I suddenly snatched out my watch. It was twenty minutes since she went out. My guess was assuming the shape of a probability. But I decided to wait another quarter of an hour. It also occurred to me that she might have come back and that I perhaps had not heard; but that could not be: there was dead silence and I could hear the whine of every little fly. Suddenly my heart began to pound. I took out my watch: three minutes to go; I sat them out, though my heart was pounding so that it hurt. Then I got up, covered myself with my hat, buttoned my coat, and glanced around the room to make sure everything was in place and there were no signs that I had come. I moved the chair closer to the window, as it had stood before. Finally, I quietly opened the door, locked it with my key, and went to the shed. The door was closed, but not locked; I knew it could not be locked, yet I did not want to open it, but got up on tiptoe and began looking through the crack. At that very moment, as I was getting up on tiptoe, I recalled that when I was sitting by the window looking at the little red spider and became oblivious, I was thinking of how I would get up on tiptoe and reach that crack with my eyes. By putting in this trifle here, I want to prove with certainty to what degree of clarity I was in possession of my mental faculties. I looked through that crack for a long time, it was dark inside, but not totally. At last I made out what I needed ... I wanted to be totally sure.
I decided finally that I could leave, and went downstairs. I did not meet anyone. About three hours later we were all in our shirtsleeves, drinking tea in my rooms and playing a friendly game of cards. Lebyadkin was reciting poetry. Many stories were told and, as if by design, they were all successful and funny, not stupid as usual. Kirillov was also there. No one drank, and though a bottle of rum was standing there, only Lebyadkin kept nipping from it. Prokhor Malov observed that "when Nikolai Vsevolodovich is pleased and not moping, all our boys are cheerful and talk cleverly." It sank into my mind right then.
But by around eleven o'clock the caretaker's girl came running from the landlady, from Gorokhovy Street, bringing me the news that Matryosha had hanged herself. I went with the girl and saw that the landlady did not know herself why she had sent for me. She was howling and thrashing, there was turmoil, a lot of people, police. I stood in the entryway for a while and then left.
I was hardly inconvenienced, though they did ask the appropriate questions. But apart from the fact that the girl had been sick and occasionally delirious over the past few days, so that for my part I had offered a doctor at my own expense, I had decidedly nothing to give as evidence. They also asked me about the penknife; I said that the landlady had given the girl a whipping, but that it was nothing. No one found out that I had come in the evening. I heard nothing about the results of the medical examination.
For a week or so I did not go back there. I went when they had long since buried her, in order to give up the apartment. The landlady was still crying, though she was already pottering with her rags and sewing as before. "It was on account of your knife that I offended her," she said to me, but without great reproach. I paid her off on the pretext that I really could no longer remain in such an apartment and receive Nina Savelyevna in it. She praised Nina Savelyevna once more on parting. As I left I gave her five roubles on top of what I owed for the apartment.
And generally I was bored with life then, to the point of stupefaction. Once the danger was past, I all but completely forgot the incident on Gorokhovy Street, like everything else then, except that for some time I remembered spitefully how I had turned coward. I vented my spite on whomever I could. At the same time, but not at all for any reason or other, I conceived the notion of somehow maiming my life, only in as repulsive a way as possible. For a year already I had been thinking of shooting myself; something better turned up. Once, looking at the lame Marya Timofeevna Lebyadkin, who was something of a servant in those corners, not yet crazy then, but simply an ecstatic idiot, and secretly madly in love with me (as our boys spied out), I decided suddenly to marry her. The thought of Stavrogin marrying such a last being tickled my nerves. Nothing uglier could be imagined. But I will not venture to decide whether my decisiveness included at least unconsciously (of course, unconsciously!) my spite at the base cowardice that had come over me after the thing with Matryosha. I do not think so, really; but in any case I went to the altar not just because of "a bet for wine after a drunken dinner." The witnesses to the marriage were Kirillov and Pyotr Verkhovensky, who happened to be in Petersburg then; and, finally, Lebyadkin himself, and Prokhor Malov (now dead). No one else ever learned of it, and these gave their word to be silent. This silence has always seemed to me a vile thing, as it were, but so far it has not been broken, though I had the intention of announcing it; I announce it now, along with everything else.
After the wedding, I left for the province to see my mother. I went for distraction, because it was unbearable. In our town I left the idea that I was crazy—an idea not eradicated even now, and undoubtedly harmful to me, as I will explain further on. I then went abroad and stayed for four years.
I was in the East, I
I am setting this down precisely in order to prove the extent of my power over my memories, and how unfeeling for them I had become. I would reject them all in a mass, and the whole mass would obediently disappear each time the moment I wanted it to. I have always felt bored remembering the past, and was never able to talk about the past, as almost everyone does. As for Matryosha, I even forgot her picture on the mantelpiece.
About a year ago, in the spring, traveling through Germany, I absentmindedly missed the station where I should have changed for my direction, and got onto a different branch. They let me off at the next station; it was three o'clock in the afternoon, a bright day. It was a tiny German town. A hotel was pointed out to me. I had to wait: the next train came through at eleven o'clock at night. I was even pleased with the adventure, because I was not in any hurry. The hotel turned out to be trashy and small, but all sunk in greenery and completely surrounded with flower beds. They gave me a cramped little room. I had a nice meal, and since I had spent the whole night on the train, I fell asleep excellently after dinner, at four o'clock in the afternoon.
I had a dream which for me was totally unexpected, because I had never before had one like it. In Dresden, in the gallery, there exists a painting by Claude Lorrain—"Acis and Galatea," [222] I think, according to the catalogue, but I always called it "The Golden Age," I do not know why myself. I had seen it before, but now, three days earlier, I had noticed it once again as I was passing through. It was this painting that I saw in my dream, though not as a painting, but as if it were some kind of verity.