“‘Let’s part and then I’ll love you,’ I’ll love you, only let’s part. Listen,” he said, quite pale, “give me more charity: don’t love me, don’t live with me, let’s never see each other; I’ll be your slave, if you call me, I’ll vanish instantly if you don’t want to see or hear me, only . . . only don’t marry anyone!”
My heart was wrung painfully when I heard such words. This naïvely humiliating request was the more pathetic, it pierced the heart the more strongly, for being so naked and impossible. Yes, of course, he was asking for charity! Well, but could he think she’d agree? And yet he stooped to the attempt: he attempted to ask! This last degree of dispiritedness was unbearable to see. All the features of her face suddenly twisted as if with pain; but before she had time to say a word, he suddenly came to his senses:
“I’ll exterminateyou!” he said suddenly in a strange, distorted voice, not his own.
But her answer was also strange, also in an unexpected voice, not at all her own:
“If I were to give you charity,” she suddenly said firmly, “you’d revenge yourself on me for it afterwards still worse than you’re threatening now, because you’d never forget that you stood before me as such a beggar . . . I cannot listen to threats from you!” she concluded almost with indignation, looking at him all but in defiance.
“‘Threats from you,’ that is, from such a beggar! I was joking,” he said softly, smiling. “I won’t do anything to you, don’t be afraid, go now . . . and I’ll do all I can to send you that document—only go, go! I wrote you a stupid letter, and you responded to the stupid letter and came—we’re quits. Go this way,” he pointed to the door (she was about to pass through the room where I was standing behind the portière).
“Forgive me if you can,” she stopped in the doorway.
“Well, what if we meet as quite good friends someday and remember this scene with bright laughter?” he said suddenly; but all the features of his face trembled, as in a man overcome by a fit.
“Oh, God grant it!” she cried, pressing her hands together before her, but peering timorously into his face and as if trying to guess what he meant to say.
“Go. Much sense there is in the two of us, but you . . . Oh, you’re my kind of person! I wrote a crazy letter, and you agreed to come and say that you ‘almost love me.’ No, you and I—we’re people of the same madness! Always be mad like that, don’t change, and we’ll meet as friends—that I predict to you, I swear it to you!”
“And then I’ll certainly love you, because I feel it even now!” The woman in her couldn’t help herself and threw him these last words from the threshold.
She went out. I hastily and inaudibly moved to the kitchen and, almost without looking at Nastasya Egorovna, who was waiting for me, set off down the back stairs and across the courtyard to the street. But I only had time to see her get into a hired carriage that was waiting for her by the porch. I ran down the street.
Chapter Eleven
I
I WENT RUNNING to Lambert. Oh, how I wish I could give a semblance of logic and seek out the least bit of common sense in my acts that evening and all that night, but even now, when I can grasp everything, I’m in no way able to present the matter in proper and clear connection. There was a feeling here, or, better, a whole chaos of feelings, among which I was naturally bound to get lost. True, there was one chiefest feeling that overwhelmed me and commanded everything, but . . . need I confess it? The more so as I’m not certain . . .
I ran to Lambert, naturally, beside myself. I even frightened him and Alphonsinka at first. I’ve always noticed that the most lost, most crapulous Frenchmen are exceedingly attached, in their domestic life, to some sort of bourgeois order, to some sort of most prosaic daily routine of life established once and for all. However, Lambert very soon realized that something had happened and went into raptures, seeing me finally at his place, finally possessingme. That was all he thought about, day and night, those days! Oh, how he needed me! And now, when he had already lost all hope, I suddenly come on my own, and in such madness—precisely the state he needed.
“Wine, Lambert!” I shouted. “Let’s drink, let’s storm it up. Alphonsina, where’s your guitar?”
I won’t describe the scene—it’s superfluous. We drank, and I told him everything, everything. He listened greedily. I—and I was the first—directly suggested a plot to him, a conflagration. First of all, we must invite Katerina Nikolaevna here by letter . . .
“That can be done,” Lambert confirmed, snatching at every word I said.
Second, to be convincing, we must send a complete copy of her “document” with the letter, so that she can see straight off that she’s not being deceived.
“So we should, so we must!” Lambert confirmed, constantly exchanging glances with Alphonsinka.
Third, the one to invite her must be Lambert himself, on his own, in the manner of some unknown person just arrived from Moscow, and I must bring Versilov . . .
“Versilov can be done . . .” Lambert confirmed.
“Must be, not can be!” I cried. “It’s necessary! The whole thing’s being done for him!” I explained, sipping gulp after gulp from my glass. (All three of us were drinking, but it seems I alone drank the whole bottle of champagne, while they only made a show of it.) “Versilov and I will sit in the other room (we have to secure the other room, Lambert!), and when she suddenly agrees to everything—to the ransom in cash and to the otherransom, because they’re all mean—then Versilov and I will come out and catch her in all her meanness, and Versilov, seeing how loathsome she is, will be cured at once and will kick her out. But we need to have Bjoring there as well, so that he, too, can have a look at her!” I added in a frenzy.
“No, we don’t need Bjoring,” Lambert observed.
“We do, we do!” I yelled again. “You understand nothing, Lambert, because you’re stupid! On the contrary, let the scandal spread through high society—that way we’ll be revenged both on high society and on her, and let her be punished! She’ll give you a promissory note, Lambert . . . I don’t need money, I spit on money; you’ll stoop down to pick it up and put it in your pocket along with my spit, but instead I will crush her!”
“Yes, yes,” Lambert kept confirming, “it’s all as you . . .” He kept exchanging glances with Alphonsinka.
“Lambert! She’s terribly in awe of Versilov; I’ve just been convinced of it,” I babbled to him.
“It’s good that you spied it all out. I never supposed you were such a spy and had so much sense!” He said that in order to flatter me.
“Lies, Frenchman, I’m not a spy, but there is a lot of sense in me! And you know, Lambert, she loves him!” I went on, trying with all my might to speak myself out. “But she won’t marry him, because Bjoring’s an officer of the guards and Versilov is only a magnanimous man and friend of mankind, a comical person, in their opinion, and nothing more! Oh, she understands this passion and enjoys it, she flirts, she entices, but she won’t marry him! She’s a woman, she’s a serpent! Every woman is a serpent, and every serpent is a woman! He’s got to be cured; he’s got to have the scales torn off. Let him see what she’s like, and he’ll be cured. I’ll bring him to you, Lambert!”
“So you must,” Lambert kept confirming, pouring more for me every minute.
Above all, he simply trembled over not angering me with something, over not contradicting me, and getting me to drink more. This was so crude and obvious that even I couldn’t help noticing it then. But I myself couldn’t leave for anything; I kept drinking and talking, and I wanted terribly to speak myself out finally. When Lambert went for another bottle, Alphonsinka played some Spanish motif on the guitar; I almost burst into tears.
“Lambert, you don’t know all!” I exclaimed with deep feeling. “This man absolutely must be saved, because he’s surrounded by . . . sorcery. If she married him, the next morning, after the first night, he’d kick her out . . . because that does happen. Because such violent, wild love works like a fit, like a deadly noose, like an illness, and—as soon as you reach satisfaction—the scales fall at once and the opposite feeling appears: disgust and hatred, the wish to exterminate, to crush. Do you know the story of Abishag, 40Lambert, have you read it?”