I shuddered myself in any question.
inwardly, but not outwardly. Outwardly I didn’t betray way, didn’t bat an eye; but still I couldn’t believe the
“How not in my hands? In my hands now? If Kraft burned it then?”
“Yes?” he aimed a fiery, fixed gaze at me, a gaze I remembered. However, he was smiling, but all his goodnaturedness, all the femininity of expression he had had till then, suddenly disappeared. What came was something indefinite and disconnected; he was becoming more and more distracted. If he had been more in control of himself then, as he had been up to that moment, he wouldn’t have asked me that question about the document; if he did, it was probably because he was in a frenzy himself. However, I say it only now; but at that time it took me a while to perceive the change that had taken place in him. I still went on flying, and there was the same music in my soul. But the story was over; I looked at him.
“An amazing thing,” he said suddenly, when I had spoken everything out to the last comma, “a very strange thing, my friend: you say you were there from three to four, and that Tatyana Pavlovna wasn’t at home?”
“Exactly from three till half-past four.”
“Well, imagine, I stopped to see Tatyana Pavlovna at exactly half-past three to the minute, and she met me in the kitchen—I almost always come to see her by the back entrance.”
“What, she met you in the kitchen?” I cried, drawing back in amazement.
“Yes, and she told me she couldn’t receive me; I stayed with her a couple of minutes, and I had only come to invite her to dinner.”
“Maybe she just came back from somewhere?”
“I don’t know; though—of course not. She was in her housecoat. This was exactly at half-past three.”
“But . . . Tatyana Pavlovna didn’t tell you I was there?”
“No, she didn’t tell me you were there . . . Otherwise I’d have known and wouldn’t be asking you about it.”
“Listen, this is very important . . .”
“Yes . . . depending on one’s point of view; and you’ve even turned pale, my dear; but, anyhow, what’s so important?”
“I’ve been laughed at like a child!”
“She was simply ‘afraid of your ardor,’ as she put it to you herself—well, and so she enlisted Tatyana Pavlovna.”
“But, my God, what a trick it was! Listen, she let me say all that with a third person there, with Tatyana Pavlovna there—who, consequently, heard everything I said! It’s . . . it’s even terrible to imagine!”
“C’est selon, mon cher! 42 And besides, you yourself mentioned earlier the ‘breadth’ of view of women in general, and exclaimed, ‘Long live breadth!’”
“If I were Othello and you Iago, you couldn’t have done it better . . . however, I’m laughing! There can’t be any Othello, because there are no such relations. And how not laugh! So be it! I still believe in what is infinitely higher than I am, and I haven’t lost my ideal! . . . If it’s a joke on her part, I forgive her. A joke on the pathetic adolescent—so be it! I didn’t get myself up as anything, and the student—the student was and remains anyway, no matter what, he was in her soul, he exists and will go on existing! Enough! Listen, what do you think: shall I go to her now, to learn the whole truth, or not?”
I said, “I’m laughing,” but there were tears in my eyes.
“Why not? Go, my friend, if you want to.”
“It’s as if I’ve dirtied my soul by telling you all this. Don’t be angry, dear heart, but it’s impossible to tell a third person about a woman, I repeat, about a woman. No confidant will understand; not even an angel will understand. If you respect a woman, don’t take a confidant; if you respect yourself, don’t take a confidant! I don’t respect myself now. Good-bye; I can’t forgive myself . . .”
“Come, my dear, you’re exaggerating. You say yourself ‘there was nothing.’”
We went out to the canal and began saying good-bye.
“Will you never kiss me from the heart, as a child, as a son kisses his father?” he said to me with a strange tremor in his voice. I kissed him warmly.
“My dear . . . always be as pure of heart as you are now.”
I had never kissed him before in my life, I could never have imagined he would want me to.
Chapter Six
I
“GO, OF COURSE!” I decided, hurrying home. “Go at once. Quite possibly I’ll find her at home alone—alone or with someone, it makes no difference—I can call her away. She’ll receive me; she’ll be surprised, but she’ll receive me. And if she doesn’t, I’ll insist that she receive me, I’ll send to tell her it’s extremely necessary. She’ll think it’s something about the document and receive me. And I’ll find out all about Tatyana. And then . . . and then what? If I’m wrong, I’ll make it up to her, and if I’m right, and she’s to blame, then it’s all over! In any case—it’s all over! What can I lose? I can’t lose anything. Go! Go!”
And then—I’ll never forget it and I remember it with pride—I didn’t go! No one will ever know it, it will just die, but it’s enough that I know it and that at such a moment I was capable of the noblest impulse! “This is a temptation, and I’ll pass it by,” I decided finally, thinking better of it. “They frightened me with a fact, but I didn’t believe it and didn’t lose faith in her purity! And why go, why ask? Why should she believe so unfailingly in me as I did in her, believe in my ‘purity,’ not be afraid of my ‘ardor,’ not enlist Tatyana? I haven’t deserved it yet in her eyes. Let her not, let her not know that I do deserve it, that I don’t yield to ‘temptations,’ that I don’t believe wicked calumnies about her; but I myself know it and will respect myself for it. Respect my feeling. Oh, yes, she allowed me to speak myself out with Tatyana there, she allowed Tatyana, she knew that Tatyana was sitting and eavesdropping (because she couldn’t help eavesdropping), she knew that she was laughing at me—it’s terrible, terrible! But . . . but what if it was impossible to avoid? What could she have done in her position today, and how can she be blamed for it? No, I myself lied to her about Kraft, I deceived her, because it was also impossible to avoid it, and I lied involuntarily, innocently. My God,” I suddenly exclaimed, blushing painfully, “and I, what have I just done myself? Haven’t I just dragged her before the same Tatyana, haven’t I just told everything to Versilov? Though —what’s the matter with me?—there’s a difference here. Here it was only about the document; essentially, I just told Versilov about the document, because there was nothing more to tell about, and there couldn’t be. Wasn’t I the first to inform him and cry that ‘there couldn’t be’? He’s a man of understanding. Hm . . . But what hatred there is in his heart for this woman, though, even now! And what a drama must have taken place between them then and from what? Of course, from self-love! Versilov can’t be capable of any other feeling except boundless self-love! ”
Yes, this last thought escaped me then, and I didn’t even notice it. It was such thoughts that raced through my head then one after another, and I was straightforward with myself then: I wasn’t being sly, I wasn’t deceiving myself; and if there was something I didn’t comprehend then at that moment, it was just because I didn’t have brains enough, and not from Jesuitism with myself.
I returned home in a terribly excited and, I don’t know why, a terribly merry state of mind, though a very unclear one. But I was afraid to analyze and tried with all my might to divert myself. I went to my landlady at once; indeed, a terrible falling out was under way between her and her husband. She was a very consumptive clerk’s wife, maybe even a kind one, but, like all consumptives, extremely capricious. I at once began to make peace between them, went to see the tenant, a very coarse, pockmarked fool, an extremely vain clerk who served in a bank, Chervyakov, whom I myself disliked very much, but with whom, anyhow, I got along well, because I often had the baseness to join him in teasing Pyotr Ippolitovich. I at once persuaded him not to move out, and he himself would not have ventured to actually move out. In the end I reassured the landlady definitively and, on top of that, managed to straighten the pillow under her head excellently. “Pyotr Ippolitovich can never manage like that,” she concluded maliciously. Then I busied myself with her mustard plasters in the kitchen, and with my own hands prepared two superb plasters for her. Poor Pyotr Ippolitovich only looked at me with envy, but I didn’t let him touch them and was rewarded literally by tears of gratitude from her. And then, I remember, I suddenly got bored with it all, and I suddenly realized that I was by no means looking after the sick woman out of the goodness of my heart, but just so, for some reason, for something else entirely.
I waited nervously for Matvei. That evening I
