“Pani Agrippina, jestem do zywego dotkniety!” he began exclaiming, but Grushenka suddenly seemed to lose all patience, as if she had been touched on her sorest spot.
“Russian, speak Russian, not a word of Polish!” she shouted at him. “You used to speak Russian, did you forget it in five years?” She was all flushed with anger.
“Pani Agrippina ...”
“I am Agrafena, I am Grushenka, speak Russian or I won’t listen to you!” The pan was panting with gonor, and in broken Russian quickly and pompously declared:
“Pani Agrafena, I came to forget the past and to forgive it, to forget what has happened until today ...” “Forgive? You mean you came to forgive me?” Grushenka interrupted and jumped up from her seat.
“Just so, pani, I am not pusillanimous, I am magnanimous. But I was surprised when I saw your lovers. Pan Mitya, in the other room, offered me three thousand to depart. I spat in the pan’s face.”
“What? He offered you money for me?” Grushenka cried hysterically. “Is it true, Mitya? How dare you! Am I for sale?”
“Panie, panie,” Mitya cried out, “she is pure, she is shining, and I have never been her lover! It’s a lie...”
“How dare you defend me to him,” Grushenka went on shouting. “I have been pure not out of virtue, and not from fear of Kuzma, but in order to stand proudly before him and have the right to call him a scoundrel when I met him. But did he really not take your money?”
“He was, he was taking it!” Mitya exclaimed. “Only he wanted all three thousand at once, and I offered him just seven hundred down.”
“But of course: he heard I had money, so he came to marry me!”
“Pani Agrippina,” cried the pan, “I am a knight, a nobleman, not a lajdak. I arrived to take you for my wife, but I see a new pani, not as she was before, but wanton and shameless.”
“Ah, go back where you came from! I’ll order them to throw you out right now, and they will!” Grushenka cried in a rage. “I was a fool, a fool to torment myself for five years! And I didn’t torment myself because of him at all, I tormented myself out of spite! And this isn’t him at all! Was he like that? This one’s more like his father! Where did you get such a wig? He was a falcon, and this one is a drake. He laughed and sang songs to me ... And I, I have been shedding tears for five years, cursed fool that I am, mean, shameless!”
She fell onto her armchair and covered her face with her hands. At that moment the chorus of Mokroye girls, finally assembled in the next room to the left, suddenly burst into a rollicking dance song.
“This is Sodom!” Pan Vrublevsky suddenly bellowed. “Innkeeper, throw these shameless people out!”
The innkeeper, who had been peeking curiously through the door for a long time already, hearing shouts and seeing that his guests were quarreling, came into the room at once.
“What are you yelling about? Shut your trap!” he addressed Vrublevsky with a sort of discourtesy that was even impossible to explain.
“Swine!” roared Pan Vrublevsky.
“Swine, am I? And what sort of cards have you just been playing with? I gave you a deck and you hid it! You were playing with marked cards! I can pack you off to Siberia for marked cards, do you know that, it’s the same as bad money ...” And going over to the sofa, he put his fingers between the cushion and the back and pulled out an unopened deck of cards.
“Here’s my deck, unopened!” He held it up and showed it all around. “From there I saw him shove my deck behind the cushion and put his own in place of it—you’re not a pan, you’re a cheat!”
“And I saw the other pan palm a card twice,” cried Kalganov.
“Ah, what shame, what shame!” exclaimed Grushenka, clasping her hands and genuinely blushing with shame. “Lord, what he’s come to!”
“And I thought so, too!” shouted Mitya. But he had barely spoken when Pan Vrublevsky, embarrassed and infuriated, turned to Grushenka and, shaking his fist at her, shouted:
“Public slut!” But he had barely exclaimed it when Mitya flew at him, seized him with both hands, lifted him up in the air, and in an instant carried him out of the room into the bedroom on the right, the one where he had just taken the two pans.
“I left him there on the floor!” he announced, returning at once, breathless with excitement. “He’s struggling, the scum, but there’s no chance he’ll get out . . .!”He closed one half of the door, and holding the other wide open, he called out to the little pan:
“Excellency, would you care to follow him? If you please!”
“Mitri Fyodorovich, my dear,” exclaimed Trifon Borisich, “take back the money you lost to them! It’s the same as if they’d stolen it from you.”
“I don’t want my fifty roubles back,” Kalganov suddenly answered.
“And I don’t want my two hundred!” exclaimed Mitya. “Not for anything will I take it back, let him keep it as a consolation.”
“Bravo, Mitya! Well done!” cried Grushenka, and a terribly malicious note rang in her exclamation. The little pan, purple with fury, yet by no means losing his stateliness, started for the door, but stopped and suddenly said, addressing Grushenka:
“Pani, jesli chcesz isc za mna, idzmy; jesli nie—bywaj zdrowa (Pani, if you want to come with me, come; if not—farewell).’”
And pompously, puffing with ambition and indignation, he went through the door. The man had character: after all that had taken place, he did not lose hope that the pani would follow after him—so highly did he value himself. Mitya slammed the door behind him.
“Lock it with a key,” said Kalganov. But the lock clicked from the other side; they had locked themselves in.
“Bravo!” Grushenka cried again, mercilessly and maliciously. “Bravo! And good riddance!”
Chapter 8: Delirium
What began then was almost an orgy, a feast of feasts. Grushenka was the first to call for wine: “I want to drink, I want to get quite drunk, like before—remember, Mitya, remember how we were coming to know each other then?” Mitya himself was as if in delirium, anticipating “his happiness.” Grushenka, incidentally, kept chasing him away from her all the while: “Go, enjoy yourself, tell them to dance, everyone should enjoy themselves, sing ‘Dance cottage, dance stove’ like before!”[261] she kept exclaiming. She was terribly excited. And Mitya would run to give orders. The chorus gathered in the next room. The room they had been sitting in so far was small in any case; it was divided in two by a cotton curtain, behind which, again, there was an enormous bed with a plump down mattress and a pile of the same sort of cotton pillows. Indeed, in all four “good” rooms of the house, there were beds everywhere. Grushenka settled herself just by the door; Mitya brought her an armchair: she had sat in the same place “then,” on the day of their first spree, and from there had watched the chorus and the dancing. The girls who gathered were the same as then; the Jews with fiddles and zithers arrived, and finally the long-awaited troika arrived with its cart full of wines and provisions. Mitya bustled about. Uninvited guests came to watch, peasant men and women who had already gone to sleep but woke up sensing an unheard-of entertainment, like that of a month before. Mitya greeted and embraced those he knew, recalling their faces; he uncorked bottles and poured for all comers. Champagne was popular only with the girls; the men preferred rum and cognac and especially hot punch. Mitya ordered hot chocolate for all the girls, and three samovars to be kept boiling all night so that everyone who came could have tea or punch: whoever wants to can help himself. In a word, something disorderly and absurd began, but Mitya was in his natural element, as it were, and the more absurd it all became, the more his spirits rose. If some peasant had asked him for money at that moment, he would at once have pulled out his whole wad and started giving it away right and left without counting. That is probably why, in order to protect Mitya, the innkeeper Trifon Borisich, who seemed to have quite given up any thought of going to sleep that night, and who nevertheless drank little (he only had one glass of punch), was almost constantly scurrying around him, vigilantly looking out, in his own way, for Mitya’s interests. When necessary, he intervened in a friendly and servile manner, reasoning with him, not letting him, as he had “then,” present the peasants with “cigarettes and Rhine wine” or, God forbid, with money, and was highly indignant that the girls were drinking liqueur and eating candy: “There’s nothing but lice there, Mitri Fyodorovich,” he would say, “I’d give them a knee in the backside, every one of them, and tell them to count it an honor—that’s what they’re like!” Mitya again remembered Andrei and ordered punch to be sent out to him. “I offended him before,” he kept saying in a weak and tender voice. Kalganov did not want to drink at first, and very much disliked the girls’ chorus, but after drinking two more glasses of champagne, he became terribly happy, paced about the rooms, laughed, and praised everyone and everything, songs and music. Maximov, blissful and tipsy, never left his side. Grushenka, who was also beginning to get drunk, kept pointing at Kalganov and saying to Mitya: “What a darling he is, what a wonderful boy!” And Mitya would run in rapture to kiss Kalganov and Maximov. Oh, he was expecting so much; she had not yet said anything to him, she obviously put off saying anything on purpose, and only glanced at him from time to time with caressing but ardent eyes. Finally she suddenly caught him fast by the hand and pulled him forcefully to herself. She was then sitting in the armchair by the door.