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She became embarrassed, and was unable to reply.
"Drink your tea!" I said spitefully. I was angry with myself, but, naturally, she was going to bear the brunt of it. A terrible spite against her suddenly boiled up in my heart; I think I could simply have killed her. To be revenged on her, I swore mentally not to speak even one word to her from then on. "It's she who caused it all," I thought.
Our silence had already lasted some five minutes. The tea sat on the table; we didn't touch it: it went so far that I purposely refused to begin drinking, so as to make it still harder for her; and it would have been awkward for her to begin. Several times she glanced at me in sad perplexity. I was stubbornly silent. The chief martyr, of course, was myself, because I was fully conscious of all the loathsome baseness of my spiteful stupidity, and at the same time I simply could not restrain myself.
"I want… to get out of there… for good," she tried to begin, in order to break the silence somehow, but, poor thing! she precisely ought not to have started with that at such a moment, stupid as it was to begin with, or to such a man, stupid as I was to begin with. Even my heart ached from pity for her ineptness and u
"Perhaps I've disturbed you?" she began timidly, in a barely audible voice, and started to get up.
But as soon as I saw this first flash of injured dignity I simply trembled with anger and at once burst out.
"What did you come to me for, do tell me, please?" I began, suffocating, and not even considering the logical order of my words. I wanted to speak everything out at once, in one shot; I didn't even care where I began.
"Why did you come? Answer! Answer!" I kept exclaiming, all but beside myself. "I'll tell you why you came, my dear. You came because of the pathetic words I used with you then. So you went all soft, and you wanted more 'pathetic words.' Know, then, know that I was laughing at you that time. And I'm laughing now. Why do you tremble? Yes, laughing! I'd been insulted earlier, at di
I knew she might perhaps get confused and not understand the details; but I also knew she'd understand the essence perfectly well. And so it happened. She turned white as a sheet, tried to utter something, her mouth twisted painfully; but, as if cut down with an axe, she sank onto the chair. And all the rest of the time she listened to me with open mouth, with wide open eyes, and trembling in terrible fear. The cynicism, the cynicism of my words crushed her…
"To save you!" I went on, jumping up from my chair and ru
But here a strange circumstance suddenly occurred.
I was so used to thinking and imagining everything from books, and to picturing everything in the world to myself as I had devised it beforehand in my dreams, that at first I didn't even understand this strange circumstance. What occurred was this: Liza, whom I had insulted and crushed, understood far more than I imagined. She understood from it all what a woman, if she loves sincerely, always understands before anything else - namely, that I myself was unhappy.
The frightened and insulted feeling in her face first gave way to rueful amazement. And when I began calling myself a scoundrel and a blackguard, and my tears poured down (I had spoken the entire tirade in tears), her whole face twisted in a sort of convulsion. She wanted to get up, to stop me; and when I came to the end, she paid no attention to my cries: "Why are you here, why don't you leave!" but only to how very hard it must have been for me to speak it all out. Besides, she was so downtrodden, poor thing; she considered herself infinitely beneath me; how could she be angry or offended? She suddenly jumped from her chair on some irrepressible impulse, and, all yearning towards me, but still timidly, not daring to move from the spot, stretched out her arms to me… Here my heart, too, turned over in me. Then she suddenly rushed to me, threw her arms about my neck, and burst into tears. I, too, could not help myself and broke into such sobbing as had never happened to me before…
"They won't let me… I can't be… good!" I barely articulated, then went to the sofa, fell face down, and sobbed for a quarter of an hour in real hysterics. She leaned towards me, embraced me, and remained as if frozen in that embrace.