Notes From The Underground 77

The thought that Liza was coming worried me continu-ally. It seemed queer to me that of all my recollections of yesterday this tormented me, as it were, especially, as it were, quite separately. Everything else I had quite succeeded in forgetting by the evening; I dismissed it all and was still perfectly satisfied with my letter to Simonov. But on this point I was not satisfied at all. It was as though I were wor-ried only by Liza. ‘What if she comes,’ I thought incessantly, ‘well, it doesn’t matter, let her come! H’m! it’s horrid that she should see, for instance, how I live. Yesterday I seemed such a hero to her, while now, h’m! It’s horrid, though, that I have let myself go so, the room looks like a beggar’s. And I brought myself to go out to dinner in such a suit! And my American leather sofa with the stuffing sticking out. And my dressing-gown, which will not cover me, such tatters, and she will see all this and she will see Apollon. That beast is certain to insult her. He will fasten upon her in order to be rude to me. And I, of course, shall be panic-stricken as usual, I shall begin bowing and scraping before her and pulling my dressing-gown round me, I shall begin smiling, telling lies. Oh, the beastliness! And it isn’t the beastliness of it that matters most! There is something more important, more loathsome, viler! Yes, viler! And to put on that dis-honest lying mask again! ...’

When I reached that thought I fired up all at once.

‘Why dishonest? How dishonest? I was speaking sincere-ly last night. I remember there was real feeling in me, too. What I wanted was to excite an honourable feeling in her ....

Her crying was a good thing, it will have a good effect.’ Yet I could not feel at ease. All that evening, even when

I had come back home, even after nine o’clock, when I cal-culated that Liza could not possibly come, still she haunted me, and what was worse, she came back to my mind always in the same position. One moment out of all that had hap-pened last night stood vividly before my imagination; the moment when I struck a match and saw her pale, distorted face, with its look of torture. And what a pitiful, what an un-natural, what a distorted smile she had at that moment! But I did not know then, that fifteen years later I should still in my imagination see Liza, always with the pitiful, distorted, inappropriate smile which was on her face at that minute.

to be contd..