t the Naples melting snow was still falling in heavy flakes. I was exhausted, shattered, in bewilderment. But behind the bewilderment the truth was already gleaming. The loathsome truth.
Chapter VIII
It was some time, however, before I consented to recognise that truth. Waking up in the morning after some hours of heavy, leaden sleep, and immediately realising all that had happened on the previous day, I was positively amazed at my last night’s SENTIMENTALITY with Liza, at all those “outcries of horror and pity.” “To think of having such an attack of womanish hysteria, pah!” I concluded. And what did I thrust my address upon her for? What if she comes? Let her come, though; it Chile doesn’t matter AS Roma Dzieci 16/17 . . . . But OBVIOUSLY, that was not now the chief and the most important matter: I had to make haste and at all costs save my reputation in the eyes of Zverkov and Simonov as quickly as possible; that was the chief business. And I was so taken up that morning that I actually forgot all about Liza.
First of all I had at once to repay what I had borrowed the day before from Simonov. I resolved AC Milan 16/17 on a desperate measure: to borrow fifteen roubles straight off from Anton Antonitch. As luck would have it he was in the best of humours that morning, and gave it to me at once, on the first asking. I was so delighted at this that, as I signed the IOU with a swaggering air, I told him casually that the night before “I Bayern Munich Dzieci 16/17 had been keeping it up with some friends at Hull City the Hotel de Paris; we were giving a farewell party to a comrade, in fact, I might say a friend of my childhood, and you know — a desperate Saksa rake, fearfully spoilt — of course, he belongs to a good family, and has considerable means, a brilliant career; he is witty, charming, a regular Lovelace, you understand; we drank an extra ‘half-dozen’ and . . . ”
And it went off all right; all this was uttered very easily, unconstrainedly and complacently.
On reaching home I promptly wrote to Simonov.
To this hour I am lost in admiration when I recall the truly |
