Fustov suddenly sat down to the table, hid his face
in both hands, and sobbed bitterly.
‘Alas, alas!’ he kept repeating through
his tears; ’alas, poor girl... poor girl...
I loved... I loved her... alas!’
I stood near him, and I am bound to confess, not the
slightest sympathy was excited in me by those incontestably
sincere sobs. I simply marvelled that Fustov
could cry like that, and it seemed to me that
now I knew what a small person he was, and that
I should, in his place, have acted quite differently.
What’s one to make of it? If Fustov had
remained quite unmoved, I should perhaps have hated
him, have conceived an aversion for him, but he would
not have sunk in my esteem.... He would have
kept his prestige. Don Juan would have remained
Don Juan! Very late in life, and only after many
experiences, does a man learn, at the sight of a fellow-creature’s
real failing or weakness, to sympathise with him,
and help him without a secret self-congratulation
at his own virtue and strength, but on the contrary,
with every humility and comprehension of the naturalness,
almost the inevitableness, of sin.
I was very bold and resolute in sending Fustov to
the Ratsches’; but when I set out there myself
at twelve o’clock (nothing would induce Fustov
to go with me, he only begged me to give him an exact
account of everything), when round the corner of the
street their house glared at me in the distance with
a yellowish blur from the coffin candles at one of
the windows, an indescribable panic made me hold my
breath, and I would gladly have turned back....
I mastered myself, however, and went into the passage.
It smelt of incense and wax; the pink cover of the
coffin, edged with silver lace, stood in a corner,
leaning against the wall. In one of the adjoining
rooms, the dining-room, the monotonous muttering of
the deacon droned like the buzzing of a bee. From
the drawing-room peeped out the sleepy face of a servant
girl, who murmured in a subdued voice, ‘Come
to do homage to the dead?’ She indicated the
door of the dining-room. I went in. The coffin
stood with the head towards the door; the black hair
of Susanna under the white wreath, above the raised
lace of the pillow, first caught my eyes. I went
up sidewards, crossed myself, bowed down to the ground,
glanced... Merciful God! what a face of agony!
Unhappy girl! even death had no pity on her, had denied
her—beauty, that would be little—even
that peace, that tender and impressive peace which
is often seen on the faces of the newly dead.
The little, dark, almost brown, face of Susanna recalled
the visages on old, old holy pictures. And the
expression on that face! It looked as though
she were on the point of shrieking—a shriek
of despair—and had died so, uttering no
sound... even the line between the brows was not smoothed
out, and the fingers on the hands were bent back and
