But I was ashamed of myself! I was my own judge, and — my God, what was there in my heart! But there’s no need to describe that hellish, insufferable feeling, and that consciousness of filth and vileness. But yet I must confess it, for I feel the time has come. It must be recorded in my story. So let it be known that I meant to shame her, and planned to be almost a witness of her yielding to Lambert’s demands — oh, the baseness!— not for the sake of saving Versilov in his madness and bringing him back to mother, but because . . . perhaps because I was myself in love and jealous! Jealous of whom: of Büring, of Versilov? Of anyone she might look at, or talk to at a ball, while I should be standing in a corner ashamed of myself. . . . Oh, the hideousness of it!
In short, I don’t know of whom I was jealous on her account; but all I felt and knew the evening before was that as certainly as twice two make four, she was lost to me, that that woman would spurn me and laugh at me for falseness and absurdity! She was truthful and honest, while I— I was a spy, using letters to threaten her!
All this I have kept hidden in my heart ever since, but now the day has come and I make up my account, but, again, for the last time. Perhaps fully half, or perhaps even seventy-five per cent. of what I am saying is a libel upon myself! That night I hated her in a kind of delirium, and afterwards like a drunken rowdy. I have said already that it was a chaos of feelings and sensations in which I could distinguish nothing clearly myself. But still I have had to confess it, for though only a part of what I felt, it was certainly present.
With an overpowering sense of disgust, and a firm determination to cancel all that had happened, I suddenly jumped up from the sofa; but as I jumped up, Alphonsine instantly popped out. I seized my overcoat and cap and told her to tell Lambert that I had been raving the evening before, that I had slandered a woman, that I had been joking, and that Lambert must not dare come near me again. . . . All this I expressed in a blundering fashion, talking hurriedly in French, and, of course, anything but clearly, but, to my surprise, Alphonsine understood everything perfectly; and what was most surprising of all, she seemed positively relieved at something.
“Oui, oui,” she said approvingly, “c’est une honte! Une dame. . . . Oh, vous être génereux, vous! Soyez tranquille, je ferai voir raison à Lambert. . . .”
So that I was even at that moment puzzled to explain the sudden change in her attitude, and consequently I suppose in Lambert’s. I went away, however, saying nothing; all was in confusion within me, and I was hardly capable of reasoning. Oh, afterwards I could explain it all, but then it was too late! Oh, what a hellish plot it was! I will pause here and explain it beforehand, as otherwise it will be impossible for the reader to understand it.
The fact was that at my very first interview with Lambert, when I was thawing in his lodging, I had muttered to him like a fool that the letter was sewn up in my pocket; then I had suddenly fallen asleep for a time on the sofa in the corner, and Lambert had promptly felt my pocket and was convinced that there was a piece of paper sewn up in it. Several times afterwards he made sure that the paper was still there; when we were dining, for instance, at the “Tatar’s,” I remember that he several times put his arms round my waist on purpose. Grasping the importance of the letter he made a separate plan of his own of which I had no suspicion at all. I, like a fool, imagined all the time that he urged me to come home so persistently to get me to join his gang and to act only in concert with him, but, alas! he invited me with quite a different object! He wanted to make me dead drunk, and when I was stretched snoring and unconscious, to rip open my pocket and take possession of the letter. This was precisely what he and Alphonsine had done that night; Alphonsine had unpicked the pocket, taking out the letter, HER LETTER, the document I had brought from Moscow, they had taken a piece of plain notepaper the same size, put it in the pocket and sewn it up again, as if nothing had happened, so that I might notice no difference. Alphonsine had sewn it up. And I, up to the very end, for another day and a half — still went on believing that I was in possession of the secret, and that Katerina Nikolaevena’s fate was still in my hands.
A last word: that theft of the letter was the cause of everything and of all the other disasters that followed.
2
The last twenty-four hours of my story have come and I am at the end!
It was, I believe, about half-past ten, when excited, and, as far as I remember, strangely absent-minded, but with a firm determination in my heart, I dragged myself to my lodgings. I was not in a hurry, I knew how I was going to act. And scarcely had I stepped into the passage when I realised at once that a new calamity had occurred, and an extraordinary complication had arisen: the old prince had just been brought from Tsarskoe-Syelo and was in the flat; with him was Anna Andreyevna!
He had been put not in my room but in the two rooms next to mine that had been occupied by my landlord and his wife. The day before, as it appeared, some changes and improvements had been made in the room, but only of the most superficial kind. The landlord and his wife had moved into the little room of the whimsical lodger marked with small-pox whom I have mentioned already, and that individual had been temporarily banished, I don’t know where.
I was met by the landlord, who at once whisked into my room. He looked less sure of his ground than he had done the evening before, but was in an unusual state of excitement, so to say, at the climax of the affair. I said nothing to him, but, moving aside into a corner and clutching my head in my hands, I stood so for a moment. He thought for the first moment that I was “putting it on,” but at last his fortitude gave way, and he could not help being scared.
“Can anything be wrong?” he muttered. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask,” he added, seeing I did not answer, “whether you preferred that door to be opened so that you may have direct access to the prince’s rooms . . . instead of going by the passage?” He pointed to the door at the side always locked, which led to the landlord’s rooms, now the old prince’s apartments.
“Look here, Pyotr Ippolitovitch,” I turned to him with a stern air, “I humbly beg you to go to Anna Andreyevna and ask her to come here at once to discuss the situation. Have they been here long?”
“Going on for an hour.”
“Go and fetch her then.”
He went and brought the strange reply “that Anna Andreyevna and Prince Nikolay Ivanitch were impatiently expecting me in the next room”; so Anna Andreyevna would not come. I smoothed out my coat, which was creased from sleeping in it that night, brushed it, washed, combed my hair; I did all this deliberately, realising how necessary it was to be careful, and I went in to the old prince.
The prince was sitting on the sofa at a round table, and Anna Andreyevna in another corner, at another table covered with a cloth, on which the landlady’s samovar, polished as it had never been before, was boiling for tea. I walked in with the same stern look on my face, and the old man instantly noticed this and winced, and the smile on his face was instantly replaced by a look of terror; but I could not keep it up, I instantly laughed and held out my hands to him; the poor old fellow simply flung himself into my arms.