I mounted up to my fifth storey. I have a room in a flat where there are
other lodgers. Mr room is small and poor, with a garret window in the
shape of a semicircle. I have a sofa covered with American leather, a
table with books on it, two chairs and a comfortable arm-chair, as old as
old can be, but of the good old-fashioned shape. I sat down, lighted the
candle, and began thinking. In the room next to mine, through the
partition wall, a perfect Bedlam was going on. It had been going on for
the last three days. A retired captain lived there, and he had half a dozen
visitors, gentlemen of doubtful reputation, drinking vodka and playing
stoss with old cards. The night before there had been a fight, and I know
that two of them had been for a long time engaged in dragging each
other about by the hair. The landlady wanted to complain, but she was in
abject terror of the captain. There was only one other lodger in the flat, a
thin little regimental lady, on a visit to Petersburg, with three little
children who had been taken ill since they came into the lodgings. Both
she and her children were in mortal fear of the captain, and lay trembling
and crossing themselves all night, and the youngest child had a sort of fit from fright. That captain, I know for a fact, sometimes stops people in the
Nevsky Prospect and begs. They won't take him into the service, but
strange to say (that's why I am telling this), all this month that the
captain has been here his behaviour has caused me no annoyance. I
have, of course, tried to avoid his acquaintance from the very beginning,
and he, too, was bored with me from the first; but I never care how much
they shout the other side of the partition nor how many of them there are
in there: I sit up all night and forget them so completely that I do not
even hear them. I stay awake till daybreak, and have been going on like
that for the last year. I sit up all night in my arm-chair at the table, doing
nothing. I only read by day. I sit - don't even think; ideas of a sort
wander through my mind and I let them come and go as they will. A
whole candle is burnt every night. I sat down quietly at the table, took
out the revolver and put it down before me. When I had put it down I
asked myself, I remember, "Is that so?" and answered with complete
conviction, "It is." That is, I shall shoot myself. I knew that I should shoot
myself that night for certain, but how much longer I should go on sitting
at the table I did not know. And no doubt I should have shot myself if it
had not been for that little girl.
II
You see, though nothing mattered to me, I could feel pain, for instance. If
anyone had stuck me it would have hurt me. It was the same morally: if
anything very pathetic happened, I should have felt pity just as I used to
do in old days when there were things in life that did matter to me. I had
felt pity that evening. I should have certainly helped a child. Why, then,
had I not helped the little girl? Because of an idea that occurred to me at
the time: when she was calling and pulling at me, a question suddenly
arose before me and I could not settle it. The question was an idle one,
but I was vexed. I was vexed at the reflection that if I were going to
make an end of myself that night, nothing in life ought to have mattered
to me. Why was it that all at once I did not feel a strange pang, quite
incongruous in my position. Really I do not know better how to convey my fleeting sensation at the moment, but the sensation persisted at home
when I was sitting at the table, and I was very much irritated as I had not
been for a long time past. One reflection followed another. I saw clearly
that so long as I was still a human being and not nothingness, I was alive
and so could suffer, be angry and feel shame at my actions. So be it. But
if I am going to kill myself, in two hours, say, what is the little girl to me
and what have I to do with shame or with anything else in the world? I
shall turn into nothing, absolutely nothing. And can it really be true that
the consciousness that I shall completely cease to exist immediately and
so everything else will cease to exist, does not in the least affect my
feeling of pity for the child nor the feeling of shame after a contemptible
action? I stamped and shouted at the unhappy child as though to say -
not only I feel no pity, but even if I behave inhumanly and contemptibly, I
am free to, for in another two hours everything will be extinguished. Do
you believe that that was why I shouted that? I am almost convinced of it
now. I seemed clear to me that life and the world somehow depended
upon me now. I may almost say that the world now seemed created for
me alone: if I shot myself the world would cease to be at least for me. I
say nothing of its being likely that nothing will exist for anyone when I am
gone, and that as soon as my consciousness is extinguished the whole
world will vanish too and become void like a phantom, as a mere
appurtenance of my consciousness, for possibly all this world and all
these people are only me myself. I remember that as I sat and reflected,
I turned all these new questions that swarmed one after another quite the
other way, and thought of something quite new. For instance, a strange
reflection suddenly occurred to me, that if I had lived before on the moon
or on Mars and there had committed the most disgraceful and
dishonourable action and had there been put to such shame and ignominy
as one can only conceive and realise in dreams, in nightmares, and if,
finding myself afterwards on earth, I were able to retain the memory of
what I had done on the other planet and at the same time knew that I
should never, under any circumstances, return there, then looking from
the earth to the moon - should I care or not? Should I feel shame for that action or not? These were idle and superfluous questions for the revolver
was already lying before me, and I knew in every fibre of my being that it
would happen for certain, but they excited me and I raged. I could not die
now without having first settled something. In short, the child had saved
me, for I put off my pistol shot for the sake of these questions. Meanwhile
the clamour had begun to subside in the captain's room: they had
finished their game, were settling down to sleep, and meanwhile were
grumbling and languidly winding up their quarrels. At that point, I
suddenly fell asleep in my chair at the table - a thing which had never
happened to me before. I dropped asleep quite unawares.
Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented
with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish
of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing
them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be
spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart,
and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in
dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it! Mr brother
died five years ago, for instance. I sometimes dream of him; he takes
part in my affairs, we are very much interested, and yet all through my
dream I quite know and remember that my brother is dead and buried.
How is it that I am not surprised that, though he is dead, he is here
beside me and working with me? Why is it that my reason fully accepts it?
But enough. I will begin about my dream. Yes, I dreamed a dream, my
dream of the third of November. They tease me now, telling me it was
only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the
dream made known to me the truth? If once one has recognized the truth
and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and
there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake. Let it be a dream, so
be it, but that real life of which you make so much I had meant to
extinguish by suicide, and my dream, my dream - oh, it revealed to me a
different life, renewed, grand and full of power!
Listen.
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