She quickly ran out, but turned on the threshold for a moment, only to shout:
“They say you’ve received an inheritance!”
And then she vanished like a shadow. I remind you once more: she was beside herself. Versilov was deeply struck; he stood as if pondering and trying to understand; at last he turned suddenly to me:
“You don’t know her at all?”
“Earlier today I accidentally saw her raging in the corridor at Vasin’s, shrieking and cursing you; but I didn’t get into conversation with her and know nothing, and just now we met by the gate. She’s probably yesterday’s teacher ‘who gives lessons in arithmetic’?”
“The very same. Once in my life I did a good deed and . . . But, anyhow, what have you got?”
“Here’s this letter,” I answered. “I consider it unnecessary to explain: it comes from Kraft, who got it from the late Andronikov. You’ll find out from the contents. I’ll add that no one in the whole world knows of this letter now except me, because Kraft, having given me the letter yesterday, shot himself just after I left . . .”
While I spoke, breathless and hurrying, he took the letter and, holding it out in his left hand, watched me attentively. When I announced Kraft’s suicide to him, I peered into his face with particular attention to see the effect. And what?—the news didn’t make the slightest impression on him; he didn’t even raise his eyebrows! On the contrary, seeing that I had stopped, he pulled out his lorgnette, which never left him and hung on a black ribbon, brought the letter over to a candle, and, after glancing at the signature, began to study it closely. I can’t express how I was even offended by this arrogant unfeelingness. He must have known Kraft very well; besides, it was in any case such extraordinary news! Finally, I naturally wanted it to produce an effect. Having waited for half a minute, and knowing that the letter was long, I turned and went out. My suitcase had long been ready, I only had to pack several things into a bundle. I thought of my mother and that I had not gone over to her. Ten minutes later, when I was quite ready and wanted to go for a cab, my sister came into my room.
“Here, mama sends you your sixty roubles and again asks you to forgive her for having told Andrei Petrovich about it, and there’s another twenty roubles. You gave her fifty roubles yesterday for your keep; mother says it’s simply impossible to take more than thirty from you, because she hadn’t spent fifty on you, so she’s sending you twenty roubles in change.”
“Well, thanks, if only she’s telling the truth. Good-bye, sister, I’m going away!”
“Where to now?”
“To an inn for the time being, only so as not to spend the night in this house. Tell mama that I love her.”
“She knows that. She knows that you also love Andrei Petrovich. You ought to be ashamed to have brought that unfortunate girl!”
“I swear to you, it wasn’t me; I met her by the gate.”
“No, you brought her.”
“I assure you . . .”
“Think, ask yourself, and you’ll see that you, too, were the reason.”
“I was only very glad that Versilov was disgraced. Imagine, he has a nursing baby by Lydia Akhmakov . . . however, why am I telling you . . .”
“He has? A nursing baby? But it’s not his baby! Where did you hear such a lie?”
“Well, as if you’d know.”
“Who else should know? It was I who took care of this baby in Luga. Listen, brother: I saw long ago that you know nothing about anything, and yet you insult Andrei Petrovich, well, and mama, too.”
“If he’s right, then I’ll be wrong, that’s all, and I don’t love you any less. Why did you blush so, sister? And still more now! Well, all right, but even so I’ll challenge that princeling to a duel for Versilov’s slap in Ems. The more so if Versilov was in the right with Miss Akhmakov.”
“Brother, come to your senses, really!”
“Since the court has now closed the case . . . Well, and now you’ve turned pale.”
“But the prince won’t fight a duel with you,” Liza smiled a pale smile through her fright.
“Then I’ll disgrace him publicly. What’s wrong, Liza?”
She became so pale that she couldn’t stand on her feet and lowered herself onto the sofa.
“Liza!” mother called from downstairs.
She put herself to rights and stood up; she was smiling tenderly at me.
“Brother, leave these trifles, or wait for a while, till you learn much more: you know so terribly little.”
“I’ll remember, Liza, that you turned pale when you learned I’d be going to a duel!”
“Yes, yes, remember that, too!” she smiled once more in farewell and went downstairs.
I called a cab and, with the driver’s help, carried my things out of the apartment. None of my family opposed me or stopped me. I did not go to say good-bye to my mother, so as not to meet Versilov. When I was already sitting in the cab, a thought suddenly flashed in me.
“To the Fontanka, the Semyonovsky Bridge,” I ordered suddenly, and went to Vasin’s again.
II
IT SUDDENLY OCCURRED to me that Vasin already knew about Kraft, and maybe a hundred times more than I did; and that’s how it turned out to be. Vasin at once and dutifully told me all the details—without great warmth, however; I concluded that he was tired, and so he was. He had been at Kraft’s himself that morning. Kraft had shot himself with a revolver (that same one) the night before, in full darkness, as was made clear by his diary. The last entry in the diary was made just before the shot, and he notes in it that he was writing almost in the dark, barely making out the letters; and he didn’t want to light a candle for fear of leaving a fire behind him. “And I don’t want to light it, only to put it out again before the shot, like my life,” he added strangely in almost the last line. He had undertaken this death diary two days earlier, as soon as he returned to Petersburg, before the visit to Dergachev; after I left, he wrote in it every quarter of an hour; the very last three or four entries were written every five minutes. I voiced my surprise that Vasin, having had this diary under his eyes for so long (it was given him to read), had not made a copy, the more so as it was no more than a printer’s sheet in all, and the entries were short—“at least the last page!” Vasin observed to me with a smile that he remembered it as it was, and moreover the notes were without any system, about whatever came to mind. I tried to argue that that was the precious thing in this case, but dropped it and began pestering him to remember at least something, and he remembered several lines, about an hour before the shot, saying “that he had chills; that he contemplated drinking a glass in order to warm up, but the thought that it would perhaps cause a bigger hemorrhage stopped him.”—“It’s almost all that sort of thing,” concluded Vasin.
“And you call that trifles!” I exclaimed.
“When did I call it that? I simply didn’t make a copy. But though it’s not trifles, the diary is actually quite ordinary, or, rather, natural, that is, precisely as it ought to be in this case . . .”
“But it’s his last thoughts, his last thoughts!”
“Last thoughts can sometimes be extremely insignificant. One such suicide precisely complains in the same sort of diary that at such an important hour at least one ‘lofty thought’ should have visited him, but, on the contrary, they were all petty and empty.”
“And that he had chills is also an empty thought?”
“That is, you mean the chills proper, or the hemorrhage? Yet it’s a known fact that a great many of those who are capable of contemplating their imminent death, self-willed or not, are quite often inclined to be concerned with the handsome appearance in which their corpse will be left. In this sense, Kraft, too, feared an excessive hemorrhage.”