Part Six · IV
“You know, perhaps (though in fact I told you myself),” Svidrigailov began, “that I was in the debtors’ prison here, for an enormous sum, and without the slightest prospect of the means to pay it. There’s no point going into detail about how Marfa Petrovna bought me out then; do you know to what a pitch of stupefaction a woman can sometimes fall in love? She was an honest woman, and far from stupid (though entirely uneducated). Imagine, then, that this very woman, jealous and honest as she was, resolved to stoop, after many terrible frenzies and reproaches, to a contract of a sort with me, which she kept to all the time we were married. The thing is, she was considerably older than I, and besides, she always kept a clove or something of the kind in her mouth. I had enough swinishness in my soul, and enough honesty of a sort, to tell her straight out that I could not be entirely faithful to her. This confession drove her into a frenzy, but my coarse frankness seems in a way to have pleased her: ‘So he doesn’t mean to deceive me, if he announces it like that beforehand’—well, and for a jealous woman that’s the first thing. After long tears, an oral contract of the following sort was concluded between us: first, I would never leave Marfa Petrovna and would always remain her husband; second, I would go nowhere without her permission; third, I would never take a permanent mistress; fourth, in return Marfa Petrovna would allow me now and then to cast an eye on the maids, but only with her secret knowledge; fifth, God forbid I should fall in love with a woman of our own class; sixth, if by chance, which God forbid, I should be visited by some passion, a great and serious one, I was to confess it to Marfa Petrovna. As for that last point, though, Marfa Petrovna was fairly easy in her mind the whole time; she was an intelligent woman, and consequently could not look on me as anything but a libertine and a rake, incapable of falling seriously in love. But an intelligent woman and a jealous woman are two different things, and that’s just where the trouble lies. However, to judge certain people impartially, one must give up beforehand certain preconceived views and one’s everyday habit with regard to the people and things that ordinarily surround us. I have the right to count on your judgment more than on anyone’s. Perhaps you’ve already heard a great many ridiculous and absurd things about Marfa Petrovna. She did indeed have some very ridiculous habits; but I’ll tell you straight out that I sincerely regret the countless sorrows I caused her. Well, that’s enough, I think, for a quite decent oraison funèbre of the tenderest of wives by the tenderest of husbands. Whenever we quarreled I mostly kept silent and didn’t get irritated, and this playing the gentleman nearly always achieved its aim; it had an effect on her, and she even liked it; there were times when she was even proud of me. But your sister was more than she could stand, all the same. And how did it ever happen that she risked taking such a beauty into her house as a governess! I explain it by the fact that Marfa Petrovna was an ardent and impressionable woman, and that, quite simply, she fell in love herself—literally fell in love—with your sister. Well, and Avdotya Romanovna too! I understood very well, at first sight, that things were in a bad way here, and—what do you think?—I made up my mind not even to raise my eyes to her. But Avdotya Romanovna herself took the first step—would you believe it? Would you also believe that Marfa Petrovna went so far as to be angry with me at first for my constant silence about your sister, for being so indifferent to her endless, enamored praises of Avdotya Romanovna? I don’t understand myself what she wanted! Well, of course, Marfa Petrovna told Avdotya Romanovna everything about me, down to the last secret. She had an unfortunate trait of telling absolutely everyone all our family secrets and complaining about me to everyone endlessly; how could she pass over such a new and beautiful friend? I imagine they talked of nothing but me, and no doubt Avdotya Romanovna came to know all those dark, mysterious tales that are laid at my door… I’ll bet you’ve heard something of the sort already too?”
“I have. Luzhin accused you of even causing a child’s death. Is it true?”
“Do me a favor, leave all these vulgarities alone,” Svidrigailov fended him off with peevish disgust. “If you absolutely must know about all that nonsense, I’ll tell you about it separately someday, but now…”
“They also talked about some footman of yours in the country, and how you were supposedly the cause of something there too.”
“Do me a favor, enough!” Svidrigailov interrupted again with obvious impatience.
“Isn’t that the footman who came to fill your pipe after he was dead… you told me yourself?” Raskolnikov went on, growing more and more irritated.
Svidrigailov was looking at Raskolnikov attentively, and it seemed to Raskolnikov that a malicious smile flashed for an instant in that look, like lightning, but Svidrigailov restrained himself and answered very politely:
“The very same. I see that all this interests you extremely too, and I’ll consider it my duty, at the first convenient opportunity, to satisfy your curiosity on every point. Devil take it! I see that I really might seem a romantic figure to somebody! Judge, then, how much I owe the late Marfa Petrovna after that, for having told your sister so many mysterious and intriguing things about me. I don’t dare judge the impression: but in any case it worked to my advantage. For all Avdotya Romanovna’s natural aversion to me, and in spite of my perpetually gloomy and repellent air, she came at last to feel sorry for me, sorry for a lost man. And when a girl’s heart begins to feel sorry, that, of course, is the most dangerous thing of all for her. Then she is sure to want to ‘save’ him, and bring him to his senses, and raise him from the dead, and call him to nobler aims, and revive him for a new life and new activity—well, everyone knows what can be dreamed up along those lines. I saw at once that the little bird was flying into the net of its own accord, and I, for my part, got ready. You seem to be frowning, Rodion Romanych? Never mind, sir, the business, as you know, came to nothing. (Devil take it, how much wine I’m drinking!) You know, I always regretted, from the very beginning, that fate hadn’t let your sister be born in the second or third century of our era, as the daughter of some ruling princeling somewhere, or of some governor or proconsul in Asia Minor. She would no doubt have been one of those who suffered martyrdom, and would of course have smiled while they burned her breast with red-hot pincers. She would have gone to it deliberately, of her own accord, and in the fourth or fifth century she would have gone off into the Egyptian desert and lived there thirty years, feeding on roots, raptures, and visions. That’s all she thirsts for herself, she demands to take on some torment for someone as quickly as possible, and if she isn’t given that torment, she may very well jump out of a window. I’ve heard something about a certain Mr. Razumikhin. A sensible fellow, they say (as his very name shows,1 a seminarian, most likely), well, let him look after your sister. In a word, I think I understood her, and I count that an honor. But then, that is, at the beginning of an acquaintance, you know yourself, one is always somehow more frivolous and stupid, one looks at things wrongly, sees what isn’t there. Devil take it, why is she so lovely? It’s not my fault! In a word, with me it began with the most uncontrollable fit of lust. Avdotya Romanovna is chaste, terribly chaste, chaste as no one has ever heard of or seen. (Mark this, I’m telling you this about your sister as a fact. She is chaste perhaps to the point of illness, for all her breadth of mind, and it will do her harm.) Just then a girl turned up at our place, Parasha, black-eyed Parasha, who had just been brought from another village, a housemaid, and whom I’d never laid eyes on before—very pretty, but stupid beyond belief: she burst into tears, raised a howl the whole yard could hear, and there was a scandal. One day after dinner Avdotya Romanovna deliberately sought me out when I was alone in an avenue of the garden and, with flashing eyes, demanded that I leave poor Parasha in peace. It was very nearly our first conversation alone together. I, naturally, counted it an honor to satisfy her wish, tried to appear stricken, abashed, well, in a word, I played the part not badly. Relations began, mysterious conversations, moral lectures, instructions, pleadings, supplications, even tears—would you believe it, even tears! That’s how strong the passion for propaganda gets in some girls! I, of course, laid it all at the door of my fate, posed as hungering and thirsting for light, and finally brought into play the greatest and most unshakable means of conquering a woman’s heart, a means that never deceives anyone and that works on absolutely every last one of them, without any exception whatever. The means is well known: flattery. There is nothing in the world harder than straightforwardness, and nothing easier than flattery. If there is even one hundredth part of a false note in straightforwardness, a dissonance follows at once, and after it, a scandal. But in flattery, even if everything down to the last note is false, it is still pleasant and is listened to not without pleasure; with a coarse pleasure, perhaps, but pleasure all the same. And however coarse flattery may be, at least half of it is sure to seem true. And that goes for every degree of development and every stratum of society. Even a vestal virgin can be seduced by flattery. And as for ordinary people, it goes without saying. I can’t recall without laughing how I once seduced a certain lady, devoted to her husband, her children, and her virtues. What fun it was, and how little work! And the lady really was virtuous, at least in her own way. My whole tactic consisted in simply being crushed every minute and falling prostrate before her chastity. I flattered shamelessly, and as soon as I’d won a pressure of the hand, or even a glance, I’d reproach myself for having wrested it from her by force, saying that she had resisted, that she had resisted so hard that I surely would never have got anything if I hadn’t been so depraved myself; that she, in her innocence, had not foreseen the treachery and had yielded unintentionally, without knowing it herself, without realizing, and so on, and so on. In a word, I achieved everything, and my lady remained convinced in the highest degree that she was innocent and chaste and fulfilled all her duties and obligations, and had come to ruin quite by accident. And how angry she was with me when I told her at the end that it was my sincere conviction that she had been seeking pleasure exactly as much as I had. Poor Marfa Petrovna was terribly susceptible to flattery too, and if I had only wanted to, I could of course have had the whole estate signed over to me while she was still alive. (I’m drinking a terrible lot of wine, though, and chattering.) I hope you won’t be angry if I mention now that the same effect was beginning to come about with Avdotya Romanovna as well. But I was stupid and impatient myself and spoiled the whole thing. Several times even before that (and once in a particular way), Avdotya Romanovna had taken a terrible dislike to the expression of my eyes, would you believe it? In a word, a certain fire kept flaring up in them, more and more strongly and incautiously, which frightened her and finally became hateful to her. No need to go into details, but we parted. Then I did something stupid again. I took to mocking all this propaganda and these conversions in the coarsest way; Parasha appeared on the scene again, and not she alone—in a word, a regular Sodom began. Oh, if you had seen, Rodion Romanych, even once in your life, your sister’s eyes as they sometimes know how to flash! Never mind that I’m drunk now and have already had a whole glass of wine, I’m telling the truth; I assure you, I dreamed of that look; in the end I could no longer bear the rustle of her dress. Really, I thought I was going to have a fit of the falling sickness; I’d never imagined I could reach such a frenzy. In a word, it was necessary to make peace; but by then that was impossible. And imagine what I did then? To what a pitch of stupidity rage can bring a man! Never undertake anything in a rage, Rodion Romanych. Reckoning that Avdotya Romanovna was, after all, essentially a beggar (ah, excuse me, that isn’t what I meant… but isn’t it all the same, if it expresses the same idea?), in a word, that she lived by the work of her own hands, that she was supporting both her mother and you (ah, the devil, you’re frowning again…), I decided to offer her all my money (I could have raised as much as thirty thousand even then) on condition that she run away with me, even if only here, to Petersburg. Naturally, I’d have sworn eternal love there, bliss, and so on, and so on. Would you believe it, I was so smitten then that if she had said to me: stab Marfa Petrovna or poison her and marry me, it would have been done on the spot! But it all ended in the catastrophe you already know about, and you can judge for yourself what a rage I could fly into when I learned that Marfa Petrovna had dug up that vilest of pen-pushers, Luzhin, and very nearly cobbled together a wedding—which, in essence, would have been the very same thing I was proposing. Wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it? It would, wouldn’t it? I notice you’ve begun listening very attentively… an interesting young man…”
Svidrigailov struck the table with his fist in impatience. He had turned red. Raskolnikov saw clearly that the glass or glass and a half of champagne he had drunk, sipping it imperceptibly, in small gulps, had had a morbid effect on him—and decided to take advantage of the opportunity. He found Svidrigailov very suspicious.
“Well, after this I’m fully convinced that you came here, too, with my sister in view,” he said to Svidrigailov directly and without concealment, to provoke him still more.
“Eh, come now,” Svidrigailov said, as if suddenly catching himself, “I told you… and besides, your sister can’t stand me.”
“Yes, of that I’m convinced too, that she can’t, but that’s not the point now.”
“And you’re convinced that she can’t?” (Svidrigailov narrowed his eyes and smiled mockingly.) “You’re right, she doesn’t love me; but never vouch for anything in matters that have passed between husband and wife, or lover and mistress. There is always one little corner there that always remains unknown to the whole world and is known only to the two of them. Will you vouch that Avdotya Romanovna looked on me with aversion?”
“From certain words and little phrases of yours while you were telling your story, I notice that you have designs on Dunya even now, and most urgent ones, and vile ones, of course.”
“What! Words and little phrases like that slipped out of me?” Svidrigailov took fright suddenly and with great naïveté, paying not the slightest attention to the epithet applied to his intentions.
“They’re slipping out even now. Well, what are you so afraid of, for instance? What has frightened you all of a sudden?”
“I, afraid and frightened? Frightened of you? It’s more for you to be afraid of me, cher ami. What rubbish, though… But anyway, I’ve got tipsy, I can see that; I nearly let something slip again. To the devil with wine! Hey, water!”
He seized the bottle and without ceremony flung it out of the window. Filipp brought water.
“That’s all nonsense,” said Svidrigailov, wetting a towel and putting it to his head, “and with one word I can bring you up short and grind all your suspicions to dust. Do you know, for instance, that I’m getting married?”
“You told me that before.”
“Did I? I forgot. But then I couldn’t say so for certain, because I hadn’t even seen my bride yet; I only intended to. Well, but now I have a bride, and the thing is settled, and if it weren’t for business, urgent business, I’d certainly take you and drive you to them right now—because I want to ask your advice. Eh, the devil! Only ten minutes left. You see, look at the watch; but anyway, I’ll tell you, because it’s an interesting little thing, my marriage, in its own way, that is—where are you going? Leaving again?”
“No, now I won’t leave.”
“Won’t leave at all? We’ll see! I’ll take you there, that’s true, I’ll show you my bride, only not now, because now it will soon be time for you to go. You go right, I go left. Do you know this Resslich woman? This very Resslich I’m living with now—eh? Do you hear? No, what do you think, the very one they say that a girl, in the water, in winter—well, do you hear? Do you hear? Well, so she cooked all this up for me; you’re sort of bored, she says, amuse yourself for a while. And I’m a gloomy, boring man, you know. You think I’m cheerful? No, gloomy: I do no harm, and sit in a corner; sometimes nobody can get a word out of me for three days. But this Resslich is a sly one, I tell you, and here’s what she has in mind: I’ll get bored, abandon my wife and go away, and the wife will fall to her, and she’ll put her into circulation; in our circle, that is, or higher. There’s a certain paralyzed father, she says, a retired official, sits in an armchair and hasn’t moved his legs for over two years. There’s a mother too, she says, a sensible lady, the mama. A son serves somewhere in the provinces, doesn’t help. A daughter has married and doesn’t visit, and they have two little nephews on their hands (as if their own weren’t enough), and they’ve taken a girl out of the gymnasium before she finished, their youngest daughter, she’ll be just sixteen in a month, which means in a month she can be married off. To me, that is. We went; how funny it is at their place; I introduce myself: a landowner, a widower, of a well-known family, with such-and-such connections, with capital—well, what of it that I’m fifty and she isn’t even sixteen? Who looks at that? But it’s tempting, isn’t it, eh? It’s tempting, ha! ha! You should have seen how I talked away with papa and mama! People ought to pay just to watch me at such a moment. She comes out, curtsies, well, you can imagine, still in a short little dress, an unopened little bud, she blushes, flushes like the dawn (they’d told her, of course). I don’t know how you feel about women’s faces, but in my opinion these sixteen years, these still childish little eyes, this timidity and these little tears of bashfulness—in my opinion that’s better than beauty, and on top of that she’s pretty as a picture. Fair little hair, fluffed up in little curls like a lamb’s, plump little scarlet lips, little feet—charming!… Well, we got acquainted, I announced that I was in a hurry on account of family circumstances, and the very next day, that is, the day before yesterday, they gave us their blessing. Since then, the moment I arrive, I have her on my knee, and I don’t let her down… Well, she flushes like the dawn, and I kiss her every minute; her mama, of course, impresses on her that this, you see, is your husband and this is how it has to be, in a word, sheer bliss! And this present state, the fiancé’s state, may really be better than the husband’s. Here you have what is called la nature et la vérité! Ha-ha! I’ve talked with her a couple of times—the girl is far from stupid; sometimes she’ll steal a look at me like that—it fairly burns right through me. And you know, she has a little face like Raphael’s Madonna. The Sistine Madonna has a fantastic face, doesn’t she, the face of a sorrowing holy fool, didn’t that strike you? Well, something of that sort. As soon as they’d blessed us, the next day I brought her fifteen hundred roubles’ worth: a diamond set, a pearl one, and a lady’s silver dressing case—this big, with all sorts of things in it, so that even her little face, the madonna’s, turned pink. I sat her on my knee yesterday, and too unceremoniously, I suppose—she flushed all over and little tears spurted out, but she doesn’t want to show it, and she’s burning all over. They all went out for a minute, she and I were left quite alone, suddenly she throws herself on my neck (of her own accord, for the first time), puts both her little arms around me, kisses me, and swears she will be an obedient, faithful, and good wife to me, that she will make me happy, that she will devote her whole life, every minute of her life, sacrifice everything, and for all this all she wants from me is my respect, and she needs nothing more, she says, ‘nothing, nothing, no presents!’ You’ll agree yourself that to hear a confession like that in private from such a sixteen-year-old little angel, in a little tulle dress, with fluffed-up curls, with the blush of maidenly shame and little tears of enthusiasm in her eyes—you’ll agree yourself, it’s rather tempting. It is tempting, isn’t it? It’s worth something, eh? Well, isn’t it worth something? Well… well, listen… well, let’s go and see my bride… only not right now!”
“In a word, it’s this monstrous difference in age and development that arouses your lust! And are you really going to marry like that?”
“Why not? Certainly. Every man shifts for himself, and he lives merriest of all who best knows how to fool himself. Ha-ha! But why have you charged into virtue like that, shaft and all? Have mercy, my dear fellow, I’m a sinful man. Heh-heh-heh!”
“You did, however, provide for Katerina Ivanovna’s children. Though… though you had your reasons for that… I understand everything now.”
“I love children in general, I love children very much,” Svidrigailov roared with laughter. “On that score I can even tell you a most curious episode, one that’s still going on. On the very first day after I arrived I went the rounds of all these various sewers, well, after seven years I simply flung myself on them. You’ve probably noticed that I’m in no hurry to take up with my own set, my former friends and acquaintances. Well, and I’ll hold out without them for as long as I can. You know: at Marfa Petrovna’s in the country I was tormented to death by memories of all those mysterious places and little spots where anyone who knows his way about can find a great deal. Devil take it! The common people drink, the educated young burn themselves out from idleness in impossible dreams and reveries and cripple themselves in theories; Jews have come flocking from somewhere and are hiding money away, and all the rest are given up to debauchery. From the very first hours the city breathed its familiar smell on me. I landed at a so-called dancing soirée—a terrible sewer (and I like my sewers precisely with a bit of dirt in them), well, of course, a cancan such as doesn’t exist anywhere and didn’t exist in my day. Yes, sir, there’s progress for you. Suddenly I look, and there’s a girl of about thirteen, very prettily dressed, dancing with a certain virtuoso; another one facing her, vis-à-vis. And by the wall, on a chair, sits her mother. Well, you can imagine what sort of cancan it was! The girl is embarrassed, blushes, finally takes offense and starts to cry. The virtuoso catches her up and starts twirling her around and showing off in front of her, everyone around is roaring with laughter and—I love our public at such moments, even a cancan public—they roar with laughter and shout: ‘Serves her right, that’s just as it should be! Shouldn’t bring children!’ Well, I don’t give a damn, it’s none of my business, whether their way of consoling themselves is logical or not! I marked out my place at once, sat down by the mother and began telling her that I was a newcomer too, that what boors they all were here, that they couldn’t tell true merit or show proper respect; I let it be known that I had a great deal of money; offered to see them home in my carriage; saw them home, made their acquaintance (they rent some little closet from tenants, they’ve only just arrived). I was told that both she and her daughter could regard my acquaintance only as an honor; I learn that they have neither house nor home, and have come to petition about something in some government office; I offer my services, money; I learn that they went to the soirée by mistake, thinking that they really taught dancing there; I offer to contribute for my part to the young lady’s education, French and dancing. They accept with delight, consider it an honor, and I keep up the acquaintance to this day… If you like, we’ll go there—only not right now.”
“Stop it, stop your vile, low anecdotes, you depraved, low, lecherous man!”
“Our Schiller, our Schiller, our very own Schiller! Où va-t-elle la vertu se nicher?2 And you know, I’m going to tell you things like this on purpose, to hear your little outcries. What a pleasure!”
“Of course, as if I didn’t seem ridiculous to myself at this moment!” Raskolnikov muttered with spite.
Svidrigailov laughed at the top of his voice; at last he called Filipp, paid, and began to get up.
“Well, I am drunk, though, assez causé!”3 he said. “What a pleasure!”
“Of course you’d feel pleasure,” Raskolnikov cried, getting up too. “Isn’t it a pleasure for a worn-out libertine to tell of adventures like these—with some monstrous intention of the same sort in view—and under such circumstances besides, and to a man like me… It inflames you.”
“Well, if that’s so,” Svidrigailov answered, even with a certain surprise, studying Raskolnikov, “if that’s so, then you’re a fair cynic yourself. At least you contain enormous material for one. You can be conscious of a great deal, a great deal… well, and you can do a great deal too. Well, that’s enough, though. I sincerely regret that we talked so little, but you won’t get away from me… Just you wait…”
Svidrigailov walked out of the tavern. Raskolnikov followed him. Svidrigailov, however, was not very drunk; the wine had gone to his head only for a moment, and the effect was wearing off with every minute. He was very preoccupied with something, something extremely important, and he frowned. Some expectation was visibly agitating and troubling him. Toward Raskolnikov, in these last minutes, he had somehow suddenly changed, and he was growing ruder and more mocking with every minute. Raskolnikov noticed all this and was uneasy as well. Svidrigailov seemed very suspicious to him; he decided to follow him.
They came out onto the sidewalk.
“You go right, and I go left, or perhaps the other way round, only—adieu, mon plaisir, till our next happy meeting!”
And he went off to the right, toward the Haymarket.
Notes
1. Razumikhin’s name is formed from razum, “reason, good sense.” Names of this kind were typical of the clergy, whose sons were educated in seminaries.
2. “Where will virtue go and make its nest!”: Molière’s remark (as the anecdote has it) when a beggar to whom he had given a gold coin ran after him to return it, thinking it given by mistake.
3. French: “enough talk.”