He was bathed in a cold sweat; his heart could not have pounded any harder; his chest was so tight that it was as if the last breath was about to fly out of it. "Could it have been a dream?" he said, clutching his head with both hands; but the terrible aliveness of the apparition was not like a dream. Awake now, he saw the old man going into the frame, even caught a glimpse of the skirts of his loose clothing, and his hand felt clearly that a moment before it had been holding something heavy. Moonlight lit up the room, drawing out of its dark corners now a canvas, now a plaster arm, now some drapery left on the floor, now trousers and a pair of unpolished boots. Only here did he notice that he was not lying in bed but standing right in front of the portrait. How he got there- that he simply could not understand. He was still more amazed that the portrait was all uncovered and there was in fact no sheet over it. In motionless fear he gazed at it and saw living, human eyes peer straight into him. Cold sweat stood out on his brow; he wanted to back away, but felt as if his feet were rooted to the ground. And he saw-this was no longer a dream-the old man's features move, his lips begin to stretch toward him, as if wishing to suck him out… With a scream of despair, he jumped back-and woke up.
"Could this, too, have been a dream?" His heart pounding to the point of bursting, he felt around him with his hands. Yes, he was lying on his bed in the same position in which he had fallen asleep. Before him stood the screen; moonlight filled the room. Through the chink in the screen he could see the portrait properly covered with a sheet-as he himself had covered it. And so, this, too, had been a dream! But his clenched hand felt even now as if something had been in it. The pounding of his heart was hard, almost terrible; the heaviness on his chest was unbearable. He looked through the chink and fixed his eyes on the sheet. And now he saw clearly that the sheet was beginning to come away, as if hands were fumbling under it, trying to throw it off. "Lord God, what is this!" he cried out, crossing himself desperately, and woke up.
And this had also been a dream! He jumped from the bed, half demented, frantic, no longer able to explain what was happening to him: the oppression of a nightmare or a household spirit, delirious raving or a living vision. Trying to calm somewhat his mental agitation and the stormy blood that throbbed in tense pulsations through all his veins, he went to the window and opened the vent pane. A chill breath of wind revived him. Moonlight still lay on the roofs and white walls of the houses, though small clouds passed across the sky more often. Everything was stilclass="underline" occasionally there came the distant rattle of a droshky, whose coachman was sleeping somewhere in an out-of-sight alley, lulled by his lazy nag as he waited for a late passenger. He gazed for a long time, thrusting his head out the vent. The sky was already beginning to show signs of approaching dawn; finally he felt the approach of drowsiness, slammed the vent shut, left the window, went to bed, and soon fell sound asleep, like the dead.
He woke up very late and felt himself in the unpleasant condition that comes over a man after fume poisoning; his head ached unpleasantly. The room was bleak; an unpleasant dampness drizzled through the air, penetrating the cracks in his windows, obstructed by paintings or primed canvases. Gloomy, disgruntled, he sat down like a wet rooster on his tattered couch, not knowing himself what to undertake, what to do, and finally recalled the whole of his dream. As he recalled it, the dream presented itself to his imagination so oppressively alive that he even began to wonder whether it had indeed been a dream and a mere delirium, and not something else, not an apparition. Pulling off the sheet, he studied this terrible portrait in the light of day. The eyes were indeed striking in their extraordinary aliveness, yet he found nothing especially terrible in them; only, it was as if some inexplicable, unpleasant feeling remained in one's soul. For all that, he still could not be completely certain that it had been a dream. It seemed to him that amidst the dream there had been some terrible fragment of reality. It seemed that even in the very gaze and expression of the old man something was as if saying that he had visited him that night; his hand felt the heaviness that had only just lain in it, as if someone had snatched it away only a moment before. It seemed to him that if he had only held on to the packet more tightly, it would surely have stayed in his hand after he woke up.
"My God, if I had at least part of that money!" he said, sighing heavily, and in his imagination all the packets he had seen, with the alluring inscription of "1,000 Gold Roubles" began to pour from the sack. The packets came unwrapped, gold gleamed, was wrapped up again, and he sat staring fixedly and mindlessly into the empty air, unable to tear himself away from such a subject- like a child sitting with dessert in front of him, his mouth watering, watching while others eat. Finally there came a knock at the door, which roused him unpleasantly. His landlord entered with the police inspector, whose appearance, as everyone knows, is more unpleasant for little people than the face of a petitioner is for the rich. The owner of the small house where Chartkov lived was such a creature as owners of houses somewhere on the Fifteenth
Line of Vasilievsky Island or on the Petersburg side or in a remote corner of Kolomna 8 usually are-a creature of which there are many in Russia and whose character is as difficult to define as the color of a worn-out frock coat. In his youth, he had been a captain and a loudmouth, had also been employed in civil affairs, had been an expert at flogging, an efficient man, a fop, and a fool; but in his old age, he had merged all these sharp peculiarities in himself into some indefinite dullness. He was a widower, he was retired, he no longer played the fop, stopped boasting, stopped bullying, and only liked drinking tea and babbling all sorts of nonsense over it; paced the room, straightened a tallow candle end; visited his tenants punctually at the end of every month for the money; went outside, key in hand, to look at the roof of his house; repeatedly chased the caretaker out of the nook where he hid and slept; in short-a retired man who, after all his rakish life and jolting about in post chaises, is left with nothing but trite habits.