Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (564 page)

          Dark visaged, tall, erect,

simple and dignified; I actually wondered how my poor Sonia could have preferred me THEN; at that time he was fifty, but he was still a fine fellow, and compared with him I was such a.  featherhead.  I remember, however, that he was unpardonably grey even then; so he must have been just as grey-headed when he married her. . . .  Perhaps that had an influence.”

Versilov had a very nasty aristocratic trick: after saying (when he could not help it) some particularly clever and fine things, he would all at once intentionally cap them with some stupid saying such as this remark about Makar Ivanovitch’s grey hair, and the influence it had on my mother.  He did this on purpose, probably without knowing why he did it, from a silly snobbish habit.  To hear him, one would suppose he was speaking quite seriously, and all the while he was posing to himself, or laughing.

3

I don’t know why but I was suddenly overcome by an intense exasperation.  In fact, I recall with extreme dissatisfaction some of my behaviour during those minutes; I suddenly got up from my seat.

“I tell you what,” I said: “you say you came up chiefly that my mother might imagine we were reconciled.  Time enough has passed for her to imagine it; will you be so good as to leave me alone?”

He flushed slightly and got up from his place.

“My dear boy, you are extremely unceremonious with me.  However, good-bye; there is no winning love by force.  I will only venture upon one question: do you really want to leave the prince?”

“Aha!  I knew you had some object in your mind. . . .”

“That is, you suspect I came up to induce you to stay with the prince, for some purpose of my own.  But do you suppose, my dear fellow, that I sent for you from Moscow for some purpose of my own?  Oh! how suspicious you are.  On the contrary, I was anxious for your good in every way.  And even now, since my position has so improved, I should have liked you to let me and your mother help you sometimes.”

“I don’t like you, Versilov.”

“And ‘Versilov’ too!  By the way, I greatly regret that I can’t transmit you the name, seeing that in reality constitutes my whole offence, if offence there is, doesn’t it? but again I couldn’t marry a married woman, could I?”

“That was why, I suppose, you wanted to marry an unmarried one?”

A slight spasm passed over his face.

“You are thinking of Ems.  Listen, Arkady, you went so far as to allude to that downstairs, pouring contempt upon me before your mother.  You must know that that’s where you make your greatest mistake.  You know nothing whatever of what happened with Lidya Ahmakov.  You don’t know how much your mother had to do with it all, although she was not with me at the time, and if I have ever seen a good woman it was when I looked at your mother then.  But that’s enough; all that is a secret still, and you — you talk of what you don’t know, and have heard about from outsiders.”

“Only to-day the prince told me that you have a special fancy for unfledged girls.”

“The prince said that?”

“Yes, listen, would you like me to tell you exactly what you have come up to me for?  I have been sitting here all this time wondering what was the secret object of this visit, and now I believe I’ve guessed it.”

He was just going out, but he stopped and turned to me in expectation.

“I blurted out just now that Touchard’s letter to Tatyana Pavlovna was among Andronikov’s papers, and at his death came into the hands of Marie Ivanovna.  I saw how your face suddenly twitched, and I only guessed why just now, when your face twitched again in the same way.  The idea suddenly occurred to you that if one letter in Andronikov’s keeping had come into Marie Ivanovna’s hands, why shouldn’t another?  And Andronikov might have left very important letters, mightn’t he?”

“So I came up here hoping to make you talk about it?”

“You know that yourself.”

He turned very pale.

“You did not imagine that of yourself; there’s a woman’s influence in it; and what hatred there is in your words — in your coarse supposition!”

“A woman?  I have seen that woman for the first time today!  Perhaps it’s just to spy on her you want me to stay on with the old prince.”

“I see, though, that you will do well in your new line.  Isn’t that perhaps ‘your idea’?  Go on, my dear fellow, you have an unmistakable gift for detective work.  Given talent, one must perfect it.”

He paused to take breath.

“Take care, Versilov, don’t make me your enemy!”

“My dear fellow, in such cases no one gives utterance to his last thoughts, but keeps them to himself.  And with that, show me a light, if you please; though you are my enemy you are not so much so as to want me to break my neck, I suppose.  Tiens, mon ami, only fancy,” he went on, as he descended the ladder, “all this month I have been taking you for a good-natured fellow.  You so want to live and are so thirsting for life that I do believe three lives would not be enough for you: one can see that in your face, and people like that are generally good-natured.  And how mistaken I’ve been!”

4

I can’t express how my heart ached when I was left alone; it was as though I had cut off a piece of my own living flesh!  Why I had so suddenly lost my temper, and why I had so insulted him — so persistently and intentionally — I couldn’t say now; nor could I at the time, of course.  And how pale he had turned!  And who knows, perhaps that paleness was the expression of the truest and purest feeling and the deepest sorrow, and not of anger or of offence.  I always fancied that there had been a moment when he really loved me.  Why, why could I not believe that now, especially when so much had been made clear?

I had flown into a sudden fury and actually driven him away, partly perhaps by my sudden guess that he had come to find out whether there were not another letter left by Andronikov in Marie Ivanovna’s possession.  That he must have been on the lookout for those letters, and that he was on the look-out for them I knew.  But who knows, perhaps at that minute I had made a horrible blunder!  And who knows, perhaps, by that blunder I had led him to think of Marie Ivanovna and the possibility of her having letters.

And finally, there was something else that was strange: again he had repeated word for word my own thought (about three lives), which I had expressed to Kraft that evening, and, what is more, in my very words.  The coincidence was of course a chance again, but how he knew the inmost core of my nature; what insight, what penetration!  But if he so well understood one thing, why was it he utterly failed to understand something else?  Was it possible he was not pretending, could he really be incapable of divining that it was not the noble rank of a Versilov I wanted, that it was not my birth I could not forgive him, but that all my life I had wanted Versilov himself, the whole man, the father, and that this idea had become part of myself.  Was it possible that so subtle a man could be so crude and so stupid?  And if not, why did he drive me to fury, why did he pretend?

CHAPTER VIII

1

I tried to get up as early as possible in the morning.  As a rule we, that is my mother, my sister and I, used to get up about eight o’clock.  Versilov used to lie comfortably in bed till half-past nine.  Punctually at half-past eight my mother used to bring me up my coffee.  But this time I slipped out of the house at eight o’clock without waiting for it.  I had the day before mapped out roughly my plan of action for the whole of this day.  In spite of my passionate resolve to carry out this plan I felt that there was a very great deal of it that was uncertain and indefinite in its most essential points.  That was why I lay all night in a sort of half-waking state; I had an immense number of dreams, as though I were light-headed, and I hardly fell asleep properly all night.  In spite of that I got up feeling fresher and more confident than usual.  I was particularly anxious not to meet my mother.  I could not have avoided speaking to her on a certain subject, and I was afraid of being distracted from the objects I was pursuing by some new and unexpected impression.

It was a cold morning and a damp, milky mist hovered over everything.  I don’t know why, but I always like the early workaday morning in Petersburg in spite of its squalid air; and the self- centred people, always absorbed in thought, and hurrying on their affairs, have a special attraction for me at eight o’clock in the morning.  As I hasten on my road I particularly like either asking some one a practical question, or being asked one by some passer- by: both question and answer are always brief, clear, and to the point; they are spoken without stopping and almost always in a friendly manner, and there is a greater readiness to answer than at any other hour.  In the middle of the day, or in the evening, the Petersburger is far more apt to be abusive or jeering.  It is quite different early in the morning, before work has begun, at the soberest and most serious hour of the day.  I have noticed that.

I set off again for the Petersburg Side.  As I had to be back in Fontanka by twelve o’clock to see Vassin (who was always more likely to be at home at midday), I hurried on without stopping, though I had a great longing to have a cup of coffee.  It was absolutely necessary to find Efim Zvyerev at home too; I went to him and almost missed him; he had finished his coffee and was just ready to go out.

“What brings you here so often?” was how he greeted me without getting up from his seat.

“I will explain that directly.”

The early morning everywhere, including Petersburg, has a sobering effect on a man’s nature.  Some of the passionate dreams of night evaporate completely with the light and chill of morning, and it has happened to me myself sometimes to recall in the morning my dreams and even my actions of the previous night, with shame and self-reproach.  But I will remark, however, in passing, I consider a Petersburg morning — which might be thought the most prosaic on the terrestrial globe — almost the most fantastic in the world.  That is my personal view, or rather impression, but I am prepared to defend it.  On such a Petersburg morning, foul, damp and foggy, the wild dream of some Herman out of Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades” (a colossal figure, an extraordinary and regular Petersburg type — the type of the Petersburg period!) would, I believe, be more like solid reality.  A hundred times over, in such a fog, I have been haunted by a strange but persistent fancy:  “What if this fog should part and float away, would not all this rotten and slimy town go with it, rise up with the fog, and vanish like smoke, and the old Finnish marsh be left as before, and in the midst of it, perhaps, to complete the picture, a bronze horseman on a panting, overdriven steed.”  In fact I cannot find words for my sensations, for all this is fantastic after all — poetic, and therefore nonsensical; nevertheless I have often been and often am haunted by an utterly senseless question:  “Here they are all flitting to and fro, but how can one tell, perhaps all this is some one’s dream, and there is not one real person here, nor one real action.  Some one who is dreaming all this will suddenly wake up — and everything will suddenly disappear.”  But I am digressing.

I must say by way of preface that there are projects and dreams in every one’s experience so eccentric that they might well be taken at first sight for madness.  It was with such a phantasy in my mind that I arrived that morning at Efim’s, — I went to Efim because I had no one else in Petersburg to whom I could apply on this occasion.  Yet Efim was the last person to whom I should have gone with such a proposition if I had had any choice.  When I was sitting opposite him, I was actually struck myself with the thought that I was the incarnation of fever and delirium, sitting opposite the incarnation of prose and the golden mean.  Yet on my side there was an idea and true feeling, while on his there was nothing but the practical conviction, that things were not done like that.  In short I explained to him briefly and clearly that I had absolutely no one else in Petersburg whom I could send by way of a second in matter vitally affecting my honour; that he, Efim, was an old comrade, and therefore had no right to refuse, and that I wanted to challenge a lieutenant in the Guards, Prince Sokolsky, because more than a year ago he had given my father a slap in the face at Ems.  I may mention by the way that Efim knew all the details of my family circumstances, my relations with Versilov, and almost all that I knew myself of Versilov’s career; I had on various occasions talked to him of my private affairs, except, of course, of certain secrets.  He sat and listened as his habit was, all ruffling up his feathers like a sparrow in a cage, silent and serious, with his puffy face and his untidy, flaxen-white hair.  A set smile of mockery never left his lips.  This smile was all the nastier for being quite unintentional and unconscious; it was evident that he genuinely and sincerely considered himself at that moment vastly superior to me in intellect and character.  I suspected, too, that he despised me for the scene the evening before at Dergatchev’s; that was bound to be so.  Efim was the crowd, Efim was the man in the street, and the man in the street has no reverence for anything but success.

“And Versilov knows nothing of this?” he asked.

“Of course not.”

“Then what right have you to meddle in his affairs?  That’s the first question.  And the second one is, what do you want to show by it?”

I was prepared for the objection, and at once explained to him that it was not so stupid as he supposed.  To begin with, the insolent prince would be shown that there are people, even in our class, who know what is meant by honour; and secondly, Versilov would be put to shame and learn a lesson.  And in the third place, what mattered most of all, even if Versilov had been right in refusing to challenge him in accordance with his convictions at the time, he would see that there was some one who was capable of feeling the insult to him so keenly that he accepted it as an insult to himself, and was prepared to lay down his life for his, Versilov’s, interests . . . although he was leaving him for ever. . . .

“Wait a minute, don’t shout, my aunt does not like it.  Tell me, is it this same Prince Sokolsky that Versilov is at law with about a will?  If so, this will be quite a new and original way of winning a lawsuit — to kill your opponent in a duel.”