“What is it to you? You think it wild of me to talk like that!” He smiled a pale smile. “I believe, if only that would charm you, I would be ready to stand for thirty years like a post on one leg. . . . I see you are sorry for me; your face says ‘I would love you if I could but I can’t. . . .’ Yes? Never mind, I’ve no pride. I’m ready to take any charity from you like a beggar — do you hear, any . . . a beggar has no pride.”
She got up and went to him. “Dear friend,” she said, with inexpressible feeling in her face, touching his shoulder with her hand, “I can’t hear you talk like that! I shall think of you all my life as some one most precious, great-hearted, as some thing most sacred of all that I respect and Love. Andrey Petrovitch, understand what I say. Why, it’s not for nothing I’ve come here now, dear friend . . . dear to me then and now: I shall never forget how deeply you stirred my mind when first we met. Let us part as friends, and you will be for me the most earnest and dearest thought in my whole life.”
“Let us part and then I will love you; I will love you — only let us part. Listen,” he brought out, perfectly white, “grant me one charity more: don’t love me, don’t live with me, let us never meet; I will be your slave if you summon me, and I will vanish at once if you don’t want to see me, or hear me, only . . . ONLY DON’T MARRY ANYONE!”
It sent a pang to my heart to hear those words. That naively humiliating entreaty was the more pitiful, the more heartrending for being so flagrant and impossible. Yes, indeed, he was asking charity! Could he imagine she would consent? Yet he had humbled himself to put it to the test; he had tried entreating her! This depth of spiritual degradation was insufferable to watch. Every feature in her face seemed suddenly distorted with pain, but before she had time to utter a word, he suddenly realised what he had done.
“I will STRANGLE you,” he said suddenly, in a strange distorted voice unlike his own.
But she answered him strangely, too, and she, too, spoke in a different voice, unlike her own.
“If I granted you charity,” she said with sudden firmness, “you would punish me for it afterwards worse than you threaten me now, for you would never forget that you stood before me as a beggar. . . . I can’t listen to threats from you!” she added, looking at him with indignation, almost defiance.
“‘Threats from you,’ you mean — from such a beggar. I was joking,” he said softly, smiling. “I won’t touch you, don’t be afraid, go away . . . and I’ll do my utmost to send you that letter — only go; go! I wrote you a stupid letter, and you answered my stupid letter in kind by coming; we are quits. This is your way.” He pointed towards the door. (She was moving towards the room in which I was standing behind the curtain.)
“Forgive me if you can,” she said, stopping in the doorway.
“What if we meet some day quite friends and recall this scene with laughter?” he said suddenly, but his face was quivering all over like the face of a man in convulsions.
“Oh, God grant we may!” she cried, clasping her hands, though she watched his face timidly, as though trying to guess what he meant.
“Go along. Much sense we have, the pair of us, but you. . . . Oh, you are one of my own kind! I wrote you a mad letter, and you agreed to come to tell me that ‘you almost love me.’ Yes, we are possessed by the same madness! Be always as mad, don’t change, and we shall meet as friends — that I predict, that I swear!”
“And then I shall certainly love you, for I feel that even now!” The woman in her could not resist flinging those last words to him from the doorway.
She went out. With noiseless haste I went into the kitchen, and scarcely glancing at Darya Onisimovna, who was waiting for me, I went down the back staircase and across the yard into the street, but I had only time to see her get into the sledge that was waiting for her at the steps. I ran down the street.
Last updated on Wed Jan 12 09:26:22 2011 for eBooks@Adelaide.
A Raw Youth, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Chapter XI
1
I ran to Lambert. Oh, how I should have liked to give a show of logic to my behaviour, and to find some trace of common sense in my actions that evening and all that night; but even now, when I can reflect on it all, I am utterly unable to present my conduct in any clear and logical connection. It was a case of feeling, or rather a perfect chaos of feelings, in the midst of which I was naturally bound to go astray. It is true there was one dominant feeling, which mastered me completely and overwhelmed all the others, but . . . need I confess to it? Especially as I am not certain. . . .
I ran to Lambert, beside myself of course. I positively scared Alphonsine and him for the first minute. I have always noticed that even the most profligate, most degraded Frenchmen are in their domestic life extremely given to a sort of bourgeois routine, a sort of very prosaic daily ceremonial of life established once and for ever. Lambert quickly realised, however, that something had happened, and was delighted that I had come to him at last, and that I was IN HIS CLUTCHES. He had been thinking of nothing else day and night! Oh, how badly he needed me! And behold now, when he had lost all hope, I had suddenly appeared of my own accord, and in such a frantic state — just in the state which suited him.
“Lambert, wine!” I cried: “let’s drink, let’s have a jolly time. Alphonsine, where’s your guitar?”
I won’t describe the scene, it’s unnecessary. We drank, and I told him all about it, everything. He listened greedily. I openly of my own accord suggested a plot, a general flare-up. To begin with, we were by letter to ask Katerina Nikolaevna to come to us. . . .
“That’s possible,” Lambert assented, gloating over every word I said.
Secondly, we must send a copy of the “document” in full, that she might see at once that she was not being deceived.
“That’s right, that’s what we must do!” Lambert agreed, continually exchanging glances with Alphonsine.
Thirdly, Lambert must ask her to come, writing as though he were an unknown person and had just arrived from Moscow, and I must bring Versilov.
“And we might have Versilov, too,” Lambert assented.
“Not might, but must!” I cried. “It’s essential! It’s for his sake it’s all being done!” I explained, taking one sip after another from my glass. (We were all three drinking, while I believe I really drank the whole bottle of champagne, while they only made a show of drinking.) “Versilov and I will sit in the next room”—(Lambert would have to take the next room!)—“and suddenly when she had agreed to everything — to paying the cash, and to his OTHER demands too, for all women were abject creatures, then Versilov and I would come in and convict her of being abject, and Versilov, seeing what a horrid woman she was, would at once be cured, and reject her with scorn. Only we ought to have Buring too, that he might see her put to shame.”
“No, we don’t want Buring,” Lambert observed.
“We do, we do,” I yelled again: “you don’t know anything about it, Lambert, for you are a fool! On the contrary, let it make a scandal in fashionable society, it will be our revenge on fashionable society, and upon her, and let her be punished! Lambert, she will give you an IOU. . . . I don’t want money, I don’t care a damn for money, but you can stoop to pick it up and stuff it in your pocket, and my curse with it, but I shall crush her!”
“Yes, yes,” Lambert kept approving, “you are right there.”
He kept exchanging glances with Alphonsine.
“Lambert, she has an awful reverence for Versilov: I saw that for certain just now,” I babbled to him.
“It’s a good thing you did peep and see it all. I should never have thought that you would have made such a good spy and that you had so much sense!” He said this to flatter me.
“That’s a lie, Frenchman; I’m not a spy, but I have plenty of sense! And do you know, Lambert, she loves him, really!” I went on making desperate efforts to express myself. “But she won’t marry him because Buring’s an officer in the guards, and Versilov is only a noble-hearted man, and a friend of humanity: to their thinking a comic person and nothing else! Oh, she understands his passion and gloats over it, flirts, is carried away by it, but won’t marry him! She’s a woman, she’s a serpent! Every woman is a serpent, and every serpent is a woman! He must be cured; we must tear the scales off his eyes; let him see what she is and be cured. I will bring him to you, Lambert!”
“Just so,” Lambert kept repeating, filling up my glass every minute.
He was in a perfect tremble of anxiety to avoid contradicting or offending me and to make me go on drinking. It was so coarse and obvious that even at the time I could not help noticing it. But nothing could have made me go
