White Nights (Penguin Little Black Classics) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Author:Fyodor Dostoyevsky [Dostoyevsky, Fyodor]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780241252109
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-03-02T13:30:00+00:00

THE FOURTH NIGHT

My God! How it has all come to an end! What an ending to all of this!

I arrived at nine o’clock. She was already there. I caught sight of her when I was still quite a distance away; she was standing like she had been then, that first time, with her elbows leaning on the railing of the embankment, and didn’t hear me approach.

‘Nastenka!’ I called out to her, making a tremendous effort to suppress my agitation.

She quickly turned around towards me.

‘Well!’ she said, ‘well, quickly now!’

I looked at her in bewilderment.

‘Well, where’s the letter? Did you bring the letter?’ she repeated, clutching the railing with her hand.

‘No, I don’t have a letter,’ I said finally, ‘has he really not come to see you yet?’

She turned terribly pale and for a long time looked at me without moving. I had shattered her last hope.

‘Well, good luck to him!’ she uttered finally in a breaking voice. ‘Good luck to him – if he’s going to leave me like that.’

She lowered her eyes, then wanted to look at me, but she couldn’t. For several more minutes she kept her agitation in check, but suddenly she turned away, leaned her elbows on the balustrade of the embankment and burst into tears.

‘Enough, enough!’ I began, but as I looked at her I didn’t have the strength to continue, and what could I have said?

‘Don’t try to comfort me,’ she said, weeping, ‘don’t talk about him, don’t say that he will come, that he wouldn’t abandon me so cruelly, so inhumanly, as he has done. What for, what for? Can it really be that there was something in my letter, in that wretched letter? …’

Here her voice was broken by sobs; my heart was breaking as I looked at her.

‘Oh, how cruelly inhuman it is!’ she began again. ‘And not a line, not a line! He could at least have answered that he didn’t need me, that he was rejecting me; but not a single line in three whole days! How easy it is for him to wound, to insult a poor defenceless girl, whose only fault is that she loves him! Oh, what I’ve endured these three days! My God! My God! When I recall that I went to him the first time myself, that I humbled myself before him, wept, that I begged him for just the tiniest smidgen of love … And after that! … Listen,’ she began, as she turned to me, and her black eyes began to flash, ‘this cannot be! It simply cannot be like this; it’s unnatural! Either you or I have been deceived; maybe he didn’t get the letter? Perhaps he still doesn’t know anything? How is it possible, judge for yourself, how is it possible to behave so barbarously and so coarsely as he has towards me! Not a single word! But the lowliest man on earth is treated with more compassion. Perhaps he heard something, perhaps somebody said something about me?’ she cried out, turning to me with a question.

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