Somebody tapped gently at my window. The little house in which I lived
stood on the high road, and was one of the first houses in the
village, and I often heard a tap at my window, especially in bad
weather when a wayfarer sought a night's lodging. This time it was no
wayfarer who knocked at my window. I went up to the window and waited
there for a flash of lightning, when I saw the dark silhouette of a
tall thin man. He was standing before the window and seemed to be
shivering with cold. I opened the window.
“Who is there? What do you want?” I asked.
“Sergey Petrovich, it's I!” I heard a plaintive voice, such as people
have who are starved with cold and fright. “It's I! I've come to you,
dear friend!”
To my great astonishment, I recognized in the plaintive voice of the
dark silhouette the voice of my friend Doctor Pavel Ivanovich. This
visit of “Screw's,” who led a regular life and went to bed before
twelve, was quite incomprehensible. What could have caused him to
change his rules and appear at my house at two o'clock in the night,
and in such weather too?
“What do you want?” I asked, at the same time in the bottom of my
heart sending this unexpected guest to the devil.
“Forgive me, golubchik. . . . I wanted to knock at the door, but your
Polycarp is sure to be sleeping like a dead man now, so I decided to
tap at the window.”
“But what do you want?”
Pavil Ivanovich came close up to my window and mumbled something
incomprehensible. He was trembling, and looked like a drunken man.
“I am listening!” I said, losing my patience.
“You . . . you are angry, I see; but . . . if you only knew all that
has happened you would cease to be angry at your sleep being disturbed
by visitors at an unseemly hour. It's no time for sleep now. Oh, my
God, my God! I have lived in the world for thirty years, and to-day is
the first time I am so terribly unhappy! I am unhappy, Sergey
Petrovich!”
“Ach! but what has happened? And what have I to do with it? I myself
can scarcely stand on my legs. . . . I can't be bothered about
others!”
“Sergey Petrovich!” Screw said in a plaintive voice, stretching out
towards my head his hand wet with rain, “Honest man! My friend!”
And then I heard a man crying. The doctor wept.
“Pavel Ivanovich, go home!” I said after a short silence. “I can't
talk with you now. . . . I am afraid of my own mood, and of yours. We
won't understand each other. . . .”
“My dear friend!” the doctor said in an imploring voice, “Marry her.”
“You've gone mad!” I said, and banged the window to. . . .
First the parrot, then the doctor suffered from my mood. I did not ask
him to come in, and I slammed the window in his face. Two rude and
indecorous sallies for which I would have challenged anybody, even a
woman, to a duel.* But meek and good-natured “Screw” had no ideas
about duels. He did not know what it is to be angry.
* The last sentence is written above some erased lines in which,
however, one can decipher: “would have torn his head from his
shoulders and broken all the windows.”—A. Ch.
About two minutes later there was a flash of lightning, and glancing
out of the window I saw the bent figure of my guest. His pose this
time was one of supplication, of expectancy, the pose of a beggar
watching for alms. He was probably waiting for me to pardon him, and
to allow him to say what he had to communicate.
Fortunately my conscience was moved; I was sorry for myself, sorry
that nature had implanted in me so much violence and meanness. My base
soul as well as my healthy body were as hard as flint.*
* Here follows a pretentiously-plastic explanation of the spiritual
endurance of the author. The sight of human affliction, blood,
post-mortem examinations, etc., etc., he maintains, produce no
effect on him. The whole of this passage bears the imprint of
boastful _naïveté_ and insincerity. It astonishes by its
coarseness, and I have deleted it. As a characterization of
Kamyshev it has no importance.—A. Ch.