But before that here is what happened: at the same moment as the landlady was rushing to pull the twigs from the broom, I found the knife on my bed, where it had somehow fallen from the table. It immediately came into my head not to announce anything, so that she would get a birching. I decided on it instantly: such moments always take my breath away. But I intend to tell everything in the firmest words, so that nothing remains hidden any longer.
Every extremely shameful, immeasurably humiliating, mean, and, above all, ridiculous position I have happened to get into in my life has always aroused in me, along with boundless wrath, an unbelievable pleasure. Exactly the same as in moments of crime, or in moments threatening to life. If I was stealing something, I would feel, while committing the theft, intoxication from the awareness of the depth of my meanness. It was not meanness that I loved (here my reason was completely sound), but I liked the intoxication from the tormenting awareness of my baseness. In the same way, each time I stood at the barrier waiting for my adversary to shoot, I felt the same shameful and violent sensation, and once extraordinarily strongly. I confess, I often sought it out myself, because for me it is stronger than any of its sort. When I was slapped (and I have been slapped twice in my life), it was there as well, in spite of the terrible wrath. But if, for all that, the wrath can be restrained, the pleasure will exceed anything imaginable. I never spoke of it to anyone, never even hinted at it, and concealed it as a shame and a disgrace. Yet when I was badly beaten once in a pot-house in Petersburg, and dragged by the hair, I did not feel this sensation, but only unbelievable wrath, without being drunk, but just fighting. Yet if that Frenchman abroad, the vicomtewho slapped me and whose lower jaw I shot off for it, had seized my hair and pulled me down, I would have felt intoxication and perhaps not even wrath. So it seemed to me then.
All this so that everyone will know that this feeling never subjected the whole of me, but there was always full consciousness left (and it was all based on consciousness!). And though it possessed me to the point of recklessness, it never came to the point of forgetting myself. Going as far as a perfect burning in me, I was at the same time quite able to subdue it, even to stop it at its peak. I am convinced that I could live my whole life as a monk, despite the animal sensuality I am endowed with and which I have always provoked. Giving myself with extraordinary immoderation, until the age of sixteen, to the vice confessed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, [219]I stopped it the moment I decided I wanted to, in my seventeenth year. I am always master of myself when I want to be. And so, let it be known that I do not want to seek irresponsibility for my crimes either in the environment or in illness.
When the punishment was over, I put the knife into my waistcoat pocket, went out, and threw it away in the street, far from the house, so that no one would ever know. Then I waited for two days. The girl cried a little and became even more silent; against me, I am convinced, she had no spiteful feeling. Though there probably was some shame at having been punished in such a way in front of me, she hadn't cried out, but had only whimpered under the strokes, of course because I was standing there and saw it all. But, being a child, she probably blamed only herself for this shame. Up to then, perhaps, she had only feared me, not personally, but as a tenant, a stranger, and it seems she was very timid.
It was during those two days that I once asked myself the question whether I could drop it and walk away from my planned intention, and I felt at once that I could, could at any time and at that very moment. Around then I wanted to kill myself, from the disease of indifference; however, I do not know from what. During those same two or three days (because I absolutely had to wait until the girl forgot it all), I committed a theft in the rooming house, probably to distract myself from incessant dreaming, or just for the fun of it. This was the only theft in my life.
There were many people nesting in that rooming house. Among them was one official and his family, living in two furnished rooms; about forty years old, not all that stupid, and with a decent air, but poor. I never got close with him, and he was afraid of the company that surrounded me there. He had just received his pay, thirty-five roubles. What chiefly prompted me was that at that moment I really did need money (though four days later I received a postal money order), so that I stole as if from need and not as a joke. It was done brazenly and obviously: I simply went into his room while he and his wife and children were having dinner in their other closet. There on the chair, right next to the door, lay his folded uniform. The thought had suddenly flashed in me still in the corridor. I thrust my hand into the pocket and took out the wallet. But the official heard a rustle and peeked out of the closet. It seems he even saw at least something, but since it was not everything, of course he did not believe his eyes. I said that as I was going down the corridor I came in to glance at the time on his wall clock. "Stopped, sir," he replied, and I left.
I was drinking a lot then, and there used to be a whole crowd in my rooms, Lebyadkin among them. I threw out the wallet with the small change and kept the bills. There were thirty-two roubles, three red bills and two yellow. I broke one of the red ones immediately and sent for champagne; then I sent another red one, and then the third. About four hours later, in the evening, the official stood waiting for me in the corridor.
"Nikolai Vsevolodovich, when you came in earlier, didn't you accidentally knock my uniform off the chair... where it was lying by the door?"
"Not that I remember. Your uniform was lying there?"
"Yes, lying there, sir." "On the floor?"
"First on the chair and then on the floor."
"So, did you pick it up?"
"I did."
"Well, what more do you want?"
"In that case, nothing, sir..."
He did not dare finish, and he did not dare tell anyone in the rooming house—so timid these people are. However, everybody in the rooming house was terribly afraid and respectful of me then. Afterwards I enjoyed meeting his eyes once or twice in the corridor. But quickly got bored.
As soon as three days passed, I went back to Gorokhovy Street. The mother was going out somewhere with a bundle; the tradesman was, of course, not there. Matryosha and I remained. The windows were open. The tenants of the house were all craftsmen, and all day long there was a tapping of hammers and singing coming from all the floors. We had been there an hour already. Matryosha sat in her closet on a low bench, back to me, pottering over something with her needle. At last she suddenly started to sing softly, very softly; she sometimes did that. I took out my watch and looked at the time—it was two. My heart was beginning to pound. But then I suddenly asked myself again: could I stop? and answered at once that I could. I got up and began stealing towards her. They had a lot of geraniums in the window, and the sun was shining terribly brightly. I quietly sat down on the floor next to her. She gave a start and at first was unbelievably frightened and jumped up. I took her hand and softly kissed it, pulling her back down onto the bench, and began looking into her eyes. The fact that I had kissed her hand suddenly made her laugh like a child, but only for one second, because she impetuously jumped up again, now so frightened that a spasm passed over her face. She looked at me with horribly fixed eyes, and her lips began to twitch, as if on the verge of tears, but all the same she did not cry out. I began to kiss her hands again and, taking her on my knees, kissed her face and her feet. When I kissed her feet, she recoiled all over and smiled as if in shame, but with some crooked smile. Her whole face flushed with shame. I kept whispering something to her. Finally, there suddenly occurred an odd thing, which I will never forget and which caused me astonishment: the girl threw her arms around my neck and suddenly began kissing me terribly herself. Her face expressed complete admiration. I almost got up and left—so unpleasant was it in such a tiny child—out of pity. But I overcame the sudden sensation of my fear and stayed.