My heart turned sick and numb, as always happens on
realising an irrevocable misfortune.
‘My God! my God! Dead!’ I repeated.
’How is it possible? So suddenly! Or
perhaps she took her own life?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Fustov, ’I
know nothing. They told me she died at midnight.
And to-morrow she will be buried.’
‘At midnight!’ I thought.... ’Then
she was still alive yesterday when I fancied I saw
her in the window, when I entreated him to hasten to
her....’
’She was still alive yesterday, when you wanted
to send me to Ivan Demianitch’s,’ said
Fustov, as though guessing my thought.
‘How little he knew her!’ I thought again.
’How little we both knew her! “High-flown,”
said he, “all girls are like that."... And
at that very minute, perhaps, she was putting to her
lips... Can one love any one and be so grossly
mistaken in them?’
Fustov stood stockstill before my bed, his hands hanging,
like a guilty man.
I dressed hurriedly.
‘What do you mean to do now, Alexander?’
I asked.
He gazed at me in bewilderment, as though marvelling
at the absurdity of my question. And indeed what
was there to do?
‘You simply must go to them, though,’
I began. ’You’re bound to ascertain
how it happened; there is, possibly, a crime concealed.
One may expect anything of those people.... It
is all to be thoroughly investigated. Remember
the statement in her manuscript, the pension was to
cease on her marriage, but in event of her death it
was to pass to Ratsch. In any case, one must
render her the last duty, pay homage to her remains!’
I talked to Fustov like a preceptor, like an elder
brother. In the midst of all that horror, grief,
bewilderment, a sort of unconscious feeling of superiority
over Fustov had suddenly come to the surface in me....
Whether from seeing him crushed by the consciousness
of his fault, distracted, shattered, whether that
a misfortune befalling a man almost always humiliates
him, lowers him in the opinion of others, ’you
can’t be much,’ is felt, ‘if you
hadn’t the wit to come off better than that!’
God knows! Any way, Fustov seemed to me almost
like a child, and I felt pity for him, and saw the
necessity of severity. I held out a helping hand
to him, stooping down to him from above. Only
a woman’s sympathy is free from condescension.
But Fustov continued to gaze with wild and stupid
eyes at me—my authoritative tone obviously
had no effect on him, and to my second question, ‘You’re
going to them, I suppose?’ he replied—
‘No, I’m not going.’
’What do you mean, really? Don’t
you want to ascertain for yourself, to investigate,
how, and what? Perhaps, she has left a letter...
a document of some sort....’
Fustov shook his head.
‘I can’t go there,’ he said.
’That’s what I came to you for, to ask
you to go... for me... I can’t...
I can’t....’
