“Ah, the devil . . . What ails him!” Lambert grumbles from his bed. “Wait, I’ll show you! Won’t let me sleep . . .” He finally jumps out of bed, runs over to me, and starts tearing the blanket off me, but I hold very, very tightly to the blanket, covering my head with it.
“Whimpering, what are you whimpering for, cretin, cghretin! Take that!” and he beats me, he hits me painfully with his fist on the back, on the side, more and more painfully, and . . . and I suddenly open my eyes . . .
It’s already bright dawn, needles of frost sparkle on the snow, on the wall . . . I’m sitting, crouched, barely alive, frozen in my fur coat, and someone is standing over me, rousing me, abusing me loudly, and kicking me painfully in the side with the toe of his right boot. I raise myself, look: a man in a rich bearskin coat, a sable hat, with black eyes, pitch-black foppish side-whiskers, a hooked nose, his white teeth bared at me, a white and ruddy face like a mask . . . He has bent down very close to me, and cold steam comes from his mouth with each breath:
“Frozen, the drunken mug, the cghretin! You’ll freeze like a dog! Get up! Get up!”
“Lambert!” I shout.
“Who are you?”
“Dolgoruky!”
“What the hell kind of Dolgoruky?”
“ SimplyDolgoruky! . . . Touchard . . . The one you stuck in the side with a fork in the tavern! . . .”
“Ha-a-a!” he cries out, smiling some sort of long, recollecting smile (but he can’t have forgotten me!). “Ha! So it’s you, you!”
He pulls me up, sets me on my feet; I can barely stand, barely move, he leads me, supporting me on his arm. He peers into my eyes, as if pondering and recalling and listening to me with all his might, and I babble on, also with all my might, ceaselessly, without pause, and I’m so glad, so glad I’m talking, and glad that it’s Lambert. Whether he appeared to me somehow as my “salvation,” or I rushed to him at that moment because I took him for a man from an entirely different world—I don’t know, I didn’t reason then, but rushed to him without reasoning. What I said then I don’t remember at all, and I hardly spoke coherently, hardly even articulated the words clearly; but he listened intently. He grabbed the first cab that came along, and a few moments later I was sitting in the warmth, in his room.
III
EVERY PERSON, WHOEVER he may be, certainly preserves some recollection of something that has happened to him which he regards or is inclined to regard as fantastic, remarkable, out of the ordinary, almost miraculous, whether it’s a dream, a meeting, a divination, a presentiment, or something of the sort. To this day I am inclined to regard this meeting of mine with Lambert as something even prophetic . . . judging at least by the circumstances and consequences of the meeting. It all happened, however, on the one hand at least, in the most natural way: he was simply coming back from one of his nighttime occupations (which one will become clear later) half drunk, and, stopping for a moment by the gate in the lane, saw me. He had been in Petersburg for only a few days then.
The room I found myself in was a small, quite unassumingly furnished example of ordinary Petersburg chambres garnies 51of the middling sort. Lambert himself, however, was excellently and expensively dressed. On the floor lay two suitcases only half unpacked. A corner of the room was partitioned off by a screen, concealing a bed.
“Alphonsine!” cried Lambert.
“Présente! ” 52a cracked female voice replied in a Parisian accent from behind the screen, and in no more than two minutes out popped Mlle. Alphonsine, hastily dressed in a bed jacket, only just risen—a strange sort of being, tall and lean as a splinter, a young girl, a brunette, with a long waist, a long face, darting eyes, and sunken cheeks—an awfully worn-out creature!
“Quick!” (I’m translating, but he spoke to her in French.) “They must have a samovar going, fetch some boiling water, red wine and sugar, and a glass here, quick, he’s frozen, this is a friend of mine . . . he slept all night in the snow.”
“ Malheureux!” 53she cried out, clasping her hands with a theatrical gesture.
“Uh-uh!” Lambert shouted at her as at a little dog, and shook his finger; she stopped gesturing at once and ran to fulfill his order.
He examined and palpated me; he felt my pulse, touched my forehead, my temples.
“Strange,” he muttered, “how you didn’t freeze . . . though you were all covered up in your fur coat, including your head, like sitting in a fur hole . . .”
The hot glass arrived, I gulped it down greedily, and it revived me at once; I started babbling again; I was half-reclining on the sofa in the corner and talking away—I was spluttering as I talked—but of precisely what and how I was speaking, once again I have almost no recollection; there are moments and even whole stretches that I’ve completely forgotten. I repeat: whether he understood anything then from what I was telling, I don’t know; but one thing I realized clearly afterwards—namely, that he managed to understand me well enough to draw the conclusion that he ought not to disregard his meeting with me . . . Later I’ll explain in its place what reckoning he might have made here.
I was not only terribly animated, but at moments, it seems, quite merry. I remember the sun suddenly lighting up the room when the blinds were raised, and the stove crackling when someone lit it—who and how, I don’t remember. I also have the memory of a tiny black dog that Mlle. Alphonsine held in her arms, coquettishly pressing it to her heart. This lapdog somehow diverted me very much, even so much that I stopped talking and twice reached out for it, but Lambert waved his hand, and Alphonsine and her lapdog instantly effaced themselves behind the screen.
He was very silent himself, sat facing me and, leaning strongly towards me, listened without tearing himself away; at times he smiled a long, drawn-out smile, baring his teeth and narrowing his eyes, as if making an effort to think and wishing to guess. I’ve kept a clear recollection only of the fact that, when I was telling him about the “document,” I simply couldn’t express myself understandably and make a coherent story of it, and by his face I could see only too well that he couldn’t understand me, but that he wanted very much to understand, so that he even risked stopping me with a question, which was dangerous, because as soon as I was interrupted, I at once interrupted the subject and forgot what I was talking about. How long we sat and talked like that I don’t know and can’t even reckon. He suddenly got up and called Alphonsine:
“He needs rest; he may also need a doctor. Do whatever he asks, that is . . . vous comprenez, ma fille? Vous avez de l’argent, 54no? Here!” And he took out a ten-rouble note for her. He started whispering to her: “ Vous comprenez! Vous comprenez!” he repeated to her, shaking his finger at her and frowning sternly. I saw that she trembled frightfully before him.
“I’ll be back, and you’d best have a good sleep,” he smiled to me and took his hat.
“Mais vous n’avez pas dormi du tout, Maurice! ” 55Alphonsine cried out pathetically.
“Taisez-vous, je dormirai après,” 56and he left.
“Sauvée! ” 57; she whispered pathetically, pointing after him to me with her hand.
“ Monsieur, monsieur!” she began declaiming at once, assuming a pose in the middle of the room. “ Jamais homme ne fut si cruel, siBismarck, que cet être, qui regarde une femme comme une saleté de hasard. Une femme, qu’est-ce que ça dans notre époque? ‘Tue-la’—voilà le dernier mot de l’Académie française!...” 58