I no sooner left the general than Potapych came to me with a summons from grandmother. It was eight o’clock, and she had just come back from the vauxhall after losing definitively. I went to her: the old woman was sitting in her chair, totally exhausted, and evidently sick. Marfa served her a cup of tea, which she almost forced her to drink. Grandmother’s voice and tone were markedly changed.
“Good evening, dearest Alexei Ivanovich,” she said, inclining her head slowly and gravely, “forgive me for troubling you once more, forgive an old woman. I, my dear, left everything there, nearly a hundred thousand roubles. You were right not to go with me yesterday. I have no money now, not a penny.
I don’t want to delay for a moment, I’ll leave at half-past nine. I’ve sent to that Englishman of yours, Astley or whatever, and want to borrow three thousand francs from him for a week. You persuade him, so he doesn’t get some notion and say no. I’m still quite rich, my dear. I have three estates and two houses. And some money can be found, I didn’t take it all with me. I say it so that he won’t have doubts of some sort…Ah, here he is! You can tell a good man when you see one.”
Mr. Astley came hurrying at grandmother’s first summons. Without much reflection or talk, he at once counted out three thousand francs against a promissory note which grandmother proceeded to sign. The business concluded, he bowed and hurriedly left.
“And now you go, too, Alexei Ivanovich. There’s a little more than an hour left—I want to lie down, my bones ache. Don’t judge me too harshly, fool that I am. Now I’ll never accuse young people of light-mindedness, and it would also be a sin now for me to accuse that unfortunate fellow, that general of yours. Even so I won’t give him any money, as he wants, because in my opinion he’s as foolish as they come, though I’m no smarter than he is, old fool that I am. Truly, God judges old age as well and punishes pride.
Well, good-bye. Marfusha, lift me up.”
I wished to see grandmother off, however. Besides, I was in some sort of expectation, I kept expecting that something was about to happen. I couldn’t sit in my room. I went out to the corridor several times, even went out for a moment to wander in the avenue.
My letter to her had been clear and decisive, and the present catastrophe was, of course, definitive. In the hotel I heard of des Grieux’s departure. Finally, if she rejects me as a friend, maybe she won’t reject me as a servant. She does need me, at any rate to run errands; I’ll be useful, it can’t be otherwise!
By train time I ran to the station and got grandmother seated. They all settled in a special family car. “Thank you, dearie, for your disinterested concern,” she said at parting, “and tell Praskovya what I said to her yesterday—I’ll be waiting for her.”
I went home. Passing by the general’s suite, I met the nanny and inquired about the general. “Him, dearie? He’s all right,” she answered glumly. I stepped in anyhow, but in the doorway to the study I stopped in decided amazement. Mlle Blanche and the general were laughing their heads off over something.
La veuve Cominges was sitting right there on the sofa. The general was obviously out of his wits with joy, babbled all sorts of nonsense, and kept dissolving in long, nervous laughter, which made his face crease into a countless number of wrinkles and his eyes disappear somewhere.
Later I learned from Blanche herself that, having chased the prince away and learning of the general’s weeping, she decided to comfort him and stopped to see him for a moment. But the poor general didn’t know then that his fate had been decided and Blanche had already started packing in order to fly off to Paris on the first morning train.
Having paused on the threshold of the general’s study, I decided not to go in and went away unnoticed. Going up to my room and opening the door, I suddenly noticed some figure in the semidarkness, sitting on a chair in the corner by the window. It didn’t get up when I appeared. I quickly approached, looked, and—my breath was taken away: it was Polina!
Chapter XIV
I CRIED OUT.
“What is it? What is it?” she asked strangely. She was pale and looked gloomy.
“What do you mean, what? You? here, in my room?”
“If I come, I come entirely. That’s my way. You’ll see it presently; light a candle.”
I lit a candle. She stood up, went to the table, and placed an unsealed letter before me.
“Read it,” she ordered.
“This—this is des Grieux’s hand!” I cried, snatching the letter. My hands shook, and the lines leaped before my eyes. I’ve forgotten the exact terms of the letter, but here it is, if not word for word, at least thought for thought.
Mademoiselle [wrote des Grieux], unfortunate circumstances have forced me to leave immediately. You, of course, noticed yourself that I deliberately avoided a final talk with you until all the circumstances had been clarified. The arrival of your old relative [de la vielle dame] and her preposterous action put an end to all my perplexities. My own unsettled affairs forbid me definitively to nourish any further the sweet hopes in which I allowed myself to revel for some time.
I regret the past, but I hope you will find nothing in my behavior unworthy of a gentleman and an honest man [gentilhomme et honnête homme]. Having lost almost all my money in loans to your stepfather, I find myself in extreme necessity of making use of what remains to me: I have already told my friends in Petersburg to make immediate arrangements for the sale of the property mortgaged to me; knowing, however, that your light-minded stepfather has squandered your own money, I have decided to forgive him fifty thousand francs, and I am returning to him part of the mortgage papers in that sum, so that it is now possible for you to regain everything you have lost by suing him for your property through the courts.
I hope, mademoiselle, that in the present state of affairs my action will prove quite profitable for you. I hope also that by acting thus I am fully fulfilling the obligations of an honest and noble man. Rest assured that the memory of you is forever imprinted on my heart.
“Well, it’s all clear,” I said, turning to Polina, “not that you could have expected anything else,” I added indignantly.
“I wasn’t expecting anything,” she replied with apparent calm, but something seemed to tremble in her voice. “I resolved everything long ago; I read his mind and knew what he thought. He thought that I was seeking…that I’d insist…” She stopped and, without finishing, bit her lip and fell silent. “I purposely doubled my contempt for him,” she began again, “I waited for what he would do.
If the telegram about the inheritance had come, I would have flung my idiot stepfather’s debt at him and chased him away! He’s been hateful to me for a long, long time. Oh, this was not the man of before, a thousand times not, and now, and now!…Oh, what happiness it would be now to fling that fifty thousand in his mean face, and spit…and smear it around!”
“But the paper—that mortgage for fifty thousand he returned—isn’t it with the general? Take it and give it to des Grieux.”
“Oh, that’s not it! That’s not it!”
“Yes, true, that’s not it! And what use is the general now? But what about grandmother?” I cried suddenly.
Polina looked at me somehow distractedly and impatiently.
“Why grandmother?” Polina said with vexation. “I can’t go to her…And I don’t want to ask anyone’s forgiveness,” she added irritably.
“What’s to be done, then?” I cried. “And how, how could you love des Grieux! Oh, the scoundrel, the scoundrel! Well, if you like, I’ll kill him in a duel! Where is he now?”
“He’s in Frankfurt and will be there for three days.”
“One word from you, and I’ll go tomorrow by the first train,” I said in some sort of stupid enthusiasm.
She laughed.
“Why, he might just say: first return the fifty thousand francs. And why would he fight?…What nonsense!”
“But where, then, where can we get these fifty thousand francs?” I repeated, grinding my teeth, as if one could just suddenly pick them up off the floor. “Listen: Mr. Astley?” I asked, turning to her with the beginnings of some strange idea.
Her eyes flashed.
“What, do you yourself really want me to leave you for that Englishman?” she said, looking into my face with piercing eyes and smiling bitterly. It was the first time in my life she had spoken so intimately.
It seems at that moment her head began spinning from agitation, and she suddenly sat down on the sofa as if in exhaustion.
It was like being struck by lightning: I stood there and couldn’t believe my eyes, couldn’t believe my ears! So it meant she loved me! She came to me, not to Mr. Astley! She, alone, a young girl, came to my room, in a hotel—meaning she had compromised herself publicly—and I stand before her and still don’t understand!
A wild thought flashed in my head.
“Polina! Give me just one hour! Wait here for only one hour and…I’ll come back! It’s…it’s necessary! You’ll see! Stay here, stay here!”
And I ran out of the room without responding to
