Читаем The Adolescent полностью

“You’re here, and I went to your place looking for you,” he said to me. His face was dark and stern, without the slightest smile. There was a fixed idea in his eyes.

“I’ve struggled all day and used all measures,” he went on focusedly. “Everything kept collapsing, and there’s horror to come . . .” (N.B. He never went to Prince Nikolai Ivanovich.) “I saw Zhibelsky, he’s an impossible man. You see: first I must have the money, and then we’ll see. And if, with the money, it still doesn’t work out, then . . . But today I decided not to think about it. Let’s just get the money today, and tomorrow we’ll see about it all. Your winnings from three days ago are still intact to the kopeck. It’s three thousand minus three roubles. Subtracting your debt, you’re left with three hundred and forty in change. Take that and another seven hundred to make a thousand, and I’ll take the remaining two thousand. Then we’ll sit down at Zershchikov’s at two different ends and try to win ten thousand—maybe we’ll do something, and if we don’t win, then . . . Anyhow, that’s the only way left.”

He gave me a fateful look.

“Yes, yes!” I cried suddenly, as if resurrecting. “Let’s go! I’ve only been waiting for you . . .”

I’ll note that I hadn’t thought about roulette for a moment in all those hours.

“But the baseness? But the meanness of the act?” the prince asked suddenly.

“That we’re going to play roulette? No, that’s everything!” I cried. “Money is everything! It’s only we who are saints, and Bjoring has sold himself. Anna Andreevna has sold herself, and Versilov—have you heard that Versilov’s a maniac? A maniac! A maniac!”

“Are you well, Arkady Makarovich? Your eyes are somehow strange.”

“Are you saying that in order to go without me? But I won’t leave you now. Not for nothing was I dreaming about gambling all night. Let’s go, let’s go!” I kept crying, as if I had suddenly found the solution to everything.

“Let’s go, then, though you’re in a fever, but there . . .”

He didn’t finish. His face looked heavy, terrible. We were already going out.

“Do you know,” he said suddenly, pausing in the doorway, “there’s yet another way out of my trouble besides gambling?”

“Which?”

“The princely way!”

“But what? But what?”

“Later you’ll find out what. Only know that I’m no longer worthy of it, because it’s too late. Let’s go, and remember my words. Let’s try the lackey’s way out . . . As if I don’t know that I am consciously, of my own full will, going and acting like a lackey!”

VI

I FLEW TO the roulette table as if my whole salvation, my whole way out, was focused in it, and yet, as I’ve already said, before the prince came, I hadn’t even thought of it. And I was going to play, not for myself, but for the prince, on the prince’s money; I can’t conceive what drew me on, but it drew me irresistibly. Oh, never had these people, these faces, these croupiers, these gambling cries, this whole squalid hall at Zershchikov’s, never had it all seemed so loathsome to me, so dismal, so coarse and sad, as this time! I remember only too well the grief and sadness that seized my heart at times during all those hours at the table. But what made me not leave? What made me endure, as if I had taken a fate, a sacrifice, a heroic deed upon myself? I’ll say one thing: I can scarcely say of myself that I was in my right mind then. And yet I had never played so intelligently as that evening. I was silent and concentrated, attentive and terribly calculating; I was patient and stingy and at the same time decided in decisive moments. I placed myself again by the zéro, that is, again between Zershchikov and Aferdov, who always sat next to Zershchikov on the right; I detested that place, but I wanted absolutely to stake on zéro, and all the other places by the zéro were taken. We had been playing for over an hour; finally, from my place, I saw the prince suddenly get up, pale, and walk over to us, and stand facing me across the table. He had lost everything and silently watched my game, though he probably understood nothing in it and was no longer thinking about the game. By that time I was just beginning to win, and Zershchikov counted out money to me. All at once Aferdov, silently, before my eyes, in the most brazen way, took one of my hundred-rouble notes and added it to his pile of money lying in front of him. I cried out and seized him by the hand. Here something unexpected happened to me: it was as if I snapped my chain, as if all the horrors and injuries of that day were suddenly focused on this one instant, on this disappearance of a hundred-rouble note. As if all that was stored up and suppressed in me had only been waiting for this moment to break out.

“He’s a thief! He just stole a hundred-rouble note from me!” I exclaimed, looking around, beside myself.