince Sergay, and with his money; I can't explain what was the attraction, but it was an irresistible attraction. Oh, never had those people, those faces, those croupiers with their monotonous shouts, all the details of the squalid gambling saloon seemed so revolting to me, so depressing, so coarse, and so melancholy as that evening! I remember well the sadness and misery that gripped my heart at times during those hours at the gambling table. But why didn't I go away? Why did I endure and, as it were, accept this fate, this sacrifice, this devotion? I will only say one thing: I can hardly say of myself that I was then in my right senses. Yet at the same time, I had never played so prudently as that evening. I was silent and concentrated, attentive and extremely calculating; I was patient and niggardly, and at the same time resolute at critical moments. I established myself again at the zero end of the table, that is between Zerstchikov and Aferdov, who always sat on the former's right hand; the place was distasteful to me, but I had an overwhelming desire to stake on zero, and all the other places at that end were taken. We had been playing over an hour; at last, from my place, I saw Prince Sergay get up from his seat and with a pale face move across to us and remain facing me the other side of the table: he had lost all he had and watched my play in silence, though he probably did not follow it and had ceased to think of play. At that moment I just began winning, and Zerstchikov was counting me out what I had won. Suddenly, without a word, Aferdov with the utmost effrontery took one of my hundred-rouble notes before my very eyes and added it to the pile of money lying before him. I cried out, and caught hold of his hand. Then something quite unexpected happened to me: it was as though I had broken some chain that restrained me, as though all the affronts and insults of that day were concentrated in that moment in the loss of that hundred-rouble note. It was as though everything that had been accumulating and suppressed within me had only been waiting for that moment to break out.

  "He's a thief, he has just stolen my hundred roubles," I exclaimed, looking round, beside myself.

  I won't describe the hubbub that followed; such a scandal was a novelty there. At Zerstchikov's, people behaved with propriety, and his saloon was famous for it. But I did not know what I was doing. Zerstchikov's voice was suddenly heard in the midst of the clamour and din:

  "But the money's not here, and it was lying here! Four hundred roubles!"

  Another scene followed at once: the money in the bank had disappeared under Zerstchikov's very nose, a roll of four hundred roubles. Zerstchikov pointed to the spot where the notes had only that minute been lying, and that spot turned out to be close to me, next to the spot where my money was lying, much closer to me than to Aferdov.

  "The thief is here! he has stolen it again, search him!" I cried pointing to Aferdov.

  "This is what comes of letting in all sorts of people," thundered an impressive voice in the midst of the general uproar. "Persons have been admitted without introduction! Who brought him in? Who is he?"

  "A fellow called Dolgoruky."

  "Prince Dolgoruky?"

  "Prince Sokolsky brought him," cried some one.

  "Listen, prince," I yelled to him across the table in a frenzy; "they think I'm a thief when I've just been robbed myself! Tell them about me, tell them about me!"

  And then there followed something worse than all that had happened that day … worse than anything that had happened in my life: Prince Sergay disowned me. I saw him shrug his shoulders and heard him in answer to a stream of questions pronounce sharply and distinctly:

  "I am not responsible for anyone. Please leave me alone."

  Meanwhile Aferdov stood in the middle of the crowd loudly demanding that "he should be searched." He kept turning out his own pockets. But his demands were met by shouts of "No, no, we know the thief!"

  Two footmen were summoned and they seized me by my arms from behind.

  "I won't let myself be searched, I won't allow it!" I shouted, pulling myself away.

  But they dragged me into the next room; there, in the midst of the crowd, they searched me to the last fold of my garments. I screamed and struggled.

  "He must have thrown it away, you must look on the floor," some one decided.

  "Where can we look on the floor now?"

  "Under the table, he must have somehow managed to throw it away."

  "Of course there's no trace … "

  I was led out, but I succeeded in stopping in the doorway, and with senseless ferocity I shouted, to be heard by the whole saloon:

  "Roulette is prohibited by the police. I shall inform against you all to-day!"

  I was led downstairs. My hat and coat were put on me, and … the door into the street was flung open before me.

  Chapter 9

  1.

  The day had ended with a catastrophe, there remained the night, and this is what I remember of that night.

  I believe it was one o'clock when I found myself in the street. It was a clear, still and frosty night, I was almost running and in horrible haste, but—not towards home.

  "Why home? Can there be a home now? Home is where one lives, I shall wake up to-morrow to live—but is that possible now? Life is over, it is utterly impossible to live now," I thought.

  And as I wandered about the streets, not noticing where I was going, and indeed I don't know whether I meant to run anywhere in particular, I was very hot and I was continually flinging open my heavy raccoon-lined coat. "No sort of action can have any object for me now" was what I felt at that moment. And strange to say, it seemed to me that everything about me, even the air I breathed, was from another planet, as though I had suddenly found myself in the moon. Everything—the town, the passers-by, the pavement I was running on—all of these were NOT MINE. "This is the Palace Square, and here is St. Isaak's," floated across my mind. "But now I have nothing to do with them." Everything had become suddenly remote, it had all suddenly become NOT MINE. "I have mother and Liza—but what are mother and Liza to me now? Everything is over, everything is over at one blow, except one thing: that I am a thief for ever."

  "How can I prove that I'm not a thief? Is it possible now? Shall I go to America? What should I prove by that? Versilov will be the first to believe I stole it! My 'idea'?
What idea? What is my 'idea' now? If I go on for fifty years, for a hundred years, some one will always turn up, to point at me and say: 'He's a thief, he began, "his idea" by stealing money at roulette.'"

  Was there resentment in my heart? I don't know, perhaps there was. Strange to say, I always had, perhaps from my earliest childhood, one characteristic: if I were ill-treated, absolutely wronged and insulted to the last degree, I always showed at once an irresistible desire to submit passively to the insult, and even to accept more than my assailant wanted to inflict upon me, as though I would say: "All right, you have humiliated me, so I will humiliate myself even more; look, and enjoy it!" Touchard beat me and tried to show I was a lackey, and not the son of a senator, and so I promptly took up the rôle of a lackey. I not only handed him his clothes, but of my own accord I snatched up the brush and began brushing off every speck of dust, without any request or order from him, and ran after him brush in hand, in a glow of menial devotion, to remove some particle of dirt from his dress-coat, so much so that he would sometimes check me himself and say, "That's enough, Arkady, that's enough." He would come and take off his overcoat, and I would brush it, fold it carefully, and cover it with a check silk handkerchief. I knew that my school-fellows used to laugh at me and despise me for it, I knew it perfectly well, but that was just what gratified me: "Since they want me to be a lackey, well, I am a lackey then; if I'm to be a cad, well, I will be a cad." I could keep up a passive hatred and underground resentment in that way for years.

  Well, at Zerstchikov's I had shouted to the whole room in an absolute frenzy:

  "I will inform against you all—roulette is forbidden by the police!" And I swear that in that case, too, there was something of the same sort: I was humiliated, searched, publicly proclaimed a thief, crushed. "Well then I can tell you, you have guessed right, I am worse than a thief, I am an informer." Recalling it now, that is how I explain it; at the time I was incapable of analysis; I shouted that at the time unintentionally, I did not know indeed a second before that I should say it: it shouted itself—the CHARACTERISTIC was there already in my heart.

  There is no doubt that I had begun to be delirious while I was running in the streets, but I remember quite well that I knew what I was doing; and yet I can confidently assert that a whole cycle of ideas and conclusions were impossible for me at that time; I felt in myself even at those moments that "some thoughts I was able to think, but others I was incapable of." In the same way some of my decisions, though they were formed with perfect consciousness, were utterly devoid of logic. What is more, I remember very well that at some moments I could recognize fully the absurdity of some conclusion and at the same time with complete consciousness proceed to act upon it. Yes, crime was hovering about me that night, and only by chance was not committed.

  I suddenly recalled Tatyana Pavlovna's saying about Versilov: "He'd better have gone at night to the Nikolaevsky Railway and have laid his head on the rails—they'd have cut it off for him."

  For a moment that idea took possession of all my feelings, but I instantly drove it away with a pang at my heart: "If I lay my head on the rails and die, they'll say to-morrow he did it because he stole the money, he did it from shame—no, for nothing in the world!" And at that instant I remember I experienced a sudden flash of fearful anger. "To clear my character is impossible," floated through my mind, "to begin a new life is impossible too, and so I must submit, become a lackey, a dog, an insect, an informer, a real informer, while I secretly prepare myself, and one day suddenly blow it all up into the air, annihilate everything and every one, guilty and innocent alike, so that they will all know that this was the man they had all called a thief … and then kill myself."

  I don't remember how I ran into a lane somewhere near Konnogvardeysky Boulevard. For about a hundred paces on both sides of this lane there were high stone walls enclosing backyards. Behind the wall on the left I saw a huge stack of wood, a long stack such as one sees in timber-yards, and more than seven feet higher than the wall. I stopped and began pondering.

  In my pocket I had wax matches in a little silver matchbox. I repeat, I realized quite distinctly at that time what I was thinking about and what I meant to do, and so I remember it even now, but why I meant to do it I don't know, I don't know at all. I only know that I suddenly felt a great longing to do it. "To climb over the wall is quite possible," I reflected; at that moment I caught sight of a gate in the wall not two paces away, probably barred up for months together. "Standing on the projection below, and taking hold of the top of the gate I could easily climb on to the wall," I reflected, "and no one will notice me, there's no one about, everything's still! And there I can sit on the wall and easily set fire to the woodstack. I can do it without getting down, for the wood almost touches the wall. The frost will make it burn all the better, I have only to take hold of a birch-log with my hand… . And indeed there's no need to reach a log at all: I can simply strip the bark off with my hand, while I sit on the wall, set light to it with a match and thrust it into the stack— and there will be a blaze. And I will jump down and walk away; there will be no need to run, for it won't be noticed for a long while… ." That was how I reasoned at the time, and all at once I made up my mind.

  I felt an extraordinary satisfaction and enjoyment, and I climbed up. I was very good at climbing: gymnastics had been my speciality at school, but I had my overboots on and it turned out to be a difficult task. I succeeded somehow in catching hold of one very slight projection above, and raised myself; I lifted my other hand to clutch the top of the wall, but at that instant I slipped and went flying backwards.

  I suppose I must have struck the ground with the back of my head, and must have lain for two or three minutes unconscious. When I came to myself I mechanically wrapped my fur coat about me, feeling all at once unbearably cold, and scarcely conscious of what I was doing, I crept into the corner of the gateway and sat crouching and huddled up in the recess between the gate and the wall. My ideas were in confusion, and most likely I soon fell into a doze. I remember now, as it were in a dream, that there suddenly sounded in my ears the deep heavy clang of a bell, and I began listening to it with pleasure.

  2.

  The bell rang steadily and distinctly, once every two or three seconds; it was not an alarm bell, however, but a pleasant and melodious chime, and I suddenly recognized that it was a familiar chime; that it was the bell of St. Nikolay's, the red church opposite Touchard's, the old-fashioned Moscow church which I remembered so well, built in the reign of Tsar Alexey Mihalovitch, full of tracery, and with many domes and columns, and that Easter was only just over, and the new-born little green leaves were trembling on the meagre birches in Touchard's front garden. The brilliant evening sun was pouring its slanting rays into our classroom, and in my little room on the left, where a year before Touchard had put me apart that I might not mix with "counts' and senators' children," there was sitting a visitor. Yes, I, who had no relations, had suddenly got a visitor for the first time since I had been at Touchard's. I recognized this visitor as soon as she came in: it was mother, though I had not seen her once since she had taken me to the village church and the dove had flown across the cupola. We were sitting alone together and I watched her strangely. Many years afterwards I learned that being left by Versilov, who had suddenly gone abroad, she had come on her own account to Moscow, paying for the journey out of her small means, and almost by stealth, without the knowledge of the people who had been commissioned to look after her, and she had done this solely to see me. It was strange, too, that when she came in and talked to Touchard, she did not say one word to me of being my mother. She sat beside me, and I remember I wondered at her talking so little. She had a parcel with her and she undid it: in it there turned out to be six oranges, several gingerbread cakes, and two ordinary loaves of French bread. I was offended at the sight of the bread, and with a constrained air I announced that our 'food' was excellent, and that they gave us a whole French loaf for our tea every day.

/>   "Never mind, darling, in my foolishness I thought 'maybe they don't feed them properly at school,' don't be vexed, my own."

  "And Antonina Vassilyevna (Touchard's wife) will be offended. My schoolfellows will laugh at me too… ."

  "Won't you have them; perhaps you'll eat them up?"

  "Please, don't… ."

  And I did not even touch her presents; the oranges and gingerbread cakes lay on the little table before me, while I sat with my eyes cast down, but with a great air of dignity. Who knows, perhaps I had a great desire to let her see that her visit made me feel ashamed to meet my schoolfellows, to let her have at least a glimpse that she might understand, as though to say, "See, you are disgracing me, and you don't understand what you are doing." Oh, by that time I was running after Touchard with a brush to flick off every speck of dust! I was picturing to myself, too, what taunts I should have to endure as soon as she was gone, from my schoolfellows and perhaps from Touchard himself; and there was not the least friendly feeling for her in my heart. I only looked sideways at her dark-coloured old dress, at her rather coarse, almost working-class hands, at her quite coarse shoes, and her terribly thin face; there were already furrows on her forehead, though Antonina Vassilyevna did say that evening after she had gone: "Your mamma must have been very pretty."