The Adolescent

canaille can you find a fifteener nowadays? Rabble! Scoundrels! He’s all in beaver, yet he makes a state problem out of a fifteener!”

“Police!” shouted Versilov.

But there was no need to shout; a policeman was standing just at the corner and had heard the lieutenant’s abuse himself.

“I ask you to be a witness to the insult, and you I ask to kindly come to the police station,” said Versilov.

“E-eh, it’s all the same to me, you’ll prove decidedly nothing! Your intelligence least of all!”

“Don’t let go of him, officer, and take us there,” Versilov concluded insistently.

“Must we go to the police station? Devil take him!” I whispered to him.

“Absolutely, my dear. This presumptuousness in our streets is beginning to be tiresomely outrageous, and if each of us did his duty, it would be useful for all. C’est comique, mais c’est ce que nous ferons.”⁴⁰

For about a hundred steps the lieutenant was very hot-tempered, spirited, and brave. He assured us that “this was impossible,” that it was all “ ’cause of a fifteener,” and so on, and so forth. But he finally started whispering something to the policeman. The policeman, a sensible fellow and clearly an enemy of street nervousness, seemed to be on his side, but only in a certain sense. To his questions, he murmured in a half-whisper that “it’s impossible now,” that “the thing’s under way,” and that “if, for instance, you were to apologize, and the gentleman would agree to accept your apology, then maybe . . .”

“Well, li-i-isten he-e-re, my dear sir, so, where are we going? I ask you, where are we trying to get to and what’s so clever about it?” the lieutenant cried loudly. “If a man unlucky in his misfortunes agrees to offer an apology . . . if, finally, you need his humiliation . . . Devil take it, we’re not in a drawing room, we’re in the street! For the street, this is apology enough . . .”

Versilov stopped and suddenly rocked with laughter; I even thought for a moment that he had gone ahead with this whole story for the fun of it, but that wasn’t so.

“I pardon you completely, Mr. Lieutenant, and I assure you that you have abilities. Act this way in a drawing room, and soon it will be quite enough for the drawing room as well, but meanwhile here’s forty kopecks for you, have a drink and a bite to eat. Pardon me for the trouble, officer, I’d reward you, too, for your labors, but you’re all on such a noble footing now . . . My dear,” he turned to me, “there’s an eatery here, in fact a terrible cesspool, but one can have tea there, and I’d suggest to you . . . here it is now, come on.”

I repeat, I had never seen him in such excitement, though his face was cheerful and shone with light; but I noticed that when he was taking the two twenty-kopeck pieces from his purse to give to the lieutenant, his hands shook and his fingers wouldn’t obey at all, so that he finally asked me to take them out and give them to the man. I can’t forget that.

He brought me to a little tavern on the canal, in the basement. The customers were few. A hoarse little organ was playing out of tune, it smelled of dirty napkins; we sat down in the corner.

“Maybe you don’t know? I like sometimes, out of boredom, out of terrible inner boredom . . . to go into various cesspools like this one. These furnishings, this stuttering aria from Lucia,²² these waiters in costumes that are Russian to the point of indecency, this stench of tobacco, these shouts from the billiard room—all this is so banal and prosaic that it borders almost on the fantastic. Well, so what, my dear? This son of Mars stopped us at the most interesting place, it seems . . . But here’s our tea; I like the tea here . . . Imagine, Pyotr Ippolitovich has now suddenly started assuring that other lodger, the pockmarked one, that in the last century a committee of jurists was especially appointed in the English Parliament to examine the whole trial of Christ before the high priest and Pilate,²³ solely in order to find out how it would go now, by our laws, and that it was all done with all solemnity, with lawyers, prosecutors, and the rest . . . well, and that the jury had to hand down a guilty verdict . . . Amazing—eh, what? That fool of a lodger started arguing, got angry, quarreled, and announced that he was moving out the next day . . . the landlady bursts into tears, because she’s losing money . . . Mais passons.⁴¹ Sometimes they have nightingales in these taverns. Do you know the old Moscow anecdote a la Pyotr Ippolitovich? A nightingale is singing in a Moscow tavern. A merchant comes in, the ‘out o’ me way’ type: ‘How much is the nightingale?’ ‘A hundred roubles.’ ‘Roast it and serve it.’ They roasted it and served it. ‘Cut me ten kopecks’ worth.’ I once told it to Pyotr Ippolitovich, but he didn’t believe it and even got indignant . . .”

He said a lot more. I quote these fragments as a sample. He interrupted me continually, as soon as I opened my mouth to begin my story, and began talking some sort of completely peculiar and inappropriate nonsense; he talked excitedly, gaily; laughed at God knows what, and even tittered—something I had never seen him do. He drank a glass of tea at one gulp and poured another. Now I understand: he was then like a man who has received a precious, curious, and long-awaited letter, which he places before him and doesn’t open on purpose; on the contrary, he turns it over in his hands for a long time, studies the envelope, the seal, goes to another room to give orders, puts off, in short, the most interesting moment, knowing that it won’t get away from him for anything, and all this for the greater fullness of pleasure.

I, naturally, told him everything, everything from the very beginning, and it took me maybe about an hour. And how else could it be? I had been longing to talk all the while. I began from our very first meeting, at the prince’s that time, on her arrival from Moscow; then I told how it all went on gradually. I didn’t leave anything out, and I couldn’t have: he led me on himself, guessed, prompted me. At moments it seemed to me that something fantastic was happening, that he had been sitting somewhere or standing behind the door, each time, for all those two months: he knew beforehand my every gesture, my every feeling. I took a boundless pleasure in making this confession to him, because I saw in him such heartfelt gentleness, such deep psychological subtlety, such an astonishing ability to guess from a quarter of a word. He listened tenderly, like a woman. Above all, he managed to make it so that I wasn’t ashamed of anything; at times he suddenly stopped me at some detail; he often stopped me and repeated nervously, “Don’t forget the small things, above all, don’t forget the small things—the smaller the trace, the more important it sometimes is.” And he interrupted me several times in the same way. Oh, naturally, I began haughtily in the beginning, haughtily towards her, but I quickly came down to the truth. I told him sincerely that I was ready to throw myself down and kiss the place on the floor where her foot had stood. The most beautiful, the brightest thing of all was that he understood in the highest degree that she “could suffer from fear over the document” and at the same time remain a pure and irreproachable being, as she had revealed herself to me that same day. He understood in the highest degree the word “student.” But as I was finishing, I noticed that, through his kind smile, something all too impatient began to flash in his eyes, something as if distracted and sharp. When I came to the “document,” I thought to myself, “Shall I tell him the real truth or not?”—and I didn’t, despite all my rapture. I note it here to remember it all my life. I explained the matter to him in the same way I had to her, that is, by Kraft. His eyes lit up. A strange wrinkle flitted across his forehead, a very dark wrinkle.

“You firmly recall, my dear, about that letter, that Kraft burned it in a candle? You’re not mistaken?”

“I’m not mistaken,” I confirmed.