He laughed.
"How is it you cannot dissemble? Why is it you are such a simple creature? Why is it you're not like all the rest? … Why, how can you tell a man you are turning away that you 'almost love him'?"
"It's only that I could not express myself," she put in hurriedly. "I used the wrong words; it's because I've always felt abashed and unable to talk to you from the first time I met you, and if I used the wrong words, saying that I almost love you, in my thought it was almost so—so that's why I said so, though I love you with that … well, with that GENERAL love with which one loves every one and which one is never ashamed to own… ."
He listened in silence, fixing his glowing eyes upon her.
"I am offending you, of course," he went on, as though beside himself. "This must really be what they call passion… . All I know is that in your presence I am done for, in your absence, too. It's just the same whether you are there or not, wherever you may be you are always before me. I know, too, that I can hate you intensely, more than I can love you. But I've long given up thinking about anything now—it's all the same to me. I am only sorry I should love a woman like you."
His voice broke; he went on, as it were, gasping for breath.
"What is it to you? You think it wild of me to talk like that!" He smiled a pale smile. "I believe, if only that would charm you, I would be ready to stand for thirty years like a post on one leg… . I see you are sorry for me; your face says 'I would love you if I could but I can't… .' Yes? Never mind, I've no pride. I'm ready to take any charity from you like a beggar—do you hear, any … a beggar has no pride."
She got up and went to him. "Dear friend," she said, with inexpressible feeling in her face, touching his shoulder with her hand, "I can't hear you talk like that! I shall think of you all my life as some one most precious, great-hearted, as some thing most sacred of all that I respect and Love. Andrey Petrovitch, understand what I say. Why, it's not for nothing I've come here now, dear friend … dear to me then and now: I shall never forget how deeply you stirred my mind when first we met. Let us part as friends, and you will be for me the most earnest and dearest thought in my whole life."
"Let us part and then I will love you; I will love you—only let us part. Listen," he brought out, perfectly white, "grant me one charity more: don't love me, don't live with me, let us never meet; I will be your slave if you summon me, and I will vanish at once if you don't want to see me, or hear me, only … ONLY DON'T MARRY ANYONE!"
It sent a pang to my heart to hear those words. That naïvely humiliating entreaty was the more pitiful, the more heartrending for being so flagrant and impossible. Yes, indeed, he was asking charity! Could he imagine she would consent? Yet he had humbled himself to put it to the test; he had tried entreating her! This depth of spiritual degradation was insufferable to watch. Every feature in her face seemed suddenly distorted with pain, but before she had time to utter a word, he suddenly realised what he had done.
"I will STRANGLE you," he said suddenly, in a strange distorted voice unlike his own.
But she answered him strangely, too, and she, too, spoke in a different voice, unlike her own.
"If I granted you charity," she said with sudden firmness, "you would punish me for it afterwards worse than you threaten me now, for you would never forget that you stood before me as a beggar… . I can't listen to threats from you!" she added, looking at him with indignation, almost defiance.
"'Threats from you,' you mean—from such a beggar. I was joking," he said softly, smiling. "I won't touch you, don't be afraid, go away … and I'll do my utmost to send you that letter—only go; go! I wrote you a stupid letter, and you answered my stupid letter in kind by coming; we are quits. This is your way." He pointed towards the door. (She was moving towards the room in which I was standing behind the curtain.)
"Forgive me if you can," she said, stopping in the doorway.
"What if we meet some day quite friends and recall this scene with laughter?" he said suddenly, but his face was quivering all over like the face of a man in convulsions.
"Oh, God grant we may!" she cried, clasping her hands, though she watched his face timidly, as though trying to guess what he meant.
"Go along. Much sense we have, the pair of us, but you… . Oh, you are one of my own kind! I wrote you a mad letter, and you agreed to come to tell me that 'you almost love me.' Yes, we are possessed by the same madness! Be always as mad, don't change, and we shall meet as friends—that I predict, that I swear!"
"And then I shall certainly love you, for I feel that even now!" The woman in her could not resist flinging those last words to him from the doorway.
She went out. With noiseless haste I went into the kitchen, and scarcely glancing at Darya Onisimovna, who was waiting for me, I went down the back staircase and across the yard into the street, but I had only time to see her get into the sledge that was waiting for her at the steps. I ran down the street.
Chapter 11
1.
I ran to Lambert. Oh, how I should have liked to give a show of logic to my behaviour, and to find some trace of common sense in my actions that evening and all that night; but even now, when I can reflect on it all, I am utterly unable to present my conduct in any clear and logical connection. It was a case of feeling, or rather a perfect chaos of feelings, in the midst of which I was naturally bound to go astray. It is true there was one dominant feeling, which mastered me completely and overwhelmed all the others, but … need I confess to it? Especially as I am not certain… .
I ran to Lambert, beside myself of course. I positively scared Alphonsine and him for the first minute. I have always noticed that even the most profligate, most degraded Frenchmen are in their domestic life extremely given to a sort of bourgeois routine, a sort of very prosaic daily ceremonial of life established once and for ever. Lambert quickly realised, however, that something had happened, and was delighted that I had come to him at last, and that I was IN HIS CLUTCHES. He had been thinking of nothing else day and night! Oh, how badly he needed me! And behold now, when he had lost all hope, I had suddenly appeared of my own accord, and in such a frantic state—just in the state which suited him.
"Lambert, wine!" I cried: "let's drink, let's have a jolly time. Alphonsine, where's your guitar?"
I won't describe the scene, it's unnecessary. We drank, and I told him all about it, everything. He listened greedily. I openly of my own accord suggested a plot, a general flare-up. To begin with, we were by letter to ask Katerina Nikolaevna to come to us… .
"That's possible," Lambert assented, gloating over every word I said.
Secondly, we must send a copy of the "document" in full, that she might see at once that she was not being deceived.
"That's right, that's what we must do!" Lambert agreed, continually exchanging glances with Alphonsine.
Thirdly, Lambert must ask her to come, writing as though he were an unknown person and had just arrived from Moscow, and I must bring Versilov.
"And we might have Versilov, too," Lambert assented.
"Not might, but must!" I cried. "It's essential! It's for his sake it's all being done!" I explained, taking one sip after another from my glass. (We were all three drinking, while I believe I really drank the whole bottle of champagne, while they only made a show of drinking.) "Versilov and I will sit in the next room"—(Lambert would have to take the next room!)—"and suddenly when she had agreed to everything—to paying the cash, and to his OTHER demands too, for all women were abject creatures, then Versilov and I would come in and convict her of being abject, and Versilov, seeing what a horrid woman she was, would at once be cured, and reject her with scorn. Only we ought to have Büring too, that he might see her put to shame."
"No, we don't want Büring," Lambert observed.
"We do, we do," I yelled again: "you don't know anything about it, Lambert, for you are a fool! On the contrary, let it make a scandal in fashionable society, it will be our revenge on fashionable society, and upon
her, and let her be punished! Lambert, she will give you an IOU… . I don't want money, I don't care a damn for money, but you can stoop to pick it up and stuff it in your pocket, and my curse with it, but I shall crush her!"
"Yes, yes," Lambert kept approving, "you are right there."
He kept exchanging glances with Alphonsine.
"Lambert, she has an awful reverence for Versilov: I saw that for certain just now," I babbled to him.
"It's a good thing you did peep and see it all. I should never have thought that you would have made such a good spy and that you had so much sense!" He said this to flatter me.
"That's a lie, Frenchman; I'm not a spy, but I have plenty of sense! And do you know, Lambert, she loves him, really!" I went on making desperate efforts to express myself. "But she won't marry him because Büring's an officer in the guards, and Versilov is only a noble-hearted man, and a friend of humanity: to their thinking a comic person and nothing else! Oh, she understands his passion and gloats over it, flirts, is carried away by it, but won't marry him! She's a woman, she's a serpent! Every woman is a serpent, and every serpent is a woman! He must be cured; we must tear the scales off his eyes; let him see what she is and be cured. I will bring him to you, Lambert!"
"Just so," Lambert kept repeating, filling up my glass every minute.
He was in a perfect tremble of anxiety to avoid contradicting or offending me and to make me go on drinking. It was so coarse and obvious that even at the time I could not help noticing it. But nothing could have made me go away; I kept drinking and talking, and was desperately anxious to give full expression to what I was feeling. When Lambert brought in another bottle, Alphonsine was playing some Spanish air on the guitar; I was almost in tears.
"Lambert, do you know everything?" I exclaimed with intense feeling. "That man must be saved, for he's spell-bound … by sorcery. If she were to marry him, he would spurn her from him the day after the wedding … for that does happen sometimes. For such a wild outrageous love is like a fit, like a deadly noose, like an illness, and—as soon as it is gratified—the scales fall from the eyes at once and the opposite feeling comes—loathing and hatred, the desire to strangle, to crush. Do you know the story of Avisage, Lambert? Have you read it?"
"No, I don't remember: a novel?" muttered Lambert.
"Oh, you know nothing. Lambert, you're fearfully, fearfully ignorant … but I don't care a damn for that. It's no matter. Oh, he loves mother, he kissed her portrait; he'll spurn that woman next morning and come back to mother of himself; but then it will be too late, so we must save him now… ."
In the end I began crying bitterly, but I still went on talking and drank a fearful quantity of champagne. It was most characteristic of Lambert that all that evening he did not once ask about the "document": where it was, that I should show it, should put it on the table. What would have been more natural than to inquire about it, since we were planning to take action? Another point: we kept saying that we must do "this," that we certainly would do "this," but of the place, the time and manner—we did not say a word! He only assented to all I said and kept looking at Alphonsine, that was all! Of course, I was incapable of reflecting on that at the time, but I remember it.
I ended by falling asleep on his sofa without undressing. I slept a long time and waked up very late. I remember that after waking I lay for a long time on the sofa, as it were petrified, trying to reflect and remember, and pretending that I was still asleep. But it appeared that Lambert was not in the room, he had gone out. It was past nine o'clock, the stove had been heated and was crackling exactly as it had done when I found myself the first time at Lambert's after that night. But Alphonsine was behind the screen keeping guard on me; I noticed it at once, for she had twice peeped out and glanced at me, but each time I shut my eyes and pretended to be asleep. I did this because I was overwhelmed and wanted to think over my position. I felt with horror all the ineptitude and loathsomeness of my confession to Lambert, my plotting with him, the blunder I had made in running to him! But, thank God, the letter was still in my keeping; it was still sewn up in my side pocket; I felt with my hand—it was there! So all I had to do was to get up and run away, I need not care what Lambert thought of me afterwards. Lambert was not worth it.
But I was ashamed of myself! I was my own judge, and—my God, what was there in my heart! But there's no need to describe that hellish, insufferable feeling, and that consciousness of filth and vileness. But yet I must confess it, for I feel the time has come. It must be recorded in my story. So let it be known that I meant to shame her, and planned to be almost a witness of her yielding to Lambert's demands—oh, the baseness!—not for the sake of saving Versilov in his madness and bringing him back to mother, but because … perhaps because I was myself in love and jealous! Jealous of whom: of Büring, of Versilov? Of anyone she might look at, or talk to at a ball, while I should be standing in a corner ashamed of myself… . Oh, the hideousness of it!
In short, I don't know of whom I was jealous on her account; but all I felt and knew the evening before was that as certainly as twice two make four, she was lost to me, that that woman would spurn me and laugh at me for falseness and absurdity! She was truthful and honest, while I—I was a spy, using letters to threaten her!
All this I have kept hidden in my heart ever since, but now the day has come and I make up my account, but, again, for the last time. Perhaps fully half, or perhaps even seventy-five per cent. of what I am saying is a libel upon myself! That night I hated her in a kind of delirium, and afterwards like a drunken rowdy. I have said already that it was a chaos of feelings and sensations in which I could distinguish nothing clearly myself. But still I have had to confess it, for though only a part of what I felt, it was certainly present.
With an overpowering sense of disgust, and a firm determination to cancel all that had happened, I suddenly jumped up from the sofa; but as I jumped up, Alphonsine instantly popped out. I seized my overcoat and cap and told her to tell Lambert that I had been raving the evening before, that I had slandered a woman, that I had been joking, and that Lambert must not dare come near me again… . All this I expressed in a blundering fashion, talking hurriedly in French, and, of course, anything but clearly, but, to my surprise, Alphonsine understood everything perfectly; and what was most surprising of all, she seemed positively relieved at something.
"Oui, oui," she said approvingly, "c'est une honte! Une dame… . Oh, vous être génereux, vous! Soyez tranquille, je ferai voir raison à Lambert… ."
So that I was even at that moment puzzled to explain the sudden change in her attitude, and consequently I suppose in Lambert's. I went away, however, saying nothing; all was in confusion within me, and I was hardly capable of reasoning. Oh, afterwards I could explain it all, but then it was too late! Oh, what a hellish plot it was! I will pause here and explain it beforehand, as otherwise it will be impossible for the reader to understand it.
The fact was that at my very first interview with Lambert, when I was thawing in his lodging, I had muttered to him like a fool that the letter was sewn up in my pocket; then I had suddenly fallen asleep for a time on the sofa in the corner, and Lambert had promptly felt my pocket and was convinced that there was a piece of paper sewn up in it. Several times afterwards he made sure that the paper was still there; when we were dining, for instance, at the "Tatar's," I remember that he several times put his arms round my waist on purpose. Grasping the importance of the letter he made a separate plan of his own of which I had no suspicion at all. I, like a fool, imagined all the time that he urged me to come home so persistently to get me to join his gang and to act only in concert with him, but, alas! he invited me with quite a different object! He wanted to make me dead drunk, and when I was stretched snoring and unconscious, to rip open my pocket and take possession of the letter. This was precisely what he and Alphonsine had done that night; Alphonsine had unpicked the pocket, taking out the letter, HER LETTER, the document I had brought from Moscow, they had taken a pi
ece of plain notepaper the same size, put it in the pocket and sewn it up again, as if nothing had happened, so that I might notice no difference. Alphonsine had sewn it up. And I, up to the very end, for another day and a half—still went on believing that I was in possession of the secret, and that Katerina Nikolaevena's fate was still in my hands.
A last word: that theft of the letter was the cause of everything and of all the other disasters that followed.
2.
The last twenty-four hours of my story have come and I am at the end!
It was, I believe, about half-past ten, when excited, and, as far as I remember, strangely absent-minded, but with a firm determination in my heart, I dragged myself to my lodgings. I was not in a hurry, I knew how I was going to act. And scarcely had I stepped into the passage when I realised at once that a new calamity had occurred, and an extraordinary complication had arisen: the old prince had just been brought from Tsarskoe-Syelo and was in the flat; with him was Anna Andreyevna!
He had been put not in my room but in the two rooms next to mine that had been occupied by my landlord and his wife. The day before, as it appeared, some changes and improvements had been made in the room, but only of the most superficial kind. The landlord and his wife had moved into the little room of the whimsical lodger marked with small-pox whom I have mentioned already, and that individual had been temporarily banished, I don't know where.
I was met by the landlord, who at once whisked into my room. He looked less sure of his ground than he had done the evening before, but was in an unusual state of excitement, so to say, at the climax of the affair. I said nothing to him, but, moving aside into a corner and clutching my head in my hands, I stood so for a moment. He thought for the first moment that I was "putting it on," but at last his fortitude gave way, and he could not help being scared.
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