She looked at me quickly, and seeing that I was speaking irritably and sarcastically, interrupted the conversation again.
'There's nothing of interest to you in my circumstances. If you want to know, I'm simply in debt. I've borrowed money and I wanted to repay it. I had the strange and mad idea that I should be sure to win here at the gambling table. Why I had the idea I can't understand, but I believed in it. Who knows, perhaps I beUeved it because no other alternative was left me.'
'Or because it was quite necessary you should win. It's exactly like a drowning man clutching at a straw. You will admit that if he were not drowning he would not look at a straw as a branch of a tree.'
PoUna was surprised.
'Why,' she said, 'you were reckoning on the saiae thing yourself! A fortnight ago you said a great deal to me about your being absolutely convinced that you could win here at roulette, and tried to persuade me not to look upon you as mad; or were you joking then? But I remember you spoke so seriously that it was impossible to take it as a joke.'
'That's true,' I answered thoughtfully. 'I am convinced to this moment that I shall win. I confess you have led me now to wonder why my senseless and unseemly failure to-day has not left the slightest doubt in me. I am still fully convinced that as soon as I begin playing for myself I shall be certain to win.'
'Why are you so positive?'
'If you will have it—I don't know. I only know that I must win, that it is the only resource left me. Well, that's why, perhaps, I fancy I am bound to win.'
'Then you, too, absolutely must have it, since you are so fanatically certain?'
'I bet you think I'm not capable of feeling that I must have anything?'
'That's nothing to me,' Polina cinswered quietly and indifferently. 'Yes, if you like. I doubt whether anything troubles you in earnest. You may be troubled, but not in earnest. You are an unstable person, not to be relied on. What do you want money for? I could see nothing serious in the reasons you brought forward the other day.'
'By the way,' I interrupted, 'you said that you had to repay a debt. A fine debt it must be! To the Frenchman, I suppose?'
'What questions! You're particularly impertinent to-day. Are you drunk, perhaps?'
'You know that I consider myself at liberty to say anything to you, and sometimes ask you very candid questions. I repeat, I'm your slave, and one does not mind what one says to a slave, and cannot take offence at anything he says.'
'And I can't endure that 'slave' theory of yours.'
'Observe that I don't speak of my slavery because I want to be your slave. I simply speak of it as a fact which doesn't depend on me in the least.'
'Tell me plainly, what do you want money for?'
'What do you want to know that for?'
'As you please,' she replied, with a proud movement of her head.
'You can't endure the 'slave' theory, but insist on slavish-ness: 'Answer and don't argue.' So be it. Why do I want money? yOu ask. How can you ask? Money is everything!'
'I understand that, but not falling into such madness from wanting it! You, too, are growing frenzied, fataUstic. There must be something behind it, some special object. Speak without beating about the bush; I wish it.'
She seemed beginning to get angry, and I was awfully pleased at her questioning me with such heat.
'Of course there is an object,' I answered, 'but I don't know how to explain what it is. Nothing else but that with money I should become to you a different man, not a slave.'
'What? How will you manage that?'
'How shall I manage it? What, you don't even understand how I could manage to make you look at me as anything but a slave? Well, that's just what I don't care for, such surprise and incredulity 1'
'You said this slavery was a pleasure to you. I thought it was myself.'
'You thought so!' I cried, with a strange enjoyment. 'Oh, how delightful such nmvetd is from you 1 Oh, yes, yes, slavery to you is a pleasure. There is—^there is a pleasure in the utmost limit of humiliation and insignificance!' I went on maundering. 'Goodness knows, perhaps there is in the knout when the knout lies on the back and tears the flesh. . . . But I should perhaps like to enjoy another kind of enjoyment. Yesterday, in your presence, the General thought fit to read me a lecture for the seven hundred roubles a year which perhaps I may not receive from him after all. The Marquis de Grieux raises his eyebrows and stares at me without noticing me. And I, per-
haps, have a passionate desire to pull the Marquis de Grieux by the nose in your presence!'
'That's tiie speech of a milksop. One can behave with dignity in any position. If there is a struggle, it is deyating, not humiliating.'
'That's straight out of a copybook I You simidy take for granted that I don't know how to behave with dignity; that is, that perhaps I am a man of moral dignity, but that I don't know how to behave with dignity. You imderstand that that perhaps may be so. Yes, all Russians are like that; and do you know why? Because Russians are too richly endowed and many-sided to be able readily to evolve a code of manners. It is a question of good form. For the most part we Russians are so richly endowed that we need genius to evrfve our code of manners. And genius is most often absent, for, indeed, it is a rarity at aU times. It's only among the Frendi, and perhaps some other Europeans, that the code of manners is so weD defined that one may have an air of the utmost dignity and yet be a man of no moral dignity whatever. That's why good form means so much with them. A Frenchman will put up with an insult, a real, moral insult, without blinking, but he wouldn't endure a flip on the nose for anything, because that is a breach of the received code, sanctified for ages. That's I why our Russian young ladies have such a weakness for Frenchmen, that their manners are so good. Though, to my thinking, they have no manners at all; it's simply the cock in them; fe coq geadois,. I can't understand it, though; I'm not a woman. Perhaps cocks are nice. And, in fact, I've been talking nonsense, and you don't stop me. You must stop me more often. When I talk to you I long to tell you ever37thing, everything, everything. I am oblivious of all good manners. I'll evea admit that I have no manners, no moral qualities either. I tell you that. I don't even worry my head about moral qualities of any sort; everything has come to a standstill in me now; you know why. I have not one human idea in my head. For a long time past I've known nothing that has gone on in the world, either in Russia or here. Here I've been through Dresden, and I don't remember what Dresden was like. You know what has swallowed me up. As I have no hope whatever and am nothing in your eyes, I speak openly: I see nothing but you evers^where, and all the rest is naught to me. Why and how I love you I dmi't know. Perfiaps you are not at all nice really, you know. Fancy! I
don't know whether you are good or not, even to look at. You certainly have not a good heart; your mind may very well be ignoble.'
'Perhaps that's how it is you reckon on buying me with money,' she said, 'because you don't believe in my sense of honour.'
'When did I reckon on buying you with money?' I cried.
'You have been talking till you don't know what you are saying. If you don't think of bujdng me, you think of buying my respect with your money.'
'Oh no, that's not it at all. I told you it was difficult for me to explain. You are overwhelming me. Don't be angry with my chatter. You know why you can't be angiy with me: I'm simply mad. Though I really don't care, even if you are angry. When I am upstairs in my httie garret I have only to remember and imagine the rustle of your dress, and I am ready to bite off my hands. And what are you angry with me for? For calling myself your slave? Make use of my being your slave, make use of it, make use of it I Do you know that I shall kill you one day? I shall kill you not because I shall cease to love you or be jealous, I shall simply kill you because I have an impulse to devour you. You laugh. ...'
'I'm not laughing,' she answered wrathfuUy. 'I order you to be silent.'
She stood still, almost breathless with anger. Upon my word, I don't know whether she was handsome, but I always liked to look at her when she stood facing me like that, and so I often liked to provoke her anger. Perhaps she had noticed this and was angry on purpose. I said as much to her.
'How disgusting!' she said, with an air erf repulsion.
'I don't care,' I went on. 'Do you know, too, that it is dangerous for us to walk together? I often have an irresistible longing to beat you, to disfigure you, to strangle you. And what do you think—^won't it come to that?
