"Was it boring for you?" she said. "I was bored, too. I see that you hate me…" she added, lowering her long eyelashes.
"Hate you? Me?… I…" Piskarev, utterly at a loss, was about to say, and would probably have produced a whole heap of the most incoherent things, but just then a gentleman-in-waiting approached with witty and pleasant observations and a beautifully curled forelock on his head. He rather pleasantly displayed a row of rather good teeth, and each of his witticisms was a sharp nail in Piskarev's heart. At last some third person, fortunately, addressed the gentleman with some question.
"How unbearable!" she said, raising her heavenly eyes to him. "I'll go and sit at the other end of the room. Meet me there!"
She slipped through the crowd and disappeared. He shoved his way through the crowd like a madman and was already there.
Yes, it was she! She was sitting like a queen, the best of all, the most beautiful of all, and was seeking him with her eyes.
"You're here," she said softly. "I'll be frank with you: you must have thought the circumstances of our meeting strange. Could you really think that I belong to that despicable class of creatures among whom you met me? To you my actions seem strange, but I will reveal a secret to you. Will you be able," she said, fixing her eyes on him, "to keep it forever?"
"Oh, I will, I will, I will!…"
But just then a rather elderly man approached, spoke to her in some language unknown to Piskarev, and offered her his arm. She looked at Piskarev with imploring eyes and motioned to him to stay where he was and wait for her to come back, but he, in a fit of impatience, was unable to obey any orders, even from her lips. He started after her; but the crowd parted them. He could no longer see the lilac dress! Anxiously he went from room to room, shoving everyone he met unmercifully, but in all the rooms there were aces sitting over whist, sunk in dead silence. In one corner of the room, several elderly men argued about the advantages of military service over civil; in another, people in superb tailcoats were exchanging light remarks about a multivolume edition of a hardworking poet. Piskarev felt one elderly man of respectable appearance seize him by the button of his tailcoat and present for his judgment some quite correct observation of his, but he rudely pushed him away without even noticing that he had a rather significant decoration around his neck. He ran to the next room-she was not there either. To a third-not there. "Where is she? Give her to me! Oh, I cannot live without another look at her! I want to hear what she was going to say"-but his search was all in vain. Anxious, weary, he pressed himself into a corner and gazed at the crowd; but his strained eyes began to present everything to him in some vague way. Finally, the walls of his own room began to show clearly before him. He raised his eyes. Before him stood a candlestick with the light nearly gone out inside it; the whole candle had melted away; tallow had poured over the table.
So he had been sleeping! God, what a dream! And why wake up? why not wait one more moment: she surely would have appeared again! The unpleasant and wan light of vexatious day showed in his windows. Such gray, such dingy disorder in his room… Oh, how repulsive reality is! What is it compared with dreams? He undressed hastily and went to bed, wrapped in a blanket, wishing to call back the flown vision for a moment. Sleep, indeed, was not slow in coming to him, but it did not at all present him with what he would have liked to see: now a Lieutenant Pirogov would come with his pipe, now an Academy watchman, now an actual state councillor, now the head of a Finnish woman whose portrait he had painted once, and other such nonsense.
He lay in bed till noon, wishing to fall asleep; but she would not appear. If only she would show her beautiful features for a moment, if only he could hear her light footstep for a moment, if only her bare arm, bright as snow on a mountaintop, could flash before him.
Abandoning everything, forgetting everything, he sat with a crushed, hopeless look, filled only with his dream. He did not think of eating anything; without any interest, without any life, his eyes gazed out the window to the courtyard, where a dirty water-carrier was pouring water that froze in the air, and the bleating voice of a peddler quavered: "Old clothes for sale." The everyday and real struck oddly on his ear. Thus he sat till evening, when he greedily rushed to bed. For a long time he struggled with sleeplessness and finally overcame it. Again some dream, some trite, vile dream. "God, be merciful; show her to me for a moment at least, just for one moment!" Again he waited till evening, again fell asleep, again dreamed of some official who was an official and at the same time a bassoon. Oh, this was unbearable! At last she came! her head and her tresses… she looks… Oh, how brief! Again the mist, again some stupid dream.
In the end dreams became his life, and his whole life thereafter took a strange turn: one might say he slept while waking and watched while asleep. If anyone had seen him sitting silently before the empty table or walking down the street, he would certainly have taken him for a lunatic or someone destroyed by hard drinking; his gaze was quite senseless, his natural distractedness developed, finally, and imperiously drove all feeling, all movement, from his face. He became animated only with the coming of night.
Such a state unsettled his health, and his most terrible torment was that sleep finally began to desert him entirely. Wishing to salvage this his only possession, he used every means to restore it. He heard that there was a means of restoring sleep-one had only to take opium. But where to get this opium? He remembered one Persian shopkeeper who sold shawls and who, whenever they met, asked him to paint a beauty for him. He decided to go to him, supposing that he would undoubtedly have this opium. The Persian received him sitting on a couch, his legs tucked under him.
"What do you need opium for?" he asked.
Piskarev told him about his insomnia.
"Very well, I give you opium, only paint me a beauty. Must be a fine beauty! Must be with black eyebrows and eyes big as olives; and me lying beside her smoking my pipe! Do you hear? Must be a fine one! a beauty!"
Piskarev promised everything. The Persian stepped out for a minute and returned with a little pot filled with dark liquid, carefully poured some of it into another little pot and gave it to Piskarev, with instructions to take no more than seven drops in water. He greedily seized this precious pot, which he would not have given up for a heap of gold, and rushed headlong home.
On coming home, he poured a few drops into a glass of water and, having swallowed it, dropped off to sleep.
God, what joy! It's she! She again! but now with a completely different look! Oh, how nicely she sits by the window of a bright country house! Her dress breathes such simplicity as only a poet's thought is clothed in. Her hair is done… O Creator, how simply her hair is done, and how becoming it is to her! A short shawl lightly covers her slender neck; everything in her is modest, everything in her is-a mysterious, inexplicable sense of taste. How lovely her graceful gait! how musical the sound of her footsteps and the rustle of her simple dress! how beautiful her arm clasped round with a bracelet of hair! She says to him with tears in her eyes: "Don't despise me. I'm not at all what you take me for. Look at me, look at me more closely, and say: Am I capable of what you think?" "Oh, no, no! If anyone dares to think so, let him…" But he woke up, all stirred, distraught, with tears in his eyes. "It would be better if you didn't exist, didn't live in the world, but were the creation of an inspired artist! I would never leave the canvas, I would eternally gaze at you and kiss you. I would live and breathe by you, as the most beautiful dream, and then I would be happy. My desires could reach no further. I would call upon you as my guardian angel, before sleep and waking, and I would wait for you whenever I had to portray the divine and holy. But now… what a terrible life! What is the use of her being alive? Is the life of a madman pleasant for his relations and friends who once used to love him? God, what is our life! An eternal discord between dream and reality!" Thoughts much like these constantly occupied him. He did not think about anything, he even ate almost nothing, and impatiently, with a lover's passion, waited for evening and the desired vision. His thoughts were constantly turned to one thing, and this finally acquired such power over his whole being and imagination that the desired image came to him almost every day, always in a situation contrary to reality, because his thoughts were perfectly pure, like the thoughts of a child. Through his dreams, the object itself was somehow becoming more pure and totally transformed.