No More Learning

At that moment my clock
began whirring and wheezing and struck seven.


IX

"Into my house come bold and free,
Its rightful mistress there to be. "

I stood before her crushed, crestfallen, revoltingly confused, and I
believe I smiled as I did my utmost to wrap myself in the skirts of my
ragged wadded dressing-gown--exactly as I had imagined the scene not
long before in a fit of depression. After standing over us for a couple
of minutes Apollon went away, but that did not make me more at ease.
What made it worse was that she, too, was overwhelmed with confusion,
more so, in fact, than I should have expected. At the sight of me, of
course.

"Sit down," I said mechanically, moving a chair up to the table, and I
sat down on the sofa. She obediently sat down at once and gazed at me
open-eyed, evidently expecting something from me at once. This naïveté
of expectation drove me to fury, but I restrained myself.

She ought to have tried not to notice, as though everything had been as
usual, while instead of that, she . . . and I dimly felt that I should
make her pay dearly for _all this_.

"You have found me in a strange position, Liza," I began, stammering and
knowing that this was the wrong way to begin. "No, no, don't imagine
anything," I cried, seeing that she had suddenly flushed. "I am not
ashamed of my poverty. . . . On the contrary I look with pride on my
poverty. I am poor but honourable. . . . One can be poor and honourable," I
muttered. "However . . . would you like tea? ". . .

"No," she was beginning.

"Wait a minute. "

I leapt up and ran to Apollon. I had to get out of the room somehow.

"Apollon," I whispered in feverish haste, flinging down before him the
seven roubles which had remained all the time in my clenched fist, "here
are your wages, you see I give them to you; but for that you must come
to my rescue: bring me tea and a dozen rusks from the restaurant. If you
won't go, you'll make me a miserable man! You don't know what this woman
is. . . . This is--everything! You may be imagining something. . . . But you
don't know what that woman is! ". . .

Apollon, who had already sat down to his work and put on his spectacles
again, at first glanced askance at the money without speaking or putting
down his needle; then, without paying the slightest attention to me or
making any answer he went on busying himself with his needle, which he
had not yet threaded. I waited before him for three minutes with my arms
crossed _à la Napoléon_. My temples were moist with sweat. I was pale, I
felt it. But, thank God, he must have been moved to pity, looking at me.
Having threaded his needle he deliberately got up from his seat,
deliberately moved back his chair, deliberately took off his spectacles,
deliberately counted the money, and finally asking me over his shoulder:
"Shall I get a whole portion? " deliberately walked out of the room. As I
was going back to Liza, the thought occurred to me on the way: shouldn't
I run away just as I was in my dressing-gown, no matter where, and then
let happen what would.

I sat down again. She looked at me uneasily. For some minutes we were
silent.

"I will kill him," I shouted suddenly, striking the table with my fist
so that the ink spurted out of the inkstand.

"What are you saying! " she cried, starting.

"I will kill him! kill him! " I shrieked, suddenly striking the table in
absolute frenzy, and at the same time fully understanding how stupid it
was to be in such a frenzy. "You don't know, Liza, what that torturer is
to me. He is my torturer. . . . He has gone now to fetch some rusks;
he. . . . "

And suddenly I burst into tears. It was an hysterical attack. How
ashamed I felt in the midst of my sobs; but still I could not restrain
them.

She was frightened.

"What is the matter? What is wrong? " she cried, fussing about me.

"Water, give me water, over there! " I muttered in a faint voice, though
I was inwardly conscious that I could have got on very well without
water and without muttering in a faint voice. But I was, what is called,
_putting it on_, to save appearances, though the attack was a genuine
one.

She gave me water, looking at me in bewilderment. At that moment Apollon
brought in the tea. It suddenly seemed to me that this commonplace,
prosaic tea was horribly undignified and paltry after all that had
happened, and I blushed crimson. Liza looked at Apollon with positive
alarm. He went out without a glance at either of us.

"Liza, do you despise me? " I asked, looking at her fixedly, trembling
with impatience to know what she was thinking.

She was confused, and did not know what to answer.

"Drink your tea," I said to her angrily. I was angry with myself, but,
of course, it was she who would have to pay for it. A horrible spite
against her suddenly surged up in my heart; I believe I could have
killed her. To revenge myself on her I swore inwardly not to say a word
to her all the time. "She is the cause of it all," I thought.

Our silence lasted for five minutes. The tea stood on the table; we did
not touch it. I had got to the point of purposely refraining from
beginning in order to embarrass her further; it was awkward for her to
begin alone. Several times she glanced at me with mournful perplexity. I
was obstinately silent. I was, of course, myself the chief sufferer,
because I was fully conscious of the disgusting meanness of my spiteful
stupidity, and yet at the same time I could not restrain myself.

"I want to . . . get away . . . from there altogether," she began, to break
the silence in some way, but, poor girl, that was just what she ought
not to have spoken about at such a stupid moment to a man so stupid as I
was. My heart positively ached with pity for her tactless and
unnecessary straightforwardness. But something hideous at once stifled
all compassion in me; it even provoked me to greater venom. I did not
care what happened. Another five minutes passed.

"Perhaps I am in your way," she began timidly, hardly audibly, and was
getting up.

But as soon as I saw this first impulse of wounded dignity I positively
trembled with spite, and at once burst out.

"Why have you come to me, tell me that, please? " I began, gasping for
breath and regardless of logical connection in my words. I longed to
have it all out at once, at one burst; I did not even trouble how to
begin. "Why have you come? Answer, answer," I cried, hardly knowing what
I was doing. "I'll tell you, my good girl, why you have come. You've
come because I talked sentimental stuff to you then. So now you are soft
as butter and longing for fine sentiments again. So you may as well know
that I was laughing at you then. And I am laughing at you now. Why are
you shuddering? Yes, I was laughing at you! I had been insulted just
before, at dinner, by the fellows who came that evening before me. I
came to you, meaning to thrash one of them, an officer; but I didn't
succeed, I didn't find him; I had to avenge the insult on some one to
get back my own again; you turned up, I vented my spleen on you and
laughed at you. I had been humiliated, so I wanted to humiliate; I had
been treated like a rag, so I wanted to show my power. . . . That's what it
was, and you imagined I had come there on purpose to save you. Yes? You
imagined that? You imagined that? "

I knew that she would perhaps be muddled and not take it all in exactly,
but I knew, too, that she would grasp the gist of it, very well indeed.
And so, indeed, she did. She turned white as a handkerchief, tried to
say something, and her lips worked painfully; but she sank on a chair as
though she had been felled by an axe. And all the time afterwards she
listened to me with her lips parted and her eyes wide open, shuddering
with awful terror. The cynicism, the cynicism of my words overwhelmed
her. . . .

"Save you! " I went on, jumping up from my chair and running up and down
the room before her. "Save you from what? But perhaps I am worse than
you myself. Why didn't you throw it in my teeth when I was giving you
that sermon: 'But what did you come here yourself for? was it to read us
a sermon? ' Power, power was what I wanted then, sport was what I wanted,
I wanted to wring out your tears, your humiliation, your hysteria--that
was what I wanted then! Of course, I couldn't keep it up then, because I
am a wretched creature, I was frightened, and, the devil knows why, gave
you my address in my folly. Afterwards, before I got home, I was cursing
and swearing at you because of that address, I hated you already because
of the lies I had told you. Because I only like playing with words, only
dreaming, but, do you know, what I really want is that you should all go
to hell. That is what I want. I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole
world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is
the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the
world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. Did you know
that, or not? Well, anyway, I know that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel,
an egoist, a sluggard. Here I have been shuddering for the last three
days at the thought of your coming. And do you know what has worried me
particularly for these three days? That I posed as such a hero to you,
and now you would see me in a wretched torn dressing-gown, beggarly,
loathsome. I told you just now that I was not ashamed of my poverty; so
you may as well know that I am ashamed of it; I am more ashamed of it
than of anything, more afraid of it than of being found out if I were a
thief, because I am as vain as though I had been skinned and the very
air blowing on me hurt. Surely by now you must realize that I shall
never forgive you for having found me in this wretched dressing-gown,
just as I was flying at Apollon like a spiteful cur. The saviour, the
former hero, was flying like a mangy, unkempt sheep-dog at his lackey,
and the lackey was jeering at him! And I shall never forgive you for the
tears I could not help shedding before you just now, like some silly
woman put to shame! And for what I am confessing to you now, I shall
never forgive _you_ either! Yes--you must answer for it all because you
turned up like this, because I am a blackguard, because I am the
nastiest, stupidest, absurdest and most envious of all the worms on
earth, who are not a bit better than I am, but, the devil knows why, are
never put to confusion; while I shall always be insulted by every louse,
that is my doom! And what is it to me that you don't understand a word
of this! And what do I care, what do I care about you, and whether you
go to ruin there or not? Do you understand? How I shall hate you now
after saying this, for having been here and listening. Why, it's not
once in a lifetime a man speaks out like this, and then it is in
hysterics! . . . What more do you want? Why do you still stand confronting
me, after all this? Why are you worrying me? Why don't you go? "

But at this point a strange thing happened. I was so accustomed to think
and imagine everything from books, and to picture everything in the
world to myself just as I had made it up in my dreams beforehand, that I
could not all at once take in this strange circumstance. What happened
was this: Liza, insulted and crushed by me, understood a great deal more
than I imagined. She understood from all this what a woman understands
first of all, if she feels genuine love, that is, that I was myself
unhappy.

The frightened and wounded expression on her face was followed first by
a look of sorrowful perplexity. When I began calling myself a scoundrel
and a blackguard and my tears flowed (the tirade was accompanied
throughout by tears) her whole face worked convulsively. She was on the
point of getting up and stopping me; when I finished she took no notice
of my shouting: "Why are you here, why don't you go away? " but realized
only that it must have been very bitter to me to say all this. Besides,
she was so crushed, poor girl; she considered herself infinitely beneath
me; how could she feel anger or resentment? She suddenly leapt up from
her chair with an irresistible impulse and held out her hands, yearning
towards me, though still timid and not daring to stir. . . . At this point
there was a revulsion in my heart, too.
Then she suddenly rushed to me,
threw her arms round me and burst into tears. I, too, could not restrain
myself, and sobbed as I never had before.

"They won't let me. . . . I can't be good! " I managed to articulate; then I
went to the sofa, fell on it face downwards, and sobbed on it for a
quarter of an hour in genuine hysterics. She came close to me, put her
arms round me and stayed motionless in that position. But the trouble
was that the hysterics could not go on for ever, and (I am writing the
loathsome truth) lying face downwards on the sofa with my face thrust
into my nasty leather pillow, I began by degrees to be aware of a
far-away, involuntary but irresistible feeling that it would be awkward
now for me to raise my head and look Liza straight in the face. Why was
I ashamed? I don't know, but I was ashamed. The thought, too, came into
my overwrought brain that our parts now were completely changed, that
she was now the heroine, while I was just such a crushed and humiliated
creature as she had been before me that night--four days before. . . . And
all this came into my mind during the minutes I was lying on my face on
the sofa.

My God! surely I was not envious of her then.

I don't know, to this day I cannot decide, and at the time, of course, I
was still less able to understand what I was feeling than now. I cannot
get on without domineering and tyrannizing over some one, but . . . there
is no explaining anything by reasoning and so it is useless to reason.

I conquered myself, however, and raised my head; I had to do so sooner
or later . . . and I am convinced to this day that it was just because I
was ashamed to look at her that another feeling was suddenly kindled and
flamed up in my heart . . . a feeling of mastery and possession. My eyes
gleamed with passion, and I gripped her hands tightly. How I hated her
and how I was drawn to her at that minute! The one feeling intensified
the other. It was almost like an act of vengeance. At first there was a
look of amazement, even of terror on her face, but only for one instant.
She warmly and rapturously embraced me.


X

A quarter of an hour later I was rushing up and down the room in
frenzied impatience, from minute to minute I went up to the screen and
peeped through the crack at Liza. She was sitting on the ground with her
head leaning against the bed, and must have been crying. But she did not
go away, and that irritated me. This time she understood it all. I had
insulted her finally, but . . . there's no need to describe it. She
realized that my outburst of passion had been simply revenge, a fresh
humiliation, and that to my earlier, almost causeless hatred was added
now a _personal hatred_, born of envy. . . . Though I do not maintain
positively that she understood all this distinctly; but she certainly
did fully understand that I was a despicable man, and what was worse,
incapable of loving her.

I know I shall be told that this is incredible--but it is incredible to
be as spiteful and stupid as I was; it may be added that it was strange
I should not love her, or at any rate, appreciate her love. Why is it
strange? In the first place, by then I was incapable of love, for I
repeat, with me loving meant tyrannizing and showing my moral
superiority. I have never in my life been able to imagine any other sort
of love, and have nowadays come to the point of sometimes thinking that
love really consists in the right--freely given by the beloved
object--to tyrannize over her.

Even in my underground dreams I did not imagine love except as a
struggle. I began it always with hatred and ended it with moral
subjugation, and afterwards I never knew what to do with the subjugated
object. And what is there to wonder at in that, since I had succeeded in
so corrupting myself, since I was so out of touch with "real life," as
to have actually thought of reproaching her, and putting her to shame
for having come to me to hear "fine sentiments"; and did not even guess
that she had come not to hear fine sentiments, but to love me, because
to a woman all reformation, all salvation from any sort of ruin, and all
moral renewal is included in love and can only show itself in that form.

I did not hate her so much, however, when I was running about the room
and peeping through the crack in the screen. I was only insufferably
oppressed by her being here. I wanted her to disappear. I wanted
"peace," to be left alone in my underground world. Real life oppressed
me with its novelty so much that I could hardly breathe.

But several minutes passed and she still remained, without stirring, as
though she were unconscious. I had the shamelessness to tap softly at
the screen as though to remind her. . . . She started, sprang up, and flew
to seek her kerchief, her hat, her coat, as though making her escape
from me. . . . Two minutes later she came from behind the screen and looked
with heavy eyes at me. I gave a spiteful grin, which was forced,
however, to _keep up appearances_, and I turned away from her eyes.

"Good-bye," she said, going towards the door.

I ran up to her, seized her hand, opened it, thrust something in it and
closed it again. Then I turned at once and dashed away in haste to the
other corner of the room to avoid seeing, anyway. . . .

I did mean a moment since to tell a lie--to write that I did this
accidentally, not knowing what I was doing through foolishness, through
losing my head. But I don't want to lie, and so I will say straight out
that I opened her hand and put the money in it . . . from spite. It came
into my head to do this while I was running up and down the room and she
was sitting behind the screen. But this I can say for certain: though I
did that cruel thing purposely, it was not an impulse from the heart,
but came from my evil brain. This cruelty was so affected, so purposely
made up, so completely a product of the brain, of books, that I could
not even keep it up a minute--first I dashed away to avoid seeing her,
and then in shame and despair rushed after Liza. I opened the door in
the passage and began listening.

"Liza! Liza! " I cried on the stairs, but in a low voice, not boldly.

There was no answer, but I fancied I heard her footsteps, lower down on
the stairs.

"Liza! " I cried, more loudly.

No answer. But at that minute I heard the stiff outer glass door open
heavily with a creak and slam violently, the sound echoed up the stairs.

She had gone. I went back to my room in hesitation. I felt horribly
oppressed.

I stood still at the table, beside the chair on which she had sat and
looked aimlessly before me. A minute passed, suddenly I started;
straight before me on the table I saw. . . . In short, I saw a crumpled
blue five-rouble note, the one I had thrust into her hand a minute
before. It was the same note; it could be no other, there was no other
in the flat. So she had managed to fling it from her hand on the table
at the moment when I had dashed into the further corner.

Well! I might have expected that she would do that. Might I have
expected it? No, I was such an egoist, I was so lacking in respect for
my fellow-creatures that I could not even imagine she would do so. I
could not endure it. A minute later I flew like a madman to dress,
flinging on what I could at random and ran headlong after her. She could
not have got two hundred paces away when I ran out into the street.

It was a still night and the snow was coming down in masses and falling
almost perpendicularly, covering the pavement and the empty street as
though with a pillow. There was no one in the street, no sound was to be
heard. The street lamps gave a disconsolate and useless glimmer. I ran
two hundred paces to the cross-roads and stopped short.

Where had she gone? And why was I running after her?

Why? To fall down before her, to sob with remorse, to kiss her feet, to
entreat her forgiveness! I longed for that, my whole breast was being
rent to pieces, and never, never shall I recall that minute with
indifference. But--what for? I thought. Should I not begin to hate her,
perhaps, even to-morrow, just because I had kissed her feet to-day?
Should I give her happiness? Had I not recognized that day, for the
hundredth time, what I was worth? Should I not torture her?

I stood in the snow, gazing into the troubled darkness and pondered
this.

"And will it not be better? " I mused fantastically, afterwards at home,
stifling the living pang of my heart with fantastic dreams. "Will it not
be better that she should keep the resentment of the insult for ever?
Resentment--why, it is purification; it is a most stinging and painful
consciousness! To-morrow I should have defiled her soul and have
exhausted her heart, while now the feeling of insult will never die in
her heart, and however loathsome the filth awaiting her--the feeling of
insult will elevate and purify her . . . by hatred . . . h'm! . . . perhaps,
too, by forgiveness. . . . Will all that make things easier for her
though? . . . "

And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which
is better--cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?

So I dreamed as I sat at home that evening, almost dead with the pain in
my soul. Never had I endured such suffering and remorse, yet could there
have been the faintest doubt when I ran out from my lodging that I
should turn back half-way? I never met Liza again and I have heard
nothing of her. I will add, too, that I remained for a long time
afterwards pleased with the phrase about the benefit from resentment and
hatred in spite of the fact that I almost fell ill from misery.

* * * * *

Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I
have many evil memories now, but . . . hadn't I better end my "Notes"
here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I
have felt ashamed all the time I've been writing this story; so it's
hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long
stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in
my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from
real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly
not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an
anti-hero are _expressly_ gathered together here, and what matters most,
it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all divorced from
life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so
divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life,
and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to
looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all
privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume
sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We don't know
what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant prayers
were answered. Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little
more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity,
relax the control and we . . . yes, I assure you . . . we should be begging
to be under control again at once. I know that you will very likely be
angry with me for that, and will begin shouting and stamping. Speak for
yourself, you will say, and for your miseries in your underground holes,
and don't dare to say all of us--excuse me, gentlemen, I am not
justifying myself with that "all of us. " As for what concerns me in
particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have
not dared to carry half-way, and what's more, you have taken your
cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving
yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in
you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living
means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without
books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know
what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate,
what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men--men
with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it
a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized
man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not
by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are
developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow
from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write more from "Underground. "

[_The notes of this paradoxalist do not end here, however.
He could not refrain from going on with them, but it seems
to us that we may stop here. _]




A FAINT HEART

A STORY


Under the same roof in the same flat on the same fourth storey lived two
young men, colleagues in the service, Arkady Ivanovitch Nefedevitch and
Vasya Shumkov. . . . The author of course, feels the necessity of
explaining to the reader why one is given his full title, while the
other's name is abbreviated, if only that such a mode of expression may
not be regarded as unseemly and rather familiar. But, to do so, it would
first be necessary to explain and describe the rank and years and
calling and duty in the service, and even, indeed, the characters of the
persons concerned; and since there are so many writers who begin in that
way, the author of the proposed story, solely in order to be unlike them
(that is, some people will perhaps say, entirely on account of his
boundless vanity), decides to begin straightaway with action. Having
completed this introduction, he begins.

Towards six o'clock on New Year's Eve Shumkov returned home.