The large windows with their dark curtains, the bed, the crumpled dress-coat on the floor, my wet footprints ... they all looked forbidding and gloomy. There was something peculiar about the silence too.
Perhaps because I had dashed into the street without my cap or galoshes, I was running a high fever. My face burnt, my legs ached, my heavy head sagged over the table, and I appeared to be suffering from split personality, each thought in my brain being seemingly haunted by its own shadow.
'Ill, weak and demoralized as I am, I cannot write to you as I should like,' I continued. 'My first wish was to insult and humiliate you, but I no longer feel I have any right to do that. We arc both failures, you and I, and neither ofus is going to rise again, so however eloquent, forceful and awesome my letter might be, it would still be like beating on a coffin lid: I could bang away for all I was worth without waking anyone up. No exertions can ever warm that damnable cold blood of yours, as you know better than I do. Is there any point in writing to you, then ? But my head and heart are burning and I continue writing, somehow excited, as if this letter could still rescue the two of us. My thoughts are incoherent because I am ^^ing a temperature, and my pen somehow scratches meaninglessly on the paper, but the question I want to ask you is plain before my eyes as though written in letters offire.
'It is not hard to explain why I have flagged and fallen prematurely. Like Samson in the Bible, I hoisted the gates of Gaza on my back to carry them to the top of the mountain, but only when I was already exhausted, when my youth and health had faded once and for all, did I realize that those gates were too heavy for me and that I had deceived myself. Moreover, I was in constant, agonizing pain. I have suffered hunger, cold, sickness and loss of liberty. I never knew personal happiness, and I still don't. I have no refuge, my memories weigh me down, and my conscience is often afraid ofthem. But you, now, you ... why have you fallen? What fatal, hellish causes prevented your life from blossoming forth in full vernal splendour? Before you had even begun to live you hastened to renounce the image and likeness ofGod, you turned into a cowardly animal which barks to scare others because it is scared itself. Why, though? You fear life, you fear it like the Oriental who sits on a cushion all day smoking his hookah. Oh yes, you read a lot, and your European coat fits you well. Yet with what fond, purely Oriental solicitude, worthy of some eastern potentate, do you shield yourself from hunger, cold, physical effort, pain and worry! How early you began to rest on your oars! What a cowardly attitude you have shown to real life and the natural forces with which every normal, healthy man has to contend! How soft, snug, warm, comfortable you are ... and oh, how bored! Yes, you experience the shattering, abysmal boredom ofa man in solitary confinement, but you try to hide even from that enemy by playing cards for eight hours out of the twenty-four.
'And your irony? Oh, how well I understand it! Vital, free-ranging, confident speculation ... it's a pretty keen and potent process, that, hut not one that a sluggish, idle brain can cope with. So, to stop it encroaching on your peace of mind, you hastened while yet young to confine it within bounds, as did thousands of your contemporaries, by arming yourself with an ironical approach to life or whatever you want to call it. Your inhibited, cowed thoughts do not dare to leap the fence which you have set round them, and when you mock ideals which you claim to know "all about", you'rejust like the deserter fleeing disgracefully from the battlefield, and stifling his own shame by deriding war and valour. Cynicism dulls the pain. In some novel of Dostoyevsky's an old man tramples his favourite daughter's portrait underfoot because he has treated her unfairly, just as you mock the ideals of goodness and justice in your nasty, cheap way because you can't live up to them any longer. You dread every honest, direct reference to your own decline, and you deliberately surround yourself with people capable only of flattering your weaknesses. So no wonder you're so scared of tears, no wonder at all.
'And incidentally, there's your attitude to women. We are all shameless—that's something we inherited with our flesh and blood, it's part of our upbringing. But what is one a man for, ifnot to subdue the beast within one? When you grew up, when you got to know "all about" ideas, the truth was staring you in the face. You knew it, but you didn't pursue it, you took fright at it, and you tried to deceive your conscience by loudly assuring yourself that the fault was not yours, it was women's, and that women were as debased as your relations with them. Those bleak dirty stories, that neighing snigger, all your innumerable theories about the so-called "basic clement", .about the vagueness of the demands made on marriage, about the ten sous which the French labourer pays his woman, your never-ending references to female illogicality, mendaciousness, feebleness and the like . . . doesn't it all rather look as ifyou want to push woman down in the mud at all costs so as to put her on the same level as your own relations with her? You're a wretched, weak, disagreeable person.'
Zinaida started playing the piano in the drawing-room, trying to remember the Saint-Sacns piece which Gruzin had played. I went and lay on my bed, but then remembered that it was time to go. Forcing myself to stand up, I went back to the desk with a heavy, hot head.
'But why are we so tired? That's the question,' I went on. 'We who start out so passionate, bold, high-minded and confident . . . why arc we so totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirtv-five? Why is it that one person pines away with consumption, another puts a bullet in his brains, and a third seeks oblivion in vodka or cards, while a fourth tries to stifle his anguished terrors by cynically trampling on the image of his fine, unsullied youth? Why do we never try to stand up once we have fallen down ? Ifwe lose one thing why don't we look for another ? Well may one ask.
'The thief on the Cross managed to recover his zest for living and a bold, realistic hope for his future, though he may have had less than an hour to live. You have long years ahead of you, and I'm not going to die as soon as you think, probably. What if, by some miracle, the present should turn out to be a dream, a hideous nightmare, what if we awoke renewed, cleansed, strong, proud in our sense of rectitude? Joyous visions fire me, I am breathless with excitement. I have a terrific appetite for life, I want our lives to be sacred, sublime and sole^^ as the vault of the heavens. And live we shall! The sun rises only once a day, and life isn't given twice, so hold tight to what is left of it and preserve that.'
I wrote not a word more. My head was seething with ideas, but they were all so blurred that I could not get them down on paper. Leaving the letter unfinished, I signed my rank, Christian name and surname, and went into the study. It was dark there. I groped for the desk and put the letter on it. I must have stumbled into the furniture in the dark and made a noise.
'Who's there ?' asked a worried voice in the drawing-room.
At that moment the clock on the desk gently struck one o'clock.
XIII
I spent at least half a minute scratching at the door and fumbling with it in the darkness, then jlowly opened it and went into the drawing- room. Zinaida was lying on a sofa and raised herself on an elbow to watch me come in. Not daring to speak, I walked slowly past her while sl e followed me with her eyes. I stood in the hall for a moment, then v. ent past again while she watched me carefully and with amazement— with fear, even. At last I halted.
'He won't be corning back,' I brought out with an effort.
She quickly rose to her feet and looked at me uncomprehendingly.
'He won't be corning back,' I repeated, my heart pounding violently. 'He can't come back because he hasn't left St. Petersburg. He is staying at Pekarsky's.'