The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky (Modern Library Classics)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  I worked myself up into so pathetic a state that I felt a lump rising to my throat and—all of a sudden I stopped, raised myself in dismay, and, bending over apprehensively, began to listen with a violently beating heart. I had good reason to feel embarrassed.

  I had felt for a long while that I had cut her to the quick and wrung her heart, and the more I became convinced of it, the more eager I was to finish what I had set out to do as expeditiously and as thoroughly as possible. It was the sport of it, the sport of it, that carried me away. However, it was not only the sport of it.

  I knew I was speaking in a stiff, affected, even bookish manner, but as a matter of fact I could not speak except “as though I was reading from a book.” But that did not worry me, for I knew, I had a feeling that I would be understood, that this very bookishness would assist rather than hinder matters. But now that I had succeeded in making an impression, I got frightened. No, never, never had I witnessed such despair! She lay prone on the bed, with her face buried in the pillow, which she clasped tightly with both her hands. Her bosom was heaving spasmodically. Her young body was writhing as though in convulsions. The sobs which she tried to suppress seemed to deprive her of breath and rend her bosom, and suddenly they broke out into loud moans and cries. It was then that she clung more tightly to the pillow. She did not want anyone here, not a soul, to know of her agonies and tears. She bit the pillow, she bit her arm till it bled (I saw it afterwards), or clutching at her dishevelled hair with her fingers, went rigid with that superhuman effort, holding her breath and clenching her teeth. I began saying something to her, asking her to calm herself, but I felt that I dared not go on, and all at once, shivering as though in a fever and almost in terror, I began groping for my clothes, intending to dress myself quickly and go. It was dark. However much I tried, I could not finish dressing quickly. Suddenly my hand touched a box of matches and a candle-stick with a new unused candle. The moment the candle lit up the room, Lisa jumped up, sat up on the bed, and with a strangely contorted face and a half-crazy smile looked at me with an almost vacant expression. I sat down beside her and took her hands. She recollected herself, flung herself at me as though wishing to embrace me, but did not dare and slowly bowed her head before me.

  “Lisa, my dear, I’m sorry, I—I shouldn’t have—” I began, but she squeezed my hands in her fingers with such force that I realised that I was saying the wrong thing and stopped.

  “Here’s my address, Lisa. Come and see me.”

  “I will,” she whispered firmly, but still not daring to raise her head.

  “I’m going now. Goodbye. You will come, won’t you?”

  I got up. She too got up, and suddenly blushed crimson, gave a shudder, seized a shawl from a chair, threw it over her shoulders and muffled herself up to the chin. Having done that, she again smiled a rather sickly smile, blushed and looked at me strangely. I was deeply sorry for her. I was longing to go, to sink through the floor.

  “Wait a minute,” she said suddenly in the entrance hall, at the very door, and stopped me by catching hold of my overcoat.

  She quickly put down the candle and ran off. She must have remembered something or wanted to show me something. As she was running away, she again blushed all over, her eyes were shining, a smile flitted over her lips—what could it mean? I waited against my will. She came back in a minute and looked at me as though asking forgiveness for something. It was altogether a different face, altogether a different look from a few hours ago—sullen, mistrustful, and obstinate. Now her eyes were soft and beseeching, and at the same time trustful, tender, and shy. So do children look at people they are very fond of and from whom they expect some favour. She had light-brown eyes, beautiful and full of life, eyes which could express love as well as sullen hatred.

  Without a word of explanation, as though I, like a sort of higher being, ought to know everything without explanations, she held out a piece of paper to me. At that moment her whole face was radiant with the most naïve, most child-like, triumph. I unfolded it. It was a letter to her from some medical student or someone of the sort—a highly flamboyant and flowery, but also extremely respectful declaration of love. I cannot recall its exact words now, but I remember very well that through that grandiloquent style there peered a genuine feeling which cannot be faked. When I had finished reading the letter, I met her fervent, curious, and childishly impatient gaze fixed on me. Her eyes were glued to my face, and she was waiting with impatience to hear what I had to say. In a few words, hurriedly, but, somehow, joyfully and as though proudly, she explained to me that she had been to a dance in a private house, a family of “very, very nice people, who knew nothing, nothing at all,” for she had only been here a short time and she did not really intend to stay—no, she had made up her mind not to stay, and she was indeed quite certainly going to leave as soon as she paid her debt.… Well, anyway, at that party she had met a student who had danced the whole evening with her. He had talked to her, and it appeared that he had known her as a child in Riga when they used to play together, but that was a long time ago. And he knew her parents too, but he knew nothing, nothing whatever about this, and he had not the slightest suspicion even! And the day after the dance (three days ago) he had sent her that letter through a girl friend of hers with whom she had gone to the dance and—and—“well, that is all.”

  She lowered her shining eyes somewhat shyly as she finished telling me her story.

  Poor child, she was keeping the letter of that student as a treasure and ran to fetch that one treasure of hers not wishing that I should go away without knowing that she, too, was loved sincerely and honestly, that people addressed her, too, with respect. That letter, I knew, would most certainly remain in her box without leading to anything. But that did not matter. I was sure she would keep it all her life, guarding it as a priceless treasure, as her pride and justification, and now at such a moment she had remembered it and brought it to boast about naïvely to me, to vindicate herself in my eyes, so that I should see it and commend her for it. I said nothing, pressed her hand, and went out. I longed to get away.…

  I walked home all the way, though the wet snow kept falling all the time in large flakes. I felt dead tired, depressed, bewildered. But the truth was already blazing through my bewilderment. The disgusting truth!

  VIII

  However, it took me some time before I acknowledged that truth to myself. Waking up next morning after a few hours of heavy, leaden sleep and immediately remembering all that had occurred the previous day, I was utterly amazed at my sentimentality with Lisa the night before, and all “those horrors and commiserations of last night.”

  “I must have been suffering from an attack of nerves just like a silly old woman,” I decided. “Lord, what a fool I was! And why did I give her my address? What if she should come? However, what does it matter if she does come? Let her come, I don’t mind.…”

  But obviously that was not the chief and most important thing. What I had to do now, and that quickly too, was to save my reputation in the eyes of Zverkov and Simonov. That was the chief thing. And so preoccupied was I with the other affair that I forgot all about Lisa that morning.

  First of all I had immediately to return the money I had borrowed from Simonov the day before. I decided on a desperate step: to borrow fifteen roubles from Anton Antonovich. As it happened, he was in an excellent mood that morning and lent me the money as soon as I asked him for it. That made me feel so happy that, as I signed the promissory note, I told him casually with a sort of devil-may-care air that “we had a very gay party last night at the Hôtel de Paris; seeing off a friend, I suppose I might almost say a friend of my childhood. An awful rake, you know, terribly spoilt and, well, of course, of a good family, a man of considerable means, a brilliant career, witty, charming, has affairs with society women, you understand. Drank an additional ‘half-dozen’ and—And it went off all right,” I said it all very glibly, confidently, and complacently.

  As soon as I got home I wro
te to Simonov.

  To this day, as I recall that letter of mine to Simonov, I am lost in admiration at the gentlemanly, good-humoured, frank tone of it. Very dexterously, with perfect grace, and, above all, without any superfluous words, I candidly acknowledged myself to have been completely in the wrong. My only excuse, “if there can possibly be an excuse for the way I behaved,” was that, being utterly unaccustomed to drink, I got drunk after the first glass which (I lied) I had drunk before they arrived, while I was waiting for them at the Hôtel de Paris between five and six o’clock. I apologised principally to Simonov, and I asked him to convey my explanations to all the others, especially to Zverkov, whom “I remember as though in a dream” I seem to have insulted. I added that I would have apologised personally to every one of them myself, but I had a terrible headache and—to be quite frank—was too ashamed to face them. I was particularly pleased with the “certain lightness,” almost off-handedness (by no means discourteous, by the way) which was so unexpectedly reflected in my style and gave them to understand at once better than any arguments that I took a very detached view of “all that ghastly business of last night”; that I was not at all so crushed as you, gentlemen, probably imagine, but on the contrary look upon it just as any self-respecting gentleman ought to look on it. “A young man,” as it were, “can hardly be blamed for every indiscretion he commits.”

  “Damned if there isn’t a certain marquis-like playfulness about it!” I thought admiringly as I read over my letter. “And it’s all because I’m such a well-educated person! Others in my place wouldn’t have known how to extricate themselves, but I’ve wriggled out of it and I’m as bright and merry as ever, and all because I am ‘an educated man, a modern intellectual.’ ”

  And really the whole ghastly business had most probably been due to the wine. Well, perhaps not to the wine. As a matter of fact, I didn’t have any drinks between five and six when I was waiting for them. I had lied to Simonov. I had told him the most shameless lie, but I’m not in the least sorry for it even now.…

  Anyway, to hell with it! The main thing is that I’ve got out of it.

  I put six roubles in the letter, sealed it, and asked Apollon to take it to Simonov. When he learnt that there was money in the letter, Apollon became more respectful and agreed to take it to Simonov. Towards evening I went out for a walk. My head was still aching from the night before and I was feeling sick. But the further the evening wore on and the darker it grew, the more my impressions and—after them—my thoughts changed and grew confused. Inside me, deep down in my heart and conscience, something kept stirring, would not die, and manifested itself in a feeling of poignant anguish. Mostly I walked aimlessly along the most crowded business streets, along Meshchanskaya, Sadovaya, and Yussupov Park. I always particularly liked taking a stroll along these streets at dusk just when crowds of workers and tradespeople with cross and worried faces were going home from their daily work. What I liked about it was just that common bustle, the every-day, prosaic nature of it all. That evening all that rush and bustle in the streets irritated me more than ever. I could not cope with my own feelings. I could not find an explanation for them. Something was rising up, rising up incessantly in my soul, painfully, something that wouldn’t quieten down. I returned home feeling greatly upset. It was as though I had a crime on my conscience.

  The thought that Lisa might come worried me constantly. I found it very strange that of all the memories of the day before, the memory of her seemed to torment me in particular, and, as it were, apart from the rest. Everything else I had been successful in dismissing from my mind completely by the evening; I just dismissed it all and was still perfectly satisfied with my letter to Simonov. But so far as Lisa was concerned, I somehow did not feel satisfied. As if it were the thought of Lisa alone that made me so unhappy. “What if she comes?” I kept thinking all the time. “Well, what if she does? Let her. H’m … For one thing, I don’t want her to see how I live. Last night I seemed—er—a hero to her and—er—now—h’m! It is certainly a nuisance that I let myself go to pieces like that. Everything in my room is so poor and shabby. And how could I have gone out to dinner in such clothes last night! And that American cloth sofa of mine with the stuffing sticking out of it! And my dressing gown in which I can’t even wrap myself decently! Rags and tatters.… And she will see it all, and she will see Apollon, too. The swine will probably insult her. He’ll be rude to her just to be rude to me. And I, of course, will get into a funk as usual, start striking attitudes before her, drape myself in the skirts of my dressing gown, start smiling, start telling lies. Ugh! Sickening! And it isn’t this that’s really so sickening. There’s something more important, more horrible, more contemptible! Yes, more contemptible! And again to assume that dishonest, lying mask—again, again!”

  Having come thus far in my thoughts, I couldn’t help flaring up.

  “Why dishonest? In what way is it dishonest? I was speaking sincerely last night. I remember there was some genuine feeling in me, too. I wanted to awaken honourable feelings in her.… If she cried a little, it was all to the good. It’s sure to have a highly beneficent effect on her.…”

  All that evening, even when I had returned home, even after nine o’clock when I knew that Lisa could not possibly come, I still could not get her out of my mind, and, above all, I remembered her in one and the same position. Yes, one moment of that night’s incident seemed to stand out in my memory with particular clarity, namely, when I struck a match and saw her pale, contorted face and that tortured look in her eyes. What a pitiful, what an unnatural, what a twisted smile she had at that moment! But I did not know then that fifteen years later I should still see Lisa in my mind’s eye with the same pitiful, inappropriate smile which was on her face at that moment.

  Next day I was once more quite ready to dismiss it all as nonsense, as a result of overstrained nerves, and, above all, as—an exaggeration. I was always aware of that weakness of mine, and sometimes I was very much afraid of it. “I always exaggerate—that’s my trouble,” I used to remind myself almost every hour. But still—“still, Lisa will probably show up all the same,” that was the constant refrain of my thoughts at the time. I was so worried about it that I sometimes flew into a blind rage: “She’ll come! She’s quite certain to come!” I stormed, pacing my room. “If not today, then tomorrow, but come she will! She’ll seek me out! For such is the damned romanticism of all those pure hearts! Oh, the loathsomeness, oh, the stupidity, oh, the insensibility of these blasted ‘sentimental souls’! How could she fail to understand? Why, anyone would have seen through it!”

  But here I would stop, overcome with embarrassment.

  And how few, how few words were necessary, I thought in passing, how few idyllic descriptions were necessary (and those, too, affected, bookish, insincere) to shape a whole human life at once according to my will! There’s innocence for you! Virgin soil!

  Sometimes I wondered whether I ought not to go and see her, “tell her everything,” and ask her not to come to me. But there, at that thought, I’d fly into such a rage that it seemed to me that I should have crushed that “damned” Lisa if she had happened to be near me at the time. I should have humiliated her. I should have heaped mortal insults upon her, driven her out, beaten her!

  However, one day passed, and another, and a third, and she did not come, and I was beginning to feel easier in my mind. I felt particularly cheerful and let my fancy run riot after nine o’clock, and at times I even began indulging in rather sweet daydreams. For instance, “I’m saving Lisa just because she’s coming regularly to see me and I’m talking to her.… I’m educating her, enlarging her mind. At last I notice that she is in love with me. I pretend not to understand (I don’t know why I am pretending, though, just for the sheer beauty of it, I suppose). In the end, all embarrassed, beautiful, trembling and sobbing, she flings herself at my feet and says that I have saved her and that she loves me more than anything in the world. I look surprised, but—‘Lisa,’ I say,
‘surely you don’t imagine I haven’t noticed that you love me, do you? I saw everything, I guessed everything, but I did not dare lay claim to your heart first because I knew you were under my influence and was afraid that, out of gratitude, you would deliberately force yourself to respond to my love, that you would rouse a feeling in your heart which perhaps did not really exist, and I did not want this because it—it would be sheer despotism on my part—it would have been indelicate.… (Well, in short, here I got myself entangled in a sort of European, George-Sandian, inexpressibly noble subtleties.) But now, now you’re mine, you are my creation, you are pure and beautiful, you are—my beautiful wife!”

  And my house, fearlessly and freely,

  As mistress you can enter now!

  And then we live happily ever after, go abroad, etc., etc. In short, I got so thoroughly fed up with myself in the end that I finished up by sticking out my tongue at myself.

  “Besides, they won’t let her go, the ‘tart’!” I thought to myself. “I don’t think they are allowed to go out very much and certainly not in the evening (for some reason I took it into my head that she would come in the evening and exactly at seven o’clock). However, she told me herself that she was not entirely at their beck and call and that she was given special privileges, and that means—h’m! Damn it, she will come! She will most certainly turn up!”