It had long been dark and Pyotr brought candles. He stood over me and asked whether I had had supper. I simply motioned him away. An hour later, however, he brought me some tea, and I greedily drank a large cupful. Then I asked what time it was? It was half-past eight, and I felt no surprise to find I had been sitting there five hours.
“I have been in to you three times already,” said Pyotr, “but I think you were asleep.”
I did not remember his coming in. I don’t know why, but I felt all at once horribly scared to think I had been asleep. I got up and walked about the room, that I might not go to sleep again. At last my head began to ache violently. At ten o’clock Prince Sergay came in and I was surprised that I had been waiting for him: I had completely forgotten him, completely.
“You are here, and I’ve been round to you to fetch you,” he said to me. His face looked gloomy and severe, and there was not a trace of a smile. There was a fixed idea in his eyes.
“I have been doing my very utmost all day and straining every nerve,” he said with concentrated intensity; “everything has failed, and nothing in the future, but horror. . . .” (N.B.— he had not been to Prince Nikolay Ivanitch’s.) “I have seen Zhibyelsky, he is an impossible person. You see, to begin with we must get the money, then we shall see. And if we don’t succeed with the money, then we shall see. . . . I have made up my mind not to think about that. If only we get hold of the money to-day, to-morrow we shall see everything. The three thousand you won is still untouched, every farthing of it. It’s three thousand all except three roubles. After paying back what I lent you, there is three hundred and forty roubles change for you. Take it. Another seven hundred as well, to make up a thousand, and I will take the other two thousand. Then let us both go to Zerstchikov and try at opposite ends of the table to win ten thousand — perhaps we shall do something, if we don’t win it — then. . . . This is the only way left, anyhow.”
He looked at me with a fateful smile.
“Yes, yes!” I cried suddenly, as though coming to life again “let us go. I was only waiting for you. . . .”
I may remark that I had never once thought of roulette during those hours.
“But the baseness? The degradation of the action?” Prince Sergay asked suddenly.
“Our going to roulette! Why that’s everything,” I cried, “money’s everything. Why, you and I are the only saints, while Büring has sold himself, Anna Andreyevna’s sold herself, and Versilov — have you heard that Versilov’s a maniac? A maniac! A maniac!”
“Are you quite well, Arkady Makarovitch? Your eyes are somehow strange.”
“You say that because you want to go without me! But I shall stick to you now. It’s not for nothing I’ve been dreaming of play all night. Let us go, let us go!” I kept exclaiming, as though I had found the solution to everything.
“Well, let us go, though you’re in a fever, and there . . .”
He did not finish. His face looked heavy and terrible. We were just going out when he stopped in the doorway.
“Do you know,” he said suddenly, “that there is another way out of my trouble, besides play?”
“What way.”
“A princely way.”
“What’s that? What’s that?”
“You’ll know what afterwards. Only let me tell you I’m not worthy of it, because I have delayed too long. Let us go, but you remember my words. We’ll try the lackey’s way. . . . And do you suppose I don’t know that I am consciously, of my own free will, behaving like a lackey?”
6
I flew to the roulette table as though in it were concentrated all hopes of my salvation, all means of escape, and yet as I have mentioned already, I had not once thought of it before Prince Sergay’s arrival. Moreover, I was going to gamble, not for myself but for Prince Sergay, and with his money; I can’t explain what was the attraction, but it was an irresistible attraction. Oh, never had those people, those faces, those croupiers with their monotonous shouts, all the details of the squalid gambling saloon seemed so revolting to me, so depressing, so coarse, and so melancholy as that evening! I remember well the sadness and misery that gripped my heart at times during those hours at the gambling table. But why didn’t I go away? Why did I endure and, as it were, accept this fate, this sacrifice, this devotion? I will only say one thing: I can hardly say of myself that I was then in my right senses. Yet at the same time, I had never played so prudently as that evening. I was silent and concentrated, attentive and extremely calculating; I was patient and niggardly, and at the same time resolute at critical moments. I established myself again at the zero end of the table, that is between Zerstchikov and Aferdov, who always sat on the former’s right hand; the place was distasteful to me, but I had an overwhelming desire to stake on zero, and all the other places at that end were taken. We had been playing over an hour; at last, from my place, I saw Prince Sergay get up from his seat and with a pale face move across to us and remain facing me the other side of the table: he had lost all he had and watched my play in silence, though he probably did not follow it and had ceased to think of play. At that moment I just began winning, and Zerstchikov was counting me out what I had won. Suddenly, without a word, Aferdov with the utmost effrontery took one of my hundred-rouble notes before my very eyes and added it to the pile of money lying before him. I cried out, and caught hold of his hand. Then something quite unexpected happened to me: it was as though I had broken some chain that restrained me, as though all the affronts and insults of that day were concentrated in that moment in the loss of that hundred-rouble note. It was as though everything that had been accumulating and suppressed within me had only been waiting for that moment to break out.
“He’s a thief, he has just stolen my hundred roubles,” I exclaimed, looking round, beside myself.
I won’t describe the hubbub that followed; such a scandal was a novelty there. At Zerstchikov’s, people behaved with propriety, and his saloon was famous for it. But I did not know what I was doing. Zerstchikov’s voice was suddenly heard in the midst of the clamour and din:
“But the money’s not here, and it was lying here! Four hundred roubles!”
Another scene followed at once: the money in the bank had disappeared under Zerstchikov’s very nose, a roll of four hundred roubles. Zerstchikov pointed to the spot where the notes had only that minute been lying, and that spot turned out to be close to me, next to the spot where my money was lying, much closer to me than to Aferdov.
“The thief is here! he has stolen it again, search him!” I cried pointing to Aferdov.
“This is what comes of letting in all sorts of people,” thundered an impressive voice in the midst of the general uproar. “Persons have been admitted without introduction! Who brought him in? Who is he?”
“A fellow called Dolgoruky.”
“Prince Dolgoruky?”
“Prince Sokolsky brought him,” cried some one.
“Listen, prince,” I yelled to him across the table in a frenzy; “they think I’m a thief when I’ve just been robbed myself! Tell them about me, tell them about me!”
And then there followed something worse than all that had happened that day . . . worse than anything that had happened in my life: Prince Sergay disowned me. I saw him shrug his shoulders and heard him in answer to a stream of questions pronounce sharply and distinctly:
“I am not responsible for anyone. Please leave me alone.”
Meanwhile Aferdov stood in the middle of the crowd loudly demanding that “he should be searched.” He kept turning out his own pockets. But his demands were met by shouts of “No, no, we know the thief!”
Two footmen were summoned and they seized me by my arms from behind.
“I won’t let myself be searched, I won’t allow it!” I shouted, pulling myself away.
But they dragged me into the next room; there, in the midst of the crowd, they searched me to the last fold of my garments. I screamed and struggled.
“He must have thrown it away, you must look on the floor,” some one decided.