I had already been sitting for an hour and more, and was sitting by the window on one of the two wicker chairs that stood by the window. It also infuriated me that time was passing and I still had to find quarters before evening. I wanted to pick up some book out of boredom, but I didn’t; the very thought of amusing myself made it doubly disgusting. The extraordinary silence had gone on for more than an hour, and then suddenly, somewhere very close by, behind the door screened by the sofa, I began to make out, involuntarily and gradually, a whispering that grew louder and louder. Two voices were speaking, obviously women’s by the sound of them, though it was quite impossible to make out their words; and nevertheless, out of boredom, I somehow began to listen. It was clear that they were speaking animatedly and passionately, and that the talk was not about patterns: they were arranging or arguing about something, or one voice persuaded and begged while the other disobeyed and objected. Must have been some other tenants. I soon got bored and my ear grew accustomed to it, so that, though I went on listening, I did so mechanically, sometimes even quite forgetting that I was listening, when suddenly something extraordinary happened, just as if someone had jumped from a chair with both feet or had suddenly jumped up from his place and stamped; then came a groan and a sudden cry, not even a cry, but a shriek, animal, angry, that no longer cared whether other people heard it or not. I rushed to the door and opened it; at the same time another door opened at the end of the corridor, the landlady’s as I learned afterwards, from which two curious heads peeked out. The cry, however, subsided at once; then suddenly the door next to mine, the women neighbors’, opened, and a young woman, as it seemed to me, quickly burst out of it and ran down the stairs. The other woman, an elderly one, wanted to hold her back, but couldn’t, and only moaned behind her:
“Olya, Olya, where are you going? Oh!”
But, seeing our two open doors, she quickly closed hers, leaving a crack and listening through it to the stairs, till the sound of Olya’s running footsteps died away completely. I went back to my window. Everything was quiet. A trifling incident, and maybe also ridiculous. I stopped thinking about it.
Around a quarter of an hour later, a loud and brash male voice rang out in the corridor, just by Vasin’s door. Somebody grasped the door handle and opened it enough so that I could make out some tall man in the corridor, who obviously also saw me and was even already studying me, though he did not yet come into the room, but, still holding the door handle, went on talking with the landlady all the way down the corridor. The landlady called out to him in a thin and gay little voice, and one could tell by her voice that she had long known the visitor, and respected and valued him as both a solid guest and a merry gentleman. The merry gentleman shouted and cracked jokes, but the point was only that Vasin was not at home, that he never could find him at home, that it had been so ordained, and that he would wait again, as the other time, and all this undoubtedly seemed the height of wittiness to the landlady. Finally the visitor came in, thrusting the door fully open.
This was a well-dressed gentleman, obviously from one of the best tailors, in “high-class fashion,” as they say, and yet he had very little of the high-class about him, and that, it seemed, despite a considerable desire to have it. He was not really brash, but somehow naturally insolent, which was in any case less offensive than insolence that rehearsed itself in front of a mirror. His hair, dark blond gone slightly gray, his black eyebrows, big beard, and big eyes, not only did not personalize his character, but seemed precisely to endow it with something general, like everyone else. Such a man laughs, and is ready to laugh, yet for some reason you never feel merry with him. He passes quickly from a laughing to a grave look, from a grave to a playful or winking one, but it is all somehow scattered and pointless . . . However, there’s no sense describing it beforehand. Later I came to know this gentleman much better and more closely, and therefore I have involuntarily presented him now more knowingly than then, when he opened the door and came into the room. Though now, too, I would have difficulty saying anything exact or definite about him, because the main thing in these people is precisely their unfinishedness, scatteredness, and indefiniteness.
He had not yet had time to sit down, when I suddenly fancied that this must be Vasin’s stepfather, a certain Mr. Stebelkov, of whom I had already heard something, but so fleetingly that I could not have said precisely what: I only remembered that it was not something nice. I knew that Vasin had lived for a long time as an orphan under his authority, but that he had long since gotten out from under his influence, that their goals and their interests were different, and that they lived separately in all respects. I also remembered that this Stebelkov had some capital, and that he was even some sort of speculator and trafficker; in short, it may be that I already knew something more specific about him, but I forget. He sized me up at a glance, though without any greeting, placed his top hat on the table in front of the sofa, pushed the table aside peremptorily with his foot, and did not so much sit as sprawl directly on the sofa, on which I had not ventured to sit, so that it let out a creak, dangled his legs, and, lifting up the right toe of his patent leather boot, began to admire it. Of course, he turned to me at once and again sized me up with his big, somewhat immobile eyes.
“I never find him at home!” he nodded his head to me slightly.
I said nothing.
“Unpunctual! His own view of things. From the Petersburg side?”
“You mean that you have come from the Petersburg side?” I returned the question.
“No, I’m asking you.”
“I . . . I came from the Petersburg side, but how did you find out?”
“How? Hm.” He winked, but did not deign to explain.
“That is, I don’t live on the Petersburg side, but I was on the Petersburg side just now and then came here.”
He went on silently smiling some sort of significant smile, which I disliked terribly. There was something stupid in this winking.
“At Mr. Dergachev’s?” he said finally.
“What, at Dergachev’s?” I opened my eyes wide.
He looked at me victoriously.
“I don’t even know him.”
“Hm.”
“As you wish,” I replied. I was beginning to find him repulsive.
“Hm, yes, sir. No, sir, pardon me; you buy something in a shop, in another shop next to it another buyer buys something else, and what do you think it is? Money, sir, from a merchant who is known as a moneylender, sir, because money’s also a thing, and the moneylender is also a merchant . . . Do you follow?”
“Perhaps so.”
“A third buyer walks past and, pointing at one of the shops, says, ‘That’s substantial,’ then, pointing at another of the shops, says, ‘That’s insubstantial.’ What conclusion can I draw about this buyer?”
“How should I know?”
“No, sir, pardon me. I’ll give an example; man lives by good example. I go down Nevsky Prospect and notice that on the other side of the street, walking down the sidewalk, is a gentleman whose character I should like to determine. We reach, on different sides, the same turn onto Morskaya Street, and precisely there, where the English shop is, we notice a third pedestrian who has just been run over by a horse. Now get this: a fourth gentleman passes by and wishes to determine the character of the three of us, including the run-over one, in the sense of practicality and substantiality . . . Do you follow?”