“Oh, do come, I even like you.”
“What on earth for? Well, but thank you. Listen, let’s drink another glass. Though—what’s the matter with me?—you’d better not drink. It’s true what he said, that you mustn’t drink more,” he suddenly winked at me significantly, “but I’ll drink even so. I’m all right now, but, believe me, I can’t restrain myself in anything. Just tell me I’m not to dine in restaurants anymore, and I’m ready for anything just to go and do it. Oh, we sincerely want to be honest, I assure you, only we keep postponing it.
And the years go by—all the best years! 24
And I’m terribly afraid he’ll hang himself. He’ll go and not tell anybody. He’s like that. Nowadays they all hang themselves; who knows—maybe there are a lot like us? I, for instance, simply can’t live without spare cash. The spare cash is much more important for me than the necessary. Listen, do you like music? I’m terribly fond of it. I’ll play something for you when I come to see you. I play the piano very well, and I studied for a long time. I studied seriously. If I were to write an opera, you know, I’d take the subject from Faust. 25I like that theme very much. I keep creating the scene in the cathedral, just so, imagining it in my head. A Gothic cathedral, inside, choirs, hymns, Gretchen enters, and, you know, the choirs are medieval, so that you can just hear the fifteenth century. Gretchen is in grief, first there’s a recitative, quiet but terrible, tormenting, but the choirs rumble gloomily, sternly, indifferently:
Dies irae, dies illa! 26
And suddenly—the devil’s voice, the devil’s song. He’s invisible, it’s just a song, alongside the hymns, together with the hymns, it almost coincides with them, and yet it’s quite different—it has to be done that way somehow. The song is long, tireless, it’s a tenor, it must be a tenor. He starts quietly, tenderly: ‘Remember, Gretchen, how you, still innocent, still a child, used to come with your mama to this cathedral and prattle out your prayers from an old book?’ But the song grows stronger, more passionate, more impetuous; the notes get higher: there are tears in it, anguish, tireless, hopeless, and, finally, despair: ‘There is no forgiveness, Gretchen, there is no forgiveness for you here!’ Gretchen wants to pray, but only cries burst from her breast—you know, when your breast is contracted with tears—but Satan’s song doesn’t stop, ever more deeply it pierces the soul, like a sharp point, ever higher—and suddenly it breaks off almost with a shout: ‘It’s all over, you are cursed!’ Gretchen falls on her knees, clasps her hands before her—and here comes her prayer, something very short, half recitative, but naïve, without any polish, something medieval in the highest degree, four lines, only four lines in all—there are several such notes in Stradella 27—and at the last note she swoons! Commotion. She’s lifted, borne up—and here suddenly a thundering choir. It’s like an assault of voices, an inspired chorus, victorious, overwhelming, something like our ‘Up-borne-by-the-an-gel-ichosts’ 28—so that everything’s shaken to its foundations, and everything changes into an ecstatic, exultant, universal exclamation—‘Hosanna!’—as if it were the cry of the whole universe, and she’s borne up, borne up, and here the curtain falls! No, you know, if I could, I’d have done something! Only I can’t do anything now, but only keep dreaming. I keep dreaming and dreaming; my whole life has turned into a dream, I even dream at night. Ah, Dolgoruky, have you read Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop?”
“I have. What about it?”
“Do you remember . . . Wait, I’ll drink another glass . . . Do you remember that place at the end, when they—that crazy old man and that lovely thirteen-year-old girl, his granddaughter—after their fantastic flight and wanderings, finally find refuge somewhere on the edge of England, near some medieval Gothic cathedral, and the girl obtains some post there, showing the cathedral to visitors . . . And then, once, the sun is setting, and this child is standing on the porch of the cathedral, all bathed in the last rays, standing and watching the sunset with quiet, pensive contemplation in her child’s soul, a soul astonished as before some riddle, because the one and the other are like a riddle—the sun as God’s thought, and the cathedral as man’s thought . . . isn’t it so? Oh, I don’t know how to express it, only God likes such first thoughts from children . . . And there, next to her on the steps, this mad old man, the grandfather, stares at her with a fixed gaze . . . You know, there’s nothing special in this picture from Dickens, absolutely nothing, but you’ll never forget it, and this remains in all of Europe—why? Here is the beautiful! Here is innocence! Eh! I don’t know what it is, only it’s good. I was always reading novels in high school. You know, I have a sister in the country, only a year older than me . . . Oh, it’s all been sold there now, and there’s no longer any estate! We sat on the terrace, under our old lindens, and read that novel, and the sun was also setting, and suddenly we stopped reading and said to each other that we, too, would be good, and we, too, would be beautiful—I was preparing for the university then and . . . Ah, Dolgoruky, you know, each of us has his memories! . . .”
And suddenly he leaned his pretty little head on my shoulder—and wept. I felt very, very sorry for him. True, he had drunk a lot of wine, but he had talked so sincerely with me, like a brother, with such feeling . . . Suddenly, at that moment, a shout came from the street and a strong rapping of knuckles on our window (the windows here are one-piece, big, and it was on the ground floor as well, so that it’s possible to knock from the street). It was the ejected Andreev.
‘Ohé, Lambert! Où est Lambert? As-tu vu Lambert?” his wild shout resounded in the street.
“Ah, but he’s here! So he hasn’t gone?” exclaimed my boy, tearing from his place.
“The check!” Lambert rasped to the waiter. His hands even trembled with anger as he went to pay, but the pockmarked one wouldn’t let Lambert pay for him.
“But why? Didn’t I invite you, didn’t you accept the invitation?”
“No, permit me.” The pockmarked one took out his purse and, having calculated his share, paid separately.
“You offend me, Semyon Sidorych!”
“That’s how I want it, sir,” Semyon Sidorovich snapped and, taking his hat and not saying good-bye to anyone, walked out of the room alone. Lambert threw the money at the waiter and hastily ran out after him, even forgetting about me in his confusion. Trishatov and I went out after all the rest. Andreev was standing by the entrance like a milepost, waiting for Trishatov.
“Blackguard!” Lambert couldn’t keep from saying.
“Uh-uh!” Andreev growled at him, and with one swing of his arm he knocked off his round hat, which rolled along the pavement. The humiliated Lambert rushed to pick it up.
“Vingt-cinq roubles!” 88Andreev showed Trishatov the banknote he had wrested from Lambert earlier.
“Enough,” Trishatov cried to him. “Why do you keep making a row? . . . And why did you skin him for twenty-five roubles? You only had seven coming.”
“What do you mean, skin him? He promised we’d dine in a private room with Athenian women, and he served up the pockmarked one instead of the women, and, besides that, I didn’t finish eating and froze in the cold a sure eighteen roubles’ worth. He had seven roubles outstanding, which makes exactly twenty-five for you.”