The Adolescent полностью

Lambert, though he took part, did not belong entirely to that Moscow gang; having acquired a taste for it, he gradually began, by way of trial, to act on his own. I’ll say beforehand: he was not quite up to it. He was calculating and by no means stupid, but he was hot-tempered and, what’s more, simplehearted, or, better to say, naïve—that is, he had no knowledge either of people or of society. For instance, he seemed not to understand at all the significance of their Moscow chief and supposed it was very easy to direct and organize such ventures. Finally, he assumed that almost everyone was the same sort of scoundrel as himself. Or, for instance, once having imagined that so-and-so was afraid or ought to be afraid for such-and-such reason, he no longer doubted that the man was indeed afraid, as in an axiom. I don’t know how to put it; later on I’ll explain it more clearly with facts, but in my opinion he was rather crudely developed, and there were certain good, noble feelings which he not only did not believe in, but maybe even had no conception of.

He had come to Petersburg because he had long been thinking of it as a vaster field than Moscow, and also because in Moscow he had gotten into a scrape somewhere and somehow, and somebody was looking for him with the most ill intentions in his regard. On coming to Petersburg, he immediately contacted a former comrade, but he found the field scant, the affairs petty. His acquaintance later widened, but nothing came of it. “People here are trashy, nothing but kids,” he himself said to me later. And then, one bright morning, at dawn, he suddenly found me freezing under the wall and fell directly onto the trail of the “richest,” in his opinion, of “affairs.”

The whole affair rested on what I had babbled as I thawed out in his apartment then. Oh, I was nearly delirious then! But still it came out clearly from my words that, of all my offenses on that fateful day, the one I remembered most and took closest to heart was the offense from Bjoring and from her: otherwise I wouldn’t have raved about that alone at Lambert’s, but would also have raved, for example, about Zershchikov; yet it turned out to be only the first, as I learned afterwards from Lambert himself. And besides, I was in ecstasy and looked upon Lambert and Alphonsine that terrible morning as some sort of liberators and saviors. Later, while recovering, I tried to figure out as I lay in bed what Lambert might have learned from my babble and precisely to what degree I had babbled—but I never once even suspected that he could have learned so much then! Oh, of course, judging by my pangs of conscience, I already suspected even then that I must have told a lot that was unnecessary, but, I repeat, I could never have supposed it was to such a degree! I also hoped and counted on the fact that I had been unable to articulate clearly at his place then, I had a firm memory of that, and yet it turned out in fact that I had articulated much more clearly than I supposed and hoped afterwards. But the main thing was that it was all revealed only later and long after, and that’s where my trouble lay.

From my raving, babbling, prattling, raptures, and so on, he had learned, first, almost all the family names accurately, and even some addresses. Second, he had formed a rather approximate notion of the significance of these persons (the old prince, her, Bjoring, Anna Andreevna, and even Versilov); third, he had learned that I had been offended and was threatening revenge; and finally, fourth and most important, he had learned that this document existed, mysterious and hidden, this letter which, if shown to the half-mad old prince, he, having read it and learned that his own daughter considered him mad and had already “consulted lawyers” about how to lock him up, would either lose his mind definitively or drive her out of the house and disinherit her, or marry a certain Mlle. Versilov, whom he already wanted to marry but had not been allowed to. In short, Lambert understood a great deal; without doubt terribly much remained obscure, but still the blackmailing artificer had fallen onto a sure trail. When I fled from Alphonsine then, he immediately found my address (by the simplest means: through the information bureau), then immediately made the proper inquiries, from which he learned that all these persons I had babbled about actually existed. Then he proceeded directly to the first step.