“And I’m very glad you say that to me precisely now,” she replied meaningly. I must say that she never talked to me about my disorderly life and of the abyss I had plunged into, though I knew she not only knew about it all, but even made inquiries indirectly. So that now it was like a first hint, and—my heart turned to her still more.
“How’s our invalid?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s much better. He’s walking, and he went for a ride yesterday and today. But didn’t you go to see him today either? He’s waiting so much for you.”
“I’m guilty towards him, but you visit him now and have fully replaced me. He’s a great traitor and has exchanged me for you.”
She made a very serious face, very possibly because my joke was trivial.
“I was at Prince Sergei Petrovich’s today,” I began to mutter, “and I . . . By the way, Liza, did you go to see Darya Onisimovna today?”
“Yes, I did,” she answered somehow curtly, not raising her head. “It seems you go to see the sick prince every day?” she asked somehow suddenly, maybe in order to say something.
“Yes, I go to see him, only I don’t get there,” I smiled. “I go in and turn left.”
“Even the prince has noticed that you go to see Katerina Nikolaevna very often. He mentioned it yesterday and laughed,” said Anna Andreevna.
“At what? What did he laugh at?”
“He was joking, you know. He said that, on the contrary, a young and beautiful woman always produces an impression of indignation and wrath in a young man your age . . .” Anna Andreevna suddenly laughed.
“Listen . . . you know, that was a terribly apt remark he made,” I cried. “Probably it wasn’t he, but you who said it to him?”
“Why so? No, it was he.”
“Well, but if this beauty pays attention to him, despite his being so insignificant, standing in the corner, angry at being ‘little,’ and suddenly prefers him to the whole crowd of surrounding admirers, what then?” I asked suddenly, with a most bold and defiant look. My heart began to pound.
“Then you’ll just perish right in front of her,” Liza laughed.
“Perish?” I cried. “No, I won’t perish. I don’t believe I’ll perish. If a woman stands across my path, then she must follow after me. You don’t block my path with impunity . . .”
Liza once said to me in passing, recalling it long afterwards, that I uttered this phrase then terribly strangely, seriously, and as if suddenly growing pensive; but at the same time “so ridiculously that it was impossible to control oneself.” Indeed, Anna Andreevna again burst out laughing.
“Laugh, laugh at me!” I exclaimed in intoxication, because I was terribly pleased with this whole conversation and the direction it had taken. “From you it only gives me pleasure. I love your laughter, Anna Andreevna! You have this feature: you keep silent and suddenly burst out laughing, instantly, so that even an instant earlier one couldn’t have guessed it by your face. I knew a lady in Moscow, distantly, I watched her from a corner. She was almost as beautiful as you are, but she couldn’t laugh the way you do, and her face, which was as attractive as yours—lost its attraction; but yours is terribly attractive . . . precisely for that ability . . . I’ve long been wanting to tell you.”
When I said of the lady that “she was as beautiful as you are,” I was being clever: I pretended that it had escaped me accidentally, as if I hadn’t even noticed; I knew very well that women value such “escaped” praise more highly than any polished compliment you like. And much as Anna Andreevna blushed, I knew it pleased her. And I invented the lady; I didn’t know any such lady in Moscow, it was only so as to praise Anna Andreevna and please her.
“One truly might think,” she said with a charming smile, “that you’ve been under the influence of some beautiful woman recently.”
It was as if I were flying off somewhere . . . I even wanted to reveal something to them . . . but I restrained myself.
“And by the way, not long ago you spoke of Katerina Nikolaevna quite hostilely.”
“If I ever said anything bad,” I flashed my eyes, “the blame for it goes to the monstrous slander against her that she was Andrei Petrovich’s enemy; the slander against him, too, that he was supposedly in love with her, had proposed to her, and similar absurdities. This idea is as outrageous as another slander against her, that, supposedly while her husband was still alive, she had promised Prince Sergei Petrovich that she would marry him when she was widowed, and then didn’t keep her word. But I know firsthand that all this wasn’t so, but was only a joke. I know it firsthand. Abroad there, once, in a joking moment, she indeed told the prince ‘maybe,’ in the future; but what could it have signified besides just a light word? I know only too well that the prince, for his part, cannot attach any value to such a promise, and he has no intentions anyway,” I added, catching myself. “He seems to have quite different ideas,” I put in slyly. “Today Nashchokin said at his place that Katerina Nikolaevna is supposedly going to marry Baron Bjoring: believe me, he bore this news in the best possible way, you may be sure.”
“Nashchokin was there?” Anna Andreevna suddenly asked weightily and as if in surprise.
“Oh, yes. He seems to be one of those respectable people . . .”
“And Nashchokin spoke with him about this marriage to Bjoring?” Anna Andreevna suddenly became very interested.
“Not about the marriage, but just so, of the possibility, as a rumor; he said there was supposedly such a rumor in society; as for me, I’m sure it’s nonsense.”
Anna Andreevna pondered, and bent over her sewing.
“I like Prince Sergei Petrovich,” I suddenly added warmly. “He has his shortcomings, indisputably, I’ve already told you—namely, a certain one-idea-ness—but his shortcomings also testify to a nobility of soul, isn’t it true? Today, for instance, he and I nearly quarreled over an idea: his conviction that if you speak about nobility, you should be noble yourself, otherwise all you say is a lie. Well, is that logical? And yet it testifies to the lofty demands of honor in his soul, of duty, of justice, isn’t it true? . . . Ah, my God, what time is it?” I suddenly cried, happening to glance at the face of the mantelpiece clock.
