The Brothers Karamazov (79 page)

“A corner!” Mitya cried. Both he and Maximov won.

“I’ll risk another little ruble now, one more single little ruble,” Maximov muttered blissfully, delighted that he had already won one ruble.

“Lost!” Mitya cried out. “A double on the seven!”

The double was lost too.

“Don’t. Stop it!” Kalganov said suddenly.

“Double, double!” Mitya kept doubling his stakes and every time he doubled, he lost. But Maximov’s single rubles kept winning.

“Double!” Mitya shouted furiously.

“You have lost two hundred, sir,” the little Pole informed him. “Do you wish to stake another two hundred?”

“What, I’ve lost two hundred already? All right, I’ll stake another two hundred and everything on the double!” Mitya pulled out two more one-hundred-ruble bills and tossed them on the queen.

But Kalganov covered the money with his hand.

“That’s enough!” he said in his ringing young voice.

“What’s the matter with you?” Mitya asked, staring at him.

“I won’t let you play anymore.”

“But why?”

“Just take my word. The hell with it—let it go at that. I simply won’t let you go on like this.”

Mitya gaped at him, completely dumbfounded.

“Give it up, Mitya. He may be right—you’ve lost enough as is,” Grushenka said with a peculiar intonation in her voice.

The two Poles suddenly stood up. They looked extremely offended.

“You must be joking, sir,” the little Pole said to Kalganov sternly, looking him up and down.

“How dare you!” Pan Wrublewski barked at Kalganov.

“What do you mean by shouting like that,” Grushenka burst out angrily, “you big turkey!”

Mitya looked at them all in turn. Something in Grushenka’s expression struck him, and a strange new notion flashed through his mind.

“Please, madam!” the little Pole began, turning to Grushenka, his face crimson with anger.

Mitya suddenly went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder.

“I would like to have a couple of words with you, honored sir,” he said.

“What is it you wish, sir?”

“Come into the other room with me. I’ll tell you something you’ll just love to hear. Come on.”

The little Pole seemed taken aback and looked at Mitya distrustfully. But he agreed at once, on condition, though, that Pan Wrublewski go with them.

“You want to have your bodyguard with you? Fine, let him come along. Besides, I want him, too. I even insist on it!” Mitya said. “Come on, my Polish friends, let’s go.”

“Where are you off to?” Grushenka asked with alarm.

“We’ll be back in a minute,” Mitya said. There was something self-confident and unexpectedly cheerful about him, and his face was quite different from what it had been when he first arrived. He led the Poles, not to the room where the girls were getting ready and the table was being set, but to another one, at the opposite end of the blue room. It was a bedroom with trunks and suitcases next to two large beds, which were piled high with pillows in cotton calico covers.

There was a small deal table in a corner with a lighted candle on it. Mitya and the little Pole sat at the table opposite each other while the huge Pan Wrublewski stood nearby, his hands clasped behind his back. The two Poles looked grim, but they were also obviously curious about what was to come.

“What can I do for you, sir?” the little Pole murmured when he was seated.

“I’ll tell you. I don’t want to make a long speech. Here’s three thousand rubles. Take it and go wherever you like, as long as you get out of here.” Mitya pulled the bundle of money out of his pocket.

The little Pole looked at Mitya with tremendous intensity, as if his eyes were trying to penetrate inside him.

“Three thousand?” he asked finally, exchanging a quick look with Wrublewski.

“Three thousand, that’s right—I said three. Listen to me: I can see you’re a reasonable man, so take the three thousand and get the hell out of here and take your Wrublewski along with you. But I want you to get out now, this very minute, and never come back. You’ll go right through this door. What do you have here? A coat, a fur coat? Wait, I’ll get it for you myself. I’ll order horses harnessed for you, and then good-by forever, my Polish friends! Well?”

Mitya waited calmly. He did not doubt that his offer would be taken up.

Something flashed in the Pole’s eyes and it looked as if he had made his decision.

“When do I receive the money, sir?”

“This is how we’ll do it: you get five hundred rubles right now—that will pay for the horses and you’ll keep what’s left as an advance. The remaining two-and-a-half thousand you’ll receive tomorrow in town, and I give you my word of honor that I’ll get it to you whatever happens!”

The Poles exchanged glances again. The little Pole’s face hardened.

“You can have seven hundred rubles instead of five right now,” Mitya said, raising his offer, as he sensed that something had gone wrong. “What’s the matter—don’t you trust me? You don’t really expect me to give you the whole three thousand right away, do you? If I gave it to you now, what would prevent you from going back to her tomorrow? Besides, I don’t have three thousand on me right now, but I swear I have the money hidden at home, in town . . .”

The face of the little Pole immediately assumed an expression of immense personal dignity.

“Is that all you wanted to tell me?” he asked sarcastically. “You should be ashamed of yourself . . . pfft!”

He spat in disgust. Wrublewski spat too.

“You’re spitting now, you Pole,” Mitya said in despair, realizing that he had failed, “because you reckon that you’ll be able to get more out of Grushenka—you’re a couple of capons, that’s what you are!”

“You’re being insulting now.” The little Pole turned red in the face, got up, and rushed out of the room with the air of a man who can no longer bear such indignity.

Wrublewski followed him in his rolling gait and the disheartened and confused Mitya brought up the rear. Mitya was now very frightened of Grushenka, anticipating that the Pole would make a scene. And he was quite right. The little Pole walked in and stopped in front of Grushenka in a theatrical pose.

“Pani . . .” he started, but she interrupted him.

“My name is Grushenka Svetlov, and if you want me to listen to you, you’ll just have to speak Russian,” she cried, losing her temper, as if he had touched a very sore spot in her. “I don’t want to hear one single Polish word. You used to speak Russian once upon a time, and I don’t believe you can have forgotten it in these five years . . .”

“Miss Svetlov . . . I . . . come from far to forget past and forgive . . . that was until today,” he said with an air of outraged dignity, in deliberately broken Russian.

“
You
 have come to forgive 
me?
”

Grushenka leapt to her feet.

“That’s right, 
pani
. I am not petty. I am a generous man. But I was surprised when I see all your lovers. Pan Mitya offered me three thousand rubles to go away. I spat in Pan Mitya’s face.”

“What! He offered you money for me? Is that right, Mitya? So you think I can be bought, do you!”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!” Mitya shouted. “She is pure and chaste and I have never, never been her lover! You lied, you, you . . .”

“Don’t you dare defend me before that man!” Grushenka cried. “If I stayed chaste it was not out of virtue or because I was afraid of Kuzma, but to be able to face this miserable wretch proudly when we met again and tell him to his face that I loathe him. In fact, I can hardly believe that he didn’t accept the money you offered him!”

“He wanted to take it, all right. He did,” Mitya cried. “Only he wanted me to give him the whole three thousand at once, and I insisted on giving him seven hundred down and the rest tomorrow.”

“Why, I know he somehow found out I had some money and so came rushing here to marry me.”

“
Pani!
” the little Pole shouted angrily. “I am a gentleman, a nobleman, not a good-for-nothing parasite. I came here to make you my wife, but I find here not the woman I know before, but a different woman, a woman who behaves bad and has lost all shame.”

“So go back where you came from!” Grushenka screamed, beside herself. “If I demand that they throw you out now, they will do it. You can be sure of that! How stupid I was to have tormented myself for five years the way I have. But it was not because I missed you that I suffered. No, it was my rage that tormented me. I don’t even think you are the same man! He couldn’t possibly have looked like this! You might be his father or something. Well, tell me, where did you order that hairpiece you’re wearing? No, that other man looked like a hawk to me and you look like a half-plucked drake. The other one laughed and sang to me . . . Ah, what fool I am to have shed so many tears during these five years, a shameless fool . . .”

She sank into the armchair and covered her face with her hands.

At that moment the singing of the Mokroye girls resounded in the room next door. They had all been assembled at last and now they started with a fast dance song.

“What is this Sodom?” Wrublewski roared indignantly. “Innkeeper, throw those shameless women out!”

Trifon, who had been peeking curiously into the room for quite some time, had realized that his guests had quarreled. So now he hurried in.

“What are you hollering like that for?” he addressed Wrublewski with quite surprising rudeness.

“You pig!” Wrublewski roared at him.

“Who’s a pig?” the landlord shouted back. “Why don’t you tell them what cards you were using just now? For you hid the deck of cards I brought you, didn’t you? And the cards you played with were marked. I could have you packed off to Siberia for that, because it’s just as bad as forged bills. You know that?”

Trifon walked over to the sofa where the little Pole had been sitting, thrust his fingers between the back of the sofa and the cushions, and pulled out a sealed pack of cards.

“Here, this is my deck, and it hasn’t been opened!” he said, holding it up for everyone to see. “I saw him from the door shoving my deck in there and replacing it with his own . . . No, this gentleman is a common card sharp!”

“Ah, how disgraceful, how disgusting! How could a man turn into that!” Grushenka cried, throwing her hands up and actually turning red with shame.

“And I saw the other one changing a card,” Kalganov said. “He did it twice, in fact.”

“I thought so too . . .” Mitya was going to say something else, but before he could go on, Wrublewski, mad with rage at being so thoroughly exposed, turned to Grushenka and, threatening her with his fist, shouted:

“You dirty whore!”

But he had hardly uttered the words before Mitya was on top of him. He grabbed the Pole with both hands, lifted him off the floor, and in an instant had carried him into the room where he had been with the two Poles before.

“I’ve put him down on the floor in there,” he announced breathlessly, returning almost at once. “He’s thrashing about, the animal, but I don’t expect he’ll come back.” Then, closing one half of the double door and holding the other half open, he turned to the little Pole: “Now, you noble Polish gentleman, would you be so kind as to join your friend in there?”

“Mr. Karamazov, sir,” the landlord said, “why don’t you take your money back from them? It’s just as if they’d stolen it from you!”

“As far as I’m concerned, they can keep my fifty rubles,” Kalganov said.

“And I don’t want my two hundred back either,” Mitya cried. “Let them keep it as a consolation.”

“That’s the right thing, Mitya. Good boy!” Grushenka shouted loudly and there was a note of wicked anger in her voice.

The little Pole, beet red with fury but still maintaining his supercilious air, walked slowly toward the door.

But before reaching it, he stopped and said, looking at Grushenka:

“
Pani
, if you still wish to follow me, come; if you do not, good-by!”

And breathing heavily with indignation and offended pride, he walked through the half of the double door that Dmitry had left open. He was indeed a man of character and great conceit, for, after all that had happened, he still hoped Grushenka would choose him, so highly did he value himself.

Mitya closed the door behind him.

“Lock them in,” Kalganov suggested, but just as he said it, the lock clicked from the inside: the two Poles had thought of locking themselves in first.

“Wonderful!” Grushenka said with implacable hatred. “Great! Good riddance!”

Chapter 8: Delirium

THEN A big party began, a free-for-all, almost an orgy. Grushenka was the first to call for champagne:

“I want to drink. I want to get completely drunk, just like the time we got to know each other, Mitya, remember?”

Mitya was in a sort of delirium. Happiness was within his reach. Right now, though, Grushenka kept sending him off to join the others.

“Go, Mitya, have a good time. I want everybody to have a wild time! Make them dance ‘Round goes the stove, round goes the house,’ just like the other time, remember?” she kept shouting to him.

She was terribly excited. Mitya dashed about giving orders. The singers had gathered in the room next door. The blue room, in which they had been sitting until then, was rather stuffy, since a section of it was divided off from the rest by a cotton curtain which concealed a huge bed covered with a puffy eiderdown and the usual pile of pillows in bright cotton covers (there were beds in all four of the “living rooms” of the guest house).

Grushenka wanted to sit by the very door, in the very spot she had sat “that other time,” and Mitya put an armchair there for her. It was from that spot that she had watched the singers and the dancers. The girls were the same as the last time. Soon the Jews arrived with their cymbals and fiddles. Then finally the long-awaited cart with the champagne and food also arrived. Mitya was very busy. Villagers, men and women who had already gone to bed, had got up again for fear of missing another sumptuous party like the one they had witnessed before, or heard of, and were now peering into the room. Mitya greeted those he already knew with a hug, trying hard to remember whether he had seen some of the faces before. He uncorked bottles and poured out wine for anyone who happened to be there. It was the women who eyed the champagne the most eagerly; the men really preferred brandy, rum, and particularly hot punch. Mitya also saw to it that there was hot chocolate for every girl, and he insisted that three samovars be kept boiling throughout the night so that anyone arriving at any time should be able to get himself hot punch or tea. In short, a most chaotic and absurd party was under way. But Mitya seemed in his natural element, and the more absurd things became, the happier he felt. If some villager had had the inspiration to ask him for money, he would have pulled out his bundle of bills immediately and proceeded to hand them out right and left without restraint. Probably sensing this, Trifon the innkeeper kept making circles around him. He had apparently given up completely the idea of going to bed that night. He drank little (he “indulged” in a glass of punch only), for he felt it was in his interest to keep a sharp eye on Mitya’s money. Whenever he had a chance, he would try gently and fawningly to prevent Mitya from distributing cigars to the peasants or from making them drunk on Rhine wine, “like that other time, sir,” and “God forbid that you should give them money, sir.” It broke his heart, as it was, to watch the village girls devouring caramels and sipping liqueurs: “They’re crawling with lice, Mr. Karamazov. They’re the kind you can kick in the backside and you’d still be doing them too great an honor.” Mitya again remembered Andrei and ordered that a glass of punch be sent to him. “I offended him,” he kept repeating sadly.