II
THE READER, OF COURSE, will think that I was in a terrible mood going out of Efim’s, and yet he will be mistaken. I realized only too well that it was childish, a schoolboy incident, but the seriousness of the matter remained intact. I had my coffee only on Vassilievsky Island, purposely skipping my yesterday’s tavern on the Petersburg side; both the tavern and the nightingale had become doubly hateful to me. A strange quality: I’m capable of hating places and objects as if they were people. On the other hand, there are also several happy places in Petersburg, that is, places where, for some reason, I was happy—and I cherish those places and purposely don’t visit them for as long as possible, so that later, when I’m quite alone and unhappy, I can go there to grieve and recall. Over coffee I did full justice to Efim and his common sense. Yes, he was more practical than I, but hardly more realistic. Realism that is limited to the end of one’s nose is more dangerous than the most insane fantasticality, because it’s blind. But in doing justice to Efim (who at that moment probably thought I was going down the street cursing him), I still did not yield anything of my convictions, as I haven’t up till now. I’ve seen people who, at the first bucket of cold water, renounce not only their actions, but even their idea, and begin to laugh at something they considered sacred only an hour before. Oh, how easily it’s done with them! Grant that Efim, even in the essence of the matter, was more right than I, and I was stupider than all that’s stupid and merely clowning, but still, in the very depth of the matter, there lay a point, standing upon which I, too, was right, there was something correct on my side, too, and, above all, something that they could never understand.
I wound up at Vasin’s, on the Fontanka by the Semyonovsky Bridge, almost exactly at twelve o’clock, but I didn’t find him at home. He had his work on Vassilievsky, and came home strictly at certain hours, among others almost always before twelve. Since, besides that, it was some holiday, I had supposed I would be sure to find him; not finding him, I settled down to wait, despite the fact that I had come to see him for the first time.
I reasoned like this: the matter of the letter about the inheritance was a matter of conscience, and I, in choosing Vasin as a judge, was thereby showing him the whole depth of my respect, which, of course, should be flattering to him. Naturally, I was truly concerned about this letter and really convinced of the necessity for arbitration; but I suspect, nevertheless, that even then I could have wriggled out of the difficulty without any outside help. And, above all, I knew it myself; to wit: I had only to hand the letter over to Versilov personally, and he could do whatever he wanted; that was the solution. And to make myself the supreme judge and arbiter in a matter like this was even quite wrong. In removing myself by handing the letter over, and that precisely silently, I would profit at once by that very thing, putting myself in a higher position than Versilov, for by renouncing all profit from the inheritance, so far as it concerned me (because, being Versilov’s son, I would, of course, have something coming to me, if not now, then later), I would forever preserve for myself a superior moral view of Versilov’s future action. And, again, no one could reproach me for ruining the princes, because the document had no decisive legal significance. All this I thought over and figured out completely, while sitting in Vasin’s empty room, and it even entered my head that I had come to see Vasin so desirous of his advice about what to do, with the sole purpose of letting him see what a highly noble and umercenary man I was, and thus taking revenge on him for my humiliation before him yesterday.
Having realized all that, I felt great vexation; nevertheless, I did not leave but stayed, though I knew for certain that my vexation would only grow greater every five minutes.
First of all, I began to take a terrible dislike to Vasin’s room. “Show me your room, and I’ll know your character”—you really can say that. Vasin lived in a furnished room, renting from tenants, obviously poor ones, who earned their living that way and had other lodgers. I was acquainted with these narrow little rooms, hardly filled with furniture, and yet with pretensions to a comfortable look; here was the inevitable soft sofa from the flea market, which it was dangerous to move, the washstand, and the iron bed behind a screen. Vasin was obviously the best and most reliable tenant. A landlady is sure to have one such best tenant, who receives special favors for it: his room is cleaned and swept more thoroughly, some lithograph gets hung over the sofa, a consumptive little rug gets spread under the table. People who like this musty cleanness and, above all, the landlady’s obsequious deference—are themselves suspect. I was convinced that the title of best tenant flattered Vasin. I don’t know why, but the sight of those two tables piled high with books gradually began to infuriate me. Books, papers, an inkstand—everything was in the most disgusting order, the ideal of which coincides with the worldview of a German landlady and her maid. There were quite a few books—not magazines or newspapers, but real books—and he obviously read them, and probably sat down to read or began to write with an extremely grave and precise look. I don’t know, but I like it better when books are scattered about in disorder, when studies are at least not turned into a sacred rite. Probably this Vasin is extremely polite with visitors, but probably his every gesture tells the visitor, “I’ll now sit with you for an hour and a half or so, and then, when you leave, I’ll get down to business.” Probably you can start up an extremely interesting conversation with him and hear something new, but—“I’m now going to have a talk with you, and I’ll get you very interested, but when you leave I’ll get down to what’s most interesting . . .” And, nevertheless, I still didn’t leave, but sat there. By then I was thoroughly convinced that I had no need at all of his advice.
I had already been sitting for an hour and more, and was sitting by the window on one of the two wicker chairs that stood by the window. It also infuriated me that time was passing and I still had to find quarters before evening. I wanted to pick up some book out of boredom, but I didn’t; the very thought of amusing myself made it doubly disgusting. The extraordinary silence had gone on for more than an hour, and then suddenly, somewhere very close by, behind the door screened by the sofa, I began to make out, involuntarily and gradually, a whispering that grew louder and louder. Two voices were speaking, obviously women’s by the sound of them, though it was quite impossible to make out their words; and nevertheless, out of boredom, I somehow began to listen. It was clear that they were speaking animatedly and passionately, and that the talk was not about patterns: they were arranging or arguing about something, or one voice persuaded and begged while the other disobeyed and objected. Must have been some other tenants. I soon got bored and my ear grew accustomed to it, so that, though I went on listening, I did so mechanically, sometimes even quite forgetting that I was listening, when suddenly something extraordinary happened, just as if someone had jumped from a chair with both feet or had suddenly jumped up from his place and stamped; then came a groan and a sudden cry, not even a cry, but a shriek, animal, angry, that no longer cared whether other people heard it or not. I rushed to the door and opened it; at the same time another door opened at the end of the corridor, the landlady’s as I learned afterwards, from which two curious heads peeked out. The cry, however, subsided at once; then suddenly the door next to mine, the women neighbors’, opened, and a young woman, as it seemed to me, quickly burst out of it and ran down the stairs. The other woman, an elderly one, wanted to hold her back, but couldn’t, and only moaned behind her:
“Olya, Olya, where are you going? Oh!”
But, seeing our two open doors, she quickly closed hers, leaving a crack and listening through it to the stairs, till the sound of Olya’s running footsteps died away completely. I went back to my window. Everything was quiet. A trifling incident, and maybe also ridiculous. I stopped thinking about it.
Around a quarter of an hour later, a loud and brash male voice rang out in the corridor, just by Vasin’s door. Somebody grasped the door handle and opened it enough so that I could make out some tall man in the corridor, who obviously also saw me and was even already studying me, though he did not yet come into the room, but, still holding the door handle, went on talking with the landlady all the way down the corridor. The landlady called out to him in a thin and gay little voice, and one could tell by her voice that she had long known the visitor, and respected and valued him as both a solid guest and a merry gentleman. The merry gentleman shouted and cracked jokes, but the point was only that Vasin was not at home, that he never could find him at home, that it had been so ordained, and that he would wait again, as the other time, and all this undoubtedly seemed the height of wittiness to the landlady. Finally the visitor came in, thrusting the door fully open.
