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“I know you’re keeping quiet. That’s good.”
“I don’t need your approval. For my own part, I very much wish for it, but I consider that it’s none of my business, and that it would even be indecent of me.”
“You see, you see—indecent!” he raised his finger.
“See what?”
“Indecent . . . Heh!” and he suddenly laughed. “I understand, I understand that it’s indecent for you, but . . . you’re not going to interfere?” he winked, but in this winking there was something so insolent, even jeering, base! He precisely supposed some sort of baseness in me and was counting on that baseness . . . That was clear, but I still didn’t understand what it was about.
“A
“Don’t you dare speak of that. And generally don’t you dare speak of A
“Don’t be proud, just for one more little minute! Listen: he’ll get the money and provide for everybody,” Stebelkov said weightily, “everybody, everybody, you follow?”
“So you think I’ll take money from him?”
“Aren’t you taking it now?”
“I’m taking my own!”
“What’s your own?”
“This is Versilov’s money; he owes Versilov twenty thousand.”
“Versilov, not you.”
“Versilov’s my father.”
“No, you’re Dolgoruky, not Versilov.”
“That makes no difference!”
Indeed, I was able to reason like that then. I knew it made a difference, I wasn’t so stupid, but I reasoned like that then, again, out of “delicacy.”
“Enough!” I cried. “I understand precisely nothing. And how dared you summon me for such trifles?”
“Can it be you really don’t understand? Are you doing it on purpose or not?” Stebelkov said slowly, staring at me piercingly and with some sort of mistrustful smile.
“By God, I don’t!”
“I say he can provide for everybody, everybody, only don’t interfere and don’t talk him out of it . . .”
“You must have lost your mind! What’s this ‘everybody’ you keep trotting out? Is it Versilov he’ll provide for?”
“You’re not the only one in it, nor is Versilov . . . there are others. And A
I stared at him goggle-eyed. Suddenly something like pity for me flashed in his vile gaze:
“You don’t understand, and so much the better! It’s good, it’s very good that you don’t understand. It’s praiseworthy . . . if you really don’t understand.”
I became completely furious:
“Away with you and your trifles, you crazy man!” I cried, seizing my hat.
“They’re not trifles! So it’s a deal? But, you know, you’ll come again.”
“No,” I snapped from the doorway.
“You’ll come, and then . . . then there’ll be a different talk. That will be the main talk. Two thousand, remember!”
II
HE MADE SUCH a filthy and murky impression on me that, going out, I even tried not to think of it and only spat. The idea that the prince could speak with him about me and this money pricked me as if with a pin. “I’ll win and pay him back today,” I thought resolutely.
Stupid and tongue-tied as Stebelkov was, I had seen a blazing scoundrel in all his splendor, and, above all, there certainly was some intrigue here. Only I had no time to go into any intrigues, and that was the main reason for my hen-blindness! I glanced worriedly at my watch, but it wasn’t even two yet; that meant I could still make one visit, otherwise I’d have died of excitement before three o’clock. I drove to see A
Lately I had even been at A
She herself invited me to come the first time. I understood even then that she was maybe counting on occasionally worming a thing or two out of me. Oh, many people could have wormed a great many things out of me then! “But what of it,” I thought, “she’s not receiving me for that alone.” In short, I was even glad that I could be of use to her, and . . . and when I sat with her, it aways seemed to me within myself that it was my sister sitting near me, though, incidentally, we never once spoke of our relation to each other, not a word, not a hint, as if it simply didn’t exist. Sitting at her place, it seemed to me somehow quite unthinkable to start talking about it, and, really, looking at her, an absurd thought sometimes came to my head, that she maybe didn’t know about this relation at all—so far as the way she behaved with me went.