A Bad Business by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Author:Fyodor Dostoevsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

III. The Noblest of Men; though I Don’t Believe It Myself

I didn’t sleep. How could I have, with that throbbing in my head? I want to make sense of it, all that filth. Oh, the filth! Oh, the filth I dragged her out of that day! Surely she must have understood that, she must have appreciated what I had done! There were other thoughts that appealed to me too, for instance that I was forty-one and she was only just sixteen. That fascinated me, that feeling of inequality—it was just delicious, quite delicious.

Another thing, I wanted a wedding à l’anglaise, I mean just the two of us, with only two witnesses, with Lukerya as one of them, and then straight onto the train, perhaps no further than Moscow (for I happened to have business there too), and a hotel, for a fortnight or so. But she wouldn’t have it, she wouldn’t let me do it, and I had to pay the aunts a respectful visit as if they were family I was taking her from. I let her have her way, and gave those aunts their due. I even made those creatures a present of a hundred roubles each, and promised them more, without telling her anything about it so as not to rub her nose in the poverty of her home. So the aunts were as soft as silk from the start. And there was an argument about her dowry too: she had nothing, almost literally nothing, but she didn’t want anything either. Even so, I managed to prove to her that it wouldn’t do to have nothing at all, so I gave her a dowry myself, because who else would have done anything for her? Well, but never mind about me. I did tell her some of my ideas, just to put her in the picture. Perhaps I was too hasty about that. The main thing was—right from the start, though she tried to hold back, she would hurry to greet me, full of love; she met me joyfully when I came home in the evenings, and chattered to me about herself (that enchanting innocent chatter of hers!), about her childhood, her babyhood, her parents’ home, her father and mother. But I poured cold water on all that excitement of hers straight away. That was my whole idea. I greeted her raptures with silence—benevolent silence, of course … all the same, she soon realized that we two were different, and that I was an enigma for her. Actually, I had staked everything on being an enigma! Perhaps I had only ever gone in for this stupid scheme to make myself into an enigma! Sternness above all—so I brought her into my home in an atmosphere of sternness. In fact, although I was quite content at the time, I set up a whole system in my home. Oh, it all came about with no effort at all. It couldn’t have been otherwise—I had to create that system, because of

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