The Adolescent

“This . . . this is the girl you wanted to marry there and who died of consumption . . . her stepdaughter?” I said somewhat timidly.

“Yes, wanted to marry, died of consumption, her stepdaughter. I knew you knew . . . all that gossip. However, apart from gossip, you couldn’t have known anything here. Let the portrait be, my friend, this is a poor madwoman and nothing more.”

“Quite mad?”

“Or else an idiot. However, I think she was mad as well. She had a child by Prince Sergei Petrovich (out of madness, not out of love; that was one of Sergei Petrovich’s meanest acts); the child is here now, in the other room, I’ve long wanted to show it to you. Prince Sergei Petrovich didn’t dare to come here and look at the baby; I made that stipulation with him while we were still abroad. I took it under my care with your mama’s permission. With your mama’s permission I also wanted then to marry that . . . unfortunate woman . . .”

“Was such permission possible?” I uttered hotly.

“Oh, yes! she gave it to me. One gets jealous of a woman, and that was not a woman.”

“Not a woman for anybody except mama! Never in my life will I believe that mama wasn’t jealous!” I cried.

“And you’re right. I realized it only when it was all over—that is, when she had given her permission. But let’s drop it. The affair didn’t work out on account of Lydia’s death, and maybe it wouldn’t have worked out even if she had remained alive, but even now I don’t let mama see the child. It was merely an episode. My dear, I’ve long been waiting for you to come here. I’ve long been dreaming of how we’d get together here. Do you know how long? For two years now.”

He looked at me sincerely and truthfully, with an unreserved warmth of heart. I seized his hand:

“Why were you so slow, why didn’t you invite me long ago? If you knew what has happened . . . and what wouldn’t have happened if you had called me long ago! . . .”

At that moment the samovar was brought in, and Nastasya Egorovna suddenly brought in the baby, asleep.

“Look at him,” said Versilov. “I love him, and I had him brought now on purpose, so that you could also look at him. Well, take him away again, Nastasya Egorovna. Sit down to the samovar. I’m going to imagine that we’ve lived like this forever and have come together every evening, never parting. Let me look at you; sit like this, so that I can see your face! How I love your face! How I kept imagining your face to myself, as I was waiting for you to come from Moscow! You ask why I didn’t send for you long ago? Wait, maybe now you’ll understand.”

“But can it be only this old man’s death that has loosened your tongue now? It’s strange . . .”

But though I did say that, I still looked at him with love. We talked like two friends in the highest and fullest sense of the word. He had brought me here to explain, to recount, to justify something to me; and yet everything was already explained and justified before any words. Whatever I was to hear from him now, the result had already been achieved, and we both happily knew it and looked at each other that way.

“It’s not exactly this old man’s death,” he replied, “not only his death; there’s something else now that has hit on the same spot . . . May God bless this moment and our life, for a long time to come! Let’s talk, my dear! I keep getting broken up, diverted, I want to talk about one thing and get sidetracked into a thousand other details. That always happens when one’s heart is full . . . But let’s talk; the time has come, and I’ve long been in love with you, my boy . . .”

He leaned back in his armchair and looked me over once more.

“How strange! How strange it is to hear that!” I repeated, drowning in ecstasy.

And then, I remember, in his face there suddenly flashed the usual wrinkle—as if of sadness and mockery together—which I knew so well. He controlled himself and, as if with a certain strain, began.

II

“HERE’S THE THING, Arkady: if I had invited you earlier, what would I have said to you? In this question lies my whole answer.”

“That is, you mean to say that you’re now mama’s husband and my father, while then . . . You wouldn’t have known before what to say about my social position? Is that it?”

“That’s not the only thing I wouldn’t have known what to say about, my dear; there’s much here that I would have had to pass over in silence. There’s even much here that’s ridiculous and humiliating, because it looks like a trick—really, like a most farcical trick. Well, how could we have understood each other before, if I understood myself only today, at five o’clock in the afternoon, exactly two hours before Makar Ivanovich’s death? You look at me with unpleasant perplexity? Don’t worry, I’ll explain the trick; but what I said is quite right: life is all wanderings and perplexities, and suddenly—the resolution, on such-and-such a day, at five o’clock in the afternoon! It’s even offensive, isn’t it? In the still-recent old days I’d have been quite offended.”