“It makes no difference to me,” I went on. “Do you know, too, that it’s dangerous for us to go about together: many times I’ve had an irrepressible longing to beat you, to mutilate you, to strangle you. And what do you think, won’t it come to that? You’ll drive me to delirium. Am I afraid of a scandal? Of your wrath? What is your wrath to me? I love without hope, and I know that after that I’ll love you a thousand times more. If I ever kill you, I’ll have to kill myself, too; well, so—I’ll put off killing myself for as long as I can, in order to feel this unbearable pain of being without you. Do you know an incredible thing: I love you more every day, and yet that’s almost impossible. Can I not be a fatalist after that? Remember, two days ago on the Schlangenberg you challenged me, and I whispered: say the word and I’ll jump into this abyss. If you had said the word then, I would have jumped. You don’t believe I’d have jumped?”
“What stupid babble!” she cried.
“It’s none of my affair whether it’s stupid or intelligent,” I cried. “I know that in your presence I have to talk, talk, talk—and so I talk. I lose all self-respect in your presence, and it makes no difference to me.”
“Why should I make you jump off the Schlangenberg?” she said dryly and somehow especially offensively. “It would be completely useless to me.”
“Splendid!” I cried. “You said that splendid ‘useless’ on purpose, in order to intimidate me. I see right through you. Useless, you say? But pleasure is always useful, and wild, boundless power—if only over a fly—is also a pleasure of a certain sort. Man is a despot by nature and likes to play the torturer. You like it terribly.”
I remember she studied me with some especially close attention. It must be that my face then expressed all my senseless and absurd feelings. I recall now that our conversation actually went on like that almost word for word, as I’ve described it here. My eyes were bloodshot. Froth clotted on the edges of my lips. And as for the Schlangenberg, I swear on my honor even now: if she had ordered me to throw myself down then, I would have done it! If she had said it only as a joke, said it with contempt, spitting on me—even then I would have jumped!
“No, why, I believe you,” she said, but as only she knows how to speak sometimes, with such contempt and sarcasm, with such arrogance, that, by God, I could have killed her at that moment. She was taking a risk. I also wasn’t lying about that, talking to her.
“Are you a coward?” she asked me suddenly.
“I don’t know, maybe I am. I don’t know…I haven’t thought about it for a long time.”
“If I told you: kill this man, would you kill him?”
“Who?”
“Whoever I wanted.”
“The Frenchman?”
“Don’t ask, answer—whoever I point to. I want to know whether you were speaking seriously just now.” She waited so seriously and impatiently for my reply that I felt somehow strange.
“But will you tell me, finally, what’s going on here?” I cried. “Are you afraid of me, or what? I myself can see all the disorders here. You’re the stepdaughter of a ruined and crazy man, infected with a passion for that she-devil—Blanche; then there’s this Frenchman with his mysterious influence over you, and—now you ask me so seriously…such a question. At any rate let me know: otherwise I’ll go mad right here and do something. Or are you ashamed to honor me with your candor? Can you really be ashamed with me?”
“I’m not talking about that at all. I asked you and I’m waiting for a reply.”
“Of course I’ll kill,” I cried, “whoever you order me to, but can you really…would you really order that?”
“What do you think, that I’ll feel sorry for you? I’ll order you to do it, and stay out of it myself. Can you bear that? No, how could you! You might kill on orders and then come and kill me for having dared to send you.”
It was as if something hit me on the head at these words. Of course, even then I considered her question half as a joke, as a challenge; but all the same she said it much too seriously. All the same, I was struck by her speaking it out like that, by her having such a right over me, accepting such power over me, and saying so directly: “Go to your ruin, and I’ll stay out of it.” There was something so cynical and frank in these words that, in my opinion, it was far too much. So that’s how she looks at me then? This was going beyond the bounds of slavery and nonentity. To have such a view is to raise a man to one’s own level. And however absurd, however unbelievable our whole conversation was, my heart shook.
Suddenly she burst out laughing. We were sitting on a bench then in front of the playing children, across from the place where carriages stopped and unloaded the public on the avenue before the vauxhall.
“Do you see that fat baroness?” she cried. “It’s Baroness Wurmerhelm. She came only three days ago. See her husband: a long, dry Prussian with a stick in his hand? Remember him looking us over two days ago? Go now, walk over to the baroness, take off your hat, and say something to her in French.”
“Why?”
“You swore you’d jump off the Schlangenberg; you swear you’re ready to kill if I order it. Instead of all these killings and tragedies, I want only to laugh. Go without any excuses. I want to see the baron beat you with his stick.”
“You’re challenging me; you think I won’t do it?”
“Yes, I’m challenging you, go, that’s how I want it!”
“I’ll go, if you please, though it’s a wild fantasy. Only here’s the thing: won’t there be trouble for the general, and for you through him? By God, I don’t worry about myself, but about you, well—and the general. And what is this fantasy of going and insulting a woman?”
“No, you’re a mere babbler, I can see,” she said contemptuously. “Your eyes became bloodshot earlier—however, maybe that’s because you drank a lot of wine at dinner. As if I don’t understand myself that it’s stupid, and trite, and that the general will get angry? I simply want to laugh. Well, I want to, that’s all! And why should you insult a woman? You’ll sooner get beaten with a stick.”
I turned and silently went to do her bidding. Of course it was stupid, and of course I failed to get out of it, but as I went up to the baroness, I remember something seemed to egg me on, namely, schoolboy prankishness. And I was terribly worked up, as if drunk.
CHAPTER VI
TWO DAYS HAVE NOW gone by since that stupid day. And so much shouting, noising, knocking, talking! And it’s all such disorder, confusion, stupidity, and banality, and I’m the cause of it all. However, sometimes it seems funny—to me at any rate. I’m unable to give myself an accounting for what has happened to me, whether I’m indeed in a state of frenzy, or have simply jumped off the rails and gone on a rampage till they tie me up. At times it seems I’m going mad. And at times it seems I’m still not far from childhood, from the schoolbench, and it’s simply crude prankishness.
It’s Polina, it’s all Polina! Maybe there would be no schoolboy pranks if it weren’t for her. Who knows, maybe I’m doing it all out of despair (however stupid it is to reason this way). And I don’t understand, I don’t understand what’s so good about her! Good-looking she is, though; yes, it seems she’s good-looking. Others lose their minds over her, too. She’s tall and trim. Only very thin. It seems to me you could tie her in a knot or bend her double. The print of her foot is narrow and long—tormenting. Precisely tormenting. Her hair has a reddish tint. Her eyes—a real cat’s, but how proud and arrogant she can look with them. Four months ago, when I had just entered their service, she had a long and heated conversation with des Grieux one evening in the drawing room. And she looked at him in such a way…that later, when I went to my room to go to bed, I imagined that she had given him a slap—given it a moment before, then stood in front of him and looked at him…That evening I fell in love with her.