Poor Folk Anthology

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  I had not of course expected to find them cheerful; but the peculiar overwhelming distress mixed with uneasiness and anxiety, which I read in their eyes, struck me at once, and I instantly concluded that "sorrow for the dead was certainly not the only cause." All this, I repeat, I remember perfectly.

  In spite of everything I embraced mother tenderly and at once asked about HIM. A gleam of tremulous curiosity came into mother's eyes at once. I made haste to mention that we had spent the whole evening together, till late at night, but that to-day he had been away from home since early morning, though at parting last night he had asked me to come as early as I could this morning. Mother made no answer, and Tatyana Pavlovna, seizing a favourable moment, shook her finger at me meaningly.

  "Good-bye, brother," Liza blurted out, going quickly out of the room. I ran after her, of course, but she stopped short at the outer door.

  "I thought you would guess you must come with me," she said in a rapid whisper.

  "Liza, what's the matter?"

  "I don't know what, but a great deal, no doubt the last chapter of 'the same old story.' He has not come, but they have heard something about him. They won't tell you, you needn't trouble yourself, and you won't ask, if you are sensible; but mother's shattered. I've not asked about anything either. Good-bye."

  She opened the door.

  "And, Liza, about you, yourself, have you nothing to tell me?" I dashed after her into the entry. Her terribly exhausted and despairing face pierced my heart. She looked at me, not simply with anger, but with a sort of exasperated fury, laughed bitterly, and waved me off.

  "If only he were dead I should thank God!" she flung up at me from the stairs, and was gone. She said this of Prince Sergay, and he, at that very time, was lying delirious and unconscious.

  I went upstairs, sad but excited. "The same old story! What same old story?" I thought defiantly, and I had suddenly an irresistible impulse to tell them at least a part of the impression left upon me by his last night's confession, and the confession too. "They're thinking some evil of him now, so let them know all about it!" floated though my mind.

  I remember that I succeeded very cleverly in beginning to tell them my story. Instantly their faces betrayed an intense curiosity. This time Tatyana Pavlovna positively fixed me with her eyes; but mother showed more reserve; she was very grave, but the glimmer of a faint, beautiful, though utterly hopeless smile came into her face, and scarcely left it all the time I was talking. I told the story well, of course, though I knew that it would be almost beyond their comprehension. To my surprise Tatyana Pavlovna did not attack me, did not insist on minute details, or try to pick holes as she usually did as soon as I began telling anything. She only pinched up her lips and screwed up her eyes, as though making an effort to get to the bottom of it. At times I positively fancied that they understood it all, though that could hardly have been so… . I spoke for instance of his convictions, but principally of his enthusiasm last night, his enthusiastic feeling for mother, his love for mother and how he had kissed her portrait… . Hearing this they exchanged a rapid silent glance with each other, and mother flushed all over, though both continued silent. Then … then I could not of course BEFORE MOTHER touch on the principal point, that is his meeting with HER and all the rest of it, above all HER letter to him the day before, and his moral resurrection after getting that letter; and that indeed was the chief point, so that all his feeling, with which I had hoped to please mother so much, naturally remained inexplicable, though of course that was not my fault; I had told all that could be told extremely well. I ended in complete confusion; their silence was still unbroken and I began to feel very uncomfortable with them.

  "Most likely he's come back now, and may be at my lodgings waiting for me," I said, and got up to go.

  "Go and see! go and see!" Tatyana Pavlovna urged me resolutely.

  "Have you been downstairs?" mother asked me, in a sort of half whisper, as she said good-bye.

  "Yes, I have been, and I bowed down and prayed for him. What a peaceful, serene face he has, mother! Thank you, mother, for not sparing expense over his coffin. At first I thought it strange, but I thought, at once, that I should have done the same."

  "Will you come to the church to-morrow?" she asked, and her lips trembled.

  "What do you mean, mother?" I asked in surprise. "I shall come to the requiem service to-day, and I shall come again; and … besides, to-morrow is your birthday, mother darling! To think that he died only thee days before!"

  I went away painfully surprised: how could she ask such questions, whether I were coming to the funeral service in the church? "If that's what they think of me, what must they think of HIM?"

  I knew that Tatyana Pavlovna would run after me and I purposely waited at the outer door of the flat; but she pushed me out on to the stairs and closed the door behind her.

  "Tatyana Pavlovna, don't you expect Andrey Petrovitch today or to-morrow, then? I am alarmed… ."

  "Hold your tongue. Much it matters your being alarmed. Tell me, tell me what you kept back when you were telling us about that rigmarole last night!"

  I didn't think it necessary to conceal it, and feeling almost irritated with Versilov I told her all about Katerina Nikolaevna's letter to him the day before and of the effect of the letter, that is of his resurrection into a new life. To my amazement the fact of the letter did not surprise her in the least, and I guessed that she knew of it already.

  "But you are lying."

  "No, I'm not."

  "I dare say," she smiled malignantly, as though meditating: "risen again, has he, so that's the latest, is it? But is it true that he kissed her portrait?"

  "Yes, Tatyana Pavlovna."

  "Did he kiss it with feeling, he wasn't putting it on?"

  "Putting it on, as though he ever did! For shame, Tatyana Pavlovna; you've a coarse soul, a woman's soul."

  I said this with heat; but she did not seem to hear me; she seemed to be pondering something again, in spite of the terrible chilliness of the stairs. I had on my fur coat, but she was in her indoor dress.

  "I might have asked you to do something, the only pity is you're so stupid," she said with contempt and apparent vexation. "Listen, go to Anna Andreyevna's, and see what's going on there… . But no, don't go; a booby's always a booby! Go along, quick march, why do you stand like a post?"

  "And I'm not going to Anna Andreyevna's. Anna Andreyevna sent to ask me herself."

  "She did? Darya Onisimovna?" she turned to me quickly; she had been on the point of going away, and had already opened the door, but she shut it again with a slam.

  "Nothing will induce me to go to Anna Andreyevna's," I repeated with spiteful enjoyment; "I won't go because I've just been called a booby, though I've never been so sharp-sighted as to-day. I see all you're doing, it's as clear as day, but I'm not going to Anna Andreyevna all the same!"

  "I know it," she exclaimed, but again pursuing her own thoughts, and taking no notice of my words at all. "They will devour her now completely, and draw her into a deadly noose."

  "Anna Andreyevna?"

  "Fool!"

  "Then whom do you mean? Surely not Katerina Nikolaevna? What sort of deadly noose?"

  I was terribly frightened, a vague but terrible idea set my whole heart quivering. Tatyana Pavlovna looked at me searchingly.

  "What are you up to there?" she asked suddenly. "What are you meddling in there? I've heard something about you too, you'd better look out!"

  "Listen, Tatyana Pavlovna, I'll tell you a terrible secret, only not just now, there's not time now, but to-morrow, when we're alone; but in return you tell me the whole truth, how and what you mean by a deadly noose, for I am all in a tremble… ."

  "Much I care for your trembling," she exclaimed. "What's this other secret you want to tell to-morrow? Why, you know nothing whatever!" she transfixed me with a questioning look. "Why, you swore then that Kraft had burnt the letter, didn't you?"

  "Tatyana Pavlovna, I tell yo
u again, don't torment me," I persisted in my turn, not answering her question, for I was beside myself. "Take care, Tatyana Pavlovna, that your hiding this from me may not lead to something worse … why, yesterday he was absolutely turning over a new leaf!"

  "Go along, you idiot! you are like a love-sick sparrow yourself, I'll be bound; father and son in love with the same idol! Foo, horrid creatures!"

  She vanished, slamming the door indignantly. Furious at the impudent, shameless cynicism of these last words, a cynicism of which only a woman would have been capable, I ran away, deeply insulted. But I won't describe my vague sensations as I have vowed to keep to facts which will explain everything now; on my way of course, I called in at his lodging, and heard from the nurse that he had not been home at all.

  "And isn't he coming at all?"

  "Goodness knows."

  2.

  But I waked up next morning feeling fresher and in better heart. I unconsciously reproached myself, indeed, with perfect sincerity, for a certain levity, and, as it were, superciliousness, with which it seemed to me, recalling it, I had listened to some parts of his "confession" the evening before. Supposing it had been to some extent muddled, and some revelations had been, as it were, a little delirious and incoherent, he had not, of course, prepared to deliver a speech when he invited me the day before. He had simply done me a great honour in turning to me, as his one friend at such a moment, and I shall never forget his doing it. On the contrary, his confession was "touching," though people may laugh at me for saying so, and if there were glimpses from time to time of something cynical, or even something that seemed ridiculous, I was not so narrow as to be unable to understand and accept realism, which did not, however, detract from the ideal. The great point was now that I understood the man, and I even felt, and was almost vexed at feeling, that it had all turned out to be so simple: I had always in my heart set that man on a supreme pinnacle, in the clouds, and had insisted on shrouding his life in mystery, so that I had naturally wished not to fit the key to it so easily.

  In his meeting WITH HER, however, and in the sufferings he had endured for two years, there was much that was complex. "He did not want to live under the yoke of fate; he wanted to be free, and not a slave to fate; through his bondage to fate he had been forced to hurt mother, who was still waiting for him at Königsberg… ." Besides, I looked upon him in any case as a preacher: he cherished in his heart the golden age, and knew all about the future of atheism; and then the meeting with HER had shattered everything, distorted everything! Oh, I was not a traitor to her, but still I was on his side. Mother, for instance, I reflected, would have been no hindrance, nor would marriage with her be so indeed. That I understood; that was something utterly different from his meeting with THAT WOMAN. Mother, it is true, would not have given him peace either, but that was all the better: one cannot judge of such men as of others, and their life must always be different; and that's not unseemly at all; on the contrary, it would be unseemly if they settled down and became altogether like other ordinary people. His praises of the nobility, and his words: "Je mourrai gentilhomme," did not disconcert me in the least; I understood what sort of gentilhomme he was; he was a man ready to abandon everything, and to become the champion of political rights for all, and the leading Russian thought of a universal harmony of ideas. And even though all this might be nonsense, that is "the universal harmony of ideas" (which is of course inconceivable), yet the very fact that he had all his life bowed down to an idea, and not to the stupid golden calf, was good. My God! why, conceiving "my idea," had I, I myself—could I—have been bowing down to the golden calf, could I have been aiming only at money, then? I swear that all I wanted was the idea! I swear I would not have had one chair, one sofa upholstered in velvet, and I would have eaten the same plate of soup as now, if I had had millions. I dressed and hurried off impatiently to see him. I may add that in regard to his outburst yesterday about the "document," I was ever so much more at ease in my mind than I had been the day before. To begin with, I hoped to have it out with him, and besides, what was there in Lambert's having wormed his way in to him, and having talked to him of something? But what rejoiced me most was an extraordinary sensation: it came from the thought that "he no longer loved HER"; I put absolute faith in it, and felt as if some one had lifted a fearful weight off my heart. I recall a conjecture that flashed upon me at the time: that the unseemliness and senselessness of his last violent outbreak, on hearing about Büring, and the sending of that insulting letter, that that final crisis might be taken as a sign and augury of a change in his feeling, and an approaching return to sanity; it must be as it is in illness, I thought, and, in fact, he is bound to reach the opposite extreme, it is a pathological episode, and nothing more.

  This thought made me happy.

  "And let her arrange her life as she pleases, let her marry her Büring as much as she likes, so long as he, my father, my friend, loves her no longer," I exclaimed.

  I had, however, certain secret feelings of my own, on which I do not care to enlarge in my notes here.

  That's enough. And now, without further reflections, I will give an account of the awful event that followed, and how the facts worked together to bring it about.

  3.

  Facts, facts! … But will the reader understand? I remember how these facts overwhelmed me and prevented me from thinking clearly, so that by the end of the day my head was in a perfect whirl. And so I think I must say two or three words by way of introduction.

  The question that tormented me was this: if he really had gone through a spiritual change and had ceased to love her, in that case where should he have been now? The answer was: first of all with me whom he had embraced the evening before, and next with mother, whose portrait he had kissed. And yet, in spite of these natural alternatives, he had suddenly, "as soon as it was light," left home and gone off somewhere, and Darya Onisimovna had for some reason babbled of his not being likely to return. What's more, Liza had hinted at the "last chapter" of some "same old story," and of mother's having some news of him, and the latest news, too; moreover, they undoubtedly knew of Katerina Nikolaevna's letter, too (I noticed that), and yet they did not believe in "his resurrection into a new life" though they had listened to me attentively. Mother was crushed, and Tatyana Pavlovna had been diabolically sarcastic at the word "resurrection." But if all this was so, it must mean that some revulsion of feeling had come over him again in the night, another crisis, and this—after yesterday's enthusiasm, emotion, pathos! So all his "resurrection" had burst like a soap-bubble, and he, perhaps, was rushing about somewhere again now, in the same frenzy as he had been after hearing the news of Buring! There was the question, too, what would become of mother, of me, of all of us, and … and, finally, what would become of HER? What was the deadly noose Tatyana had babbled of when she was sending me to Anna Andreyevna? So that "deadly noose" was there, at Anna Andreyevna's! Why at Anna Andreyevna's? Of course I should run to Anna Andreyevna's; I had said that I wouldn't go on purpose, only in annoyance; I would run there at once, but what was it Tatyana had said about the "document"? And hadn't he himself said to me the evening before: "Burn the document"?

  These were my thoughts, this was what strangled me, too, in a deadly noose; but what I wanted most of all was HIM. With him I could have decided everything—I felt that; we should have understood each other in two words! I should have gripped his hands, pressed them; I should have found burning words in my heart— this was the dream that haunted me. Oh, I would have calmed his frenzy… . But where was he? Where was he?

  And, as though this were not enough, Lambert must needs turn up at such a moment, when I was so excited! When I was only a few steps from my door I met him; he uttered a yell of delight on seeing me, and seized me by the arm.

  "I've been to see you thr-r-ree times already… . Enfin! come and have lunch."

  "Stay, have you been to my rooms; was Andrey Petrovitch there?"

  "No, there was no one there. Dr-r-rop t
hem all! You're a fool, you were cross yesterday; you were drunk, and I've something important to tell you; I heard a splendid piece of news this morning, about what we were discussing yesterday… ."

  "Lambert," I interrupted hurriedly, breathing hard and unconsciously declaiming a little. "I am only stopping with you now to finish with you for good. I told you yesterday, but you still won't understand. Lambert, you're a baby and as stupid as a Frenchman. You persist in thinking that it's the same as it was at Touchard's, and that I'm as stupid as at Touchard's… . But I'm not so silly as I was at Touchard's… . I was drunk yesterday, but not from wine, but because I was excited; and if I seemed to agree with the stuff you talked, it was because I pretended, so as to find out what you were driving at. I deceived you, and you were delighted and believed it and went on talking nonsense. Let me tell you that marrying her is such nonsense that it wouldn't take in a schoolboy in the first form. How could you imagine I should believe it? Did you believe it? You believed it because you have never been in aristocratic society, and don't know how things are done among decent people. Things aren't done so simply in aristocratic society, and it's not possible for her so simply to go and get married… . Now I will tell you plainly what it is you want: you mean to entice me, so as to make me drunk, and to get me to give up the document, and to join you in some scoundrelly plot against Katerina Nikolaevna! So I tell you it's nonsense! I'll never come to you. And you may as well know that to-morrow or the day after that letter will be in her own hands, for it belongs to her, for it was written by her, and I'll give it to her myself, and if you care to know where, I can tell you that through Tatyana Pavlovna, her friend, I shall give it at Tatyana Pavlovna's, and in Tatyana Pavlovna's presence, and I'll take nothing from her for giving it her. And now be off and keep away from me for ever, or else … or else, I shan't treat you so civilly next time, Lambert… ."