Fyodor Dostoyevsky Fullscreen Demons (1871)

"Did you hear?

She wants to drive me to refusing at last.

Why, I may lose patience, too, and... refuse!

'Sit still, there's no need for you to go to her.' But after all, why should I be married?

Simply because she's taken an absurd fancy into her heart.

But I'm a serious man, and I can refuse to submit to the idle whims of a giddy-woman!

I have duties to my son and...and to myself!

I'm making a sacrifice. Does she realise that?

I have agreed, perhaps, because I am weary of life and nothing matters to me.

But she may exasperate me, and then it will matter. I shall resent it and refuse.

Et enfin, le ridicule...what will they say at the club?

What will... what will... Laputin say?

'Perhaps nothing will come of it'—what a thing to say!

That beats everything.

That's really... what is one to say to that?...

Je suis un forcat, un Badinguet, un man pushed to the wall...."

And at the same time a sort of capricious complacency, something frivolous and playful, could be seen in the midst of all these plaintive exclamations.

In the evening we drank too much again.

CHAPTER III. THE SINS OF OTHERS

ABOUT A WEEK had passed, and the position had begun to grow more complicated.

I may mention in passing that I suffered a great deal during that unhappy week, as I scarcely left the side of my affianced friend, in the capacity of his most intimate confidant.

What weighed upon him most was the feeling of shame, though we saw no one all that week, and sat indoors alone. But he was even ashamed before me, and so much so that the more he confided to me the more vexed he was with me for it.

He was so morbidly apprehensive that he expected that every one knew about it already, the whole town, and was afraid to show himself, not only at the club, but even in his circle of friends.

He positively would not go out to take his constitutional till well after dusk, when it was quite dark.

A week passed and he still did not know whether he were betrothed or not, and could not find out for a fact, however much he tried.

He had not yet seen his future bride, and did not know whether she was to be his bride or not; did not, in fact, know whether there was anything serious in it at all.

Varvara Petrovna, for some reason, resolutely refused to admit him to her presence.

In answer to one of his first letters to her (and he wrote a great number of them) she begged him plainly to spare her all communications with him for a time, because she was very busy, and having a great deal of the utmost importance to communicate to him she was waiting for a more free moment to do so, and that she would let him know in time when he could come to see her.

She declared she would send back his letters unopened, as they were "simple self-indulgence."

I read that letter myself—he showed it me.

Yet all this harshness and indefiniteness were nothing compared with his chief anxiety.

That anxiety tormented him to the utmost and without ceasing. He grew thin and dispirited through it.

It was something of which he was more ashamed than of anything else, and of which he would not on any account speak, even to me; on the contrary, he lied on occasion, and shuffled before me like a little boy; and at the same time he sent for me himself every day, could not stay two hours without me, needing me as much as air or water.

Such conduct rather wounded my vanity.

I need hardly say that I had long ago privately guessed this great secret of his, and saw through it completely.

It was my firmest conviction at the time that the revelation of this secret, this chief anxiety of Stepan Trofimovitch's would not have redounded to his credit, and, therefore, as I was still young, I was rather indignant at the coarseness of his feelings and the ugliness of some of his suspicions.

In my warmth—and, I must confess, in my weariness of being his confidant—I perhaps blamed him too much.

I was so cruel as to try and force him to confess it all to me himself, though I did recognise that it might be difficult to confess some things.

He, too, saw through me; that is, he clearly perceived that I saw through him, and that I was angry with him indeed, and he was angry with me too for being angry with him and seeing through him.

My irritation was perhaps petty and stupid; but the unrelieved solitude of two friends together is sometimes extremely prejudicial to true friendship.

From a certain point of view he had a very true understanding of some aspects of his position, and defined it, indeed, very subtly on those points about which he did not think it necessary to be secret.

"Oh, how different she was then!" he would sometimes say to me about Varvara Petrovna.

"How different she was in the old days when we used to talk together.... Do you know that she could talk in those days!

Can you believe that she had ideas in those days, original ideas!

Now, everything has changed!

She says all that's only old-fashioned twaddle.

She despises the past.... Now she's like some shopman or cashier, she has grown hard-hearted, and she's always cross...."

"Why is she cross now if you are carrying out her orders?" I answered.

He looked at me subtly.

"Cher ami; if I had not agreed she would have been dreadfully angry, dread-ful-ly! But yet less than now that I have consented."