Though I’m writing down this conversation somewhat humorously here, and in a way characteristic of me then, the thinking is still mine.
“And get away with it?” the prince became curious.
“I spit and walk away. Naturally, she feels it, but she doesn’t let it show, she stomps on majestically without turning her head. And there was only one time that I berated a couple of them quite seriously, both with trains, on the boulevard—naturally, not in nasty words, I merely observed out loud that trains were offensive.”
“That’s how you put it?”
“Of course. First, she’s trampling on social conventions, and second, she’s raising dust; and the boulevard is for everybody: I walk there, another person walks there, a third, Fyodor, Ivan, it makes no difference. So I spoke it all out. And generally I don’t like the female gait, if you look from behind; I spoke that out, too, but in a hint.”
“My friend, you could have gotten into a serious incident: they could have dragged you to the justice of the peace!”
“They could have done nothing at all. There were no grounds for complaint: a man walks by and talks to himself. Every man has the right to voice his conviction into the air. I was speaking abstractly, I wasn’t addressing them. They themselves did the pestering: they started berating me, they were much nastier than I was: milksop, ought to go without dinner, nihilist, hand him over to the police, and that I started pestering them because they were alone and weak women, and that if there had been a man with them, I’d have put my tail between my legs at once. I told them coolly that they should stop bothering me, and that I would cross to the other side. And in order to prove to them that I’m not afraid of their men and am ready to accept their challenge, I will follow twenty steps behind them right to their house, then stand in front of their house and wait for their men. And so I did.”
“Really?”
“Of course, it was stupid, but I was worked up. They dragged me for over three miles, in hot weather, as far as the institutes, went into a one-story wooden house—quite a decent one, I must admit—and you could see lots of flowers inside, two canaries, three lapdogs, and some framed prints. I stood in the middle of the street in front of the house for about half an hour. They peeked out on the sly three times or so, and then drew all the blinds. Finally, an official came out of the gate, an elderly man; judging by his looks, he had been asleep and had been awakened on purpose; he was wearing, not quite a house robe, but something very informal; he stood by the gate, put his hands behind his back, and started looking at me, and I at him. He would glance away, then look at me again, and suddenly he began to smile at me. I turned around and left.”
“My friend, this is something Schilleresque!8 It has always surprised me: you’ve got ruddy cheeks, your face is bursting with health, and—such a, one might say, aversion to women! How is it possible that at your age a woman does not make a certain impression? When I was just eleven, mon cher, my tutor observed to me that I gazed too much at the statues in the Summer Garden.”9 “You’d like terribly for me to go and visit some local Josephine and come to let you know. There’s no need. I myself, when I was just thirteen, saw a woman’s nakedness, all of it; since then I’ve felt this loathing.”
“Seriously? But, cher enfant, a beautiful, fresh woman smells just like an apple, what’s there to loathe?”
“In my former little boarding school, at Touchard’s, even before high school, I had a comrade—Lambert. He used to beat me, because he was more than three years older, and I served him and took his boots off. When he went to confirmation, the abbé Rigaud visited him to congratulate him on his first communion,10 and the two rushed in tears to embrace each other, and the abbé Rigaud started pressing him to his breast terribly hard, with various gestures. I also wept and was very envious. When his father died, he left school, and I didn’t see him for two years, but after two years I met him in the street. He said he would come to see me.
I was already in high school and was living with Nikolai Semyonovich. He came in the morning, showed me five hundred roubles, and told me to come with him. Though he had beaten me two years earlier, he had always needed me, not only for his boots; he used to tell me everything. He told me that he had stolen the money that day from his mother’s cashbox, having duplicated the key, because his father’s money was all his by law, and she dared not keep it from him, and that the abbé Rigaud had come the day before to admonish him—came in, stood over him and started whimpering, portraying horror, and raising his arms to the sky, “and I pulled my knife and said I’d cut his throat ” (he pronounced it thghroat). We drove to Kuznetsky. On the way, he told me that his mother had relations with the abbé Rigaud, and that he had noticed it, and that he spat on it all, and that everything they said about communion was rubbish. He said a lot more, and I was frightened.
In Kuznetsky he bought a double-barreled shotgun, a game bag, cartridges, a horsewhip, and then also a pound of candy. We drove out of town to shoot, and on our way met a birdcatcher with his cages; Lambert bought a canary from him. In the woods he let the canary out, because it couldn’t fly far after being in a cage, and began shooting at it, but missed. It was the first time in his life he had shot a gun, but he had been wanting to buy a gun for a long time, still at Touchard’s, and we had long dreamed of a gun. He was as if spluttering. His hair was terribly black, his face white and red-cheeked like a mask, his nose long and aquiline, such as Frenchmen have, his teeth white, his eyes black. He tied the canary to a branch with a thread, and with both barrels, point-blank, from four inches away, blasted it twice, and it scattered into a hundred little feathers.
Then we went back, stopped at a hotel, took a room, began eating and drinking champagne; a lady came . . . I was very struck, I remember, by how magnificently she was dressed, in green silk. Here I saw all that . . . what I told you about . . . Afterwards, when we started drinking again, he began to taunt her and abuse her; she was sitting there without her dress; he had taken her dress away, and when she began cursing and asking for her dress, so that she could put it on, he started whipping her as hard as he could on her bare shoulders with the whip. I stood up and seized him by the hair, so deftly that I threw him to the floor at once. He seized a fork and stuck it into my thigh. Then people rushed in, hearing the shouting, and I managed to escape. Since then the memory of nakedness has been loathsome to me; believe me, she was a beauty.”
As I talked, the prince’s face changed from playful to very sad.
“Mon pauvre enfant! 4 I’ve always been convinced that there were a great many unhappy days in your childhood.”
“Please don’t worry.”
“But you were alone, you told me so yourself, though there was this Lambert. The way you described it: the canary, the confirmation with tears on each other’s breasts, and then, after a year or so, he speaks of his mother and this abbot . . . O, mon cher, this children question of our time is simply frightful: while these little golden heads, with their curls and innocence, in their earliest childhood, flutter before you and look at you with their bright laughter and bright little eyes—they’re like God’s angels or lovely little birds; but later . . . but later it so happens that it would be better for them not to grow up at all!”
“How unnerved you are, Prince! As if you had children yourself. You don’t have children and never will.”
“Tiens!”5 His face changed instantly. “In fact, Alexandra Petrovna—the day before yesterday, heh, heh!—Alexandra Petrovna Sinitsky—I think you must have met her here about three weeks ago—imagine, suddenly, the day before yesterday, to my cheerful remark that if I marry now, at least I can rest assured that I won’t have children—suddenly she says to me, and even with a sort of spite, ‘On the contrary, you precisely will, such a one as you will unfailingly have children, even in the very first year, you’ll see.’ Heh, heh! And everybody imagined for some reason that I’d suddenly get married; but, though it’s spiteful, you must agree it’s witty.”
“Witty, but
