The Adolescent

And so, contrary to all expectation, Miss Versilov, having shaken the prince’s hand and exchanged some cheerful social phrases with him, looked at me with extraordinary curiosity and, seeing that I was also looking at her, suddenly bowed to me with a smile. True, she had just walked in and her bow was in greeting, but her smile was so kind that it was obviously deliberate. And I recall that I experienced an extraordinarily pleasant feeling.

“And this . . . this is my dear and young friend Arkady Andreevich Dol . . .”—the prince murmured, noticing that she had bowed to me, while I was still sitting—and suddenly broke off: perhaps he became embarrassed that he was introducing me to her (that is, essentially, a brother to a sister). The pillow also gave me a bow; but I suddenly flew into a stupid rage and jumped up from my seat: a surge of affected pride, completely senseless, all from self-love!

“Excuse me, Prince, I am not Arkady Andreevich, but Arkady Makarovich,” I cut off cuttingly, quite forgetting that I ought to have responded to the ladies’ bows. Devil take that indecent moment!

“Mais . . . tiens! ” the prince cried out, striking himself on the forehead with his finger.

“Where did you study?” I heard beside me the silly and drawn-out question of the pillow, who had come over to me.

“In a high school in Moscow.”

“Ah! So I heard. And do they teach well there?”

“Very well.”

I went on standing, and spoke like a soldier reporting.

The girl’s questions were indisputably unresourceful, but, nevertheless, she did manage to cover up my stupid escapade and to ease the embarrassment of the prince, who listened at the same time with a merry smile to something Miss Versilov was merrily whispering to him—evidently not about me. A question, though: why should this girl, a total stranger to me, volunteer to cover up my stupid escapade and all the rest? At the same time, it was impossible to imagine that she had addressed me just like that; there was an intention here. She looked at me all too curiously, as if she also wanted me to take as much notice of her as possible. I figured it all out afterwards and was not mistaken.

“What, today?” the prince cried suddenly, leaping up from his place.

“So you didn’t know?” Miss Versilov was surprised. “Olympe! The prince didn’t know that Katerina Nikolaevna would be here today. We came to see her, we thought she took the morning train and had long been at home. We only just met her on the porch; she came straight from the station and told us to go to you, and that she would come presently . . . Here she is!”

The side door opened and—that woman appeared!

I already knew her face from an astonishing portrait that hung in the prince’s office; I had studied that portrait all month. In her presence, I spent some three minutes in the office and not for one second did I tear my eyes from her face. But if I hadn’t known the portrait and had been asked, after those three minutes, “What is she like?”—I wouldn’t have been able to answer, because everything became clouded in me.

I only remember from those three minutes a truly beautiful woman, whom the prince was kissing and making crosses over, and who suddenly—just as soon as she entered—quickly began looking at me. I clearly heard how the prince, obviously pointing to me, murmured something, with a sort of little laugh, about a new secretary, and spoke my last name. She somehow jerked her face up, gave me a nasty look, and smiled so insolently that I suddenly made a step, went up to the prince, and murmured, trembling terribly, without finishing a single word and, I think, with chattering teeth:

“From then on I . . . my own affairs now . . . I’m going.”

And I turned and went out. No one said a word to me, not even the prince; they all merely looked. The prince later told me that I turned so pale that he was “simply frightened.”

Well, who could care!

Chapter Three

I

PRECISELY, WHO COULD CARE? The highest consideration absorbed all trifles, and one powerful feeling satisfied me for everything. I went out in a sort of rapture. Stepping into the street, I was ready to start singing. As if on purpose, it was a lovely morning, sun, passersby, noise, movement, joy, the crowd. But hadn’t this woman insulted me? From whom would I have borne such a look and such an insolent smile without an immediate protest, even the stupidest—it makes no difference—on my part? Note that she was coming just so as to insult me the sooner, without ever having seen me: in her eyes, I was “Versilov’s agent,” and she was convinced even then and for a long time afterwards that Versilov held her entire fate in his hands and had the means to ruin her at once, if he wished to, by means of a certain document; she suspected as much at least. This was a duel to the death. And here—I was not insulted! There was an insult, but I didn’t feel it! Far from it! I was even glad; having come to hate her, I even felt I was begi

That was how I would have translated my thoughts and my joy at that time, and much of what I felt. I will add only that here, in what I’ve just written, it has come out more light-minded: in reality, I was more profound and modest. Maybe even now I’m more modest in myself than in my words and deeds. God grant it!

Maybe I’ve done a very bad thing in sitting down to write; there is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable. Versilov told me that the complete opposite happens only with the worst people. They just lie, it’s easy for them; while I’m trying to write the whole truth, which is terribly hard!

II

ON THIS NINETEENTH day of the month, I took one more “step.”

For the first time since my arrival, I had money in my pocket, because my sixty roubles, which I had saved up over two years, I had given to my mother, as I mentioned above; but several days earlier I had resolved that, on the day I got my salary, I would make a “test ” I had long been dreaming of. Just the day before, I had cut out an address from a newspaper—an a

It was just past one o’clock. I hurried on foot to the address. It was over two years since I’d taken a cab—I gave my word (otherwise I wouldn’t have saved sixty roubles). I never went to auctions, I couldn’t afford it yet; and though my present “step” was only tentative, even this step I had resolved to resort to only when I had finished school, when I had broken with everyone, when I had shrunk into my shell and become completely free. True, I was still far from being in a “shell” and far from being free; but I resolved to take the step only as a test—just so, in order to see, almost to dream a little, as it were, and then perhaps not to come for a long time, until it was a serious begi