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

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  “I’m quite all right. Indeed, I am!”

  But as she said it she suddenly blushed, from shame, no doubt. Yes, it was quite obviously shame. Oh, now I understand it! She was ashamed, you see, that I was still her husband, that I was taking care of her as though I were her real husband still. But at the time I did not realise it, and I ascribed her smile to her humility. (Oh, those scales!)

  And so, a month later, at five o’clock in the afternoon, on a bright, sunny day in April, I was sitting in the pawnshop, making up my accounts. All of a sudden I heard how, sitting at the table in our room, at her work, she began softly, ever so softly—to sing. This new incident made an overwhelming impression on me. To this day I can’t explain it. Till then I had hardly ever heard her sing, at all events not since the first days of our married life when we were still able to have some fun together, practising target shooting with my gun. At that time her voice was still strong and clear, though hardly true, but very pleasant and healthy. But now the song sounded so feeble. Oh, I don’t mean it was a plaintive tune (it was some love song), but it sounded as though her voice were cracked, broken, as though her dear little voice could not manage it, as though the song itself were sick. She sang in an undertone, and suddenly her voice, rising on a high note, broke. Such a poor little voice, and it broke off so miserably. She cleared her throat and started singing something again in a very soft and hardly audible voice.…

  You may laugh at my agitation, but no one will ever understand the reason for it. No. I wasn’t sorry for her yet. Not yet. It was something quite different. To begin with, during the first few minutes at any rate I suddenly felt bewildered and terribly surprised. It was a horrible, strange sort of surprise, painful and almost vindictive. “She is singing, and—while I am in the house! She hasn’t forgotten about me, has she?”

  Thunderstruck, I sat there for some time without stirring from my place. Then I suddenly got up, took my hat, and went out, as though acting on impulse. At least I don’t know why or where I was going. Lukerya was helping me on with my coat.

  “She is singing?” I asked Lukerya, involuntarily.

  Lukerya did not seem to know what I was talking about, and she went on staring at me incomprehensibly. But of course I was rather incomprehensible.

  “Is it the first time you’ve heard her sing?”

  “No, sir,” said Lukerya, “she sometimes sings when you are out.”

  I remember everything. I went down the stairs, went out into the street and walked along at random. I walked to the corner, and started looking vaguely ahead of me. All sorts of people passed by me, knocked against me, but I was not aware of anything. I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me to the Police Bridge. I haven’t the faintest idea why. Then suddenly I changed my mind and gave him a twenty-copeck piece.

  “Sorry to have troubled you,” I said, laughing stupidly at him, but my heart was suddenly filled with a strange ecstasy.

  I went back home, quickening my pace as I walked along. The poor, cracked broken note was again ringing in my heart. My breath failed me. Yes, the scales were falling, falling from my eyes! If she had started singing while I was in the house, it could only mean that she had forgotten all about me. That’s what was so terribly clear. I realised it in my heart, but my soul was aglow with ecstasy and it proved stronger than my fear.

  Oh, the irony of fate! Had there been anything else in my soul the whole winter, could there have been anything else but this feeling of ecstasy? But where had I been myself all the winter? Had I been there with my soul? I ran up the stairs in a great hurry, and I don’t remember whether I was apprehensive or not when I went in. All I remember is that the floor seemed to be swaying and that I felt as though I were floating on a river. I entered the room. She was sitting in her usual place, with her head bent over her sewing, but she was no longer singing. She threw a rapid and casual glance at me. It was hardly a glance really. Just the usual indifferent sign of recognition one gives when someone comes into the room.

  I went up straight to her and sat down beside her. Close to her, like one demented. She looked at me quickly, as though she were afraid of me. I took her hand, and I don’t remember what I said to her, or rather what I meant to say to her, for I couldn’t even speak properly. My voice shook and did not obey me. Nor did I know what to say. All I did was to gasp for breath.

  “Let’s talk—you know—say something!” I suddenly stammered out something utterly idiotic.

  Oh, how could I think of anything sensible to say at that moment? She started again and, as she looked at my face, she drew back from me in horror, but almost immediately a look of stern surprise came into her eyes. Yes, surprise and stern. She looked at me with wide-open eyes. That sternness, that stern surprise seemed all at once to deal me a stunning blow. “So it’s love you still want? Love?” that look of surprise asked me, though she herself never uttered a word. But I read it all. I read it all. My world came crashing about my ears and I just collapsed at her feet. Yes, I fell down at her feet. She jumped up quickly, but I seized her hands and held her back with all the force at my command.

  And I fully understood my despair. Oh, I understood it all right! But, you see, ecstasy was blazing so fiercely in my heart that I feared I should die. I kissed her feet rapturously, in a transport of happiness. Yes, in a transport of happiness. Boundless, infinite happiness. And I did it though I realised full well all the hopelessness of my despair. I wept, I tried to say something, but could not speak. Her surprise and terror suddenly gave way to a sort of worried thought, a thought of great urgency, and she looked at me strangely, wildly even. She wanted to understand something without a moment’s delay, and—she smiled. She was ashamed that I was kissing her feet, horribly ashamed, and she kept drawing them away from me. But I immediately kissed the spot where her foot had rested. She saw it and began suddenly laughing from embarrassment (you know the feeling when one starts laughing from embarrassment). She became hysterical—I saw it coming—her hands were trembling. But I paid no attention to it. I went on murmuring that I loved her, that I wouldn’t get up. “Let me kiss your dress. Let me worship you like this all my life!” I don’t know, I don’t remember, but suddenly she broke into sobs and trembled all over. She had a terrible fit of hysterics. I had frightened her.

  I picked her up in my arms and carried her to the bed. When her attack was over, she sat up in bed and, looking terribly distressed, she seized me by the hands and begged me to calm myself. “Come, don’t torment yourself! There, there. Be calm, please!” and once more she burst into tears.

  All that evening I remained at her side. I kept telling her that I’d take her to Boulogne to bathe in the sea—now, at once, in a fortnight—that she had such a cracked little voice—I had heard it that afternoon—that I would give up my pawnshop—sell it to Dobronravov—that we should start life afresh. But, above all, Boulogne, Boulogne! She listened to me, but she was still afraid. It was not that, however, that worried me at the time. What worried me was that I felt more and more irresistibly drawn to fling myself at her feet again, to kiss again and again the ground on which her feet rested, and to pray to her, and “I shall ask nothing, nothing more of you,” I kept repeating every minute. “Don’t answer me. Don’t take any notice of me at all. Only let me look at you from a corner. Make me your slave, your lapdog!” She wept.

  “And I thought you’d let me alone,” she said suddenly, the words escaping her involuntarily, so much so that quite possibly she herself was not aware of what she said.

  And yet.… Oh, that was the most important, the most fateful sentence she uttered that evening, and one that was only too easy for me to understand, and it stabbed my heart as though with a knife. It explained everything to me. Everything! But while she was beside me, while she was before my eyes, I was full of hope, and I was terribly happy. Oh, I exhausted her completely that evening, and I realised it, but I kept thinking that any moment I might succeed in changing it all. At length, towards night, she was ut
terly worn out, and I persuaded her to go to sleep. She fell asleep at once, and slept soundly. I expected her to be delirious, and she was a little. I kept getting up every minute in the night, and went softly in my slippers to have a look at her. I wrung my hands over her, as I looked at that sick creature in that poor little bed, the iron bedstead I had bought her for three roubles. I knelt down, but I did not dare to kiss her feet while she was asleep (and without her permission!). I knelt to pray, but jumped to my feet almost at once. Lukerya was keeping an eye on me, and kept coming in out of the kitchen. I went out to her and told her to go to bed. I told her that tomorrow everything would be “quite different.”

  And I believed it. Blindly, madly, frighteningly. Oh, my heart overflowed with rapture! I was only waiting for the next day. No, I did not believe in any trouble, in spite of the symptoms. I had not come to my senses yet, though the scales had fallen from my eyes. And for a long, long time I did not come to my senses. Oh, not till today, till this very day! And how could I have expected to come to my senses then? Wasn’t she still alive then? Wasn’t she still before me and I before her? “Tomorrow she’ll wake up, and I’ll tell her all this, and she will see it all.” That was what I kept saying to myself then. It was so clear and simple, and hence my ecstasy. The main thing was the trip to Boulogne. For some reason I kept thinking that Boulogne was everything. That there was something final about Boulogne. “To Boulogne! To Boulogne!” I waited frantically for the morning.

  III

  I UNDERSTAND IT TOO WELL

  And all that was only a few days ago. Five days—only five days ago. Last Tuesday! Oh, if there had been a little more time! If only she had waited a little longer, I would have dispersed this terrible cloud of darkness. And was she not absolutely calm and composed? The very next day she listened to me with a smile, though no doubt she did look a little embarrassed. Yes, that above all. Her embarrassment, I mean. All the time, all during those five days, I could not help noticing that she was either embarrassed or ashamed. And frightened, too. Very frightened. I don’t want to argue about it. I would be mad to deny it. She was frightened, but after all that was natural enough. How could she help being frightened? For hadn’t we been strangers to one another for such a long time? Hadn’t we become so terribly estranged from each other? And now suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, all this.… But I paid no attention to her fear. A new life shone like a bright star before me! It is true, it is absolutely true: I made a mistake. Perhaps many mistakes. As soon as we woke next morning (it was on Wednesday) I at once made a mistake. I at once began to treat her as my friend. I was too much in a hurry. Much too much in a hurry. But I simply had to confess everything to her. Yes, my confession was absolutely necessary. Even more than a confession! I did not conceal from her what I had been concealing from myself all my life. I told her frankly that all during the winter I had never for a moment doubted that she loved me. I explained to her that my money-lending business was nothing but a symptom of my loss of willpower. It was nothing but a mental aberration. A personal idea of self-castigation and self-exaltation. I explained to her that I was a coward in the bar of the theatre that evening. I couldn’t help it. It has something to do with my character, my oversensitiveness. I was thrown into a panic by the surroundings. It was the fact that it took place in a theatre bar that unnerved me. What had made me so nervous was—how could I walk up to the hussar officer? How could I do it without cutting a ridiculous figure? What I was afraid of was not the duel but that I might make a fool of myself. Later, of course, I would not admit it. And I tormented myself and everybody else. I had tormented her for it, too. In fact, I only married her so as to be able to torment her for it. In general, I spoke for the most part as though I were in a fever. She kept clasping my hands, begging me to stop. “You’re exaggerating.… You’re tormenting yourself!” And again she was weeping. Again she was on the point of becoming hysterical. She kept asking me all the time not to say anything about it. Not to think of it at all.

  I disregarded her entreaties, or almost disregarded them. Spring! Boulogne! There was the sun there! There was our new sun there! I could speak of nothing else. I shut up the pawnshop. I transferred my business to Dobronravov. On the spur of the moment I even proposed to her to distribute all my money among the poor. All but the original three thousand roubles I had received from my godmother. That money would pay for our trip to Boulogne, and when we came back, we’d start a new life. A life of honest work. So it was decided, for she did not contradict me. She said nothing. She only smiled. And it seemed that she smiled more out of consideration for me, so as not to disappoint me. I realised, of course, that I was worrying her. Do not imagine I was such a fool or such an egoist as not to see it. I saw everything. Everything to the last detail. I saw and I knew everything more than anyone. All my despair was laid bare.

  I told her everything about myself and about her. And about Lukerya. I told her that I had wept.… Oh, I, too, changed the subject. I did not want to remind her of certain things. And once or twice she looked quite cheerful. Yes, I remember that. I remember it distinctly! Why do you say I looked at her and saw nothing? If only this had not happened, everything would have been different. Why, didn’t she tell me that amusing story about Gil Blas and the Archbishop of Granada herself the day before yesterday? We were discussing books. She was telling me about the books she had been reading that winter, and it was then that she told me about that scene from Gil Blas. And she laughed, too! Yes, she laughed, and, good Lord, what a sweet, childish laughter it was! Just as she used to laugh at the time of our engagement (A moment! Only a fleeting moment!). How glad I was! How happy! I was terribly struck by it, by the story of the Archbishop, I mean. She could then find so much happiness and peace of mind as to be able to enjoy a literary masterpiece. What else could it mean but that she was beginning to regain her self-composure completely, that she was already beginning to believe that I would let her alone. “I thought you’d let me alone!” that was what she had said on Tuesday, wasn’t it? Oh, the thought of a ten-year-old girl! And she did believe that everything would really remain as it was. She believed that she’d always be sitting at her table and I at mine, and that the two of us would go on like that till we were old. All of a sudden I come up to her as her husband, and a husband wants love! Oh, how blind I was! Oh, what a frightful misunderstanding!

  Another mistake I made was to have looked at her with such rapture. I should have controlled myself. For my transports only frightened her. But did I not control myself? Did I kiss her feet again? No. Never for a moment did I betray the fact that—well—that I was her husband. Oh, that thought never entered my head. All I did was to worship her. But it was quite obviously impossible for me to have been silent all the time. I had to say something. I suddenly told her that I enjoyed talking to her. I said that I thought her incomparably—yes, incomparably—better educated and mentally developed than I was. She blushed crimson and looked very embarrassed. She said I was exaggerating. Then—fool that I was!—I could not restrain myself and I told her with what delight I had listened to her battle of wits with that awful swine! How overjoyed I had been when I realised, as I stood behind the door, how much hatred there lay hidden in all her replies to that unspeakable cad. How pleased I had been with all her clever repartees, her brilliant sallies, combined with such child-like artlessness. She seemed to start, she murmured something about my exaggerating again, and all of a sudden her face darkened, she buried it in her hands, and broke into sobs.… Here I was unable to restrain myself any longer. I went down on my knees before her again, I began kissing her feet again, and again, as on Tuesday, it all ended in hysterics.… That was yesterday evening, and in the morning.…

  In the morning? Why, you madman, it was this morning, only a few hours ago, only a few hours ago!

  Listen and try to understand. When we met at the tea-table a few hours ago (after last night’s fit of hysterics), she surprised me by her calmness. Yes, she was absolutely self-compo
sed. And all night I had been trembling with fear because of what happened yesterday. And quite suddenly she herself came up to me and, folding her hands, began telling me (only a few hours ago, only a few hours ago!) that she was guilty, that she was fully aware of it, that her guilt had been torturing her all the winter, that it was torturing her even now, that she appreciated my generosity very much, that “I will be a true and faithful wife to you,” that “I will always respect you.…” Then I leapt to my feet like a madman and embraced her. I kissed her. I kissed her face. I kissed her on her lips like a husband for the first time after a long separation. And why, why did I go out after that? Only for a couple of hours! Our passports for abroad!… Oh, God, why didn’t I come back five minutes earlier? Only five minutes earlier. And that crowd at our gates. Those eyes staring at me! Oh, God!

  Lukerya says (Oh, I shall never let Lukerya go now! She knows everything. She’s been with us all the winter, and she’ll be able to tell me everything!), Lukerya says that when I had gone out of the house, and only about twenty minutes before I came back, she suddenly went into our room where her mistress was at the time, intending to ask her something (I forget what), and she noticed that her icon (the same icon of the Holy Virgin) had been taken out of the case and was standing before her on the table, as though her mistress had only a moment ago been saying her prayers before it. “What’s the matter, madam?” “Nothing, Lukerya, you can go.” Then she said, “Wait a minute, Lukerya,” and she went up to her and kissed her. “Are you happy, madam?” Lukerya asked. “Yes, thank you, Lukerya, I am happy.” “Master ought to have asked your pardon a long time ago, madam. Thank God, you’ve made it up now.” “All right, Lukerya,” she said. “You can go now, Lukerya.” And she smiled so—so strangely. So strangely that ten minutes later Lukerya went back to have a look at her.