"No need! Stay another five minutes . . . ten. If it doesn't disgust
you, do stay, I entreat you."
As he begged me he was trembling and his teeth were chattering. I
obeyed, and sat down on the edge of the sofa. Ten minutes passed
in silence. I sat silent, looking about the room into which fate
had brought me so unexpectedly. What poverty! This man who was the
possessor of a handsome, effeminate face and a luxuriant well-tended
beard, had surroundings which a humble working man would not have
envied. A sofa with its American-leather torn and peeling, a humble
greasy-looking chair, a table covered with a little of paper, and
a wretched oleograph on the wall, that was all I saw. Damp, gloomy,
and grey.
"What a wind!" said the sick man, without opening his eyes, "How
it whistles!"
"Yes," I said. "I say, I fancy I know you. Didn't you take part in
some private theatricals in General Luhatchev's villa last year?"
"What of it?" he asked, quickly opening his eyes.
A cloud seemed to pass over his face.
"I certainly saw you there. Isn't your name Vassilyev?"
"If it is, what of it? It makes it no better that you should know
me."
"No, but I just asked you."
Vassilyev closed his eyes and, as though offended, turned his face
to the back of the sofa.
"I don't understand your curiosity," he muttered. "You'll be asking
me next what it was drove me to commit suicide!"
Before a minute had passed, he turned round towards me again, opened
his eyes and said in a tearful voice:
"Excuse me for taking such a tone, but you'll admit I'm right! To
ask a convict how he got into prison, or a suicide why he shot
himself is not generous . . . and indelicate. To think of gratifying
idle curiosity at the expense of another man's nerves!"
"There is no need to excite yourself. . . . It never occurred to
me to question you about your motives."
"You would have asked. . . . It's what people always do. Though it
would be no use to ask. If I told you, you would not believe or
understand. . . . I must own I don't understand it myself. . . .
There are phrases used in the police reports and newspapers such
as: 'unrequited love,' and 'hopeless poverty,' but the reasons are
not known. . . . They are not known to me, nor to you, nor to your
newspaper offices, where they have the impudence to write 'The diary
of a suicide.' God alone understands the state of a man's soul when
he takes his own life; but men know nothing about it."
"That is all very nice," I said, "but you oughtn't to talk. . . ."
But my suicide could not be stopped, he leaned his head on his fist,
and went on in the tone of some great professor:
"Man will never understand the psychological subtleties of suicide!
How can one speak of reasons? To-day the reason makes one snatch
up a revolver, while to-morrow the same reason seems not worth a
rotten egg. It all depends most likely on the particular condition
of the individual at the given moment. . . . Take me for instance.
Half an hour ago, I had a passionate desire for death, now when the
candle is lighted, and you are sitting by me, I don't even think
of the hour of death. Explain that change if you can! Am I better
off, or has my wife risen from the dead? Is it the influence of the
light on me, or the presence of an outsider?"
"The light certainly has an influence . . ." I muttered for the
sake of saying something. "The influence of light on the organism
. . . ."
"The influence of light. . . . We admit it! But you know men do
shoot themselves by candle-light! And it would be ignominious indeed
for the heroes of your novels if such a trifling thing as a candle
were to change the course of the drama so abruptly. All this nonsense
can be explained perhaps, but not by us. It's useless to ask questions
or give explanations of what one does not understand. . . ."
"Forgive me," I said, "but . . . judging by the expression of your
face, it seems to me that at this moment you . . . are posing."
"Yes," Vassilyev said, startled. "It's very possible! I am naturally
vain and fatuous. Well, explain it, if you believe in your power
of reading faces! Half an hour ago I shot myself, and just now I
am posing. . . . Explain that if you can."
These last words Vassilyev pronounced in a faint, failing voice.
He was exhausted, and sank into silence. A pause followed. I began
scrutinising his face. It was as pale as a dead man's. It seemed
as though life were almost extinct in him, and only the signs of
the suffering that the "vain and fatuous" man was feeling betrayed
that it was still alive. It was painful to look at that face, but
what must it have been for Vassilyev himself who yet had the strength
to argue and, if I were not mistaken, to pose?
"You here--are you here?" he asked suddenly, raising himself on
his elbow. "My God, just listen!"
I began listening. The rain was pattering angrily on the dark window,
never ceasing for a minute. The wind howled plaintively and
lugubriously.
"'And I shall be whiter than snow, and my ears will hear gladness
and rejoicing.'" Madame Mimotih, who had returned, was reading in
the drawing-room in a languid, weary voice, neither raising nor
dropping the monotonous dreary key.
"It is cheerful, isn't it?" whispered Vassilyev, turning his
frightened eyes towards me. "My God, the things a man has to see
and hear! If only one could set this chaos to music! As Hamlet says,
'it would--
"Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed,
The very faculties of eyes and ears."
How well I should have understood that music then! How I should
have felt it! What time is it?"
"Five minutes to three."
"Morning is still far off. And in the morning there's the funeral.
A lovely prospect! One follows the coffin through the mud and rain.
One walks along, seeing nothing but the cloudy sky and the wretched
scenery. The muddy mutes, taverns, woodstacks. . . . One's trousers
drenched to the knees. The never-ending streets. The time dragging
out like eternity, the coarse people. And on the heart a stone, a
stone!"
After a brief pause he suddenly asked: "Is it long since you saw
General Luhatchev?"
"I haven't seen him since last summer."
"He likes to be cock of the walk, but he is a nice little old chap.
And are you still writing?"
"Yes, a little."
"Ah. . . . Do you remember how I pranced about like a needle, like
an enthusiastic ass at those private theatricals when I was courting
Zina? It was stupid, but it was good, it was fun. . . . The very
memory of it brings back a whiff of spring. . . . And now! What a
cruel change of scene! There is a subject for you! Only don't you
go in for writing 'the diary of a suicide.' That's vulgar and
conventional. You make something humorous of it."
"Again you are . . . posing," I said. "There's nothing humorous in
your position."
"Nothing laughable? You say nothing laughable?" Vassilyev sat up,
and tears glistened in his eyes. An expression of bitter distress
came into his pale face. His chin quivered.
"You laugh at the deceit of cheating clerks and faithless wives,"
he said, "but no clerk, no faithless wife has cheated as my fate
has cheated me! I have been deceived as no bank depositor, no duped
husband has ever been deceived! Only realise what an absurd fool I
have been made! Last year before your eyes I did not know what to
do with myself for happiness. And now before your eyes. . . ."
Vassilyev's head sank on the pillow and he laughed.
"Nothing more absurd and stupid than such a change could possibly
be imagined. Chapter one: spring, love, honeymoon . . . honey, in
fact; chapter two: looking for a job, the pawnshop, pallor, the
chemist's shop, and . . . to-morrow's splashing through the mud to
the graveyard."
He laughed again. I felt acutely uncomfortable and made up my mind
to go.
"I tell you what," I said, "you lie down, and I will go to the
chemist's."
He made no answer. I put on my great-coat and went out of his room.
As I crossed the passage I glanced at the coffin and Madame Mimotih
reading over it. I strained my eyes in vain, I could not recognise
in the swarthy, yellow face Zina, the lively, pretty _ingénue_ of
Luhatchev's company.
"_Sic transit_," I thought.
With that I went out, not forgetting to take the revolver, and made
my way to the chemist's. But I ought not to have gone away. When I
came back from the chemist's, Vassilyev lay on the sofa fainting.
The bandages had been roughly torn off, and blood was flowing from
the reopened wound. It was daylight before I succeeded in restoring
him to consciousness. He was raving in delirium, shivering, and
looking with unseeing eyes about the room till morning had come,
and we heard the booming voice of the priest as he read the service
over the dead.
When Vassilyev's rooms were crowded with old women and mutes, when
the coffin had been moved and carried out of the yard, I advised
him to remain at home. But he would not obey me, in spite of the
pain and the grey, rainy morning. He walked bareheaded and in silence
behind the coffin all the way to the cemetery, hardly able to move
one leg after the other, and from time to time clutching convulsively
at his wounded side. His face expressed complete apathy. Only once
when I roused him from his lethargy by some insignificant question
he shifted his eyes over the pavement and the grey fence, and for
a moment there was a gleam of gloomy anger in them.
"'Weelright,'" he read on a signboard. "Ignorant, illiterate
people, devil take them!"