Despair (14 page)

“There, there, Hermann,” put in Lydia softly.

Ardalion made an explosive sound with his lips. “Passing sad,” he observed.

I went on fuming for some time—don’t remember the exact words—not important.

“It really seems,” said Ardalion with a side glance at Lydia, “I have put my foot in. Sorry.”

I fell silent suddenly and sat deep in thought, stirring my tea which had long done all it could with the sugar; then after a time I said aloud:

“What a perfect donkey I am.”

“Oh, come, don’t overdo it,” said Ardalion good-naturedly.

My own folly made me gay. How on earth had it not occurred to me that if Felix had actually come (which in itself would have been something of a wonder, considering he did not even know my name), the maid ought to have been flabbergasted, for in front of her would have stood my perfect double!

Now that I had come to think of it my fancy conjured up vividly the girl’s ejaculation, and how she would have rushed to me and gasped, and clung to me, babbling about the marvel of our resemblance. Then I would have explained to her that it was my brother unexpectedly arrived from Russia. As it was I had spent a long lonely day in absurd sufferings, for instead of being surprised by the bare fact of
his coming I had kept trying to decide what was going to happen next—whether he had gone for good or would come back yet, and what was his game, and had not his coming vitiated the fulfillment of my still unvanquished, wild and wonderful dream; or alternatively, had a score of people, knowing my face, seen him in the street, which, if so, would have meant an end to my plans.

After having thus pondered over the shortcomings of my reason, and the danger so easily dispelled, I felt, as already mentioned, a flow of merriment and good will.

“I’m nervy today. Please excuse me. To be honest, I have simply not seen your delightful friend. He came at the wrong moment. I was having my bath, and Elsie told him I wasn’t in. Here: give him these three marks when you see him—what I can do I do gladly—and tell him I can’t afford any more, so he’d better apply to somebody else—to Vladimir Isakovich Davidov, perhaps.”

“That’s an idea,” said Ardalion, “I’ll have a shot there myself. By the bye, he drinks like a fish, good old Perebrodov. Ask that aunt of mine, who married a French farmer—I told you about her—a very lively lady, but dashed close-fisted. She had some land in the Crimea and during the fighting there in 1920 Perebrodov and I drank up her cellar.”

“As to that trip to Italy—well, we shall see,” said I, smiling, “yes, we shall see.”

“Hermann has a heart of gold,” remarked Lydia.

“Pass me the sausage, my dear,” said I, smiling as before.

I could not quite make out at the time what was going on in me—but now I know what it was: my passion for my double was surging anew with a muffled but formidable violence which soon escaped all control. It started by my becoming aware that, in the town of Berlin, there had appeared
a certain dim central point round which a confused force compelled me to circle closer and closer. The cobalt blue of mailboxes, or that yellow plump-wheeled automobile with the emblematic black-feathered eagle under its barred window; a postman with his bag on his belly walking down the street (with that special rich slowness which marks the ways of the experienced worker) or the stamp-emitting automaton at the underground station; or even some little philatelistic shop, with appetizingly blended stamps from all parts of the world crammed into windowed envelopes; in short, everything connected with the post had begun to exercise upon me a strange pressure, a ruthless influence.

I remember that one day something very like somnambulism took me to a certain lane I knew well, and so there I was, moving nearer and nearer to the magnetic point that had become the peg of my being; but with a start I collected my wits and fled; and presently—within a few minutes or quite as possibly within a few days—I noticed that again I had entered that lane. It was distribution time, and they came toward me, at a leisurely walk, a dozen blue postmen, and leisurely they dispersed at the corner. I turned, biting my thumb, I shook my head, I was still resisting; and all the while, with the mad throb of unerring intuition, I knew that the letter was there, awaiting my call and that sooner or later I would yield to temptation.

To begin with, let us take the following motto (not especially for this chapter, but generally): Literature is Love. Now we can continue.

It was darkish in the post office; two or three people stood at every counter, mostly women; and at every counter, framed in his little window, like some tarnished picture, showed the face of an official. I looked for number nine.… I wavered before going up to it.… There was, in the middle of the place, a series of writing desks, so I lingered there, pretending, in front of my own self, that I had something to write: on the back of an old bill which I found in my pocket, I began to scrawl the very first words that came. The pen supplied by the State screeched and rattled, I kept thrusting it into the inkwell, into the black spit therein; the pale blotting paper upon which I leaned my elbow was all crisscrossed with the imprints of unreadable lines. Those irrational characters, preceded as it were by a minus, remind me always of mirrors: minus X minus = plus. It struck me that perhaps Felix too was a minus I, and that was a line of thought of quite astounding importance, which I did wrong, oh, very wrong, not to have thoroughly investigated.

Meanwhile the consumptive pen in my hand went on spitting words: can’t stop, can’t stop, cans, pots, stop, he’ll to
hell. I crumpled the slip of paper in my fist. An impatient fat female squeezed in and snatched up the pen, now free, shoving me aside as she did so with a twist of her sealskin rump.

All of a sudden I found myself standing at counter nine. A large face with a sandy moustache glanced at me inquiringly. I breathed the password. A hand with a black cot on the index finger gave me not one but three letters. It now seems to me to have all happened in a flash; and the next moment I was walking along the street with my hand pressed to my heart. As soon as I reached a bench I sat down and tore the letters open.

Put up some memorial there; for instance, a yellow signpost. Let that particle of time leave a mark in space as well. There I was, sitting and reading—and then suddenly choking with unexpected and irrepressible laughter. Oh, courteous reader, those were letters of the blackmailing kind! A blackmailing letter, which none perhaps will ever unseal, a blackmailing letter addressed P.O. till called for, under an agreed cipher, to boot, i.e., with the candid confession that its sender knows neither the name nor the address of the person he writes to—that is a wildly funny paradox indeed!

In the first of those three letters (middle of November) the blackmail theme was merely foreshadowed. It was much offended with me, that letter, it demanded explanations, it seemed verily to elevate its eyebrows, as its author did, ready at a moment’s notice to smile his arch smile; for he did not understand, he said, he was extremely desirous to understand, why I had behaved so mysteriously, why I had, without clinching matters, stolen away in the dead of night. He did have certain suspicions, that he did, but was not willing to show his cards yet; was ready to conceal those suspicions from
the world, if only I acted as I should; and with dignity he expressed his hesitations and with dignity expected a reply. It was all very ungrammatical and, at the same time stilted, that mixture being his natural style.

In the next letter (end of December. What patience!) the specific theme was already more conspicuous. It was plain now why he wrote to me at all. The memory of that one-thousand-mark note, of that grey-blue vision which had whisked under his very nose and then vanished, gnawed at his entrails; his cupidity was stung to the quick, he licked his parched lips, he could not forgive himself for having let me go and thus been cheated of that adorable rustle, which made the tips of his fingers itch. So he wrote that he was ready to grant me a new interview; that he had thought things over of late; but that if I declined seeing him or simply did not reply he would be compelled—right here came pat an enormous inkblot which the scoundrel had made on purpose with the object of intriguing me, as he had not the faintest notion what kind of threat to declare.

Lastly, the third, January, letter was a true masterpiece on his part. I remember it in more detail than the rest, because I preserved it somewhat longer:

Signed: “Sparrow” and underneath the address of a provincial post office.

I was long in relishing that last letter, the Gothic charm of which my rather tame translation is hardly capable of rendering. All its features pleased me: that majestic stream of words, untrammeled by a single punctuation mark; that doltish display of puny curdom coming from so harmless-looking an individual; that implied consent to accept any proposal, however revolting, provided he got the money. But what, above all, gave me delight, delight of such force and ripeness that it was difficult to bear, consisted in the fact that Felix of his own accord, without any prompting from me, had reappeared and was offering me his services; nay, more: was commanding me to make use of his services and, withal doing everything I wished, was relieving me of any responsibility that might be incurred by the fatal succession of events.

I rocked with laughter as I sat on that bench. Oh, do erect a monument there (a yellow post) by all means! How did he conceive it—the simpleton? That his letters would, by some sort of telepathy, inform me of their arrival and that after a magical perusal of their contents I would magically believe in the potency of his phantom menaces? How amusing that I
did
somehow feel that the letters awaited me, counter number
nine, and that I
did
intend answering them, in other words, what he—in his arrogant stupidity—had conjectured,
had
happened!

As I sat on that bench and clasped those letters in my burning embrace, I was suddenly aware that my scheme had received a final outline and that everything, or nearly everything, was already settled; a mere couple of details were still missing which would be no trouble to fix. What, indeed, does trouble mean in such matters? It all went on by itself, it all flowed and fused together, smoothly taking inevitable forms, since that very moment when I had first seen Felix.

Why, what is this talk about trouble, when it is the harmony of mathematical symbols, the movement of planets, the hitchless working of natural laws which have a true bearing upon the subject? My wonderful edifice grew without my assistance; yes, from the very start everything had complied with my wishes; and when now I asked myself what to write to Felix, I was hardly astonished to find that letter in my brain, as ready-made there as those congratulatory telegrams with vignettes that can be sent for a certain additional payment to newly married couples. It only remained to inscribe the date in the space left for it on the printed form.

Let us discuss crime, crime as an art; and card tricks. I am greatly worked up just at present. Oh, Conan Doyle! How marvelously you could have crowned your creation when your two heroes began boring you! What an opportunity, what a subject you missed! For you could have written one last tale concluding the whole Sherlock Holmes epic; one last episode beautifully setting off the rest: the murderer in that tale should have turned out to be not the one-legged bookkeeper, not the Chinaman Ching and not the woman in crimson, but the very chronicler of the crime stories, Dr.
Watson himself—Watson, who, so to speak, knew what was Whatson. A staggering surprise for the reader.

But what are they—Doyle, Dostoevsky, Leblanc, Wallace—what are all the great novelists who wrote of nimble criminals, what are all the great criminals who never read the nimble novelists—what are they in comparison with me? Blundering fools! As in the case of inventive geniuses, I was certainly helped by chance (my meeting Felix), but that piece of luck fitted exactly into the place I had made for it; I pounced upon it and used it, which another in my position would not have done.

My accomplishment resembles a game of patience, arranged beforehand; first I put down the open cards in such a manner as to make its success a dead certainty; then I gathered them up in the opposite order and gave the prepared pack to others with the perfect assurance it would come out.

The mistake of my innumerable forerunners consisted of their laying principal stress upon the act itself and in their attaching more importance to a subsequent removal of all traces, than to the most natural way of leading up to that same act which is really but a link in the chain, one detail, one line in the book, and must be logically derived from all previous matter; such being the nature of every art. If the deed is planned and performed correctly, then the force of creative art is such, that were the criminal to give himself up on the very next morning, none would believe him, the invention of art containing far more intrinsical truth than life’s reality.