A feeling of immense happiness took possession of Velchaninoff; something
was finished, and done with, and settled. Some huge anxiety was at an end,
so it seemed to him. This anxiety had lasted five weeks.
He raised his hand and looked at the blood-stained rag bound about it.
“Oh, yes!” he thought, “it is, indeed, all over now.”
And all this morning—the first time for many a day, he did not even once
think of Liza; just as if the blood from those cut fingers had wiped out
that grief as well, and made him “quits” with it.
He quite realized how terrible was the danger which he had passed through.
“For those people,” he thought, “who do not know a minute or two
before-hand that they are going to murder you, when they once get the
knife into their hands, and feel the first touch of warm blood—Good
Heaven! they not only cut your throat, they hack your head off
afterwards—right off!”
Velchaninoff could not sit at home, he _must_ go out and let something
happen to him, and he walked about in hopes of something turning up; he
longed to _talk_, and it struck him that he might fairly go to the doctor
and talk to him, and have his hand properly bound up.
The doctor inquired how he hurt his hand, which made Velchaninoff laugh
like mad; he was on the point of telling all, but refrained. Several times
during the day he was on the point of telling others the whole story. Once
it was to a perfect stranger in a restaurant, with whom he had begun to
converse on his own initiative. Before this day he had hated the very idea
of speaking to strangers in the public restaurants.
He went into a shop and ordered some new clothes, not with the idea of
visiting the Pogoryeltseffs however—the thought of any such visit was
distasteful to him; besides he could not leave town, he felt that he must
stay and see what was going to happen.
Velchaninoff dined and enjoyed his dinner, talking affably to his
neighbour and to the waiter as well. When evening fell he went home, his
head was whirling a little, and he felt slightly delirious; the first
sight of his rooms gave him quite a start. He walked round them and
reflected. He visited the kitchen, which he had hardly ever done before in
his life, and thought, “This is where they heated the plates last night.”
He locked the doors carefully, and lit his candles earlier than usual. As
he shut the door he remembered that he had asked Mavra, as he passed the
dvornik’s lodging, whether Pavel Pavlovitch had been. Just as if the
latter could possibly have been near the place!
Having then carefully locked himself in, he opened the little cupboard
where his razors were kept, and took out “the” razor. There was still some
of the blood on the bone handle. He put the razor back again, and locked
the cupboard.
He was sleepy; he felt that he must go to sleep as speedily as possible,
otherwise he would be useless “for to-morrow,” and to-morrow seemed to him
for some reason or other to be about to be a fateful day for him.
But all those thoughts which had crowded in upon him all day, and had
never left him for a moment, were still in full swing within his brain; he
thought, and thought, and thought, and could not fall asleep.
If Pavel Pavlovitch arrived at murdering point accidentally, had he ever
seriously thought of murder even for a single evil instant before?
Velchaninoff decided the question strangely enough: Pavel Pavlovitch _had_
the desire to murder him, but did not himself know of the existence of
this desire.
“It seems an absurd conclusion; but so it is!” thought Velchaninoff.
Pavel Pavlovitch did not come to Petersburg to look out for a new
appointment, nor did he come for the sake of finding Bagantoff, in spite
of his rage when the latter died. No! he despised Bagantoff thoroughly.
Pavel Pavlovitch had come to St. Petersburg for _him_, and had brought
Liza with him, for him alone, Velchaninoff.
“Did _I_ expect to have my throat cut?” Velchaninoff decided that he _had_
expected it, from the moment when he saw Pavel Pavlovitch in the carriage
following in Bagantoff’s funeral procession. “That is I expected
something—of course, not exactly to have my throat cut! And surely—surely,
it was not all _bonâ fide_ yesterday,” he reflected, raising his head from
the pillow in the excitement of the idea. “_Surely_ it cannot have been
all in good faith that that fellow assured me of his love for me, beating
his breast, and with his under lip trembling, as he spoke!
“Yes, it was absolutely _bonâ fide_!” he decided. “This quasimodo of T——
was quite good enough and generous enough to fall in love with his wife’s
lover—his wife in whom he never observed ’anything’ during the twenty
years of their married life.
“He respected and loved me for nine years, and remembered both me and my
sayings. My goodness, to think of that! and I knew nothing whatever of all
this! Oh, no! he was not lying yesterday! But did he love me _while_ he
declared his love for me, and said that we must be ‘quits!’ Yes, he did,
he loved me spitefully—and spiteful love is sometimes the strongest of
all.
“I daresay I made a colossal impression upon him down at T——, for it is
just upon such Schiller-like men that one is liable to make a colossal
impression. He exaggerated my value a thousand fold; perhaps it was my
‘philosophical retirement’ that struck him! It would be curious to
discover precisely what it was that made so great an impression upon him.
Who knows, it may have been that I wore a good pair of gloves, and knew
how to put them on. These quasimodo fellows love æstheticism to
distraction! Give them a start in the direction of admiration for
yourself, and they will do all the rest, and give you a thousand times
more than your due of every virtue that exists; will fight to the death
for you with pleasure, if you ask it of them. How high he must have held
my aptitude for illusionizing others; perhaps that has struck him as much
as anything else! for he remarked: ‘If _this_ man deceived me, whom am I
ever to trust again!’
“After such a cry as that a man may well turn wild beast.
“And he came here to ’embrace and weep over me,’ as he expressed it. H’m!
that means he came to cut my throat, and _thought_ that he came to embrace
and weep over me. He brought Liza with him, too.
“What if I _had_ wept with him and embraced him? Perhaps he really would
have fully and entirely forgiven me—for he was yearning to forgive me, I
could see that! And all this turned to drunkenness and bestiality at the
first check. Yes, Pavel Pavlovitch, the most deformed of all deformities
is the abortion with noble feelings. And this man was foolish enough to
take me down to see his ‘bride.’ My goodness! his bride! Only such a
lunatic of a fellow could ever have developed so wild an idea as a ‘new
existence’ to be inaugurated by an alliance between himself and Nadia. But
you are not to blame, Pavel Pavlovitch, you are a deformity, and all your
ideas and actions and aspirations must of necessity be deformed. But
deformity though he be, why in the world was _my_ sanction, _my_ blessing,
as it were, necessary to his union with Miss Zachlebnikoff? Perhaps he
sincerely hoped that there, with so much sweet innocence and charm around
us, we should fall into each other’s arms in some leafy spot, and weep out
our differences on each other’s shoulders?
“Was _murder_ in his thoughts when I caught him standing between our beds
that first time, in the darkness? No. I think not. And yet the first idea
of it may have entered his soul as he stood there—And if I had not left
the razors out, probably nothing would have happened. Surely that is so;
for he avoided me for weeks—he was _sorry_ for me, and avoided me. He
chose Bagantoff to expend his wrath upon, first, not me! He jumped out of
bed and fussed over the hot plates, to divert his mind from murder
perhaps—from the knife to charity! Perhaps he tried to save both himself
and me by his hot plates!”
So mused Velchaninoff, his poor overwrought brain working on and on, and
jumping from conclusion to conclusion with the endless activity of fever,
until he fell asleep. Next morning he awoke with no less tired brain and
body, but with a new terror, an unexpected and novel feeling of dread
hanging over him.
This dread consisted in the fact that he felt that he, Velchaninoff, must
go and see Pavel Pavlovitch that very day; he knew not why he must go, but
he felt drawn to go, as though by some unseen force. The idea was too
loathsome to look into, so he left it to take care of itself as an
unalterable fact. The madness of it, however, was modified, and the whole
aspect of the thought became more reasonable, after a while, when it took
shape and resolved itself into a conviction in Velchaninoff’s mind that
Pavel Pavlovitch had returned home, locked himself up, and hung himself to
the bedpost, as Maria Sisevna had described of the wretched suicide
witnessed by poor Liza.
“Why should the fool hang himself?” he repeated over and over again; yet
the thought _would_ return that he was bound to hang himself, as Liza had
said that he threatened to do. Velchaninoff could not help adding that if
he were in Pavel Pavlovitch’s place he would probably do the same.
So the end of it was that instead of going out to his dinner, he set off
for Pavel Pavlovitch’s lodging, “just to ask Maria Sisevna after him.” But
before he had reached the street he paused and his face flushed up with
shame. “Surely I am not going there to embrace and weep over him! Surely I
am not going to add this one last pitiful folly to the long list of my
late shameful actions!”
However, his good providence saved him from this “pitiful folly,” for he
had hardly passed through the large gateway into the street, when
Alexander Loboff suddenly collided with him. The young fellow was dashing
along in a state of great excitement.
“I was just coming to you. Our friend Pavel Pavlovitch—a nice sort of
fellow he is——”
“Has he hung himself?” gasped Velchaninoff.
“Hung himself? Who? Why?” asked Loboff, with his eyes starting out of his
head.
“Oh! go on, I meant nothing!”
“Tfu! What a funny line your thoughts seem to take. He hasn’t hung himself
a bit—why in the world should he?—on the contrary, he’s gone away. I’ve
just seen him off! My goodness, how that fellow can drink! We had three
bottles of wine. Predposiloff was there too—but how the fellow drinks!
Good heavens! he was singing in the carriage when the train went off! He
thought of you, and kissed his hand to you, and sent his love. He’s a
scamp, that fellow, eh?”
Young Loboff had apparently had quite his share of the three bottles, his
face was flushed and his utterance thick. Velchaninoff roared with
laughter.
“So you ended up by weeping over each others shoulders, did you? Ha-ha-ha!
Oh, you poetical, Schiller-ish, funny fellows, you!”
“Don’t scold us. You must know he went down _there_ yesterday and to-day,
and he has withdrawn. He ‘sneaked’ like anything about Nadia and me.
They’ve shut her up. There was such a row, but we wouldn’t give way—and,
my word, how the fellow drinks! He was always talking about you; but, of
course, he is no companion for you. You are, more or less, a respectable
sort of man, and must have belonged to society at some time of your life,
though you seem to have retired into private life just now. Is it poverty,
or what? I couldn’t make head or tail of Pavel Pavlovitch’s story.”
“Oh! Then it was he who gave you those interesting details about me?”
“Yes; don’t be cross about it. It’s better to be a citizen than ‘a swell’
any-day! The thing is one does not know whom to respect in Russia
nowadays! Don’t you think it a diseased feature of the times, in Russia,
that one doesn’t know whom to respect?”
“Quite so, quite so. Well, go on about Pavel Pavlovitch——”
“Well, he sat down in the railway carriage and began singing, then he
cried a bit. It was really disgusting to see the fellow. I hate fools!
Then he began to throw money to beggars ‘for the repose of Liza’s soul,’
he said. Is that his wife?”
“Daughter.”
“What’s the matter with your hand?”
“I cut it.”
“H’m! Never mind, cheer up! It’ll be all right soon! I am glad that fellow
has gone, you know,—confound him! But I bet anything he’ll marry as soon
as he arrives at his place.”
“Well, what of that? You are going to marry, too!”
“I! That’s quite a different affair! What a funny man you are! Why, if
_you_ are fifty, he must be sixty! Well, ta-ta! Glad I met you—can’t come
in—don’t ask me—no time!”
He started off at a run, but turned a minute after and came back.
“What a fool I am!” he cried, “I forgot all about it—he sent you a letter.
Here it is. How was it you didn’t see him off? Ta-ta!”
Velchaninoff returned home and opened the letter, which was sealed and
addressed to himself.
There was not a syllable inside in Pavel Pavlovitch’s own hand writing;
but he drew out another letter, and knew the writing at once. It was an
old, faded, yellow-looking sheet of paper, and the ink was faint and
discoloured; the letter was addressed to Velchaninoff, and written ten
years before—a couple of months after his departure from T——. He had never
received a copy of this one, but another letter, which he well remembered,
had evidently been written and sent instead of it; he could tell that by
the substance of the faded document in his hand. In this present letter
Natalia Vasilievna bade farewell to him for ever (as she had done in the
other communication), and informed him that she expected her confinement
in a few months. She added, for his consolation, that she would find an
opportunity of purveying his child to him in good time, and pointed out
that their friendship was now cemented for ever. She begged him to love
her no longer, because she could no longer return his love, but authorized
him to pay a visit to T—— after a year’s absence, in order to see the
child. Goodness only knows why she had not sent this letter, but had
changed it for another!
Velchaninoff was deadly pale when he read this document; but he imagined
Pavel Pavlovitch finding it in the family box of black wood with
mother-of-pearl ornamentation and silver mounting, and reading it for the
first time!
“I should think he, too, grew as pale as a corpse,” he reflected, catching
sight of his own face in the looking-glass. “Perhaps he read it and then
closed his eyes and hoped and prayed that when he opened them again the
dreadful letter would be nothing but a sheet of white paper once more!
Perhaps the poor fellow tried this desperate expedient two or three times
before he accepted the truth!”