Fortunately for the world and for the arts, such a strained and violent life could not long continue: the scope of its passions was too exaggerated and colossal for its feeble forces. Attacks of rage and madness began to come more often, and finally it all turned into a most terrible illness. A cruel fever combined with galloping consumption came over him with such fierceness that in three days nothing but a shadow of him remained. This was combined with all the signs of hopeless insanity. Sometimes several men could not hold him back. He would begin to imagine the long forgotten, living eyes of the extraordinary portrait, and then his rage was terrible. All the people around his bed seemed to him like terrible portraits. It doubled, quadrupled in his eyes; all the walls seemed hung with portraits, their motionless, living eyes fixed on him. Frightful portraits stared from the ceiling, from the floor; the room expanded and went on endlessly to make space for more of these motionless eyes. The doctor who had assumed the charge of caring for him, having heard something of his strange story, tried his best to find the mysterious relation between the phantoms he imagined and the circumstances of his life, but never succeeded. The sick man neither understood nor felt anything except his own torments, and uttered only terrible screams and incoherent talk. Finally his life broke off in the last, already voiceless strain of suffering. His corpse was frightful. Nothing could be found of his enormous wealth, either; but seeing the slashed remains of lofty works of art whose worth went beyond millions, its terrible use became clear.
PART II
A great many carriages, droshkies, and barouches stood outside the entrance of a house in which an auction was under way of the belongings of one of those wealthy lovers of art who spend their whole life drowsing sweetly, immersed in their zephyrs and cupids, who innocently pass for Maecenases 16 and simple-heartedly spend on it the millions accumulated by their substantial fathers, and often even by their own former labors. Such Maecenases, as we know, exist no longer, and our nineteenth century has long since acquired the dull physiognomy of a banker who delights in his millions only as numbers on paper. The long room was filled with a most motley crowd of visitors, who had come flying like birds of prey to an unburied body. There was a whole fleet of Russian merchants from the Merchants' Arcade, 17 and even from the flea market, in dark blue German frock coats. Their appearance and the expression of their faces was somehow more firm here, more free, and not marked by that cloying subservience so conspicuous in the Russian merchant when he is in his shop with a customer before him. Here they dropped all decorum, even though there were in this same hall a great many of those counts before whom, in some other place, they would be ready with their bowing to sweep away the dust brought in on their own boots. Here they were completely casual, unceremoniously fingered the books and paintings, wishing to see if the wares were good, and boldly upped the bids offered by aristocratic experts. Here there were many of those inevitable auction-goers whose custom it was to attend one every day in place of lunch; aristocratic experts who considered it their duty not to miss a chance of adding to their collections and who found nothing else to do between twelve and one; and, lastly, those noble gentlemen whose clothes and pockets were quite threadbare, who came daily with no mercenary purpose but solely to see how it would end, who would offer more, who less, who would bid up whom, and who would be left with what. A great many paintings were thrown around without any sense at all; they were mixed in with furniture and books bearing the monogram of their former owner, who probably never had the laudable curiosity to look into them. Chinese vases, marble table tops, new and old pieces of furniture with curved lines, gryphons, sphinxes, and lions' paws, gilded and ungilded, chandeliers, Quinquet lamps 18 - it was all lying in heaps, and by no means in the orderly fashion of shops. It all presented some sort of chaos of the arts. Generally, we experience a dreadful feeling at the sight of an auction: it all smacks of something like a funeral procession. The rooms in which they are held are always somehow gloomy; the windows, blocked by furniture and paintings, emit a scant light, silence spreads over the faces, and the funereal voice of the auctioneer, as he taps with his hammer, intones a panikhida 19 over the poor arts so oddly come together there. All this seems to strengthen still more the strange unpleasantness of the impression.
The auction seemed to be at its peak. A whole crowd of decent people, clustered together, vied excitedly with each other over something. The words "Rouble, rouble, rouble," coming from all sides, gave the auctioneer no time to repeat the rising price, which had already grown four times over the initial one. The surrounding crowd was excited over a portrait that could not have failed to stop anyone with at least some understanding of painting. The lofty brush of an artist was clearly manifest in it. The portrait had evidently already been renewed and restored several times, and it represented the swarthy features of some Asian in loose attire, with an extraordinary, strange expression on his face; but most of all, the people around it were struck by the extraordinary aliveness of the eyes. The more they looked at them, the more the eyes seemed to penetrate into each of them. This strangeness, this extraordinary trick of the artist, occupied almost everyone's attention. Many of the competitors had already given up, because the bids rose incredibly. There remained only two well-known aristocrats, lovers of painting, who simply refused to give up such an acquisition. They were excited and would probably have raised the bid impossibly, if one of the onlookers there had not suddenly said:
"Allow me to interrupt your dispute for a time. I have perhaps more right to this portrait than anyone else."
These words instantly drew everyone's attention to him. He was a trim man of about thirty-five with long black hair. His pleasant face, filled with some carefree brightness, spoke for a soul foreign to all wearisome worldly shocks; in his clothing there was no pretense to fashion: everything in him spoke of the artist. This was, in fact, the painter B., known personally to many of those present.
"Strange as my words may seem to you," he went on, seeing the general attention directed at him, "if you are resolved to listen to a brief story, you will perhaps see that I had the right to speak them. Everything assures me that this portrait is the very one I am looking for."
A quite natural curiosity lit up on the faces of almost all of them, and the auctioneer himself stopped, openmouthed, with the upraised hammer in his hand, preparing to listen. At the beginning of the story, many kept involuntarily turning their eyes to the portrait, but soon they all fixed their eyes on the narrator alone, as his story became ever more engrossing.
"You know that part of the city which is called Kolomna." So he began. "There everything is unlike the other parts of Petersburg; there it is neither capital nor province; you seem to feel, as you enter the streets of Kolomna, that all youthful desires and impulses are abandoning you. The future does not visit there, everything there is silence and retirement; everything has settled out of the movement of the capital. Retired clerks move there to live, and widows, and people of small income who, after some acquaintance with the Senate, 20 condemned themselves to this place for almost their whole lives; pensioned-off cooks who spend all day jostling in the marketplaces, babbling nonsense with some peasant in a small-goods shop, and every day take five kopecks' worth of coffee and four of sugar; and, finally, that whole class of people who may be called by one word: ashen-people whose clothing, faces, hair, eyes have a sort of dull, ashen appearance, like a day on which there is neither storm nor sun in the sky, but simply nothing in particular: a drizzling mist robs all objects of their sharpness. Retired theater ushers, retired titular councillors, retired disciples of Mars with a blind eye and a swollen lip, can be included here. These people are utterly passionless: they walk about without looking at anything, they are silent without thinking about anything. They have few chattels in their rooms, sometimes simply a bottle of pure Russian vodka, which they sip monotonously all day, without any strong rush to the head aroused by a heavy intake such as a young German artisan likes to treat himself to on Sundays-that daredevil of Meshchanskaya Street, who takes sole possession of the pavements once it's past midnight.