At this period, indeed, my friendship with Dimitri hung by a hair. I
had been criticising him too long not to have discovered faults in his
character, for it is only in first youth that we love passionately and
therefore love only perfect people. As soon as the mists engendered by
love of this kind begin to dissolve, and to be penetrated by the clear
beams of reason, we see the object of our adoration in his true shape,
and with all his virtues and failings exposed. Some of those failings
strike us with the exaggerated force of the unexpected, and combine with
the instinct for novelty and the hope that perfection may yet be
found in a fellow-man to induce us not only to feel coldness, but
even aversion, towards the late object of our adoration. Consequently,
desiring it no longer, we usually cast it from us, and pass onwards
to seek fresh perfection. For the circumstance that that was not what
occurred with respect to my own relation to Dimitri, I was indebted to
his stubborn, punctilious, and more critical than impulsive attachment
to myself--a tie which I felt ashamed to break. Moreover, our strange
vow of frankness bound us together. We were afraid that, if we parted,
we should leave in one another’s power all the incriminatory moral
secrets of which we had made mutual confession. At the same time, our
rule of frankness had long ceased to be faithfully observed, but, on
the contrary, proved a frequent cause of constraint, and brought about
strange relations between us.
Almost every time that winter that I went upstairs to Dimitri’s room,
I used to find there a University friend of his named Bezobiedoff, with
whom he appeared to be very much taken up. Bezobiedoff was a small,
slight fellow, with a face pitted over with smallpox, freckled,
effeminate hands, and a huge flaxen moustache much in need of the comb.
He was invariably dirty, shabby, uncouth, and uninteresting. To me,
Dimitri’s relations with him were as unintelligible as his relations
with Lubov Sergievna, and the only reason he could have had for choosing
such a man for his associate was that in the whole University there was
no worse-looking student than Bezobiedoff. Yet that alone would have
been sufficient to make Dimitri extend him his friendship, and, as a
matter of fact, in all his intercourse with this fellow he seemed to be
saying proudly: “I care nothing who a man may be. In my eyes every one
is equal. I like him, and therefore he is a desirable acquaintance.”
Nevertheless I could not imagine how he could bring himself to do it,
nor how the wretched Bezobiedoff ever contrived to maintain his awkward
position. To me the friendship seemed a most distasteful one.
One night, I went up to Dimitri’s room to try and get him to come down
for an evening’s talk in his mother’s drawing-room, where we could
also listen to Varenika’s reading and singing, but Bezobiedoff had
forestalled me there, and Dimitri answered me curtly that he could not
come down, since, as I could see for myself, he had a visitor with him.
“Besides,” he added, “what is the fun of sitting there? We had much
better stay HERE and talk.”
I scarcely relished the prospect of spending a couple of hours in
Bezobiedoff’s company, yet could not make up my mind to go down
alone; wherefore, cursing my friend’s vagaries, I seated myself in a
rocking-chair, and began rocking myself silently to and fro. I
felt vexed with them both for depriving me of the pleasures of the
drawing-room, and my only hope as I listened irritably to their
conversation was that Bezobiedoff would soon take his departure. “A nice
guest indeed to be sitting with!” I thought to myself when a footman
brought in tea and Dimitri had five times to beg Bezobiedoff to have a
cup, for the reason that the bashful guest thought it incumbent upon him
always to refuse it at first and to say, “No, help yourself.” I could
see that Dimitri had to put some restraint upon himself as he resumed
the conversation. He tried to inveigle me also into it, but I remained
glum and silent.
“I do not mean to let my face give any one the suspicion that I am
bored” was my mental remark to Dimitri as I sat quietly rocking myself
to and fro with measured beat. Yet, as the moments passed, I found
myself--not without a certain satisfaction--growing more and more
inwardly hostile to my friend. “What a fool he is!” I reflected. “He
might be spending the evening agreeably with his charming family, yet he
goes on sitting with this brute!--will go on doing so, too, until it is
too late to go down to the drawing-room!” Here I glanced at him over
the back of my chair, and thought the general look of his attitude and
appearance so offensive and repellant that at the moment I could gladly
have offered him some insult, even a most serious one.
At last Bezobiedoff rose, but Dimitri could not easily let such a
delightful friend depart, and asked him to stay the night. Fortunately,
Bezobiedoff declined the invitation, and departed. Having seen him off,
Dimitri returned, and, smiling a faintly complacent smile as he did so,
and rubbing his hands together (in all probability partly because he had
sustained his character for eccentricity, and partly because he had got
rid of a bore), started to pace the room, with an occasional glance
at myself. I felt more offended with him than ever. “How can he go
on walking about the room and grinning like that?” was my inward
reflection.
“What are you so angry about?” he asked me suddenly as he halted in
front of my chair.
“I am not in the least angry,” I replied (as people always do answer
under such circumstances). “I am merely vexed that you should play-act
to me, and to Bezobiedoff, and to yourself.”
“What rubbish!” he retorted. “I never play-act to any one.”
“I have in mind our rule of frankness,” I replied, “when I tell you that
I am certain you cannot bear this Bezobiedoff any more than I can. He is
an absolute cad, yet for some inexplicable reason or another it pleases
you to masquerade before him.”
“Not at all! To begin with, he is a splendid fellow, and--”
“But I tell you it IS so. I also tell you that your friendship for Lubov
Sergievna is founded on the same basis, namely, that she thinks you a
god.”
“And I tell you once more that it is not so.”
“Oh, I know it for myself,” I retorted with the heat of suppressed
anger, and designing to disarm him with my frankness. “I have told you
before, and I repeat it now, that you always seem to like people who say
pleasant things to you, but that, as soon as ever I come to examine
your friendship, I invariably find that there exists no real attachment
between you.”
“Oh, but you are wrong,” said Dimitri with an angry straightening of the
neck in his collar. “When I like people, neither their praise nor their
blame can make any difference to my opinion of them.”
“Well, dreadful though it may seem to you, I confess that I myself often
used to hate my father when he abused me, and to wish that he was dead.
In the same way, you--”
“Speak for yourself. I am very sorry that you could ever have been so--”
“No, no!” I cried as I leapt from my chair and faced him with the
courage of exasperation. “It is for YOURSELF that you ought to feel
sorry--sorry because you never told me a word about this fellow. You
know that was not honourable of you. Nevertheless, I will tell YOU what
I think of you,” and, burning to wound him even more than he had wounded
me, I set out to prove to him that he was incapable of feeling any real
affection for anybody, and that I had the best of grounds (as in very
truth I believed I had) for reproaching him. I took great pleasure
in telling him all this, but at the same time forgot that the only
conceivable purpose of my doing so--to force him to confess to the
faults of which I had accused him--could not possibly be attained at the
present moment, when he was in a rage. Had he, on the other hand, been
in a condition to argue calmly, I should probably never have said what I
did.
The dispute was verging upon an open quarrel when Dimitri suddenly
became silent, and left the room. I pursued him, and continued what I
was saying, but he did not answer. I knew that his failings included a
hasty temper, and that he was now fighting it down; wherefore I cursed
his good resolutions the more in my heart.
This, then, was what our rule of frankness had brought us to--the rule
that we should “tell one another everything in our minds, and never
discuss one another with a third person!” Many a time we had exaggerated
frankness to the pitch of making mutual confession of the most shameless
thoughts, and of shaming ourselves by voicing to one another proposals
or schemes for attaining our desires; yet those confessions had not
only failed to draw closer the tie which united us, but had dissipated
sympathy and thrust us further apart, until now pride would not allow
him to expose his feelings even in the smallest detail, and we employed
in our quarrel the very weapons which we had formerly surrendered to one
another--the weapons which could strike the shrewdest blows!