“Yes, but now I drink … I drink terribly!” he whispered. “Terribly, day and night, not giving myself a moment's respite! Even the Count never drank to such an extent as I do now.… It is dreadfully hard, Sergei Petrovich! God alone knows what a weight I have on my heart! It's just grief that makes me drink.… I always liked and honoured you, Sergei Petrovich, and I can tell you quite candidly.… I'd often be glad to hang myself!”
“For what reason?”
“My own stupidity.… Not only children are stupid.… There are also fools at fifty. Don't ask the cause.”
The Count re-entered the room and put a stop to his effusions.
“A most excellent liqueur,” he said, placing a pot-bellied bottle with the seal of the Benedictine monks on the table instead of “the remarkable plans.” “When I passed through Moscow I got it at Depré's. Have a glass, Sergei?”
“I thought you had gone to fetch the plans,” I said.
“I? What plans? Oh, yes! But, brother, the devil himself couldn't find anything in my portmanteaux.… I rummaged and rummaged and gave it up as a bad job.… The liqueur is very nice. Won't you have some, Serezha?”
Urbenin remained a little longer, then he took leave and went away. When he left we began to drink claret. This wine quite finished me. I became intoxicated in the way I had wished while riding to the Count's. I became very bold, active and unusually gay. I wanted to do some extraordinary deed, something ludicrous, something that would astonish people.… In such moments I thought I could swim across the lake, unravel the most entangled case, conquer any woman.… The world and its life made me enthusiastic; I loved it, but at the same time I wanted to pick a quarrel with somebody, to consume him with venomous jests and ridicule.… It was necessary to scoff at the comical black-browed Pole and the Count, to attack them with biting sarcasm, to turn them to dust.
“Why are you silent?” I began again. “Speak! I am listening to you! Ha-ha! I am awfully fond of hearing people with serious, sedate faces talk childish drivel!… It is such mockery, such mockery of the brains of man!… The face does not correspond to the brains! In order not to lie, you ought to have the faces of idiots, and you have the countenances of Greek sages!”
I had not finished.… My tongue was entangled by the thought that I was talking to people who were nullities, who were unworthy of even half a word! I required a hall filled with people, brilliant women, thousands of lights.… I rose, took my glass and began walking about the rooms. When we indulge in debauchery, we do not limit ourselves to space. We do not restrict ourselves only to the dining-room, but take the whole house and sometimes even the whole estate.