Indeed, a forgotten old woman was shouting on the bottom floor of the blazing cottage, the eighty-year-old relative of the merchant who owned the burning house. But she had not been forgotten; she had gone back into the burning house herself while it was possible, with the insane purpose of dragging her feather bed out of the still untouched corner room. Choking from the smoke and shouting from the heat, because that room, too, had caught fire, she was still trying with all her might to push her feather bed through a broken window with her decrepit hands. Lembke rushed to help her. Everyone saw him run up to the window, seize a corner of the feather bed and begin to pull it through the window with all his might. As bad luck would have it, at that very moment a broken board fell from the roof and struck the unfortunate man. It did not kill him, it merely grazed his neck with one end as it fell, but the career of Andrei Antonovich was over, at least among us; the blow knocked him off his feet, and he collapsed unconscious.
At last came a sullen, gloomy dawn. The fire dwindled; after the wind it suddenly became still, and then came a slow, drizzling rain, as if through a sieve. I was by then in another part of Zarechye, far from the spot where Lembke had fallen, and there in the crowd I heard very strange talk. A strange fact had been discovered: at the edge of the quarter, on a vacant lot beyond the kitchen gardens, not less than fifty steps away from the other buildings, there stood a small, recently built wooden house, and this solitary house had burst into flames almost before any of the others, at the very beginning of the fire. Even if it had burned down, it could not have transmitted the fire to any town buildings because of the distance, and, vice versa, if the whole of Zarechye had burned down, this one house would have remained untouched, whatever wind was blowing. It appeared to have caught fire separately and independently, so there was something behind it. But the main thing was that it had not had time to burn down, and towards daybreak astonishing things were discovered inside it. The owner of this new house, a tradesman who lived in the nearby quarter, as soon as he saw his new house on fire, rushed to it and managed to save it, with the help of some neighbors, by scattering the burning logs that had been piled against the side wall. But there were tenants living in the house—a captain well known in town, his sister, and with them an elderly servingwoman, and these tenants, the captain, his sister, and the servingwoman, had all three been stabbed to death that night and apparently robbed. (It was here that the police chief had gone when he had left the fire while Lembke was trying to rescue the feather bed.) By morning the news had spread and a huge mass of all sorts of people, even some who had been burned out in Zarechye, poured down to the vacant lot, to the new house. It was so crowded that it was even difficult to get through. I was told at once that the captain had been found with his throat cut, on the bench, dressed, and that he had probably been dead drunk when he was killed, so that he had not even felt it, and that he had bled "like a bull"; that his sister Marya Timofeevna had been "stuck all over" with a knife, and was lying on the floor of the doorway, so that she had probably been awake and had struggled and fought with the murderer. The housekeeper, who probably also woke up, had her head completely smashed in. According to the owner's story, the captain had come to see him the day before, in the morning, had boasted and displayed a lot of money, as much as two hundred roubles. The captain's old, worn green wallet was found empty on the floor; but Marya Timofeevna's trunk had not been touched, and the silver casing of her icon had not been touched either; of the captain's clothes, everything turned out to be intact as well; one could see that the thief had been in a hurry, and that he was a man who was familiar with the captain's affairs, had come to take money only, and knew where to find it. If the owner had not come running right away, the logs would have flared up and quite certainly burned the house down, "and it would have been difficult to learn the truth from charred corpses."
So ran the account of the affair. Further information was added: that the place had been rented for the captain and his sister personally by Mr. Stavrogin, Nikolai Vsevolodovich, General Stavrogin's widow's boy, that he had come personally to rent it, and had been very insistent, because the owner did not want to let it and was intending to make the house a tavern, but Nikolai Vsevolodovich had spared no expense and handed him money for a year in advance.
"There's something behind this fire," voices came from the crowd.
But the majority were silent. Their faces were gloomy, but I did not notice any great, obvious irritation. All around, however, stories went on about Nikolai Vsevolodovich, that the murdered woman was his wife, that yesterday, "in a dishonest manner," he had lured to himself a young lady from the foremost house in town, the daughter of General Drozdov's widow, that a complaint would be lodged against him in Petersburg, and that if his wife had been killed, it must have been so that he could marry the Drozdov girl. Skvoreshniki was no more than a mile and a half away, and I remember thinking: shouldn't I send word to them there? However, I did not notice anyone especially inciting the crowd, and I do not want to speak evil, though I did see flash by me two or three "buffet" mugs, who turned up at the fire by morning and whom I recognized at once. I particularly remember one tall, lean fellow, a tradesman, haggard, curly-haired, as if smeared with soot—a locksmith, as I learned later. He was not drunk, but, in contrast to the gloomily standing crowd, seemed beside himself. He kept addressing the people, though I do not remember his words. Whatever was coherent was no longer than: "What's this, brothers? Can it really be like this?"—all the while waving his arms.
3: A Finished Romance
I
From the big reception room at Skvoreshniki (the same one in which the last meeting between Varvara Petrovna and Stepan Trofimovich had taken place), the fire was in full view. At dawn, towards six o'clock, Liza was standing at the last window on the right, looking intently at the dying glow. She was alone in the room. The dress she was wearing was the festive one from the day before, in which she had appeared at the reading—light green, magnificent, all lace, but rumpled now, hastily and carelessly put on. Suddenly noticing that the front of the dress was not tightly fastened, she blushed, hastily put it right, snatched from the armchair a red shawl left there the day before when she came in, and threw it around her neck. Her fluffy hair fell in disorderly curls onto her right shoulder from under the shawl. Her face was tired, preoccupied, but her eyes were burning from under her frowning brows. She went up to the window again and leaned her hot forehead against the cold glass. The door opened and Nikolai Vsevolodovich came in.
"I've sent a messenger on horseback," he said, "in ten minutes we'll learn everything, but meanwhile the servants are saying that part of Zarechye has burned down, nearer the embankment, to the right from the bridge. It started burning before twelve; it's going out now."
He did not go to the window, but stopped three steps behind her, yet she did not turn to him.
"By the calendar it ought to have been light an hour ago, and it's still like night," she said with vexation.
"Every calendar doth lie,"[185] he remarked with an obliging grin, but, ashamed, hastened to add: "It's boring to live by the calendar, Liza."
And he fell silent finally, vexed at the new platitude he had uttered; Liza smiled crookedly.
"You're in such a sad mood that you can't even find words with me. But don't worry, you put it appropriately: I always live by the calendar, my every step is reckoned by the calendar. Are you surprised?"