“But how about this prince!” I cried in indignation. “How about the way he behaved with the sick girl!”
“She wasn’t so sick then . . . Besides, she chased him away herself . . . True, maybe he was unnecessarily quick to take advantage of his dismissal.”
“You vindicate such a scoundrel?”
“No, I merely don’t call him a scoundrel. There’s much else here besides direct meanness. Generally, it’s a very ordinary affair.”
“Tell me, Vasin, did you know him closely? I’d especially like to trust your opinion, in view of a circumstance that concerns me greatly.”
But here Vasin’s answers became somehow all too restrained. He knew the prince, but with obvious deliberateness he said nothing about the circumstances under which he had made his acquaintance. Next he said that his character was such that he merited a certain indulgence. “He’s full of honest inclinations and he’s impressionable, but he possesses neither the sense nor the strength of will to sufficiently control his desires. He’s an uneducated man; there is a host of ideas and phenomena that are beyond him, and yet he throws himself upon them. For instance, he would insistently maintain something like this: ‘I am a prince and a descendant of Rurik,54 but why shouldn’t I be a shoemaker’s apprentice, if I have to earn my bread and am incapable of doing anything else? My shingle will say: “Prince So-and-so, Shoemaker”—it’s even noble.’ He’ll say it, and he’ll do it—that’s the main thing,” Vasin added, “and yet there’s no strength of conviction here, but just the most light-minded impressionability. But afterwards repentance would undoubtedly come, and then he would always be ready for some totally contrary extreme; and so for his whole life. In our age many people come a cropper like that,” Vasin concluded, “precisely because they were born in our time.”
I involuntarily fell to thinking.
“Is it true that he was thrown out of his regiment earlier?” I inquired.
“I don’t know if he was thrown out, but he did indeed leave the regiment on account of some unpleasantness. Is it known to you that last autumn, precisely being retired, he spent two or three months in Luga?”
“I . . . I knew that you were living in Luga then.”
“Yes, I, too, for a while. The prince was also acquainted with Lizaveta Makarovna.”
“Oh? I didn’t know. I confess, I’ve spoken so little with my sister . . . But can it be that he was received in my mother’s house?” I cried.
“Oh, no. He was too distantly acquainted, through a third house.”
“Yes, what was it my sister told me about this baby? Wasn’t the baby in Luga as well?”
“For a while.”
“And where is it now?”
“Undoubtedly in Petersburg.”
“Never in my life will I believe,” I cried in extreme agitation, “that my mother participated in any way in this story with this Lydia!”
“Apart from all these intrigues, which I don’t undertake to sort out, the personal role of Versilov in this story had nothing particularly reprehensible about it,” Vasin observed, smiling condescendingly. It was apparently becoming hard for him to speak with me, only he didn’t let it show.
“Never, never will I believe,” I cried again, “that a woman could give up her husband to another woman, that I will not believe! . . . I swear that my mother did not participate in it!”
“It seems, however, that she didn’t oppose it.”
“In her place, out of pride alone, I wouldn’t have opposed it!”
“For my part, I absolutely refuse to judge in such a matter,” Vasin concluded.
Indeed, Vasin, for all his intelligence, may have had no notion of women, so that a whole cycle of ideas and phenomena remained unknown to him. I fell silent. Vasin was working temporarily in a joint-stock company, and I knew that he brought work home. To my insistent question, he confessed that he had work then, too, some accounts, and I warmly begged him not to stand on ceremony with me. That seemed to afford him pleasure; but before sitting down with his papers, he began to make a bed for me on the sofa. First of all he tried to yield me his bed, but when I didn’t accept, that also seemed to please him. He obtained a pillow and a blanket from the landlady. Vasin was extremely polite and amiable, but it was somehow hard for me to see him going to such trouble on my account. I had liked it better when once, about three weeks ago, I had chanced to spend the night on the Petersburg side, at Efim’s. I remember him concocting a bed for me, also on a sofa and in secret from his aunt, supposing for some reason that she would get angry on learning that his comrades came to spend the night. We laughed a lot, spread out a shirt instead of a sheet, and folded an overcoat for a pillow. I remember Zverev, when he had finished work, giving the sofa a loving flick and saying to me:
“
Both his stupid gaiety and the French phrase, which suited him like a saddle on a cow, had the result that I slept with extreme pleasure then at this buffoon’s place. As for Vasin, I was extremely glad when he finally sat down to work, his back turned to me. I sprawled on the sofa and, looking at his back, thought long and about much.
III
AND THERE WAS plenty to think about. My soul was very troubled, and there was nothing whole in it; but some sensations stood out very definitely, though no one of them drew me fully to itself, owing to their abundance. Everything flashed somehow without connection or sequence, and I remember that I myself had no wish to stop at anything or introduce any sequence. Even the idea of Kraft moved imperceptibly into the background. What excited me most of all was my own situation, that here I had already “broken away,” and my suitcase was with me, and I wasn’t at home, and was beginning everything entirely anew. Just as if up to now all my intentions and preparations had been a joke, and only “now, suddenly and, above all,
