Sophia began the nocturne. She played rather badly, but with feeling. Her sister played nothing but polkas and waltzes, and even that very seldom. She would go sometimes with her indolent step to the piano, sit down, let her coat slip from her shoulders down to her elbows (I never saw her without a coat), begin playing a polka very loud, and without finishing it, begin another, then she would suddenly heave a sigh, get up, and go back again to the window. A queer creature was that Varvara!
I sat down near Sophia.
'Sophia Nikolaevna,' I began, watching her intently from one side. 'I ought to tell you a piece of news, news disagreeable to me.'
'News? what is it?'
'I'll tell you…. Up till now I have been mistaken in you, completely mistaken.'
'How was that?' she rejoined, going on playing, and keeping her eyes fixed on her fingers.
'I imagined you to be open; I imagined that you were incapable of hypocrisy, of hiding your feelings, deceiving….'
Sophia bent her face closer over the music.
'I don't understand you.'
'And what's more,' I went on; 'I could never have conceived that you, at your age, were already quite capable of acting a part in such masterly fashion.'
Sophia's hands faintly trembled above the keys. 'Why are you saying this?' she said, still not looking at me; 'I play a part?'
'Yes, you do.' (She smiled … I was seized with spiteful fury.) … 'You pretend to be indifferent to a man and … and you write letters to him,' I added in a whisper.
Sophia's cheeks grew white, but she did not turn to me: she played the nocturne through to the end, got up, and closed the piano.
'Where are you going?' I asked her in some perplexity. 'You have no answer to make me?'
'What answer can I make you? I don't know what you 're talking about…. And I am not good at pretending….'
She began putting by the music.
The blood rushed to my head. 'No; you know what I am talking about,' I said, and I too got up from my seat; 'or if you like, I will remind you directly of some of your expressions in one letter: 'be as careful as before'….'
Sophia gave a faint start.
'I never should have expected this of you,' she said at last.
'I never should have expected,' I retorted, 'that you, Sophia
Nikolaevna, would have deigned to notice a man who …'
Sophia turned with a rapid movement to me; I instinctively stepped back a little from her; her eyes, always half closed, were so wide open that they looked immense, and they glittered wrathfully under her frowning brows.
'Oh! if that's it,' she said, 'let me tell you that I love that man, and that it's absolutely no consequence to me what you think about him or about my love for him. And what business is it of yours? … What right have you to speak of this? If I have made up my mind …'
She stopped speaking, and went hurriedly out of the room. I stood still. I felt all of a sudden so uncomfortable and so ashamed that I hid my face in my hands. I realised all the impropriety, all the baseness of my behaviour, and, choked with shame and remorse, I stood as it were in disgrace. 'Mercy,' I thought, 'what I've done!'
'Anton Nikititch,' I heard the maid-servant saying in the outer-room, 'get a glass of water, quick, for Sophia Nikolaevna.'
'What's wrong?' answered the man.
'I fancy she's crying….'
I started up and went into the drawing-room for my hat.
'What were you talking about to Sonitchka?' Varvara inquired indifferently, and after a brief pause she added in an undertone, 'Here's that clerk again.'
I began saying good-bye.
'Why are you going? Stay a little; mamma is coming down directly.'
'No; I can't now,' I said: 'I had better call and see her another time.'
At that instant, to my horror, to my positive horror, Sophia walked with resolute steps into the drawing-room. Her face was paler than usual, and her eyelids were a little red. She never even glanced at me.
'Look, Sonia,' observed Varvara; 'there's a clerk keeps continually passing our house.'
'A spy, perhaps…' Sophia remarked coldly and contemptuously.
This was too much. I went away, and I really don't know how I got home.
I felt very miserable, wretched and miserable beyond description. In twenty-four hours two such cruel blows! I had learned that Sophia loved another man, and I had for ever forfeited her respect. I felt myself so utterly annihilated and disgraced that I could not even feel indignant with myself. Lying on the sofa with my face turned to the wall, I was revelling in the first rush of despairing misery, when I suddenly heard footsteps in the room. I lifted my head and saw one of my most intimate friends, Yakov Pasinkov.
I was ready to fly into a rage with any one who had come into my room that day, but with Pasinkov I could never be angry. Quite the contrary; in spite of the sorrow devouring me, I was inwardly rejoiced at his coming, and I nodded to him. He walked twice up and down the room, as his habit was, clearing his throat, and stretching out his long limbs; then he stood a minute facing me in silence, and in silence he seated himself in a corner.
I had known Pasinkov a very long while, almost from childhood. He had been brought up at the same private school, kept by a German, Winterkeller, at which I had spent three years. Yakov's father, a poor major on the retired list, a very honest man, but a little deranged mentally, had brought him, when a boy of seven, to this German; had paid for him for a year in advance, and had then left Moscow and been lost sight of completely…. From time to time there were dark, strange rumours about him. Eight years later it was known as a positive fact that he had been drowned in a flood when crossing the Irtish. What had taken him to Siberia, God knows. Yakov had no other relations; his mother had long been dead. He was simply left stranded on Winterkeller's hands. Yakov had, it is true, a distant relation, a great-aunt; but she was so poor, that she was afraid at first to go to her nephew, for fear she should have the care of him thrust upon her. Her fears turned out to be groundless; the kind-hearted German kept Yakov with him, let him study with his other pupils, fed him (dessert, however, was not offered him except on Sundays), and rigged him out in clothes cut out of the cast-off morning-gowns—usually snuff-coloured—of his mother, an old Livonian lady, still alert and active in spite of her great age. Owing to all these circumstances, and owing generally to Yakov's inferior position in the school, his schoolfellows treated him in rather a casual fashion, looked down upon him, and used to call him 'mammy's dressing-gown,' the 'nephew of the mob-cap' (his aunt invariably wore a very peculiar mob-cap with a bunch of yellow ribbons sticking straight upright, like a globe artichoke, upon it), and sometimes the 'son of Yermak' (because his father had, like that hero, been drowned in the Irtish). But in spite of those nicknames, in spite of his ridiculous garb, and his absolute destitution, every one was fond of him, and indeed it was impossible not to be fond of him; a sweeter, nobler nature, I imagine, has never existed upon earth. He was very good at lessons too.
When I saw him first, he was sixteen years old, and I was only just thirteen. I was an exceedingly selfish and spoilt boy; I had grown up in a rather wealthy house, and so, on entering the school, I lost no time in making friends with a little prince, an object of special solicitude to Winterkeller, and with two or three other juvenile aristocrats; while I gave myself great airs with all the rest. Pasinkov I did not deign to notice at all. I regarded the long, gawky lad, in a shapeless coat and short trousers, which showed his coarse thread stockings, as some sort of page-boy, one of the house-serfs—at best, a person of the working class. Pasinkov was extremely courteous and gentle to everybody, though he never sought the society of any one. If he were rudely treated, he was neither humiliated nor sullen; he simply withdrew and held himself aloof, with a sort of regretful look, as it were biding his time. This was just how he behaved with me. About two months passed. One bright summer day I happened to go out of the playground after a noisy game of leap-frog, and walking into the garden I saw Pasinkov sitting on a bench under a high lilac-bush. He was reading. I glanced at the cover of the book as I passed, and read
