Diary of a Madman and Other Stories (7 page)

Taking opium broke up his thought even more, and if ever there was a man in love to the last degree of madness, violently, terribly, overwhelmingly, turbulently, that unfortunate was he.

Of all his dreams one was the happiest. He saw his studio. He was so overjoyed and sat with his palette in his hand so delightedly! She was there. She was already his wife. She sat by him, leaning her lovely elbow on the back of his chair, and watching him work. Her eyes, languid and faint, were filled with bliss: his whole room exhaled paradise; it was so full of light and so tidy. God Almighty! She leant her lovely head against his breast.... He never had a better dream. He would get up afterwards feeling fresher and looking less absent-minded than before. A strange idea was born in his brain: “Perhaps,” he thought, “she has been dragged by some terrible accident into this depraved life against her will. Perhaps her spirit is inclined towards repentance; perhaps she would herself like to break away from her awful position. And surely one cannot see her go to her ruin indifferently, especially when one only has to stretch out a hand to save her from drowning.” This thought went further. “No one knows me,” he told himself, “and what business am I of anyone's or what business is anyone of mine. If she shows a real repentance and changes her life, I will marry her. I must marry her, and I will probably do better than most people, who marry their housekeepers, and often even the most despicable creatures. But this action of mine will be magnanimous, and perhaps even great. I shall restore to the world its most beautiful ornament.”

Having made such a rash plan, he felt the color rising to his cheeks; he went to the mirror and was frightened to see how his cheeks had fallen in and how pale his whole face was now. He began to dress up carefully; he washed; combed his hair, put on a new frock-coat, an elegant waistcoat, flung a cloak round his shoulders and went out into the street. He took a breath of fresh air and felt the freshness enter his heart like a convalescent who has decided to go out for the first time after a prolonged illness. His heart beat fast when he approached the street in which he had not set foot since the fateful meeting.

He searched for the house a long time; it looked as if his memory had failed him. He walked the length of the street twice without deciding before which house to pause. At last one seemed like it to him. He ran upstairs quickly and knocked at the door: the door opened, and who came to meet him? His ideal, his mysterious image, the original of his dream pictures, she for whom he lived so terribly, so painfully, so sweetly—she herself stood before him. He quivered, he could hardly stand for weakness, as fit of joy seized hold of him. She stood before him as lovely as ever, though her eyes were sleepy, though a pallor was creeping over her face which was no longer so fresh, yet she remained beautiful.

“Ah!” she cried, catching sight of Piskarev and rubbing her eyes. It was already two o'clock then. “Why did you run away that time?”

He sat down weakly in a chair and gazed at her.

“I've only just woken up; they brought me home at seven this morning. I was quite drunk,” she added smiling.

Oh, better had you been dumb and bereft of your tongue than that you should make such speeches! She suddenly revealed the whole panorama of her life to him. But disregarding this and steeling himself, he decided to try whether his admonishment might have any effect on her. Plucking up heart he began to describe to her in a trembling and fiery voice the whole fearfulness of her position. She heard him attentively with the same feeling of surprise which we evince at the sight of something unexpected and strange. She glanced with a faint smile at her friend who was sitting in the corner and who had stopped combing her hair and was also listening attentively to this new preacher.

“It is true I am poor,” Piskarev said finally after a long and didactic exhortation, “but we will work hard; we will try to vie with each other to improve our life. There is nothing so pleasant as to be dependent on oneself alone for everything. I will sit at my painting and you, sitting by my side, will inspire my labor, and embroider or occupy yourself with some other handwork, and we will want for nothing.”

“How can I?” she interrupted him disdainfully. “I'm not a washerwoman or a sempstress that I should work.”

Heaven! in these words the whole baseness of her despicable life was expressed, a life full of emptiness and sloth, the true companions of depravity.

“Marry me!” her friend in the corner who had kept silent until then caught up with a bold look. “If I were your wife, this is how I should sit!” At which she put a stupid expression on her pitiful face, which amused the beautiful girl tremendously.

Oh, this was too much! He had not strength to bear it! He rushed out, losing all control of his feelings and thoughts. His mind grew dulled: he wandered about stupidly, aimlessly all day, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing. No one could tell whether he had taken shelter anywhere that night or not, and he only entered his flat on the following day led by some stupid instinct, looking pale and ghastly with dishevelled hair and signs of madness in his face. He locked himself in his room and let no one in, demanded nothing. Four days went by and his locked door did not once open; at length a week passed and the room continued locked as before. People rushed to the door and called him, but there was no reply; finally they broke down the door and found his corpse with the throat cut. A bloody razor lay on the floor. One could see by the convulsive pose of his arms and the strange distortion of his face that his hand had not been true and that he had lain in torture for a long time before his sinful soul had left his body.

So poor Piskarev perished, the victim of a wild passion, quiet, shy, modest, and simple-minded as a child, bearing a spark of talent which might with time have flamed up wide and bright! No one wept over him; no one was seen beside his lifeless body except the usual figure of the supervisor of the flats and the calm face of the police doctor. His coffin was taken quietly, even without the ritual of the church to Okhta, there was only one mourner following, a soldier-watchman and only because he had drunk a glass too much of vodka. Not even Lieutenant Pirogov came to see the corpse of the unhappy creature to whom he had extended his great patronage when he was alive. As a matter of fact, he had no time for such things: he was busy with an amazing adventure. But let us turn to him. I do not like corpses and dead men and I always get an unpleasant feeling when a long funeral procession crosses my path and a disabled soldier dressed in some sort of capucine, takes a pinch of snuff with his left hand because his right is busy with a torch. I always feel heavy at heart when I see a rich catafalque and a velvet coffin; but my heaviness is mixed with sadness when I see a drayman taking away the red uncovered coffin of a poor man, with only a beggar woman ambling behind, since she met it at the crossroads and had no other business.

I think we left Lieutenant Pirogov when he parted with poor Piskarev and followed the blonde. This blonde was an airy rather interesting little creature. She paused before each window and glanced at belts, kerchieves, ear-rings, gloves and other idle knick-knacks standing in the window, stared in all directions and glanced over her shoulders. “You're mine, my dear!” Pirogov said confidently, continuing his pursuit and muffling his face in the collar of his greatcoat, in case he met anyone he knew. But the reader should be informed who this Lieutenant Pirogov was.

But before we say who Lieutenant Pirogov was, it would be as well to describe the society in which Pirogov moved. There are officers who make up a kind of middle class in the society of St. Petersburg. At soirées, at dinners given by a councillor of state or an actual councillor of state who has attained this rank after forty years of toil, you will always meet one of these. Several pale daughters as completely colorless as St. Petersburg, some of whom are over-ripe, a tea-table, a piano, dancing in the drawing-room—all this is inseparable from the bright epaulette which shines in the lamplight between a well-behaved blonde and the black dress-coat of a brother or a friend of the family. These cold-blooded young women are very hard to move or make laugh; for this one must use great art, or more exactly, no art at all. You must speak neither too cleverly nor too wittily so that the trifles which all women love are included. In this one must give the above-mentioned gentlemen their due. They have a special gift for listening to these colorless beauties and making them laugh. Exclamations drowned in laughter: “Oh, do stop it! Aren't you ashamed to make such jokes!” are often their highest reward. In the upper classes one meets them rarely, or rather, never. They are driven thence by what this class of society calls the aristocrats; however they are considered educated and well brought-up people. They like to discuss literature; they praise Bulgarin, Pushkin and Grech and speak with scorn and barbed witticisms about A. A. Orlov. They never miss a single public lecture, whether it is about book-keeping or even about forestry. You will always meet one of them at the theatre whatever the piece, even if some sort of “Filatka” is on, which is an insult to their discerning taste. They are always at the theatre. They are the most useful people for the theatre directors. They are particularly fond of good verse in the drama and of calling loudly on the actors; many of them when taking the examinations for the civil service, or preparing for it, finally keep a cabriolet and pair. Then their circle of acquaintance widens. At last they attain to marriage with a merchant's daughter who can play the piano and has a hundred thousand or thereabouts in ready cash and a heap of bearded relatives: but they cannot reach this honored state until they have at least become colonels; because Russian beards, despite the fact that they still give off an odour of cabbage will by no means see their daughters marry anyone save generals or at the least colonels.

These are the main characteristics of young men of this kind. But Lieutenant Pirogov possessed a large number of talents which belonged to him personally. He declaimed verses wonderfully from “Dimitri Donskoy” and “The Misfortune of Being Clever,” and and had a special gift for making smoke-rings with his pipe so well that he could suddenly thread about ten of them one on another. He knew how to tell pleasant anecdotes about how a field-gun is a field-gun and a howitzer a howitzer. Indeed, it is rather difficult to give a list of all the talents with which fate had rewarded Pirogov. He liked to discuss actresses and dancers but no longer expressed himself so crudely on the subject as a young ensign does. He was very pleased with his rank, to which he had only recently been promoted, and although sometimes he would say as he stretched out on the divan: “Oh, oh! Vanity! All is vanity! What if I am a lieutenant?” yet secretly his new dignity was very flattering to him: he often tried to give a covert hint of it in conversation, and once when he came across a copyist clerk in the street who seemed rude to him, he immediately stopped him and made him see in a few curt words that he had a lieutenant to deal with and not any other officer—and he tried to express this and more eloquently because at that moment two rather good-looking ladies were passing. Pirogov, generally, had a passion for everything elegant and encouraged the painter Piskarev; though, indeed, this might have been due to a desire to see his virile features in a portrait. But enough of Pirogov's qualities. Man is such a wonderful being that one can never enumerate all his good qualities and the more deeply you look into him the more new peculiarities you find and their description might be endless.

And so Pirogov continued to follow the stranger and from time to time amused her with the questions to which she answered curtly, brokenly and indistinctly. They went through the dark Kazan Gates into the Meshchanskaya—a street of tobacconists, small shops, German craftsmen and Finnish nymphs. The blonde ran ahead more quickly and fluttered through the gates of a rather dirty-looking house. Pirogov followed. She ran up a narrow dark staircase and entered a door through which Pirogov too passed boldly. He found himself in a large room with black walls and a sooty ceiling. A heap of metal screws, blacksmith's tools, shining coffee-pots and candlesticks lay on the table; the floor was littered with brass and iron filings. Pirogov immediately realised it was a craftsman's flat. The stranger flitted on through a side door. He thought for a moment, but then, following the Russian rule, went straight ahead. He entered the other apartment which was quite unlike the first, and very neatly kept, showing that the master of the house was a German. He was amazed by an odd and extraordinary sight: before him sat Schiller, not the Schiller who wrote
Wilhelm Tell
and
The History of the Thirty Years War,
but the well-known Schiller, the metal-worker in the Meshchanskaya. Hoffmann stood by his side—not Hoffmann the writer, but a rather good cobbler from Officers' Street, a great friend of Schiller's. Schiller was drunk and sat in a chair, stamping his foot and talking heatedly. All this was not the cause of Pirogov's amazement—what did astonish him was the extraordinary grouping of the figures. Schiller sat with uplifted face, sticking out his rather fat nose and Hoffmann held him by the nose with his fingers and twisted the blade of his cobbler's knife on its very bridge. Both personages spoke in German, and therefore Pirogov, who only knew “Gut' Morgen” in German, could make neither head nor tail of this business. In effect Schiller's words consisted of the following:

“I don't want it, I don't need a nose!” said he, waving his arms about. “I spend three pounds of tobacco a month on my nose alone. And I pay the money into a rotten Russian shop (because a German shop doesn't keep Russian tobacco); I pay into a rotten Russian shop forty kopecks for each pound; that's one rouble twenty kopecks; twelve times one rouble twenty kopecks, that's fourteen roubles forty kopecks. D'you hear, friend Hoffmann? Fourteen roubles forty kopecks on one nose alone! And on holidays I take
râpé,
because I don't want to take bad Russian tobacco on holidays. I take two pounds of
râpé
a year at two roubles the pound. Six and fourteen—twenty roubles forty kopecks on tobacco alone! It's robbery! I ask you, friend Hoffmann, isn't it, now?” Hoffmann who was drunk himself, answered in the affirmative. “Twenty roubles forty kopecks! I'm a Swabian German; I've a king in Germany. I don't want a nose! Cut off my nose! Here it is!”