I’ll note in parenthesis: it was all too evident to me from the first words, the first look, that Versilov was even seeking an outburst, that he was provoking and teasing this irritable baron, and maybe trying his patience too much. The baron winced.
“I have heard that you can be witty, but wit is not yet intelligence.”
“An extremely profound observation, Colonel.”
“I did not ask for your praise,” cried the baron, “and I have not come to pour through a sieve! Be so good as to listen: Baron Bjoring was in great doubt on receiving your letter, because it testified to the madhouse. And, of course, means could have been found at once to . . . calm you down. But, owing to certain special considerations, you were granted indulgence, and inquiries were made about you. It turned out that, though you belonged to good society and had once served in the guards, you have been excluded from society, and your reputation is more than dubious. However, even despite that, I have come here to ascertain personally, and here, on top of everything else, you allow yourself to play with words and yourself assert that you are subject to fits. Enough! Baron Bjoring’s position and his reputation cannot indulge you in this affair . . . In short, dear sir, I am authorized to announce to you that if this is followed by a repetition or merely by anything resembling the previous action, means will immediately be found to pacify you, quite quick and reliable ones, I can assure you. We do not live in the forest, but in a well-organized state!”
“Are you so sure of that, my good Baron R.?”
“Devil take it,” the baron suddenly stood up, “you tempt me too much to prove to you right now that I am hardly your ‘good Baron R.’”
“Ah, once again I warn you,” Versilov also got up, “that my wife and daughter are not far from here . . . and therefore I would beg you not to speak so loudly, because your shouts may reach them.”
“Your wife . . . the devil . . . If I sat and talked with you now, it was solely with the aim of clarifying this vile affair,” the baron went on with the same wrath and not lowering his voice in the least. “Enough!” he cried out furiously. “You are not only excluded from the circle of decent people, but you are a maniac, a real crazy maniac, and so you have been attested! You are not worthy of indulgence, and I announce to you that this very day measures will be taken regarding you, and you will be invited to one such place, where they will know how to restore your reason . . . and they will remove you from town!”
With big and rapid strides he left the room. Versilov didn’t see him off. He stood, gazed at me distractedly, and seemed not to notice me; suddenly he smiled, shook his hair, and, taking his hat, also started towards the door. I seized him by the arm.
“Ah, yes, you’re here, too? You . . . heard?” he stopped in front of me.
“How could you have done it? How could you so distort, so disgrace! . . . With such perfidy!”
He gazed intently, but his smile extended more and more and decidedly turned to laughter.
“But I’ve been disgraced . . . in front of her! In front of her! I was derided in her eyes, and he . . . shoved me!” I cried, beside myself.
“Really? Ah, poor boy, I’m so sorry for you . . . So they . . . de-ri-ded you there!”
“You’re laughing, you’re laughing at me! You think it’s funny!”
He quickly tore his arm from my hand, put his hat on, and laughing, laughing with genuine laughter now, left the apartment. Why should I go after him? What for? I had understood everything and—lost everything in a single moment! Suddenly I saw mama; she had come down from upstairs and was timidly looking around.
“He’s gone?”
I silently embraced her, and she me, tightly, tightly, pressing herself against me.
“Mama, my own, can you possibly stay here? Let’s go now, I’ll protect you, I’ll work for you like at hard labor, for you and for Liza . . . Let’s leave them all, all, and go away. We’ll be by ourselves. Mama, do you remember how you came to see me at Touchard’s and how I refused to recognize you?”
“I remember, my own, all my life I’ve been guilty before you, I gave birth to you, but I didn’t know you.”
“He’s the guilty one, mama, it’s he who is guilty of everything; he never loved us.”
“No, he did love us.”
“Let’s go, mama.”
“How can I go away from him, is he happy, do you think?”
“Where’s Liza?”
“Lying down. She came back and felt unwell; I fear for her. What, are they very angry with him there? What will they do with him now? Where did he go? What was this officer threatening here?”
“Nothing will happen to him, mama, nothing will ever happen to him, and nothing can, he’s that kind of man! Here’s Tatyana Pavlovna, ask her, if you don’t believe me, here she is.” (Tatyana Pavlovna suddenly came into the room.) “Good-bye, mama. I’ll come back to you right away, and when I do, I’ll ask you the same thing again . . .”
I ran off; I couldn’t see anybody at all, not only Tatyana Pavlovna, and mama tormented me. I wanted to be alone, alone.
V
BUT BEFORE I reached the end of the street, I felt that I couldn’t walk around senselessly bumping into these alien, indifferent people; but what to do with myself? Who needs me and—what do I need now? Mechanically, I trudged to Prince Sergei Petrovich’s, without thinking of him at all. He wasn’t home. I told Pyotr (his man) that I’d wait in the study (as I had done many times). His study was a big, very high room, cluttered with furniture. I wandered into the darkest corner, sat down on the sofa, and, placing my elbows on the table, propped my head in both hands. Yes, that was the question: “What do I need now?” And if I could have formulated the question then, the last thing I could have done was answer it.
But I was no longer able either to think or to ask properly. I’ve already made known above that by the end of those days I was “crushed by events”; I sat there now and everything was spinning like chaos in my mind. “Yes, I failed to see everything in him and perceived nothing,” I fancied at moments. “He laughed in my face just now: it wasn’t at me; it’s all Bjoring here, and not me. Two days ago, over dinner, he already knew everything and was gloomy. He picked up my stupid confession in the tavern and distorted all that concerned any truth, only what did he need the truth for? He doesn’t believe half a word of what he wrote to her. He only needed to insult her, to insult her senselessly, not even knowing what for, snatching at a pretext, and I gave him a pretext . . . The act of a rabid dog! Does he want to kill Bjoring now, or what? Why? His heart knows why! And I know nothing of what’s in his heart . . . No, no, even now I don’t know. Can he love her with so much passion? Or hate her with so much passion? I don’t know, but does he know himself? What was that I said to mama, that ‘nothing can happen to him’? What did I mean to say by that? Have I lost him or not?
“. . . She saw how he shoved me . . . Did she also laugh or not? I’d have laughed! The spy’s been beaten, the spy! . . .
“What does it mean” (it suddenly flashed in me), “what does it mean, his including in that nasty letter that the document hasn’t been burned at all, but still exists? . . .
“He won’t kill Bjoring, but he’s certainly sitting in the tavern now, listening to Lucia! And maybe after Lucia he’ll go and kill Bjoring. Bjoring shoved me, almost hit me; did he hit me? Bjoring scorns to fight even with Versilov, how can he go fighting with me? Maybe I should kill him tomorrow with a revolver, waiting in the street . . .” And I let this thought pass through my head quite mechanically, without lingering over it in the least.
At moments it was as if I dreamed that the door would open now, Katerina Nikolaevna would come in, give me her hand, and we’d both laugh . . . Oh, my dear student! I imagined it, that is, wished for it, when it was already very dark in the room. “But was it so long ago that I stood before her, saying good-bye to her, and she gave me her hand and laughed? How could it happen that in such a short time such a terrible distance appeared! Simply
go to her and talk it over right now, this minute, simply, simply! Lord, how is it that a totally new world has begun so suddenly! Yes, a new world, totally, totally new . . . And Liza, and the prince, that’s still the old . . . Here I am now at the prince’s. And mama—how could she live with him, if it’s so? I could, I can do anything, but she? What will happen now?” And here, as in a whirl, the figures of Liza, Anna Andreevna, Stebelkov, the prince, Aferdov, everybody flashed tracelessly in my sick brain. But my thoughts were growing more formless and elusive; I was glad when I managed to comprehend one of them and get hold of it.
“I have my ‘idea’!” I thought suddenly. “But is that so? Don’t I just repeat it by rote? My idea is darkness and solitude, but is it possible now to crawl back into the former darkness? Ah, my God, I haven’t burned the ‘document’! I simply forgot to burn it two days ago. I’ll go back and burn it in a candle, precisely in a candle; I don’t know whether what I think now . . .”
It had long been dark, and Pyotr brought in candles. He stood over me and asked whether I had eaten. I only waved my hand. However, an hour later he brought me tea, and I greedily drank a big cup. Then I inquired what time it was. It was half-past eight, and I wasn’t even surprised that I had been sitting there for five hours already.
“I’ve come to you three times now,” said Pyotr, “but it seemed you were asleep.”
I didn’t remember him coming in. I don’t know why, but I suddenly felt terribly frightened at having “slept,” got up and began pacing the room so as not to “fall asleep” again. Finally, my head began to ache badly. At exactly ten o’clock the prince came in, and I was surprised that I had waited for him; I had totally forgotten about him, totally.
“You’re here, and I went to your place looking for you,” he said to me. His face was dark and stern, without the slightest smile. There was a fixed idea in his eyes.
“I’ve struggled all day and used all measures,” he went on focusedly. “Everything kept collapsing, and there’s horror to come . . .” (N.B. He never went to Prince Nikolai Ivanovich.) “I saw Zhibelsky, he’s an impossible man. You see: first I must have the money, and then we’ll see. And if, with the money, it still doesn’t work out, then . . . But today I decided not to think about it. Let’s just get the money today, and tomorrow we’ll see about it all. Your winnings from three days ago are still intact to the kopeck. It’s three thousand minus three roubles. Subtracting your debt, you’re left with three hundred and forty in change. Take that and another seven hundred to make a thousand, and I’ll take the remaining two thousand. Then we’ll sit down at Zershchikov’s at two different ends and try to win ten thousand—maybe we’ll do something, and if we don’t win, then . . . Anyhow, that’s the only way left.”
He gave me a fateful look.
“Yes, yes!” I cried suddenly, as if resurrecting. “Let’s go! I’ve only been waiting for you . . .”
I’ll note that I hadn’t thought about roulette for a moment in all those hours.
“But the baseness? But the meanness of the act?” the prince asked suddenly.
“That we’re going to play roulette? No, that’s everything!” I cried. “Money is everything! It’s only we who are saints, and Bjoring has sold himself. Anna Andreevna has sold herself, and Versilov—have you heard that Versilov’s a maniac? A maniac! A maniac!”
“Are you well, Arkady Makarovich? Your eyes are somehow strange.”
“Are you saying that in order to go without me? But I won’t leave you now. Not for nothing was I dreaming about gambling all night. Let’s go, let’s go!” I kept crying, as if I had suddenly found the solution to everything.
“Let’s go, then, though you’re in a fever, but there . . .”
He didn’t finish. His face looked heavy, terrible. We were already going out.
“Do you know,” he said suddenly, pausing in the doorway, “there’s yet another way out of my trouble besides gambling?”
“Which?”
“The princely way!”
“But what? But what?”
“Later you’ll find out what. Only know that I’m no longer worthy of it, because it’s too late. Let’s go, and remember my words. Let’s try the lackey’s way out . . . As if I don’t know that I am consciously, of my own full will, going and acting like a lackey!”
VI
I FLEW TO the roulette table as if my whole salvation, my whole way out, was focused in it, and yet, as I’ve already said, before the prince came, I hadn’t even thought of it. And I was going to play, not for myself, but for the prince, on the prince’s money; I can’t conceive what drew me on, but it drew me irresistibly. Oh, never had these people, these faces, these croupiers, these gambling cries, this whole squalid hall at Zershchikov’s, never had it all seemed so loathsome to me, so dismal, so coarse and sad, as this time! I remember only too well the grief and sadness that seized my heart at times during all those hours at the table. But what made me not leave? What made me endure, as if I had taken a fate, a sacrifice, a heroic deed upon myself? I’ll say one thing: I can scarcely say of myself that I was in my right mind then. And yet I had never played so intelligently as that evening. I was silent and concentrated, attentive and terribly calculating; I was patient and stingy and at the same time decided in decisive moments. I placed myself again by the zéro, that is, again between Zershchikov and Aferdov, who always sat next to Zershchikov on the right; I detested that place, but I wanted absolutely to stake on zéro, and all the other places by the zéro were taken. We had been playing for over an hour; finally, from my place, I saw the prince suddenly get up, pale, and walk over to us, and stand facing me across the table. He had lost everything and silently watched my game, though he probably understood nothing in it and was no longer thinking about the game. By that time I was just beginning to win, and Zershchikov counted out money to me. All at once Aferdov, silently, before my eyes, in the most brazen way, took one of my hundred-rouble notes and added it to his pile of money lying in front of him. I cried out and seized him by the hand. Here something unexpected happened to me: it was as if I snapped my chain, as if all the horrors and injuries of that day were suddenly focused on this one instant, on this disappearance of a hundred-rouble note. As if all that was stored up and suppressed in me had only been waiting for this moment to break out.
“He’s a thief! He just stole a hundred-rouble note from me!” I exclaimed, looking around, beside myself.
I won’t describe the tumult that arose; such an incident was a complete novelty here. People behaved decently at Zershchikov’s, and the place was known for that. But I forgot myself. Amidst the noise and shouting, Zershchikov’s voice was suddenly heard:
“And by the way, there’s money missing, and it was lying right here! Four hundred roubles!”
Another incident took place at once: money had disappeared from the bank, under Zershchikov’s nose, a roll of four hundred roubles. Zershchikov pointed to the spot where it was lying, “was lying just now,” and that spot turned out to be right next to me, adjoining me, the place where my money lay, meaning much closer to me than to Aferdov.
“Here’s the thief! It’s him stealing again, search him!” I exclaimed, pointing at Aferdov.
“It’s all because unknown people are let in,” someone’s thundering and impressive voice rang out amidst the general outcry. “They get in without any recommendation! Who brought him? Who is he?”
“Some Dolgoruky.”
“Prince Dolgoruky?”
“Prince Sokolsky brought him,” somebody cried.
“Listen, Prince,” I screamed to him across the table in a frenzy, “they consider me a thief, when it’s I who have just been robbed here! Tell them, tell them about me!”
And here something took place that was the most terrible of all that had happened that whole day . . . even in my whole life: the prince disavowed me. I saw him shrug his shoulders and, in reply to the flood of questions, utter sharply and clearly:
“I don’t a
nswer for anyone. I beg you to leave me alone.”
Meanwhile Aferdov stood amidst the crowd and loudly demanded to be searched. He turned out his pockets himself. His demand was answered with shouts: “No, no, the thief is known!” Two summoned lackeys seized me by the arms from behind.
“I will not let you search me, I will not allow it!” I shouted, struggling to free myself.
But they dragged me to the next room, and there, amidst the crowd, they searched me down to the last fold. I shouted and struggled.
“Dropped it, must be, have to look on the floor,” somebody decided.
“Go now and look on the floor!”
“Under the table, must be he managed to throw it there!”
“Of course, the trail’s cold . . .”
They led me out, but I somehow managed to stand in the doorway and shout with senseless fury to the whole hall:
“Roulette is forbidden by law. Today I shall denounce you all!”
They took me downstairs, dressed me, and . . . opened the door to the street before me.
Chapter Nine
I
THE DAY ENDED with catastrophe, but there remained the night, and this is what I remembered from that night.
I think it was just past midnight when I found myself in the street. The night was clear, still, and frosty. I almost ran, was hurrying terribly, but—certainly not for home. “Why home? Can there be a home now? At home you live, I’d wake up tomorrow to live—but is that possible now? Life is over, it’s no longer possible to live now.” And so I plodded along the streets, not knowing where I was going, and I doubt that I wanted to get anywhere. I felt very hot and kept throwing open my heavy raccoon coat. “Now no sort of action,” it seemed to me at that moment, “can have any purpose.” And, strangely, I kept fancying that everything around me, even the air I breathed, was as if from another planet, as though I suddenly found myself on the moon. All of it—the city, the passersby, the sidewalk I was running along—all of it was suddenly not mine anymore. “This is the Palace Square, this is St. Isaac’s,” went through my head, “but now I have nothing to do with them.” Everything somehow forsook me, suddenly became not mine. “I have mama, Liza—well, what of it, what are Liza and my mother to me now? Everything is over, everything is over all at once, except one thing: that I am a thief forever.
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