“Are you well, Arkady Makarovich? Your eyes are somehow strange.”
“Are you saying that in order to go without me? But I won’t leave you now. Not for nothing was I dreaming about gambling all night. Let’s go, let’s go!” I kept crying, as if I had suddenly found the solution to everything.
“Let’s go, then, though you’re in a fever, but there . . .”
He didn’t finish. His face looked heavy, terrible. We were already going out.
“Do you know,” he said suddenly, pausing in the doorway, “there’s yet another way out of my trouble besides gambling?”
“Which?”
“The princely way!”
“But what? But what?”
“Later you’ll find out what. Only know that I’m no longer worthy of it, because it’s too late. Let’s go, and remember my words. Let’s try the lackey’s way out . . . As if I don’t know that I am consciously, of my own full will, going and acting like a lackey!”
VI
I FLEW TO the roulette table as if my whole salvation, my whole way out, was focused in it, and yet, as I’ve already said, before the prince came, I hadn’t even thought of it. And I was going to play, not for myself, but for the prince, on the prince’s money; I can’t conceive what drew me on, but it drew me irresistibly. Oh, never had these people, these faces, these croupiers, these gambling cries, this whole squalid hall at Zershchikov’s, never had it all seemed so loathsome to me, so dismal, so coarse and sad, as this time! I remember only too well the grief and sadness that seized my heart at times during all those hours at the table. But what made me not leave? What made me endure, as if I had taken a fate, a sacrifice, a heroic deed upon myself? I’ll say one thing: I can scarcely say of myself that I was in my right mind then. And yet I had never played so intelligently as that evening. I was silent and concentrated, attentive and terribly calculating; I was patient and stingy and at the same time decided in decisive moments. I placed myself again by the zéro, that is, again between Zershchikov and Aferdov, who always sat next to Zershchikov on the right; I detested that place, but I wanted absolutely to stake on zéro, and all the other places by the zérowere taken. We had been playing for over an hour; finally, from my place, I saw the prince suddenly get up, pale, and walk over to us, and stand facing me across the table. He had lost everything and silently watched my game, though he probably understood nothing in it and was no longer thinking about the game. By that time I was just beginning to win, and Zershchikov counted out money to me. All at once Aferdov, silently, before my eyes, in the most brazen way, took one of my hundred-rouble notes and added it to his pile of money lying in front of him. I cried out and seized him by the hand. Here something unexpected happened to me: it was as if I snapped my chain, as if all the horrors and injuries of that day were suddenly focused on this one instant, on this disappearance of a hundred-rouble note. As if all that was stored up and suppressed in me had only been waiting for this moment to break out.
“He’s a thief! He just stole a hundred-rouble note from me!” I exclaimed, looking around, beside myself.
I won’t describe the tumult that arose; such an incident was a complete novelty here. People behaved decently at Zershchikov’s, and the place was known for that. But I forgot myself. Amidst the noise and shouting, Zershchikov’s voice was suddenly heard:
“And by the way, there’s money missing, and it was lying right here! Four hundred roubles!”
Another incident took place at once: money had disappeared from the bank, under Zershchikov’s nose, a roll of four hundred roubles. Zershchikov pointed to the spot where it was lying, “was lying just now,” and that spot turned out to be right next to me, adjoining me, the place where my money lay, meaning much closer to me than to Aferdov.
“Here’s the thief! It’s him stealing again, search him!” I exclaimed, pointing at Aferdov.
“It’s all because unknown people are let in,” someone’s thundering and impressive voice rang out amidst the general outcry. “They get in without any recommendation! Who brought him? Who is he?”
“Some Dolgoruky.”
“Prince Dolgoruky?”
“Prince Sokolsky brought him,” somebody cried.
“Listen, Prince,” I screamed to him across the table in a frenzy, “they consider me a thief, when it’s I who have just been robbed here! Tell them, tell them about me!”
And here something took place that was the most terrible of all that had happened that whole day . . . even in my whole life: the prince disavowed me. I saw him shrug his shoulders and, in reply to the flood of questions, utter sharply and clearly:
“I don’t answer for anyone. I beg you to leave me alone.”
Meanwhile Aferdov stood amidst the crowd and loudly demanded to be searched. He turned out his pockets himself. His demand was answered with shouts: “No, no, the thief is known!” Two summoned lackeys seized me by the arms from behind.
“I will not let you search me, I will not allow it!” I shouted, struggling to free myself.
But they dragged me to the next room, and there, amidst the crowd, they searched me down to the last fold. I shouted and struggled.
“Dropped it, must be, have to look on the floor,” somebody decided.
“Go now and look on the floor!”
“Under the table, must be he managed to throw it there!”
“Of course, the trail’s cold . . .”
They led me out, but I somehow managed to stand in the doorway and shout with senseless fury to the whole halclass="underline"
“Roulette is forbidden by law. Today I shall denounce you all!”
They took me downstairs, dressed me, and . . . opened the door to the street before me.
Chapter Nine
I
THE DAY ENDED with catastrophe, but there remained the night, and this is what I remembered from that night.
I think it was just past midnight when I found myself in the street. The night was clear, still, and frosty. I almost ran, was hurrying terribly, but—certainly not for home. “Why home? Can there be a home now? At home you live, I’d wake up tomorrow to live—but is that possible now? Life is over, it’s no longer possible to live now.” And so I plodded along the streets, not knowing where I was going, and I doubt that I wanted to get anywhere. I felt very hot and kept throwing open my heavy raccoon coat. “Now no sort of action,” it seemed to me at that moment, “can have any purpose.” And, strangely, I kept fancying that everything around me, even the air I breathed, was as if from another planet, as though I suddenly found myself on the moon. All of it—the city, the passersby, the sidewalk I was running along—all of it was suddenly not mineanymore. “This is the Palace Square, this is St. Isaac’s,” went through my head, “but now I have nothing to do with them.” Everything somehow forsook me, suddenly became not mine. “I have mama, Liza—well, what of it, what are Liza and my mother to me now? Everything is over, everything is over all at once, except one thing: that I am a thief forever.
“How can I prove that I’m not a thief? Is it possible now? Shall I go to America? Well, what would I prove by that? Versilov will be the first to believe that I stole! My ‘idea’? What ‘idea’? What of that now? In fifty years, in a hundred years, I’ll be walking along, and a man will always turn up who will point at me and say: ‘Look at that thief. He began his “idea” by stealing money at roulette’. . .”
Was there anger in me? I don’t know, maybe there was. Strangely, there had always been this feature in me, maybe ever since earliest childhood: once evil had been done to me, fulfilled to the utmost, and I had been offended to the final limits, there always appeared in me at once an unquenchable desire to submit passively to the offense and even to outstrip the offender’s desires: “There, you’ve humiliated me, so I’ll humiliate myself still more, look here, admire!” Touchard used to beat me and wanted to show that I was a lackey and not a senator’s son, and so I myself at once entered into the role of lackey then. I not only helped him to dress, but would seize the brush myself and begin brushing the last specks of dust off him, without any request or order from him, sometimes ran after him, in the heat of my lackey zeal, to brush off some last speck of dust from his tailcoat, so that he himself sometimes stopped me: “Enough, enough, Arkady, enough.” He used to come and take off his street clothes—and I would clean them, fold them carefully, and cover them with a checked silk handkerchief. I knew that my comrades laughed and despised me for that, I knew it perfectly well, but that was what I liked: “You wanted me to be a lackey, well, so I’m a lackey, a boor—yes, a boor.” I could keep up this passive hatred and underground spite for years. And what then? At Zershchikov’s I had shouted to the whole hall, in complete frenzy: “I shall denounce you all, roulette is forbidden by law!” And I swear that here, too, there was something as if similar: I had been humiliated, searched, declared a thief, destroyed—“well, then know, all of you, that you’ve guessed right, I’m not only a thief, I’m an informer as well!” Recalling it now, I sum it up and explain it in precisely that way; but then I couldn’t be bothered with analyzing; then I shouted without any intention; even a moment before, I hadn’t known I’d shout that; it shouted itself—there was that streakin my soul.