“But it’s impossible!” Vassilyev said aloud and fell back on the bed. “I’m the first who couldn’t marry! For that you need to be a saint, to know no hatred and feel no revulsion. But suppose that I, the medic, and the artist overcome ourselves and get married, and they all marry us. What would be the result? The result? The result would be that while they’re getting married here, in Moscow, the bookkeeper from Smolensk will be corrupting a new batch, and that batch will swarm here to the vacant places, along with others from Saratov, Nizhni-Novgorod, Warsaw…And where to put the hundred thousand from London? From Hamburg?”
The lamp, which was running out of kerosene, began to smoke. Vassilyev did not notice it. He started pacing again and went on thinking. Now he put the question differently: What must be done so that fallen women are no longer needed? For that it is necessary that the men who buy them and do them in feel all the immorality of their slave-owning role and are horrified. The men must be saved.
“Science and the arts are obviously no help…,” thought Vassilyev. “The only solution here is to become an apostle.”
And he began to dream of how, the very next evening, he would stand at the corner of the lane and say to every passerby:
“Where are you going and for what? Have fear of God!”
He would turn to the indifferent cabbies and say to them:
“Why are you standing here? Why aren’t you indignant, outraged? You believe in God, and you know that it’s sinful, that people will go to hell for that, so why are you silent? True, they’re strangers to you, but they, too, have fathers, brothers, just as you do…”
One of his friends once said of Vassilyev that he was a talented man. There are talents for writing, acting, painting, but he had a special talent—for being human. He possessed a refined, superb sense of pain in general. As a good actor reflects other people’s movements and voices in himself, so Vassilyev could reflect other people’s pain in his soul. Seeing tears, he wept; next to a sick person, he himself became sick and moaned; if he saw violence, it seemed to him that the violence was being done to him, he became afraid like a little boy and, turning coward, ran for help. Other people’s pain chafed him, roused him, brought him to a state of ecstasy, and so on.
Whether this friend was right, I don’t know, but what Vassilyev experienced when it seemed to him that the question had been resolved was very much like inspiration. He wept, laughed, recited aloud the words he would speak the next day; he felt an ardent love for the people who would listen to him and stand beside him at the corner of the lane in order to preach; he sat down to write letters, made vows to himself…
All this was like inspiration also in that it did not last long. Vassilyev soon became tired. The London, Hamburg, and Warsaw women weighed on him in their mass as mountains weigh upon the earth; he quailed before this mass, felt at a loss; he remembered that he had no gift for words, that he was cowardly and fainthearted, that indifferent people would hardly want to listen to him and understand him, a third-year law student, a timid and insignificant man, that a true apostolic calling consisted not only in preaching, but also in acts…
When it became light and carriages were already clattering in the street, Vassilyev lay motionless on the divan staring at a single spot. He was no longer thinking about women, or men, or becoming an apostle. All his attention was concentrated on the inner pain that tormented him. It was a dull, aimless, indefinite pain, which resembled both anguish and fear in the highest degree, and also despair. He could point to where it was: in his chest, under his heart; but he had nothing to compare it with. In the past he had had a bad toothache, had had pleurisy and neuralgia, but it was all nothing compared to this inner pain. In the face of this pain, life appeared disgusting. His dissertation, an excellent piece of work, already written, the people dear to him, the saving of perishing women—all that still yesterday he had loved or been indifferent to, now, on recollection, annoyed him in the same way as the noise of the carriages, the running of the floor boys, the daylight…If right now, before his eyes, someone were to perform a deed of mercy or of outrageous violence, either would have made an equally disgusting impression on him. Of all the thoughts that lazily wandered in his head, only two did not annoy him: one, that at every moment it was in his power to kill himself; the other, that the pain would not last longer than three days. The second he knew from experience.
After lying there for a while, he got up and, wringing his hands, paced, not up and down as usual, but in a square along the walls. In passing he looked at himself in the mirror. His face was pale and pinched, his temples sunken, his eyes had become bigger, darker, more fixed, as if they were someone else’s, and expressed an unbearable inner suffering.
At noon the artist knocked on the door.
“Grigory, are you there?” he asked.
Receiving no answer, he stood for a minute, pondered, and answered himself in Ukrainian:
“Nobody. Went off to the university, curse him.”
And he left. Vassilyev lay down on the bed and, hiding his head under the pillow, began to weep from pain, and the more his tears flowed, the more terrible his inner pain became. When it grew dark, he remembered about the tormenting night ahead of him, and was overcome by terrible despair. He quickly got dressed, ran out of his room, and, leaving his door wide open, with no need or purpose went outside. Not asking himself where to go, he walked quickly along Sadovaya Street.
Snow poured down as the day before; it was a thaw. Thrusting his hands into his sleeves, trembling and afraid of noises, of horsecar bells, and of passersby, Vassilyev went along Sadovaya to the Sukharev Tower, then to the Red Gate, and from there turned onto Basmannaya Street. He stopped at a pot-house and drank a big glass of vodka, but felt no better for that. On reaching Razgulyai, he turned right and set off along lanes he had never been on in his life before. He came to the old bridge where the Yauza flows and from where you can see long rows of lights in the windows of the Red Barracks. To divert his inner pain with some new sensation or a different pain, not knowing what to do, weeping and trembling, Vassilyev unbuttoned his overcoat and his frock coat and offered his bared chest to the wet snow and wind. But that also did not lessen the pain. Then he bent over the railing of the bridge and looked down at the black, turbulent Yauza, and he felt like throwing himself down headlong, not out of revulsion for life, not to commit suicide, but at least to hurt himself and divert one pain with another. But the black water, the darkness, the deserted banks covered with snow, were frightening. He shuddered and went on. He went along the Red Barracks, then back and descended into some sort of grove, from the grove to the bridge again…
“No, home, home!” he thought. “At home it seems better…”
And he went back. On returning home, he tore off his wet overcoat and hat, began to pace along the walls, and went on pacing tirelessly until morning.
VII
When the artist and the medic came to see him the next day, he rushed about the room, in a torn shirt and with bitten hands, groaning with pain.
“For God’s sake!” he sobbed, seeing his friends. “Take me wherever you like, do whatever you know, but for God’s sake save me quickly! I’ll kill myself!”
The artist turned pale and was at a loss. The medic also nearly wept, but, in the belief that medics must in all circumstances remain coolheaded and serious, said coldly: