I follow my wife and hear her speaking, but am too upset to take in any of it. Her candle throwsjumping patches oflight on the steps, our long shadows quiver, my legs trip in the skirts of my dressing-gown, I gasp for breath, I feel as if someone's chasing me and trying to seize my back.
'I shall die here and now on these stairs,' I think. 'Now '
But then we pass up the staircase and along the dark corridor with the Italian window, and enter Liza's room. She sits on the bed in her night-go^n with her bare feet dangling. She is groaning.
'God, God!' she mutters, frowning in the light of our candle. 'I can't stand it, I can't '
'Liza, my child,' I say. 'What's the matter?'
Seeing me, she shrieks and throws herself on my neck.
'My kind father,' she sobs. 'My good, kind father, my darling, my dearest! I don't know what's the matter, I feel so awful.'
She puts her arms round me, kisses me and babbles endearments such as I used to hear from her when she was a little girl.
'Be calm, child—really!' I say. 'You mustn't cry. I feel awful myself.'
I try to tuck her in, my wife gives her some water, and we both potter about haphazardly at her bedside. I jog my wife's shoulder with my o^n, reminded of the days when we used to bath our children together.
'Help her, can't you?' begs my wife. 'Do something!'
But what can I do?. Nothing. Something's depressing the child, but I understand nothing, know nothing.
'Never mind,' is all I can mutter. 'It'll pass—. Sleep, sleep '
To make thi,jigs worse, dogs suddenly howl in our yard—quietly and hesitantly at first, but then in a rowdy duet. I never used to bother about omens like dogs howling or owls hooting, but now my heart sinks in anguish, and I hasten to find an explanation for the howling.
'It means nothing,' I think. 'It's just the way one organism affects another. My extreme nervous tension infected my wife, then Liza and the dog, and that's all. Such infection is behind all forebodings and premonitions.'
Returning to my room soon afterwards to write Liza a prescription, I no longer brood on my impending death, but just feel so downcast and forlorn that I actually regret not having died suddenly. I stand motionless in the centre of the room for a while, wondering what to prescribe for Liza, but the groans above my ceiling fade away, and I decide not to prescribe anything. But I still stand there .
There's a deathly hush, a quiet so intense that it makes your ears tingle, as some writer once put it. Time passes slowly, and the strips of moonlight look as if they had congealed on the window-sill, for they don't budge.
Da^n is still a long way off.
But then the garden gate squeaks. Someone creeps in, breaks a twig off one of the scraggy saplings, and cautiously taps the window.
'Nicholas,' I hear a whisper. 'Nicholas Stepanovich!'
I open the window and feel asifl'm dreaming. Beneath the window, huddled against the wall and bathed in moonlight stands a black- garbed woman whose huge eyes stare at me. Her face is pale and stern —and weird, like marble, in the moonlight. Her chin quivers.
'It's me,' she says. 'Me—Katya.'
By moonlight all women's eyes look large and black, and people seem taller and paler, which is probably why I had failed to recognize her at first.
'What do you want?'
'I'm sorry,' she says, 'but I suddenly felt unutterably depressed, somehow. I couldn't bear it, so I came here, there was a light in your window and—and I decided to knock. I'm sorry—. Oh, I was so depressed, did you but know. What are you doing now?'
'Nothing—I can't sleep.'
'I had some premonition—it doesn't matter, anyway.'
She raises her eyebrows, tears shine in her eyes, and her whole face glows with that familiar, trustful look which I have not seen for so long.
'Nicholas Stepanovich,' she beseeches, stretching out both arms to me. 'My dear friend, I beg you—1 implore you—. If you don't despise my affection and respect, do grant me this request.'
'What request?'
'Take my money.'
'Oh, really, don't be silly! What do I want with your money ?'
'You can go somewhere for your health—you need treatment. You will take it, won't you, my dear?'
She stares avidly into my face.
'You will,' she repeats, 'won't you?'
'No, my dear, I won't,' I say. 'No thank you.'
She turns her back on me and bows herhead. I must have refused her in a tone which brooked no discussion of money.
'Go home and sleep,' say I. 'We'll meet tomorrow.'
'So you don't consider me your friend?' she asks dejectedly.
'That's not what I'm saying, but your money's no good to me now.'
'I'm sorry,' she says, dropping her voice an octave. 'I see what you mean. To borrow money from someone like me—a retired actress—. Good-bye, anyway.'
And she leaves in such haste that I don't even have time to say goodbye.
VI
I'm in Kharkov.
It would be pointless, and beyond my powers, to fight against my present mood. So I've decided that the last days of my life shall at least be above reproach in the formal sense. If I'm in the wrong where my family's concerned—as I fully realize I am—I'll try to do what they want. If I'm to go to Kharkov, then to Kharkov I will go. Besides, I've grownwn so indifferent to everything lately that I really don't in the least care where I go—Kharkov, Paris or Berdichev.
I arrived at noon, and took a room in a hotel near the cathedral. The train's jolting upset me, I had draughts blowing right through me, and now I'm sitting on my bed, clutching my head and waiting for my nervous tic to start. I ought to visit some professors of my acquaintance today, but I have neither strength nor inclination.
The old corridor servant comes in and asks ifl have bed linen. I keep him for five minutes, putting several questions about Gnekker, the object of my errand. The servant turns out to be a Kharkov man who knows the city inside out, but he doesn't remember any house belonging to a Gnekker. I ask about the country estates and the answer is the same.
The corridor clock strikes one, then two, then three.
These last months of my life, this waiting for death, seem to last far longer than the rest of my life put together. Never before could I resign myself to the slow passage of time as I can now. Waiting for a train at the station, or sitting through an examination once used to make a quarter of an hour seem an eternity, but now I can sit motionless all night on my bed, reflecting with total unconcern that tomorrow night will be just as long and colourless, and so will the night after.
Five o'clock strikes in the corridor, then six, then seven.
It grows dark.
There is a dull ache in my check—the onset of the tic. To occupy my mind, I revert to a point of view which I held before I became so apathetic.
'Why', I ask, 'should a distinguished man like myself, one of the heads of his profession, sit in this small hotel room, on this bed with the unfamiliar grey blanket. Why do I look at this cheap tin wash- stand? Why listen to that wretched clock rattling in the corridor? Is this in keeping with my fame and high social position?' I answer these questions with an ironical smile, tickled by my own youthful credulity in once' exaggerating the importance of fame and of the exclusive position supposedly enjoyed by notabilities. I'm well kno^n, my name is invoked with awe, I've had my picture in The Meadmv and World Illustrated—I've even read my biography in a German magazine. And the upshot? I sit all on my own in a strange town, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching check with my hand.
Family squabbles, hard-hearted creditors, rude railway officials, the nuisance of the internal passport system, expensive and unwholesome food in the buffets, general loutishness and rough manners—all these, and many other things too time-consuming to mention, affect me no less than any humble citizen unknown outside his own back alley. So what is there so special about my situation? Granted, I'm a celebrity a thousand times over, a great man, the pride of Russia. Granted, bulletins about my illness appear in all the papers, and my mail includes addresses of sympathy from colleagues, pupils and the general public. Yet these things won't save me from dying a miserable death on a strange bed in utter loneliness.