The Adolescent

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  “And then I’ll certainly love you, because I feel it even now!” The woman in her couldn’t help herself and threw him these last words from the threshold.

  She went out. I hastily and inaudibly moved to the kitchen and, almost without looking at Nastasya Egorovna, who was waiting for me, set off down the back stairs and across the courtyard to the street. But I only had time to see her get into a hired carriage that was waiting for her by the porch. I ran down the street.

  Chapter Eleven

  I

  I WENT RUNNING to Lambert. Oh, how I wish I could give a semblance of logic and seek out the least bit of common sense in my acts that evening and all that night, but even now, when I can grasp everything, I’m in no way able to present the matter in proper and clear connection. There was a feeling here, or, better, a whole chaos of feelings, among which I was naturally bound to get lost. True, there was one chiefest feeling that overwhelmed me and commanded everything, but . . . need I confess it? The more so as I’m not certain . . .

  I ran to Lambert, naturally, beside myself. I even frightened him and Alphonsinka at first. I’ve always noticed that the most lost, most crapulous Frenchmen are exceedingly attached, in their domestic life, to some sort of bourgeois order, to some sort of most prosaic daily routine of life established once and for all. However, Lambert very soon realized that something had happened and went into raptures, seeing me finally at his place, finally possessing me. That was all he thought about, day and night, those days! Oh, how he needed me! And now, when he had already lost all hope, I suddenly come on my own, and in such madness—precisely the state he needed.

  “Wine, Lambert!” I shouted. “Let’s drink, let’s storm it up. Alphonsina, where’s your guitar?”

  I won’t describe the scene—it’s superfluous. We drank, and I told him everything, everything. He listened greedily. I—and I was the first—directly suggested a plot to him, a conflagration. First of all, we must invite Katerina Nikolaevna here by letter . . .

  “That can be done,” Lambert confirmed, snatching at every word I said.

  Second, to be convincing, we must send a complete copy of her “document” with the letter, so that she can see straight off that she’s not being deceived.

  “So we should, so we must!” Lambert confirmed, constantly exchanging glances with Alphonsinka.

  Third, the one to invite her must be Lambert himself, on his own, in the manner of some unknown person just arrived from Moscow, and I must bring Versilov . . .

  “Versilov can be done . . .” Lambert confirmed.

  “Must be, not can be!” I cried. “It’s necessary! The whole thing’s being done for him!” I explained, sipping gulp after gulp from my glass. (All three of us were drinking, but it seems I alone drank the whole bottle of champagne, while they only made a show of it.) “Versilov and I will sit in the other room (we have to secure the other room, Lambert!), and when she suddenly agrees to everything—to the ransom in cash and to the other ransom, because they’re all mean—then Versilov and I will come out and catch her in all her meanness, and Versilov, seeing how loathsome she is, will be cured at once and will kick her out. But we need to have Bjoring there as well, so that he, too, can have a look at her!” I added in a frenzy.

  “No, we don’t need Bjoring,” Lambert observed.

  “We do, we do!” I yelled again. “You understand nothing, Lambert, because you’re stupid! On the contrary, let the scandal spread through high society—that way we’ll be revenged both on high society and on her, and let her be punished! She’ll give you a promissory note, Lambert . . . I don’t need money, I spit on money; you’ll stoop down to pick it up and put it in your pocket along with my spit, but instead I will crush her!”

  “Yes, yes,” Lambert kept confirming, “it’s all as you . . .” He kept exchanging glances with Alphonsinka.

  “Lambert! She’s terribly in awe of Versilov; I’ve just been convinced of it,” I babbled to him.

  “It’s good that you spied it all out. I never supposed you were such a spy and had so much sense!” He said that in order to flatter me.

  “Lies, Frenchman, I’m not a spy, but there is a lot of sense in me! And you know, Lambert, she loves him!” I went on, trying with all my might to speak myself out. “But she won’t marry him, because Bjoring’s an officer of the guards and Versilov is only a magnanimous man and friend of mankind, a comical person, in their opinion, and nothing more! Oh, she understands this passion and enjoys it, she flirts, she entices, but she won’t marry him! She’s a woman, she’s a serpent! Every woman is a serpent, and every serpent is a woman! He’s got to be cured; he’s got to have the scales torn off. Let him see what she’s like, and he’ll be cured. I’ll bring him to you, Lambert!”

  “So you must,” Lambert kept confirming, pouring more for me every minute.

  Above all, he simply trembled over not angering me with something, over not contradicting me, and getting me to drink more. This was so crude and obvious that even I couldn’t help noticing it then. But I myself couldn’t leave for anything; I kept drinking and talking, and I wanted terribly to speak myself out finally. When Lambert went for another bottle, Alphonsinka played some Spanish motif on the guitar; I almost burst into tears.

  “Lambert, you don’t know all!” I exclaimed with deep feeling. “This man absolutely must be saved, because he’s surrounded by . . . sorcery. If she married him, the next morning, after the first night, he’d kick her out . . . because that does happen. Because such violent, wild love works like a fit, like a deadly noose, like an illness, and—as soon as you reach satisfaction—the scales fall at once and the opposite feeling appears: disgust and hatred, the wish to exterminate, to crush. Do you know the story of Abishag,40 Lambert, have you read it?”

  “No, I don’t recall. A novel?” murmured Lambert.

  “Oh, you know nothing, Lambert! You’re terribly, terribly uneducated . . . but I spit on that. It makes no difference. Oh, he loves mama; he kissed her portrait; he’ll drive the other woman out the next morning and go to mama himself; but it will be too late, and that’s why we must save him now . . .”

  Towards the end I started weeping bitterly; but I still went on talking, and I drank terribly much. The most characteristic feature consisted in the fact that Lambert, all evening, never once asked about the “document,” that is, where it was. That is, that I should show it to him, lay it on the table. What, it seems, would have been more natural than to ask about it, when we were arranging to act together? Another feature: we only said it must be done, that we must do “it” without fail, but where it would be, how and when—of that we also didn’t say a word! He only yessed me and exchanged glances with Alphonsinka—nothing more! Of course, I couldn’t put anything together then, but all the same I remember it.

  I ended by falling asleep on his sofa without undressing. I slept for a very long time and woke up very late. I remember that, on waking up, I lay for some time on the sofa, as if stunned, trying to remember and put things together and pretending I was still asleep. But Lambert turned out not to be in the room: he had left. It was going on ten o’clock; the stove was burning and crackling, exactly as then, after that night, when I found myself at Lambert’s for the first time. But Alphonsinka was keeping watch on me from behind the screen. I noticed it at once, because she peeked out a couple of times and checked on me, but I closed my eyes each time and pretended I was still asleep. I did that because I was crushed and had to make sense of my situation. I felt with horror the whole absurdity and loathsomeness of my night’s confession to Lambert, my complicity with him, my mistake in having run to him! But, thank God, the document still remained with me, was still sewn up in my side pocket; I felt it with my hand—it was there! So all I had to do right then was jump up and run away, and there was no point in being ashamed of Lambert afterwards; Lambert wasn’t worth it.

  But I was also ashamed of myself! I was my own judge, and—God, what there was in my soul! But I’m not going to
describe that infernal, unbearable feeling and that consciousness of filth and vileness. But all the same I must confess it, because it seems the time has come for that. It should be pointed out in my notes. And so, let it be known that I wanted to disgrace her and witness her giving the ransom to Lambert (oh, baseness!), not because I wanted to save the mad Versilov and return him to mama, but because . . . maybe I myself was in love with her, in love and jealous! Jealous of whom? Of Bjoring? Of Versilov? Of all those she would look at or talk with at a ball, while I stood in the corner, ashamed of myself? . . . Oh, unseemliness!

  In short, I don’t know whom I was jealous of; I only felt and had become convinced during the past evening, like two times two, that for me she was lost, that this woman would spurn and deride me for my falseness and absurdity. She was truthful and honest, while I—I was a spy, and with documents!

  All this I’ve kept hidden in my heart ever since, but now the time has come, and I’m drawing the bottom line. But, once again and for the last time: maybe I’ve heaped lies on myself by a whole half or even seventy-five percent! That night I hated her, like a man beside himself, and later like a raging drunkard. I’ve already said it was a chaos of feelings and sensations in which I myself could make out nothing. But, all the same, they had to be spoken out, because at least a part of these feelings was certainly there.

  With irrepressible disgust and with the irrepressible intention of smoothing everything over, I suddenly jumped up from the sofa; but just as I jumped up, Alphonsinka instantly jumped out. I grabbed my coat and hat, and told her to tell Lambert that I was raving the night before, that I had slandered the woman, that I was deliberately joking, and that Lambert should never dare come to me . . . All this I brought out anyhow, haphazardly, hastily, in French, and, of course, awfully unclearly, but, to my surprise, Alphonsinka understood it all terribly well. But, what was most surprising, she was even as if glad of something.

  “Oui, oui,” she agreed with me, “c’est une honte! Une dame . . . Oh, vous êtes généreux, vous! Soyez tranquille, je ferai voir raison à Lambert . . .”99

  So that even at that moment I should have been thrown into perplexity, seeing such an unexpected turnabout in her feelings, which meant, perhaps, in Lambert’s as well. I went out silently, however; my soul was troubled and I wasn’t reasoning well. Oh, afterwards I considered it all, but by then it was too late! Oh, what an infernal machination came out here! I’ll stop and explain everything beforehand; otherwise it will be impossible for the reader to understand.

  The thing was that, back at my first meeting with Lambert, while I was thawing out in his apartment, I had murmured to him, like a fool, that the document was sewn up in my pocket. Then I had suddenly fallen asleep for a while on the sofa in the corner, and Lambert had immediately felt my pocket then and made sure that a piece of paper was actually sewn up in it. Several times later he had made sure that the paper was still there: so, for instance, during our dinner at the Tartars’, I remember he purposely put his arm around my waist several times. Realizing, finally, how important this paper was, he put together his own totally particular plan, which I never supposed he had. Like a fool, I imagined all the while that he was so persistently inviting me to his place solely to persuade me to join company with him and not act otherwise than together. But, alas! he invited me for something quite different! He invited me in order to get me dead drunk and, when I was sprawled out there, unconscious and snoring, to cut my pocket open and take possession of the document. That’s just what he and Alphonsinka did that night; it was Alphonsinka who cut open the pocket. Having taken out the letter, her letter, my Moscow document, they took a simple sheet of note paper of the same size, put it into the cut pocket, and sewed it up again as if nothing had happened, so that I wouldn’t notice anything. Alphonsinka also did the sewing up. And I, almost to the very end, I—for a whole day and a half—went on thinking that I was in possession of the secret, and that Katerina Nikolaevna’s destiny was still in my hands!

  A last word: this theft of the document was the cause of it all, all the remaining misfortunes!

  II

  NOW COME THE last twenty-four hours of my notes, and I’m at the final end!

  It was, I think, around half-past ten when, agitated and, as far as I remember, somehow strangely distracted, but with a definitive resolve in my heart, I came trudging to my apartment. I was not in a hurry, I already knew how I was going to act. And suddenly, just as I entered our corridor, I understood at once that a new calamity had befallen and an extraordinary complication of matters had occurred: the old prince, having just been brought from Tsarskoe Selo, was in our apartment, and Anna Andreevna was with him!

  He had been put not in my room, but in the two rooms next to mine, which belonged to the landlord. The day before, as it turned out, certain changes and embellishments, though of a minimal sort, had been carried out in these rooms. The landlord and his wife had moved to the tiny closet occupied by the fussy pockmarked tenant whom I have mentioned before, and the pockmarked tenant had been confiscated for the time being—I don’t know where to.

  I was met by the landlord, who at once darted into my room. He did not have the same resolute air as the day before, but he was in an extraordinarily agitated state, equal, so to speak, to the event. I said nothing to him, but went to the corner and, clutching my head with my hands, stood there for about a minute. At first he thought I was “putting it on,” but in the end he couldn’t stand it and became alarmed.

  “Is anything wrong?” he murmured. “I’ve been waiting to ask you,” he added, seeing that I didn’t answer, “whether you wouldn’t like to open this door, for direct communication with the prince’s rooms . . . rather than through the corridor?” He was pointing to the side door, which was always locked, and which communicated with his own rooms and now, therefore, with the prince’s quarters.

  “Look here, Pyotr Ippolitovich,” I addressed him with a stern air, “I humbly beg you to go and invite Anna Andreevna here to my room for a talk. Have they been here long?”

  “Must be nearly an hour.”

  “So go.”

  He went and brought back the strange reply that Anna Andreevna and Prince Nikolai Ivanovich were impatiently awaiting me in their rooms—meaning that Anna Andreevna did not wish to come. I straightened and cleaned my frock coat, which had become wrinkled during the night, washed, combed my hair, all of that unhurriedly, and, aware of how necessary it was to be cautious, went to see the old man.

  The prince was sitting on the sofa at a round table, and Anna Andreevna was preparing tea for him in another corner, at another table covered with a tablecloth, on which the landlord’s samovar, polished as it had never been before, was boiling. I came in with the same stern look on my face, and the old man, instantly noticing it, gave a start, and the smile on his face quickly gave way to decided alarm. But I couldn’t keep it up, laughed at once, and held out my arms to him. The poor man simply threw himself into my embrace.

  Unquestionably, I realized at once whom I was dealing with. First of all, it became as clear to me as two times two that, during the time since I last saw him, they had made the old man, who had even been almost hale and still at least somewhat sensible and with a certain character, into a sort of mummy, a sort of perfect child, fearful and mistrustful. I will add that he knew perfectly well why he had been brought here, and that everything had happened exactly as I explained above, when I ran ahead of myself. He was suddenly struck, broken, crushed by the news of his daughter’s betrayal and of the madhouse. He had allowed himself to be brought, so frightened that he scarcely knew what he was doing. He had been told that I was in possession of the secret, and held the key to the ultimate solution. I’ll say beforehand: it was this ultimate solution and key that he feared more than anything in the world. He expected that I’d just walk in there with some sort of sentence on my forehead and a paper in my hand, and he was awfully glad that I was prepared meanwhile to laugh and chatter about other thing
s. When we embraced, he wept. I confess, I wept a bit, too. But I suddenly felt very sorry for him . . . Alphonsinka’s little dog went off into a high, bell-like barking and strained towards me from the sofa. He hadn’t parted from this tiny dog since the day he acquired it, and even slept with it.

  “Oh, je disais qu’il a du coeur!”100 he exclaimed, pointing at me to Anna Andreevna.

  “But how you’ve improved, Prince, what a fine, fresh, healthy look you have!” I observed. Alas! it was all quite the opposite: this was a mummy, and I only said it to encourage him.

  “N’est-cepas, n’est-cepas?”101 he repeated joyfully. “Oh, my health has improved astonishingly.”

  “Anyhow, have your tea, and if you offer me a cup, I’ll drink with you.”

  “Marvelous! ‘Let us drink and enjoy . . .’ or how does the poem go? Anna Andreevna, give him tea, il prend toujours par les sentiments102 . . . give us tea, my dear.”

  Anna Andreevna served us tea, but suddenly turned to me and began with extreme solemnity:

  “Arkady Makarovich, both of us, I and my benefactor, Prince Nikolai Ivanovich, have taken refuge with you. I consider that we have come to you, to you alone, and we are both asking you for shelter. Remember that almost the whole destiny of this saintly, this most noble and offended man is in your hands . . . We await the decision of your truthful heart!”

  But she was unable to finish; the prince was horrified and almost trembled with fear:

  “Après, après, n’est-ce pas? Chère amie! ” 103; he repeated, holding his hands up to her.

  I can’t express how unpleasantly her outburst also affected me. I said nothing in reply and contented myself only with a cold and grave bow; then I sat down at the table and even deliberately began talking about other things, about some foolishness, started laughing and cracking jokes . . . The old man was obviously grateful to me and became rapturously merry. But his merriment, though rapturous, was somehow fragile and might be supplanted at any moment by complete dispiritedness; that was clear from the first glance.