The Complete Short Novels

everywhere about him visiting us in the evenings when Orlov was away and staying with Zinaida Fyodorovna till late at night? And when my gossip reached the ears of his acquaintances, he would drop his eyes abashedly and shake his little finger. And mightn’t he—I thought, looking at his honeyed little face—pretend tonight over cards and perhaps let slip that he had already won Zinaida Fyodorovna away from Orlov?

The hatred I had so lacked at noontime, when the old man came, now took possession of me. Kukushkin finally left, and, listening to the shuffling of his leather galoshes, I felt a strong desire to send some rude oath after him in farewell, but I restrained myself. But when the footsteps died away on the stairs, I went back to the front hall and, not knowing what I was doing, seized the bundle of papers Gruzin had forgotten and rushed downstairs. I ran outside without coat or hat. It wasn’t cold, but snow was falling in big flakes, and the wind was blowing.

‘‘Your Excellency!’’ I cried, running after Kukushkin. ‘‘Your Excellency!’’

He stopped by a streetlamp and looked back in perplexity.

‘‘Your Excellency!’’ I said breathlessly. ‘‘Your Excellency!’’

And, unable to think up anything to say, I struck him on the face twice with the bundle of papers. Understanding nothing and not even astonished—so stunned he was—he leaned his back against the streetlamp and covered his face with his hands. At that moment some military doctor walked by and saw me beating a man, but he only looked at us in perplexity and went on.

I felt ashamed and ran back into the house.

XII

BREATHLESS, MY HEAD wet with snow, I ran to the servants’ quarters, threw off the tailcoat at once, put on a suit jacket and overcoat, and brought my suitcase out to the front hall. To flee! But before leaving, I quickly sat down and began writing to Orlov:

‘‘I am leaving you my false passport,’’ I began, ‘‘asking you to keep it as a souvenir, you false man, Mr. Petersburg Official!

‘‘To sneak into a house under another man’s name, to observe your intimate life from behind a servant’s mask, to see and hear everything, and then, unbidden, to expose the lie—all that, you will say, resembles theft. Yes, but I cannot worry about nobility now. I lived through dozens of your suppers and dinners, when you said and did whatever you liked, and I had to listen, see, and be silent—I do not want to make you a gift of that. Besides, if there is no living soul around you who would dare to tell you the truth and not flatter, then at least let the servant Stepan wash your splendid physiognomy for you.’’

I didn’t like this beginning, but I had no wish to correct it. And what difference did it make?

The big windows with dark curtains, the bed, the crumpled tailcoat on the floor, and the wet tracks of my feet looked stern and sorrowful. And the silence was somehow peculiar.

Probably because I had run outside without a hat and galoshes, my temperature went up. My face was burning, my legs ached . . . My heavy head bent to the table, and there was a sort of doubling in my thoughts, when it seems that each thought in your brain is followed by its shadow.

‘‘I am ill, weak, morally depressed,’’ I went on, ‘‘I cannot write to you as I would like. In the first moment, I had the wish to insult and humiliate you, but now I do not think I have the right to do so. You and I have both fallen, and neither of us will ever get up, and my letter, even if it were eloquent, strong, and fearsome, would still be like knocking on a coffin lid: knock as you will, there’s no waking up! No efforts can warm your cursed cold blood, and you know it better than I do. Why write, then? But my head and heart are on fire, I go on writing, agitated for some reason, as if this letter might still save you and me. Fever keeps the thoughts in my head from cohering, and my pen scratches somehow senselessly on the paper, but the question I want to ask you stands before me as clear as a flame.

‘‘Why I grew weak and fell before my time is not hard to explain. Like the biblical strongman,²⁰ I lifted the gates of Gaza on my back, so as to carry them to the top of the mountain, but only when I was exhausted, when youth and health were extinguished in me forever, did I notice that those gates were too heavy for me, that I had deceived myself. Besides, I was in constant, cruel pain. I have experienced hunger, cold, illness, the loss of freedom; personal happiness I have not known and do not know, I have no refuge, my memories are a burden, and my conscience is often afraid of them. But you, why have you fallen? What fatal, diabolical reasons kept your life from unfolding into full spring flower? Why, before you had begun to live, did you hasten to shake from yourself the image and likeness of God ²¹ and turn into a cowardly animal that barks, and frightens others with its barking, because it is afraid? You are afraid of life, afraid, like that Asiatic, the one who sits on a featherbed all day and smokes a hookah. Yes, you read a lot, and wear your European tailcoat dashingly, but still, with what tender, purely Asiatic, khanlike solicitude you protect yourself from hunger, cold, physical strain—from pain and anxiety! How early your soul hid itself in a dressing gown, how you played the coward before real life and nature, with which every healthy and normal person struggles! How soft, cozy, warm, and comfortable it is for you—and how boring! Yes, it is sometimes killingly, irredeemably boring for you, as in solitary confinement, but you try to hide from that enemy as well: you spend eight hours a day playing cards.

‘‘And your irony? Oh, how well I understand it! Living, free, spirited thought is inquisitive and imperious; for a lazy, idle mind, it is unbearable. To keep it from disturbing your peace, you, like thousands of your peers, hastened while still young to set limits to it; you armed yourself with an ironic attitude toward life, or whatever you want to call it, and your restricted, intimidated thought does not dare jump over the little palisade you have set around it, and when you jeer at the ideas that are supposedly all known to you, you are like a deserter who shamefully runs away from the field of battle but, to stifle his shame, mocks at war and courage. Cynicism stifles pain. In one of Dostoevsky’s stories,²² an old man tramples underfoot the portrait of his beloved daughter because he is in the wrong before her, and you vilely and tritely make fun of the ideas of good and truth because you are no longer able to go back to them. Any sincere and truthful hint at your fall is frightening to you, and you have deliberately surrounded yourself with people who know only how to flatter your weaknesses. And not for nothing, not for nothing, are you so afraid of tears!

‘‘Incidentally, about your relations with women. We have inherited shamelessness with our flesh and blood, and we are brought up in shamelessness, but it is also for this that we are human beings, so as to overcome the beast in us. With maturity, when all ideas became known to you, you could not help seeing the truth; you knew it, but you did not follow it, you were frightened of it, and in order to deceive your conscience, you began loudly assuring yourself that the one to blame was not you but women themselves, that they were as mean as your relations with them. Your cold, scabrous jokes, your horse laugh, all your numberless theories about the essential, the indefinite demands of marriage, the ten sous that a French worker pays a woman, your eternal allusions to women’s logic, falsity, weakness, and the rest—does it not all look like a desire to force women down into the mud at all costs, so that they and your relations with them stand on the same level? You are a weak, unhappy, unsympathetic man.’’

In the drawing room, Zinaida Fyodorovna started playing the piano, trying to remember the piece by Saint- Saens that Gruzin had played. I went and lay on my bed, but, remembering that it was time for me to leave, I forced myself to get up and, with a heavy, hot head, went back to the table.