With my head wet from the snow, and gasping for breath, I ran to my
room, and immediately flung off my swallow-tails, put on a reefer jacket
and an overcoat, and carried my portmanteau out into the passage; I must
get away! But before going I hurriedly sat down and began writing to
Orlov:
"I leave you my false passport," I began. "I beg you to keep it as a
memento, you false man, you Petersburg official!
"To steal into another man's house under a false name, to watch under
the mask of a flunkey this person's intimate life, to hear everything,
to see everything in order later on, unasked, to accuse a man of
lying--all this, you will say, is on a level with theft. Yes, but I care
nothing for fine feelings now. I have endured dozens of your dinners and
suppers when you said and did what you liked, and I had to hear, to look
on, and be silent. I don't want to make you a present of my silence.
Besides, if there is not a living soul at hand who dares to tell you the
truth without flattery, let your flunkey Stepan wash your magnificent
countenance for you."
I did not like this beginning, but I did not care to alter it. Besides,
what did it matter?
The big windows with their dark curtains, the bed, the crumpled dress
coat on the floor, and my wet footprints, looked gloomy and forbidding.
And there was a peculiar stillness.
Possibly because I had run out into the street without my cap and
goloshes I was in a high fever. My face burned, my legs ached.... My
heavy head drooped over the table, and there was that kind of division
in my thought when every idea in the brain seemed dogged by its shadow.
"I am ill, weak, morally cast down," I went on; "I cannot write to you
as I should like to. From the first moment I desired to insult and
humiliate you, but now I do not feel that I have the right to do so. You
and I have both fallen, and neither of us will ever rise up again; and
even if my letter were eloquent, terrible, and passionate, it would
still seem like beating on the lid of a coffin: however one knocks upon
it, one will not wake up the dead! No efforts could warm your accursed
cold blood, and you know that better than I do. Why write? But my mind
and heart are burning, and I go on writing; for some reason I am moved
as though this letter still might save you and me. I am so feverish that
my thoughts are disconnected, and my pen scratches the paper without
meaning; but the question I want to put to you stands before me as clear
as though in letters of flame.
"Why I am prematurely weak and fallen is not hard to explain. Like
Samson of old, I have taken the gates of Gaza on my shoulders to carry
them to the top of the mountain, and only when I was exhausted, when
youth and health were quenched in me forever, I noticed that that burden
was not for my shoulders, and that I had deceived myself. I have been,
moreover, in cruel and continual pain. I have endured cold, hunger,
illness, and loss of liberty. Of personal happiness I know and have
known nothing. I have no home; my memories are bitter, and my conscience
is often in dread of them. But why have you fallen--you? What fatal,
diabolical causes hindered your life from blossoming into full flower?
Why, almost before beginning life, were you in such haste to cast off
the image and likeness of God, and to become a cowardly beast who backs
and scares others because he is afraid himself? You are afraid of
life--as afraid of it as an Oriental who sits all day on a cushion
smoking his hookah. Yes, you read a great deal, and a European coat fits
you well, but yet with what tender, purely Oriental, pasha-like care you
protect yourself from hunger, cold, physical effort, from pain and
uneasiness! How early your soul has taken to its dressing-gown! What a
cowardly part you have played towards real life and nature, with which
every healthy and normal man struggles! How soft, how snug, how warm,
how comfortable--and how bored you are! Yes, it is deathly boredom,
unrelieved by one ray of light, as in solitary confinement; but you try
to hide from that enemy, too, you play cards eight hours out of
twenty-four.
"And your irony? Oh, but how well I understand it! Free, bold, living
thought is searching and dominating; for an indolent, sluggish mind it
is intolerable. That it may not disturb your peace, like thousands of
your contemporaries, you made haste in youth to put it under bar and
bolt. Your ironical attitude to life, or whatever you like to call it,
is your armour; and your thought, fettered and frightened, dare not leap
over the fence you have put round it; and when you jeer at ideas which
you pretend to know all about, you are like the deserter fleeing from
the field of battle, and, to stifle his shame, sneering at war and at
valour. Cynicism stifles pain. In some novel of Dostoevsky's an old man
tramples underfoot the portrait of his dearly loved daughter because he
had been unjust to her, and you vent your foul and vulgar jeers upon the
ideas of goodness and truth because you have not the strength to follow
them. You are frightened of every honest and truthful hint at your
degradation, and you purposely surround yourself with people who do
nothing but flatter your weaknesses. And you may well, you may well
dread the sight of tears!
"By the way, your attitude to women. Shamelessness has been handed down
to us in our flesh and blood, and we are trained to shamelessness; but
that is what we are men for--to subdue the beast in us. When you reached
manhood and _all_ ideas became known to you, you could not have failed
to see the truth; you knew it, but you did not follow it; you were
afraid of it, and to deceive your conscience you began loudly assuring
yourself that it was not you but woman that was to blame, that she was
as degraded as your attitude to her. Your cold, scabrous anecdotes, your
coarse laughter, all your innumerable theories concerning the underlying
reality of marriage and the definite demands made upon it, concerning
the ten _sous_ the French workman pays his woman; your everlasting
attacks on female logic, lying, weakness and so on--doesn't it all look
like a desire at all costs to force woman down into the mud that she may
be on the same level as your attitude to her? You are a weak, unhappy,
unpleasant person!"
Zinaida Fyodorovna began playing the piano in the drawing-room, trying
to recall the song of Saint Saëns that Gruzin had played. I went and lay
on my bed, but remembering that it was time for me to go, I got up with
an effort and with a heavy, burning head went to the table again.
"But this is the question," I went on. "Why are we worn out? Why are we,
at first so passionate, so bold, so noble, and so full of faith, complete
bankrupts at thirty or thirty-five? Why does one waste in consumption,
another put a bullet through his brains, a third seeks forgetfulness in
vodka and cards, while the fourth tries to stifle his fear and misery by
cynically trampling underfoot the pure image of his fair youth? Why is
it that, having once fallen, we do not try to rise up again, and, losing
one thing, do not seek something else? Why is it?
"The thief hanging on the Cross could bring back the joy of life and the
courage of confident hope, though perhaps he had not more than an hour
to live. You have long years before you, and I shall probably not die so
soon as one might suppose. What if by a miracle the present turned out
to be a dream, a horrible nightmare, and we should wake up renewed,
pure, strong, proud of our righteousness? Sweet visions fire me, and I
am almost breathless with emotion. I have a terrible longing to live. I
long for our life to be holy, lofty, and majestic as the heavens above.
Let us live! The sun doesn't rise twice a day, and life is not given us
again--clutch at what is left of your life and save it...."
I did not write another word. I had a multitude of thoughts in my mind,
but I could not connect them and get them on to paper. Without finishing
the letter, I signed it with my name and rank, and went into the study.
It was dark. I felt for the table and put the letter on it. I must have
stumbled against the furniture in the dark and made a noise.
"Who is there?" I heard an alarmed voice in the drawing-room.
And the clock on the table softly struck one at the moment.