The Adolescent

“Nastasya Egorovna is a very sweet person, and I certainly cannot forbid her to love me, but she has no means of knowing what doesn’t concern her.”

My heart was wrung; and since she was counting precisely on firing my indignation, indignation did boil up in me, not against that woman, but so far only against Anna Andreevna herself. I got up from my place.

“As an honest man, I must warn you, Anna Andreevna, that your expectations . . . concerning me . . . may prove vain in the highest degree . . .”

“I expect you to stand up for me,” she looked at me firmly, “for me, who am abandoned by everyone . . . your sister, if you want that, Arkady Makarovich!”

Another moment and she would have started crying.

“Well, it would be better not to, because ‘maybe’ nothing will happen,” I babbled with an inexpressibly heavy feeling.

“How am I to take your words?” she asked somehow too warily.

“Like this, that I will leave you all and—basta! ” I suddenly exclaimed almost in fury. “And as for the document—I’ll tear it up! Farewell!”

I bowed to her and left silently, at the same time almost not daring to glance at her; but I had not yet reached the bottom of the stairs when Nastasya Egorovna overtook me with a folded half-page of note paper. Where Nastasya Egorovna had come from, and where she had been sitting while I was talking with Anna Andreevna—I can’t even comprehend. She didn’t say a single word, but only handed me the paper and ran back. I unfolded it: Lambert’s address was written on it legibly and clearly, and it had been prepared, obviously, several days earlier. I suddenly remembered that on the day when Nastasya Egorovna had come to see me, I had let slip to her that I didn’t know where Lambert lived, but in the sense that “I didn’t know and didn’t want to know.” But by that time I had already learned Lambert’s address through Liza, whom I had asked especially to make inquiries at the information bureau. Anna Andreevna’s escapade seemed to me too resolute, even cynical: despite my refusal to assist her, she, as if not believing me a whit, was sending me straight to Lambert. It became only too clear to me that she had already learned all about the document—and from whom else if not from Lambert, to whom she was therefore sending me to arrange things?

“Decidedly every last one of them takes me for a little boy with no will or character, with whom anything can be done!” I thought with indignation.

II

NEVERTHELESS I WENT to Lambert’s anyway. How could I overcome my curiosity at that time? Lambert, it turned out, lived very far away, in Kosoy Lane, by the Summer Garden, incidentally in the same furnished rooms; but the other time, when I had fled from him, I had been so oblivious of the way and the distance that, when I got his address from Liza four days earlier, I was even surprised and almost didn’t believe he lived there. While still going up the stairs, I noticed two young men at the door to his rooms, on the third floor, and thought they had rung before me and were waiting to be let in. As I came up the stairs, they both turned their backs to the door and studied me carefully. “These are furnished rooms, and they, of course, are going to see other lodgers,” I frowned as I approached them. It would have been very unpleasant for me to find somebody at Lambert’s. Trying not to look at them, I reached out my hand for the bell-pull.

“Atanday,”⁷⁰ one of them shouted at me.

“Please wait to ring,” the other young man said in a ringing and gentle little voice, drawing the words out somewhat. “We’ll finish this, and then we can all ring together if you like.”

I stopped. They were both still very young men, about twenty or twenty-two years old; they were doing something strange there by the door, and in surprise I tried to grasp what it was. The one who had shouted atanday was a very tall fellow, about six foot six, not less, gaunt and haggard, but very muscular, with a very small head for his height, and a strange, sort of comically gloomy expression on his somewhat pockmarked but not at all stupid and even pleasant face. His eyes looked with a somehow excessive intentness, and even a sort of unnecessary and superfluous resolution. He was quite vilely dressed, in an old quilted cotton overcoat with a small, shabby raccoon collar, too short for his height—obviously from someone else’s back—and vile, almost peasant boots, and with a terribly crumpled, discolored top hat on his head. In all he was clearly a sloven: his gloveless hands were dirty, and his long nails were in mourning. His comrade, on the contrary, was foppishly dressed, judging by his light polecat coat, his elegant hat, and the light, fresh gloves on his slender fingers; he was the same height as I, but with an extremely sweet expression on his fresh and young little face.