So I loved her. I was staggered by her mendacious story and just as staggered by the little hotel room and the parrot wallpaper. The surroundings in which she lived were unworthy of her, and more particularly unworthy of her mouth. I remembered the face of the hotelier, as he sat below in his box, looking like a sort of dog in shirtsleeves — and I made up my mind to provide for Lutetia a happier, kindlier existence.
“Would you allow me,” I asked, “to help you? Please don’t misunderstand me. I make no demands. Helping people affords me great pleasure,” I lied, because destruction was my profession. “I have nothing else to do. Unfortunately I have no profession. So would you allow me…?”
“On what conditions?” asked Lutetia, sitting down on the bed
“On no conditions, as I have already told you.”
“All rights!” she said. And since I made a move to get by she began: “Please don’t think that I am unhappy here. But our lord and master, whom you know, is very often bad-tempered — and I have the misfortune to be more dependent on his temper than the other girls. You know”—and now her tongue began to distill poison—“they all have their rich and noble friends. But I, I prefer to be alone and respectable. I don’t sell myself!” she added after a while and jumped up from the bed. Her dressing-gown, pink with blue flowers, gaped open. No! She didn’t sell herself. She was only offering herself to me.
From now on began the most confused period of my life. I rented a little maisonette near the Champs Élysées, one of those houses which at that time used to be called “love nests.” Lutetia herself arranged it according to her tastes. Again there were parrots on the walls — a genus of birds which, as I have already said, I loathed. There was a piano although Lutetia could not play, two cats, of whose noiseless and startling jumps I was greatly afraid, a fireplace without a draught, in which the fire immediately went out — and lastly, so to speak a special compliment to myself, a genuine Russian samovar made of brass, which I was chosen to operate. There was a pleasing parlor maid in a suitable and pleasing dress — she looked as though she had come from a special factory for parlor maids — and, as a crowning touch, which enraged me beyond bounds, there was a genuine live parrot which learned, with uncanny quickness and almost malicious genius, to repeat my false name “Krapotkin,” thus continually reminding me of my foolishness and deceit. It would certainly not have learned the name “Golubchik” so easily.
Besides all this, the “love nest” swarmed with various of Lutetia’s friends. They were all made of porcelain and wax. And I drew no distinctions between any of them: the cats, the wallpaper, the parrot and the friends. Lutetia was the only one I still recognized. I was a prisoner, thrice and four times a prisoner. And twice a day I returned voluntarily to my sweet, hateful, alluring prison.
One evening I remained there — it could not have been otherwise! I stayed the night there. Over the parrot’s cage hung a covering of red plush. The energetic cats purred comfortably in their baskets. And I slept, no longer a prisoner, but a man chained for all eternity; chained in Lutetia’s arms. Poor Golubchik!
In the early morning I woke up, happy and yet unhappy. I felt ensnared and depraved, and yet I still had not lost my feeling for cleanness and decency. But that feeling, my friends, as tender as a breath of air upon a summer’s morning, was stronger, far stronger, than the strong wind of sun which raged around me. And it was under the influence of that feeling that I left Lutetia’s house. I did not know whether I ought to feel happy or sad. And beset by this doubt, I strode, without thought or plan in my head, through the early streets of Paris.
Lutetia cost money I very soon discovered that. (All women cost money, especially those who are in love; they cost even more than those who are loved.) And I thought that Lutetia loved me. I was grateful that someone in the world loved me. Besides, Lutetia was the only person who wholly believed in my Krapotkin — who believed in my new existence, yes, even confirmed it. But I was determined not to make any sacrifices for her; only for myself would I make sacrifices. For myself, for the false Golubchik, the real Krapotkin.
So there began a terrible confusion — not in my soul — that had already existed long — but in my private, my material affairs. I began to spend money — with both hands, as one says. Actually, Lutetia herself did not need so much. I myself needed it; I needed it for her. And she began to spend it, senselessly and with that hungry accursed delight with which women always spend the money of their husbands and lovers — almost as though they see in the money which one pays for them, which one even squanders for them, a certain measure of the feeling which their loving men have for them. So I needed money. Very soon. Very much. I went, as was my duty, to my sympathetic chief — his name was Solovejczyk, Michael Nikolajevitch Solovejczyk.
“What have you to report to me?” he asked. It was getting on towards nine o’clock in the evening, and it seemed to me that there was no one else, not a soul, in the great white house. It was very still, and one could hear, as if from an infinite distance, the confused noises of the great city. The whole room was dark. The single lamp with a green shade, standing on Solovejczyk’s desk, looked like a bright green core in the surrounding darkness.
“I need money,” I said, hidden in the gloom and therefore more boldly than I had intended.
“For the money which you need,” he answered, “you must work. We have several jobs for you. It is only a question of whether you are capable — or rather, of whether you are willing to be capable — of carrying out these jobs.”
“I am ready for anything,” I said. “That is why I came here.”
“I do not believe it,” said Solovejczyk. “I have not known you long, but I do not believe it. Do you know what this work entails? It entails a vile betrayal — a vile betrayal, I tell you. The betrayal of defenseless people.” He paused a while. Then he said: “And of defenseless women.…”
“I am used to it. In our profession…”
He cut me short. “I know the profession,” he said and bent his head. He began to search among the papers which lay before him; and the only sounds in the room were the rustling of paper and the slow ticking of the clock upon the wall.
“Sit down!” said Solovejczyk.
I sat down, and now my face was in the light of the green lamp, opposite his. He raised his eyes and stared fixedly at me. His eyes were dead, there was something blind in them, something comfortless and already far away. I held out against those eyes, although I was afraid of them, for there was nothing to be read in them, no thoughts, no feelings; and yet I knew that they were not blind, on the contrary they were exceedingly sharp. I knew very well that they were observing me, but I was unable to discover the reflex which every observing eye naturally reveals. Indeed, Solovejczyk was the only person whom I have ever found to possess that faculty; that is, the faculty of masking the eyes in the same way as many people can mask their faces.