And he suddenly hurried out of the room, again through the kitchen (where he had left his fur coat and hat). I won’t describe in detail what happened with mama: scared to death, she stood with her hands raised and clasped above her and suddenly called out after him:
“Andrei Petrovich, come back at least to say good-bye, dear!”
“He’ll come, Sofya, he’ll come! Don’t worry!” Tatyana cried, trembling all over in a terrible fit of anger, ferocious anger. “You heard, he himself promised to come back! Let the madcap run loose for one last time. He’ll get old, and who indeed will nurse him then, when he’s broken down, except you, his old nurse? He says it straight out himself, without shame . . .”
As for us, Liza was in a faint. I was about to run after him, but then I rushed to mama. I put my arms around her and held her in my embrace. Lukerya came running with a glass of water for Liza. But mama soon recovered; she sank onto the sofa, covered her face with her hands, and wept.
“But no, but no . . . catch up with him!” Tatyana Pavlovna suddenly cried out with all her might, as if coming to her senses. “Go . . . go . . . catch up with him, don’t let him get a step ahead of you—go, go!” She was pulling me away from mama with all her might. “Ah, I’ll run myself !”
“Arkasha, ah, run after him quickly!” mama suddenly cried as well.
I ran out headlong, also through the kitchen and the yard, but he was nowhere to be seen. Far down the sidewalk I made out the black figures of passersby in the darkness; I started running after them and, catching up with them, looked each one in the face as I ran past. In this way I ran as far as the intersection.
“You don’t get angry with madmen,” suddenly flashed in my head, “but Tatyana was ferociously angry with him, which means he’s not mad at all . . .” Oh, I kept thinking that it was an allegory and that he absolutely wanted to have done with something, as with that icon, and to show it to us, to mama, to everybody. But the “double” was also undoubtedly next to him; of that there was no doubt at all . . .
III
HE DIDN’T TURN up anywhere, however, and there was no point in running to his place; it was hard to imagine that he had just simply gone home. Suddenly a thought began to gleam before me, and I rushed headlong to Anna Andreevna’s.
Anna Andreevna had already returned, and I was admitted at once. I went in, controlling myself as far as I could. Without sitting down, I told her directly about the scene that had just taken place, that is, precisely about the “double.” I will never forget nor forgive her the greedy but mercilessly calm and self-assured curiosity with which she listened to me, also without sitting down.
“Where is he? Maybe you know?” I concluded insistently. “Tatyana Pavlovna sent me to you yesterday . . .”
“I sent for you yesterday. Yesterday he was in Tsarskoe, and he was here as well. And now,” she glanced at the clock, “now it’s seven o’clock . . . That means he’s probably at home.”
“I see you know everything—so speak, speak!” I cried.
“I know a good deal, but I don’t know everything. Of course, there’s no need to conceal it from you . . .” She measured me with a strange look, smiling and as if reflecting. “Yesterday morning, in response to Katerina Nikolaevna’s letter, he made her a formal proposal of marriage.”
“That’s not true!” I goggled my eyes.
“The letter went through my hands; I myself took it to her, unopened. This time he acted ‘chivalrously’ and concealed nothing from me.”
“Anna Andreevna, I don’t understand anything!”
“Of course, it’s hard to understand, but it’s like a gambler who throws his last gold coin on the table and has a revolver ready in his pocket—that’s the meaning of his proposal. The chances are nine out of ten that she won’t accept his proposal; but it means that he’s counting on that one-tenth chance, and, I confess, that’s very curious, in my opinion, though . . .
though there might also be frenzy in it, that same ‘double,’ as you said so well just now.”
“And you laugh? And how can I believe that the letter was conveyed through you? Aren’t you her father’s fiancée? Spare me, Anna Andreevna!”
“He asked me to sacrifice my destiny to his happiness, though he didn’t really ask; it was all done quite silently, I merely read it all in his eyes. Ah, my God, what more do you want? Didn’t he go to your mother in Königsberg to ask her permission to marry Mme. Akhmakov’s stepdaughter? That goes very well with the way he chose me yesterday as his representative and confidante.”
She was slightly pale. But her calmness only reinforced her sarcasm. Oh, I forgave her much during that minute when I gradually came to grasp the matter. For a minute I thought it over; she waited in silence.
“You know,” I smiled suddenly, “you conveyed the letter, because for you there was no risk, because there will be no marriage, but what about him? And her, finally? Of course, she’ll turn down his proposal, and then . . . what may happen then? Where is he now, Anna Andreevna?” I cried. “Here every minute is precious, any minute there may be trouble!”
“He’s at home, I told you. In his letter to Katerina Nikolaevna yesterday, which I conveyed, he asked her, in any event, for a meeting at his apartment, today, at exactly seven o’clock in the evening. She gave her promise.”
“She’ll go to his apartment? How is it possible?”
“Why not? The apartment belongs to Nastasya Egorovna; they both could very well meet there as her guests . . .”
“But she’s afraid of him . . . he may kill her!”
Anna Andreevna only smiled.
“Katerina Nikolaevna, despite all her fear, which I’ve noticed in her myself, has always nursed, since former times, a certain reverence and awe for the nobility of Andrei Petrovich’s principles and the loftiness of his mind. She’s trusting herself to him this time so as to have done with him forever. In his letter he gave her his most solemn, most chivalrous word that she had nothing to fear . . . In short, I don’t remember the terms of his letter, but she’s trusting herself . . . so to speak, for the last time . . . and, so to speak, responding with the most heroic feelings. There may be some sort of chivalrous struggle here on both sides.”
“But the double, the double!” I exclaimed. “He really has lost his mind!”
“On giving her word yesterday that she would come to meet him, Katerina Nikolaevna probably didn’t suppose the possibility of such a case.”
I suddenly turned and broke into a run . . . To him, to them, of course! But I came back from the front room for a second.
“Maybe that’s just what you want, that he should kill her!” I cried, and ran out of the house.
Though I was trembling all over as if in a fit, I entered the apartment silently, through the kitchen, and asked in a whisper to have Nastasya Egorovna come out to me; but she came out at once herself and silently fixed me with a terribly questioning look.
“He’s not at home, sir.”
But I explained to her directly and precisely, in a quick whisper, that I knew everything from Anna Andreevna and had just come from her.
“Where are they, Nastasya Egorovna?”
“They’re in the drawing room, sir, where you were sitting two days ago, at the table . . .”
“Let me in there, Nastasya Egorovna!”
“How is that possible, sir?”
“Not there, but the room next to it. Nastasya Egorovna, it may be that Anna Andreevna herself wants it. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have told me they were here. They won’t hear me . . . she wants it herself . . .”
“And what if she doesn’t?” Nastasya Egorovna kept her gaze fixed on me.
“Nastasya Egorovna, I remember your Olya . . . let me in.”
Her lips and chin suddenly began to tremble:
“Dear heart, maybe for Olya’s sake . . . for your feeling . . . Don’t abandon Anna Andreevna, dear heart! You won’t abandon her, eh? You won’t?”
“I won’t!”
“Give me your great word, then, that you won’t rush in on them and start shouting, if I put you in there?”
“I swear on my honor, Nastasya Egorovna!”
She took hold of my frock coat, let me into the dark room adjacent to the one they were sitting in, led me barely audibly over the soft rug to the door, placed me just at the lowered portière and, lifting a tiny corner of the portière, showed me both of them.
I stayed and she left. Naturally, I stayed. I realized that I was eavesdropping, eavesdropping on other people’s secrets, but I stayed. How could I not stay—what of the double? Hadn’t he smashed an icon before my eyes?
IV
THEY WERE SITTING opposite each other at the same table at which he and I had drunk wine yesterday to his “resurrection.” I could see their faces very well. She was in a simple black dress, beautiful, and apparently calm, as always. He was speaking, and she was listening to him with extreme and obliging attention.
