Part 6

I light the lamp quickly and drink some water straight out of the decanter. Then I hurry to the window. The weather is magnificent. The air smells of hay and some delicious thing besides. I see the spikes of my garden fence, the sleepy starveling trees by the window, the road, the dark strip of forest. There is a calm and brilliant moon in the sky and not a single cloud. Serenity. Not a leaf stirs. To me it seems that everything is looking at me and listening for me to die.

Dread seizes me. I shut the window and run to the bed, I feel for my pulse. I cannot find it in my wrist; I seek it in my temples, my chin, my hand again. They are all cold and slippery with sweat. My breathing comes quicker and quicker; my body trembles, all my bowels are stirred, and my face and forehead feel as though a cobweb had settled on them.

What shall I do? Shall I call my family? No use. I do not know what my wife and Liza will do when they come in to me.

I hide my head under the pillow, shut my eyes and wait, wait.... My spine is cold. It almost contracts within me. And I feel that death will approach me only from behind, very quietly.

“Kivi, kivi.” A squeak sounds in the stillness of the night. I do not know whether it is in my heart or in the street.

God, how awful! I would drink some more water; but now I dread opening my eyes, and fear to raise my head. The terror is unaccountable, animal. I cannot understand why I am afraid. Is it because I want to live, or because a new and unknown pain awaits me?

Upstairs, above the ceiling, a moan, then a laugh ... I listen. A little after steps sound on the staircase. Someone hurries down, then up again. In a minute steps sound downstairs again. Someone stops by my door and listens.

“Who’s there?” I call.

The door opens. I open my eyes boldly and see my wife. Her face is pale and her eyes red with weeping.

“You’re not asleep, Nicolai Stiepanovich?” she asks.

“What is it?”

“For God’s sake go down to Liza. Something is wrong with her.”

“Very well ... with pleasure,” I murmur, very glad that I am not alone. “Very well ... immediately.”

As I follow my wife I hear what she tells me, and from agitation understand not a word. Bright spots from her candle dance over the steps of the stairs; our long shadows tremble; my feet catch in the skirts of my dressing-gown. My breath goes, and it seems to me that someone is chasing me, trying to seize my back. “I shall die here on the staircase, this second,” I think, “this second.” But we have passed the staircase, the dark hall with the Italian window and we go into Liza’s room. She sits in bed in her chemise; her bare legs hang down and she moans.

“Oh, my God ... oh, my God!” she murmurs, half shutting her eyes from our candles. “I can’t, I can’t.”

“Liza, my child,” I say, “what’s the matter?”

Seeing me, she calls out and falls on my neck.

“Papa darling,” she sobs. “Papa dearest ... my sweet. I don’t know what it is.... It hurts.”

She embraces me, kisses me and lisps endearments which I heard her lisp when she was still a baby.

“Be calm, my child. God’s with you,” I say. “You mustn’t cry. Something hurts me too.”

I try to cover her with the bedclothes; my wife gives her to drink; and both of us jostle in confusion round the bed. My shoulders push into hers, and at that moment I remember how we used to bathe our children.

“But help her, help her!” my wife implores. “Do something!” And what can I do? Nothing. There is some weight on the girl’s soul; but I understand nothing, know nothing and can only murmur:

“It’s nothing, nothing.... It will pass.... Sleep, sleep.”

As if on purpose a dog suddenly howls in the yard, at first low and irresolute, then aloud, in two voices. I never put any value on such signs as dogs’ whining or screeching owls; but now my heart contracts painfully, and I hasten to explain the howling.

“Nonsense,” I think. “It’s the influence of one organism on another. My great nervous strain was transmitted to my wife, to Liza, and to the dog. That’s all. Such transmissions explain presentiments and previsions.”

A little later when I return to my room to write a prescription for Liza I no longer think that I shall die soon. My soul simply feels heavy and dull, so that I am even sad that I did not die suddenly. For a long while I stand motionless in the middle of the room, pondering what I shall prescribe for Liza; but the moans above the ceiling are silent and I decide not to write a prescription, but stand there still.

There is a dead silence, a silence, as one man wrote, that rings in one’s ears. The time goes slowly. The bars of moonshine on the windowsill do not move from their place, as though congealed.... The dawn is still far away.

But the garden-gate creaks; someone steals in, and strips a twig from the starveling trees, and cautiously knocks with it on my window.

“Nicolai Stiepanovich!” I hear a whisper. “Nicolai Stiepanovich!”

I open the window, and I think that I am dreaming. Under the window, close against the wall stands a woman in a black dress. She is brightly lighted by the moon and looks at me with wide eyes. Her face is pale, stern and fantastic in the moon, like marble. Her chin trembles.

“It is I....” she says, “I ... Katy!”

In the moon all women’s eyes are big and black, people are taller and paler. Probably that is the reason why I did not recognise her in the first moment.

“What’s the matter?”

“Forgive me,” she says. “I suddenly felt so dreary ... I could not bear it. So I came here. There’s a light in your window ... and I decided to knock.... Forgive me.... Ah, if you knew how dreary I felt! What are you doing now?”

“Nothing. Insomnia.”

Her eyebrows lift, her eyes shine with tears and all her face is illumined as with light, with the familiar, but long unseen, look of confidence.

“Nicolai Stiepanovich!” she says imploringly, stretching out both her hands to me. “Dear, I beg you ... I implore.... If you do not despise my friendship and my respect for you, then do what I implore you.”

“What is it?”

“Take my money.”

“What next? What’s the good of your money to me?”

“You will go somewhere to be cured. You must cure yourself. You will take it? Yes? Dear ... Yes?”

She looks into my face eagerly and repeats:

“Yes? You will take it?”

“No, my dear, I won’t take it....”, I say. “Thank you.”

She turns her back to me and lowers her head. Probably the tone of my refusal would not allow any further talk of money.

“Go home to sleep,” I say. “I’ll see you to-morrow.”

“It means, you don’t consider me your friend?” she asks sadly.

“I don’t say that. But your money is no good to me.”

“Forgive me,” she says lowering her voice by a full octave. “I understand you. To be obliged to a person like me ... a retired actress... But good-bye.”

And she walks away so quickly that I have no time even to say “Good-bye.”

VI

I am in Kharkov.

Since it would be useless to fight against my present mood, and I have no power to do it, I made up my mind that the last days of my life shall be irreproachable, on the formal side. If I am not right with my family, which I certainly admit, I will try at least to do as it wishes. Besides I am lately become so indifferent that it’s positively all the same, to me whether I go to Kharkov, or Paris, or Berditshev.

I arrived here at noon and put up at a hotel not far from the cathedral. The train made me giddy, the draughts blew through me, and now I am sitting on the bed with my head in my hands waiting for the tic. I ought to go to my professor friends to-day, but I have neither the will nor the strength.

The old hall-porter comes in to ask whether I have brought my own bed-clothes. I keep him about five minutes asking him questions about Gnekker, on whose account I came here. The porter happens to be Kharkov-born, and knows the town inside out; but he doesn’t remember any family with the name of Gnekker. I inquire about the estate. The answer is the same.

The clock in the passage strikes one,... two,... three.... The last months of my life, while I wait for death, seem to me far longer than my whole life. Never before could I reconcile myself to the slowness of time as I can now. Before, when I had to wait for a train at the station, or to sit at an examination, a quarter of an hour would seem an eternity. Now I can sit motionless in bed the whole night long, quite calmly thinking that there will be the same long, colourless night to-morrow, and the next day....

In the passage the clock strikes five, six, seven.... It grows dark. There is dull pain in my cheek--the beginning of the tic. To occupy myself with thoughts, I return to my old point of view, when I was not indifferent, and ask: Why do I, a famous man, a privy councillor, sit in this little room, on this bed with a strange grey blanket? Why do I look at this cheap tin washstand and listen to the wretched clock jarring in the passage? Is all this worthy of my fame and my high position among people? And I answer these questions with a smile. My _naïveté_ seems funny to me--the _naïveté_ with which as a young man I exaggerated the value of fame and of the exclusive position which famous men enjoy. I am famous, my name is spoken with reverence. My portrait has appeared in “Niva” and in “The Universal Illustration.” I’ve even read my biography in a German paper, but what of that? I sit lonely, by myself, in a strange city, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching cheek with my palm....

Family scandals, the hardness of creditors, the rudeness of railway men, the discomforts of the passport system, the expensive and unwholesome food at the buffets, the general coarseness and roughness of people,--all this and a great deal more that would take too long to put down, concerns me as much as it concerns any bourgeois who is known only in his own little street. Where is the exclusiveness of my position then? We will admit that I am infinitely famous, that I am a hero of whom my country is proud. All the newspapers give bulletins of my illness, the post is already bringing in sympathetic addresses from my friends, my pupils, and the public. But all this will not save me from dying in anguish on a stranger’s bed in utter loneliness. Of course there is no one to blame for this. But I must confess I do not like my popularity. I feel that it has deceived me.

At about ten I fall asleep, and, in spite of the tic sleep soundly, and would sleep for a long while were I not awakened. Just after one there is a sudden knock on my door.

“Who’s there?”

“A telegram.”

“You could have brought it to-morrow,” I storm, as I take the telegram from the porter. “Now I shan’t sleep again.”

“I’m sorry. There was a light in your room. I thought you were not asleep.”

I open the telegram and look first at the signature--my wife’s. What does she want?

“Gnekker married Liza secretly yesterday. Return.”

I read the telegram. For a long while I am not startled. Not Gnekker’s or Liza’s action frightens me, but the indifference with which I receive the news of their marriage. Men say that philosophers and true _savants_ are indifferent. It is untrue. Indifference is the paralysis of the soul, premature death.

I go to bed again and begin to ponder with what thoughts I can occupy myself. What on earth shall I think of? I seem to have thought over everything, and now there is nothing powerful enough to rouse my thought.

When the day begins to dawn, I sit in bed clasping my knees and, for want of occupation I try to know myself. “Know yourself” is good, useful advice; but it is a pity that the ancients did not think of showing us the way to avail ourselves of it.

Before, when I had the desire to understand somebody else, or myself, I used not to take into consideration actions, wherein everything is conditional, but desires. Tell me what you want, and I will tell you what you are.

And now I examine myself. What do I want?

I want our wives, children, friends, and pupils to love in us, not the name or the firm or the label, but the ordinary human beings. What besides? I should like to have assistants and successors. What more? I should like to wake in a hundred years’ time, and take a look, if only with one eye, at what has happened to science. I should like to live ten years more.... What further?

Nothing further. I think, think a long while and cannot make out anything else. However much I were to think, wherever my thoughts should stray, it is clear to me that the chief, all-important something is lacking in my desires. In my infatuation for science, my desire to live, my sitting here on a strange bed, my yearning to know myself, in all the thoughts, feelings, and ideas I form about anything, there is wanting the something universal which could bind all these together in one whole. Each feeling and thought lives detached in me, and in all my opinions about science, the theatre, literature, and my pupils, and in all the little pictures which my imagination paints, not even the most cunning analyst will discover what is called the general idea, or the god of the living man.

And if this is not there, then nothing is there.

In poverty such as this a serious infirmity, fear of death, influence of circumstances and people would have been enough to overthrow and shatter all that I formerly considered as my conception of the world, and all wherein I saw the meaning and joy of my life. Therefore, it is nothing strange that I have darkened the last months of my life by thoughts and feelings worthy of a slave or a savage, and that I am now indifferent and do not notice the dawn. If there is lacking in a man that which is higher and stronger than all outside influences, then verily a good cold in the head is enough to upset his balance and to make him see each bird an owl and hear a dog’s whine in every sound; and all his pessimism or his optimism with their attendant thoughts, great and small, seem then to be merely symptoms and no more.

I am beaten. Then it’s no good going on thinking, no good talking. I shall sit and wait in silence for what will come.

In the morning the porter brings me tea and the local paper. Mechanically I read the advertisements on the first page, the leader, the extracts from newspapers and magazines, the local news ... Among other things I find in the local news an item like this: “Our famous scholar, emeritus professor Nicolai Stiepanovich arrived in Kharkov yesterday by the express, and stayed at----hotel.”

Evidently big names are created to live detached from those who bear them. Now my name walks in Kharkov undisturbed. In some three months it will shine as bright as the sun itself, inscribed in letters of gold on my tombstone--at a time when I myself will be under the sod....

A faint knock at the door. Somebody wants me.

“Who’s there? Come in!”

The door opens. I step back in astonishment, and hasten to pull my dressing gown together. Before me stands Katy.

“How do you do?” she says, panting from running up the stairs. “You didn’t expect me? I ... I’ve come too.”

She sits down and continues, stammering and looking away from me. “Why don’t you say ‘Good morning’? I arrived too ... to-day. I found out you were at this hotel, and came to see you.”

“I’m delighted to see you,” I say shrugging my shoulders. “But I’m surprised. You might have dropped straight from heaven. What are you doing here?”

“I?... I just came.”

Silence. Suddenly she gets up impetuously and comes over to me.

“Nicolai Stiepanich!” she says, growing pale and pressing her hands to her breast. “Nicolai Stiepanich! I can’t go on like this any longer. I can’t. For God’s sake tell me now, immediately. What shall I do? Tell me, what shall I do?”

“What can I say? I am beaten. I can say nothing.”

“But tell me, I implore you,” she continues, out of breath and trembling all over her body. “I swear to you, I can’t go on like this any longer. I haven’t the strength.”

She drops into a chair and begins to sob. She throws her head back, wrings her hands, stamps with her feet; her hat falls from her head and dangles by its string, her hair is loosened.

“Help me, help,” she implores. “I can’t bear it any more.”

She takes a handkerchief out of her little travelling bag and with it pulls out some letters which fall from her knees to the floor. I pick them up from the floor and recognise on one of them Mikhail Fiodorovich’s hand-writing, and accidentally read part of a word: “passionat....”

“There’s nothing that I can say to you, Katy,” I say.

“Help me,” she sobs, seizing my hand and kissing it. “You’re my father, my only friend. You’re wise and learned, and you’ve lived long! You were a teacher. Tell me what to do.”

I am bewildered and surprised, stirred by her sobbing, and I can hardly stand upright.

“Let’s have some breakfast, Katy,” I say with a constrained smile.

Instantly I add in a sinking voice:

“I shall be dead soon, Katy....”

“Only one word, only one word,” she weeps and stretches out her hands to me. “What shall I do?”

“You’re a queer thing, really ...”, I murmur. “I can’t understand it. Such a clever woman and suddenly--weeping....”

Comes silence. Katy arranges her hair, puts on her hat, then crumples her letters and stuffs them in her little bag, all in silence and unhurried. Her face, her bosom and her gloves are wet with tears, but her expression is dry already, stern.... I look at her and am ashamed that I am happier than she. It was but a little while before my death, in the ebb of my life, that I noticed in myself the absence of what our friends the philosophers call the general idea; but this poor thing’s soul has never known and never will know shelter all her life, all her life.

“Katy, let’s have breakfast,” I say.

“No, thank you,” she answers coldly.

One minute more passes in silence.

“I don’t like Kharkov,” I say. “It’s too grey. A grey city.”

“Yes ... ugly.... I’m not here for long.... On my way. I leave to-day.”

“For where?”

“For the Crimea ... I mean, the Caucasus.”

“So. For long?”

“I don’t know.”

Katy gets up and gives me her hand with a cold smile, looking away from me.

I would like to ask her: “That means you won’t be at my funeral?” But she does not look at me; her hand is cold and like a stranger’s. I escort her to the door in silence.... She goes out of my room and walks down the long passage, without looking back. She knows that my eyes are following her, and probably on the landing she will look back.

No, she did not look back. The black dress showed for the last time, her steps were stilled.... Goodbye, my treasure!

THE FIT

I

The medical student Mayer, and Ribnikov, a student at the Moscow school of painting, sculpture, and architecture, came one evening to their friend Vassiliev, law student, and proposed that he should go with them to S----v Street. For a long while Vassiliev did not agree, but eventually dressed himself and went with them.

Unfortunate women he knew only by hearsay and from books, and never once in his life had he been in the houses where they live. He knew there were immoral women who were forced by the pressure of disastrous circumstances--environment, bad up-bringing, poverty, and the like--to sell their honour for money. They do not know pure love, have no children and no legal rights; mothers and sisters mourn them for dead, science treats them as an evil, men are familiar with them. But notwithstanding all this they do not lose the image and likeness of God. They all acknowledge their sin and hope for salvation. They are free to avail themselves of every means of salvation. True, Society does not forgive people their past, but with God Mary of Egypt is not lower than the other saints. Whenever Vassiliev recognised an unfortunate woman in the street by her costume or her manner, or saw a picture of one in a comic paper, there came into his mind every time a story he once read somewhere: a pure and heroic young man falls in love with an unfortunate woman and asks her to be his wife, but she, considering herself unworthy of such happiness, poisons herself.

Vassiliev lived in one of the streets off the Tverskoi boulevard. When he and his friends came out of the house it was about eleven o’clock--the first snow had just fallen and all nature was under the spell of this new snow. The air smelt of snow, the snow cracked softly under foot, the earth, the roofs, the trees, the benches on the boulevards--all were soft, white, and young. Owing to this the houses had a different look from yesterday, the lamps burned brighter, the air was more transparent, the clatter of the cabs was dulled and there entered into the soul with the fresh, easy, frosty air a feeling like the white, young, feathery snow. “To these sad shores unknowing” the medico began to sing in a pleasant tenor, “An unknown power entices”.

“Behold the mill” ... the painter’s voice took him up, “it is now fall’n to ruin.”

“Behold the mill, it is now fall’n to ruin,” the medico repeated, raising his eyebrows and sadly shaking his head.

He was silent for a while, passed his hand over his forehead trying to recall the words, and began to sing in a loud voice and so well that the passers-by looked back.

“Here, long ago, came free, free love to me”...

All three went into a restaurant and without taking off their coats they each had two thimblefuls of vodka at the bar. Before drinking the second, Vassiliev noticed a piece of cork in his Vodka, lifted the glass to his eye, looked at it for a long while with a short-sighted frown. The medico misunderstood his expression and said--

“Well, what are you staring at? No philosophy, please. Vodka’s made to be drunk, caviare to be eaten, women to sleep with, snow to walk on. Live like a man for one evening.”

“Well, I’ve nothing to say,” said Vassiliev laughingly, “I’m not refusing?”

The vodka warmed his breast. He looked at his friends, admired and envied them. How balanced everything is in these healthy, strong, cheerful people. Everything in their minds and souls is smooth and rounded off. They sing, have a passion for the theatre, paint, talk continually, and drink, and they never have a headache the next day. They are romantic and dissolute, sentimental and insolent; they can work and go on the loose and laugh at nothing and talk rubbish; they are hot-headed, honest, heroic and as human beings not a bit worse than Vassiliev, who watches his every step and word, who is careful, cautious, and able to give the smallest trifle the dignity of a problem. And he made up his mind if only for one evening to live like his friends, to let himself go, and be free from his own control. Must he drink vodka? He’ll drink, even if his head falls to pieces to-morrow. Must he be taken to women? He’ll go. He’ll laugh, play the fool, and give a joking answer to disapproving passers-by.

He came out of the restaurant laughing. He liked his friends--one in a battered hat with a wide brim who aped aesthetic disorder; the other in a sealskin cap, not very poor, with a pretence of learned Bohemia. He liked the snow, the paleness, the lamp-lights, the clear black prints which the passers’ feet left on the snow. He liked the air, and above all the transparent, tender, naive, virgin tone which can be seen in nature only twice in the year: when everything is covered in snow, on the bright days in spring, and on moonlight nights when the ice breaks on the river.

“To these sad shores unknowing,” he began to sing _sotto-voce,_ “An unknown power entices.”

And all the way for some reason or other he and his friends had this melody on their lips. All three hummed it mechanically out of time with each other.