Paying no attention to anything, I was pacing the room and, I think, talking to myself. It was as if I had been saved from death, and I joyfully sensed it with my whole being: for I would have slapped him, I would certainly, certainly have slapped him! But now they're not here and… everything's vanished, everything's changed!… I kept looking over my shoulder. I still could not grasp it. Mechanically, I glanced at the girl who had come in: before me flashed a fresh, young, somewhat pale face, with straight dark eyebrows and serious, as if somewhat astonished, eyes. I liked it at once; I would have hated her if she'd been smiling. I began to study her more attentively and as if with effort: my thoughts were not all collected yet. There was something simple-hearted and kind in that face, yet somehow serious to the point of strangeness. I was certain that it was a disadvantage to her there, and that none of those fools had noticed her. However, she could not have been called a beauty, though she was tall, strong, well built. She was dressed extremely simply. Something nasty stung me; I went straight up to her…
By chance I looked in a mirror. My agitated face seemed to me repulsive in the extreme: pale, wicked, mean, with disheveled hair. "Let it be; I'm glad of it," I thought, "I'm precisely glad that I'll seem repulsive to her; I like it…"
VI
…Somewhere behind a partition, as if under some strong pressure, as if someone were strangling it, a clock wheezed.
After an unnaturally prolonged wheeze, there followed a thin, vile, and somehow unexpectedly rapid chiming - as if someone had suddenly jumped forward. It struck two. I came to my senses, though I had not been asleep, but only lying there half-oblivious.
The room - narrow, small, and low, encumbered by a huge wardrobe, and littered with cartons, rags, and all sorts of castoff clothing - was almost totally dark. The candle-butt burning on the table at the other end of the room was about to go out, barely flickering every now and then. In a few moments it would be quite dark.
It did not take me long to recover myself; everything came back to me at once, without effort, instantly, as if it had just been lying in wait to pounce on me again. And even in my oblivion there had still constantly remained some point, as it were, in my memory that simply refused to be forgotten, around which my drowsy reveries turned heavily. Yet it was strange: everything that had happened to me that day seemed to me now, on awakening, to have happened long, long ago, as if I had long, long ago outlived it all.
There were fumes in my head. Something was as if hovering over me, brushing against me, agitating and troubling me. Anguish and bile were again boiling up in me and seeking a way out. Suddenly I saw two open eyes beside me, peering at me curiously and obstinately. Their expression was coldly indifferent, sullen, as if utterly alien; it gave one a heavy feeling.
A sullen thought was born in my brain and passed through my whole body like some vile sensation, similar to what one feels on entering an underground cellar, damp and musty. It was somehow unnatural that these two eyes had only decided precisely now to begin peering at me. It also occurred to me that in the course of two hours I had not exchanged a single word with this being and had not considered it at all necessary; I had even liked it for some reason. But now, all of a sudden, there appeared before me the absurd, loathsomely spiderish notion of debauchery, which, without love, crudely and shamelessly begins straight off with that which is the crown of true love. We looked at each other like that for a long time, but she did not lower her eyes before mine, nor did she change their expression, and in the end, for some reason, this made me feel eerie.
"What's your name?" I asked curtly, so as to put a quick end to it.
"Liza," she replied, almost in a whisper, but somehow quite unpleasantly, and looked away.
I paused.
"The weather today… the snow… nasty!" I said, almost to myself, wearily putting my hand behind my head and looking at the ceiling.
She did not reply. The whole thing was hideous.
"Do you come from around here?" I asked after a minute, almost exasperated, turning my head slightly towards her.
"No."
"Where, then?"
"From Riga," she said reluctantly.
"German?"
"Russian."
"Been here long?"
"Where?"
"In this house."
"Two weeks." She spoke more and more curtly. The candle went out altogether; I could no longer make out her face.
"Do you have a father and mother?"
"Yes… no… I do."
"Where are they?"
"There… in Riga."
"What are they?"
"Just…"
"Just what? What are they, socially?"
"Tradespeople."
"You were living with them?"
"Yes."
"How old are you?"
"Twenty."
"Why did you leave them?"
"Just…"
This "just" meant: let me alone, this is sickening. We fell silent.
God knows why I wouldn't leave. I myself felt more and more sickened and anguished. Images of the whole past day began to pass confusedly through my memory, somehow of themselves, without my will. I suddenly recalled a scene I had witnessed that morning in the street, as I was trotting along, preoccupied, to work.
"They were carrying a coffin out today and almost dropped it," I suddenly said aloud, not at all wishing to start a conversation, but just so, almost accidentally.
"A coffin?"
"Yes, in the Haymarket; they were carrying it out of a basement."
"Out of a basement?"
"Not a basement, but the basement floor… you know… down under… from a bad house… There was such filth all around… Eggshells, trash… stink… it was vile."
Silence.
"A bad day for a burial!" I began again, just not to be silent.
"Why bad?"
"Snow, slush…" (I yawned.)
"Makes no difference," she said suddenly, after some silence.
"No, it's nasty…" (I yawned again.) "The gravediggers must have been swearing because the snow was making it wet. And there must have been water in the grave."
"Why water in the grave?" she asked with a certain curiosity, but speaking even more rudely and curtly than before. Something suddenly began egging me on.
"There'd be water in the bottom for sure, about half a foot. Here in the Volkovo you can never dig a dry grave."
"Why not?"
"Why not? Such a watery place. It's swamp all around here. They just get put down in the water. I've seen it myself… many times…"
(I had never once seen it, and had never been in the Volkovo cemetery, but had only heard people talk.)
"It makes no difference to you how you die?"
"But why should I die?" she answered, as if defending herself.
"You'll die someday, and just the same way as that one today. She was also… a girl… She died of consumption."
"A jill would have died in the hospital…" (She already knows about that, I thought, and she said jill, not girl.)
"She owed money to the madam," I objected, egged on more and more by the argument, "and worked for her almost to the end, even though she had consumption. The cabbies around there were talking with the soldiers and told them about it. Probably her old acquaintances. They were laughing. They wanted to go and commemorate her in a pot-house." (Here, too, I was laying it on thick.)
Silence, deep silence. She did not even stir.
"So it's better to die in a hospital, is it?"
"What's the difference… Anyway, who says I'm going to die?" she added irritably.
"If not now, then later?"
"Well, and later…"
"That's easy to say! You're young now, good-looking, fresh -so you're worth the price. But after a year of this life you won't be the same, you'll fade."
"In a year?"
"At any rate, in a year you'll be worth less," I went on, gloatingly. "So you'll go from here to somewhere lower, another house. A year later - to a third house, always lower and lower, and in about seven years you'll reach the Haymarket and the basement. That's still not so bad. Worse luck will be if on top of that some sickness comes along, say, some weakness of the chest… or you catch cold, or something. Sickness doesn't go away easily in such a life. Once it gets into you, it may not get out. And so you'll die."