“You will get it, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” Madame Khokhlakov at once cut him short, “you may consider it as good as in your pocket, and not three thousand, but three million, Dmitri Fyodorovich, and in no time! I shall tell you your idea: you will discover mines, make millions, return and become an active figure, and you will stir us, too, leading us towards the good. Should everything be left to the Jews? You’ll build buildings, start various enterprises. You will help the poor, and they will bless you. This is the age of railroads, Dmitri Fyodorovich. You will become known and indispensable to the Ministry of Finance, which is in such need now. The decline of the paper rouble allows me no sleep, Dmitri Fyodorovich, few know this side of me...”
“Madame, madame!” Dmitri Fyodorovich again interrupted with a certain uneasy foreboding. “Perhaps I will really and truly follow your advice, your sound advice, and go there, perhaps ... to these mines ... we can talk more about it ... I’ll come again ... even many times ... but about this three thousand, which you have so generously ... Oh, it would set me free, today if possible ... That is, you see, I don’t have any time now, not a moment...”
“Enough, Dmitri Fyodorovich, enough!” Madame Khokhlakov interrupted insistently. “The question is: are you going to the mines or not? Have you fully decided? Answer mathematically.”
“I will go, madame, later ... I’ll go wherever you like, madame, but now...”
“Wait, then!” cried Madame Khokhlakov, and, jumping up, she rushed to her magnificent bureau with numerous little drawers and began pulling out one drawer after another, looking for something and in a terrible hurry.
“The three thousand!” Mitya’s heart froze, “and just like that, without any papers, without any deed ... oh, but how gentlemanly! A splendid woman, if only she weren’t so talkative...”
“Here!” Madame Khokhlakov cried joyfully, coming back to Mitya. “Here is what I was looking for!”
It was a tiny silver icon on a string, of the kind sometimes worn around the neck together with a cross.
“It’s from Kiev, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” she continued reverently, “from the relics of the great martyr Varvara.[238] Allow me personally to put it around your neck and thereby bless you for a new life and new deeds.”
And she indeed put the icon around his neck and began tucking it in. Mitya, in great embarrassment, leaned forward and tried to help her, and finally got the icon past his tie and collar and onto his chest.
“Now you can go!” Madame Khokhlakov uttered, solemnly resuming her seat.
“Madame, I am so touched ... I don’t know how to thank ... for such kindness, but ... if you knew how precious time is to me now...! That sum, which I am so much expecting from your generosity ... Oh, madame, since you are so kind, so touchingly generous to me,” Mitya suddenly exclaimed inspiredly, “allow me to reveal to you ... what you, however, have long known ... that I love a certain person here ... I’ve betrayed Katya ... Katerina Ivanovna, I mean. Oh, I was inhuman and dishonorable towards her, but here I’ve come to love another ... a woman you perhaps despise, madame, for you already know everything, but whom I absolutely cannot part with, absolutely, and therefore, now, this three thousand...”
“Part with everything, Dmitri Fyodorovich!” Madame Khokhlakov interrupted him in the most determined tone. “Everything, women especially. Your goal is the mines, and there’s no need to take women there. Later, when you return in wealth and glory, you will find a companion for your heart in the highest society. She will be a modern girl, educated and without prejudices. By then the women’s question, which is just beginning now, will have ripened, and a new woman will appear ...”
“Madame, that’s not it, not it ... ,” Dmitri Fyodorovich clasped his hands imploringly.
“That is it, Dmitri Fyodorovich, that is precisely what you need, what you thirst for, without knowing it. I am no stranger to the present women’s question, Dmitri Fyodorovich. The development of women and even a political role for women in the nearest future—that is my ideal. I myself have a daughter, Dmitri Fyodorovich, and few know this side of me. I wrote in this regard to the writer Shchedrin. This writer has shown me so much, so much about the woman’s vocation, that last year I sent him an anonymous letter of two lines: ‘I embrace you and kiss you, my writer, for the contemporary woman: carry on.’ And I signed it: A mother.’ I almost wrote ‘a contemporary mother,’ but I hesitated, and then decided just to be a mother: it has more moral beauty, Dmitri Fyodorovich, and besides, the word contemporary’ would have reminded him of
“Madame,” Mitya jumped up at last, clasping his hands in helpless supplication, “you will make me weep, madame, if you keep putting off what you have so generously...”
