“Mama . . .”
“Your mother is the most perfect and lovely being, mais . . . In short, I’m probably not worthy of them. By the way, what’s with them today? Lately they’ve all been somehow sort of . . . You know, I always try to ignore it, but today they’ve got something brewing there . . . You didn’t notice anything?”
“I know decidedly nothing and wouldn’t even have noticed anything, if it hadn’t been for that cursed Tatyana Pavlovna, who can’t keep from biting. You’re right: there’s something there. Today I found Liza at Anna Andreevna’s; there, too, she was somehow . . . she even surprised me. You do know that she’s received at Anna Andreevna’s?”
“I do, my friend. And you . . . when were you at Anna Andreevna’s—that is, at precisely what hour? I need that for the sake of a certain fact.”
“From two to three. And imagine, as I was leaving, the prince came . . .”
Here I told him about my whole visit in extreme detail. He listened to it all silently: about the possibility of the prince proposing to Anna Andreevna he didn’t utter a word; to my rapturous praises of Anna Andreevna he again mumbled that “she’s sweet.”
“I managed to astonish her extremely today by telling her the most fresh-baked society news about Katerina Nikolaevna Akhmakov marrying Baron Bjoring,” I said suddenly, as if something in me had come unhinged.
“Oh? Imagine, she told me that same ‘news’ earlier today, before noon, that is, much earlier than you could have astonished her with it.”
“What?” I just stopped in my tracks. “But how could she have found out? Though what am I saying? Naturally, she could have found out before me, but imagine: she listened to me say it as if it was absolute news! Though . . . though what am I saying? Long live breadth! One must allow for breadth of character, right? I, for instance, would have blurted it all out at once, but she locks it up in a snuffbox . . . And so be it, so be it, nonetheless she’s the loveliest being and the most excellent character!”
“Oh, no doubt, to each his own! And what’s most original of all: these excellent characters are sometimes able to puzzle you in an extremely peculiar way. Imagine, today Anna Andreevna suddenly takes me aback with the question, ‘Do you love Katerina Nikolaevna Akhmakov, or not?’”
“What a wild and incredible question!” I cried out, dumbfounded again. My eyes even went dim. Never yet had I ventured to talk with him on this subject, and—here he himself . . .
“What did she formulate it with?”
“With nothing, my friend, absolutely nothing; the snuffbox was locked up at once and still tighter, and, above all, notice, I had never allowed even the possibility of such conversations with me, nor had she . . . However, you say yourself that you know her, and therefore you can imagine how such a question suits her . . . You wouldn’t happen to know anything?”
“I’m as puzzled as you are. Some sort of curiosity, or maybe a joke?”
“Oh, on the contrary, a most serious question, and not a question, but almost, so to speak, an inquiry, and evidently for the most extreme and categorical reasons. Won’t you be going there? Mightn’t you find something out? I’d even ask you to, you see . . .”
“But the possibility, above all—the possibility alone of supposing that you love Katerina Nikolaevna! Forgive me, I’m still dumbfounded. I’ve never, never allowed myself to speak with you on this or any similar subject . . .”
“And you’ve done wisely, my dear.”
“Your former intrigues and relations—no, the subject is, of course, impossible between us, and it would even be stupid on my part; but, precisely in this last period, in the last few days, I’ve exclaimed to myself several times: what if you had loved this woman once, even for a moment? Oh, you would never have made such an awful mistake regarding her in your opinion of her as the one that came out afterwards! Of what came out, I do know: of your mutual enmity and your mutual, so to speak, aversion for each other, I do know, I’ve heard, I’ve heard only too well, I heard still in Moscow; but it’s precisely here first of all that the fact of a bitter aversion leaps to the surface, the bitterness of hostility, precisely of non-love, and yet Anna Andreevna suddenly puts it to you, ‘Do you love her?’ Can she be so poorly renseigneered?39 It’s a wild thing! She was laughing, I assure you, she was laughing!”
“But I notice, my dear,” something nervous and soulfelt suddenly sounded in his voice, something that went to the heart, which happened terribly rarely with him, “I notice that you yourself speak of it all too ardently. You just said that you call on women . . . of course, for me to question you is somehow . . . on this subject, as you put it . . . But doesn’t ‘that woman’ also figure on the list of your newer friends?”
“That woman . . .” My voice suddenly trembled. “Listen, Andrei Petrovich, listen: that woman is what you said today at the prince’s about ‘living life’—remember? You said that this living life is something so direct and simple, which looks at you so directly, that precisely because of this directness and clarity it’s impossible to believe it could be precisely what we seek so hard all our lives . . . Well, so with such views you met the ideal woman, and in perfection, in the ideal, you recognized—‘all vices’! There you are!”
The reader can judge what a frenzy I was in.
“‘All vices’! Ho, ho! I know that phrase!” exclaimed Versilov. “And if it’s gone so far as telling you such a phrase, shouldn’t you be congratulated for something? It means such intimacy between you that you may even have to be praised for your modesty and secrecy, which a young man is rarely capable of . . .”
A sweet, friendly, affectionate laughter sparkled in his voice . . . there was something inviting and sweet in his words, in his bright face, as far as I could tell at night. He was surprisingly excited. Involuntarily, I sparkled all over.
“Modesty! Secrecy! Oh, no, no!” I exclaimed, blushing and at the same time squeezing his hand, which I had somehow managed to seize and, without noticing it, would not let go of. “No, not for anything! . . . In short, there’s nothing to congratulate me for, and never, never can anything happen here.” I was breathless and flying, and I so wanted to be flying, it felt so good to me. “You know . . . well, let it be so just once, for one little time! You see, my darling, my nice papa—you’ll let me call you papa—it’s impossible, not only for a father and son, but for anyone, to talk with a third person about his relations with a woman, even the purest of them! Even the purer they are, the more forbidden it ought to be. It’s forbidding, it’s coarse, in short—a confidant is impossible! But if there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, then it’s possible to talk, isn’t it?”
“As your heart dictates.”
“An indiscreet, a very indiscreet question. You’ve known women in your life, you’ve had liaisons? . . . I’m asking generally, generally, not in particular!” I was blushing and spluttering with rapture.
“Let’s suppose there were lapses.”
“So here’s an occasion, and you explain it to me, as a more experienced person: a woman, while taking leave of you, suddenly says somehow by chance, looking away, ‘Tomorrow at three o’clock I’ll be at such and such place’ . . . well, say, at Tatyana Pavlovna’s,” I came unhinged and flew off definitively. My heart gave a throb and stopped; I even stopped talking, I couldn’t. He was listening terribly.
“And so the next day I’m at Tatyana Pavlovna’s at three o’clock, I go in and reason like this: ‘If the cook opens the door’—you know her cook? —‘I’ll ask her first off: is Tatyana Pavlovna at home? And if the cook says Tatyana Pavlovna isn’t at home, but some lady visitor’s sitting and waiting —what should I have concluded, tell me, if you . . . In short, if you . . .’”
“Quite simply that you had an appointed rendezvous. But that means it took place? And took place today? Yes?”
“Oh, no, no, no, nothing, nothing! It took place, but it wasn’t that; a rendezvous, but not for that, and I announce it first of all, so as not to be a scoundrel, it happened, but . . .”
“My friend, all this is beginning to become so curious, that I suggest . . .”
“Myself, I used to give a tenner or a twenty-fiver to solicitors. For a dram. Just a few kopecks, it’s a lieutenant soliciting, a former lieutenant asking!” The tall figure of a solicitor, maybe indeed a retired lieutenant, suddenly blocked our way. Most curious of all, he was quite well dressed for his profession, and yet he had his hand out.
III
I PURPOSELY DO not want to omit this most paltry anecdote
