But all the same I just could not calm down.
That whole evening, when I'd already returned home, when it was already past nine and by my reckoning Liza simply could not come, I still kept imagining her, and I recalled her, mostly, in one and the same position. Namely, of all that had happened yesterday, I pictured one moment especially vividly: it was when I lighted up the room with a match and saw her pale, distorted face with its tormented eyes. And how pathetic, how unnatural, how twisted her smile was at that moment! But I did not know then that even after fifteen years I would still be picturing Liza precisely with the pathetic, twisted, needless smile she had at that moment.
The next day I was again prepared to regard it all as nonsense, frazzled nerves, and, above all - exaggeration. I was always aware of this weak link in me, and at times was very afraid of it: "I'm forever exaggerating; that's where I'm lame," I repeated to myself at all hours. But nevertheless, "nevertheless, Liza may still come" - this was the refrain with which all my reasonings at that time concluded. I worried so much that I sometimes became furious. "She'll come! She's sure to come!" I'd exclaim, running up and down my room. "If not today, then tomorrow, but she'll find me! That's the cursed romanticism of all these pure hearts! Oh, the vileness, oh, the stupidity, oh, the narrowness of these 'rotten, sentimental souls'! How can one not understand, how indeed can one not understand…" But here I myself would stop, and even in great confusion.
"And it took so little, so little talk," I thought in passing, "such a little idyll (an affected idyll besides, a contrived, a bookish one), to succeed in turning a whole human soul the way I wanted. There's virginity for you! There's the freshness of the soil!"
At times the thought occurred to me of going to her myself, "to tell her everything" and prevail upon her not to come to me. But here, at this thought, such spite rose up in me that I think I would simply have squashed this "cursed" Liza if she'd suddenly happened to be there, insulted her, spat upon her, driven her out, struck her!
A day passed, however, then another, then a third - she did not come, and I began to calm down. I especially took heart and let myself go after nine o'clock, I sometimes even began to dream, and that quite sweetly: "I save Liza," for example, "precisely through her coming to me, and my telling her… I develop her, educate her. I finally notice that she loves me, loves me passionately. I pretend not to understand (I don't know, however, why I pretend; probably just for the beauty of it). At last, all confused, beautiful, trembling and weeping, she throws herself at my feet and says that I am her savior, and that she loves me more than anything in the world. I am amazed, but… 'Liza,' I say, 'can you really think I haven't noticed your love? I saw everything, I guessed, but I dared not presume first upon your heart, because I had influence over you and feared lest you, out of gratitude, might deliberately make yourself return my love, might call up by force a feeling that perhaps is not there, and I did not want that, because that is… despotism… It is indelicate'" (well, in short, here I let my tongue run away with me in some such European, George-Sandian, ineffably noble refinement…). 17 "'But now, now - you are mine, you are my creation, you are pure, beautiful, you are - my beautiful wife.
And now, full mistress of the place, Come bold and free into my house.' 18
"And then we begin living happily ever after, go abroad, etc., etc." In short, I felt vile and would end by sticking my tongue out at myself.
"They won't even let the 'slut' come!" I thought. "They don't seem to allow them out much, especially in the evening" (for some reason it seemed certain to me that she must come in the evening, and precisely at seven o'clock). "Though she said she's not completely bound to them yet, she has some special privileges there; so - hm! Devil take it, she'll come, she's sure to come!
It was a good thing Apollon diverted me at that time with his rudeness. Drove me out of all patience! He was my thorn, a scourge visited upon me by Providence. He and I had been in constant altercation for several years on end, and I hated him. My God, how I hated him! I think I've never in my life hated anyone as I did him, especially at certain moments. He was an elderly, imposing man, who occupied himself part of the time with tailoring. I don't know why, but he despised me even beyond all measure and looked at me with an insufferable haughtiness. But then he looked at everyone with haughtiness. One glance at that pale-haired, slicked-down head, at the quiff he fluffed up on his forehead and oiled with vegetable oil, at that serious mouth forever pursed in a V - and you immediately sensed before you a being who never doubted himself. He was in the highest degree a pedant, and the most enormous pedant of any I've ever met on earth; and this was accompanied by a vanity perhaps befitting only Alexander of Macedon. He was in love with his every button, his every fingernail - absolutely in love, and he looked it! He treated me quite despotically, spoke extremely little with me, and if he chanced to let his eyes rest on me, he did so with a firm, majestically self-confident, and permanently mocking look, which sometimes drove me to fury. He fulfilled his duties with such an air as if he were bestowing the highest favor upon me. However, he did almost exactly nothing for me, and did not even consider himself obliged to do anything. There was no doubting that he considered me the most complete fool in the whole world, and if he "kept me around," it was solely because he could get his wages from me every month. He agreed to "do nothing" in my service for seven roubles a month. Many sins will be forgiven me for him. It sometimes reached such hatred that I'd be all but thrown into convulsions by his gait alone. But I loathed his lisp especially. His tongue was a bit longer than it should have been, or something like that, which caused him to be forever lisping and sissing, and he was apparently terribly proud of it, imagining that it lent him a great deal of dignity. He spoke softly, measuredly, placing his hands behind his back and looking down. He especially infuriated me when he'd start reading the Psalter behind his partition. I endured many a battle on account of that reading. But he liked terribly much to read in the evenings, in a soft, even voice, chanting as over a dead body. Curiously, that's how he ended up: he now hires himself out to read the Psalter over the deceased, and along with that he exterminates rats and makes shoe polish. But at the time I was unable to throw him out, as though he had combined chemically with my existence. Besides, he would not have agreed to leave me for anything. It was impossible for me to live in chambres garnies: 19 my apartment was my mansion, my shell, my case, in which I hid from all mankind, and Apollon, it seemed to me -devil knows why - belonged to that apartment, and for a whole seven years I was unable to throw him out.
To withhold his wages, for example, for as little as two or three days, was impossible. He'd make such a to-do that I wouldn't even know where to hide. But in those days I was so embittered against everyone that I resolved, who knows why or what for, to punish Apollon and not give him his wages for another two weeks. I had long been intending to do this, for two years or so - solely to prove to him that he dared not get so puffed up over me, and that if I wished I could always not give him his wages. I decided not to tell him about it and even to maintain a deliberate silence, in order to vanquish his pride and make him be the first to speak of his wages. Then I would take all seven roubles from the drawer, to show him that I had them and had deliberately set them aside, but that I "did not, did not, simply did not want to give him his wages, did not want to because that's how I wanted it, because such was 'my will as the master,' because he was irreverent, because he was a boor; but that if he asked reverently, perhaps I would relent and pay him; otherwise he'd have to wait another two weeks, wait three weeks, wait a whole month…"