expectantly on dragged-out chests and feather beds, each under his own windows. Part of the male population was working hard, ruthlessly chopping down fences and even knocking apart entire shanties that stood closer to the fire and to windward. There was only the crying of awakened children and the wailing lamentations of women who had already successfully dragged their junk out. The unsuccessful were silently and energetically dragging theirs out. Sparks and grit flew far away; they were extinguished as well as possible. At the fire itself there was a crowd of spectators who had come running from every end of town. Some helped to put it out, others gazed like admirers. A big fire at night always produces a stirring and exhilarating impression; fireworks are based on that, but there the fire is disposed along graceful, regular lines and, with all its safety, produces a playful and light impression, as after a glass of champagne. A real fire is another matter: here horror and, after all, some sense of personal danger, as it were— combined with the well-known exhilarating impression of a fire at night—produce in the spectator (not, of course, in the burnt-out inhabitant) a sort of brain concussion and a challenge, as it were, to his own destructive instincts, which, alas! lie hidden in every soul, even that of the most humble and familial titular councillor [184]... This gloomy sensation is almost always intoxicating. 'I really do not know whether it is possible to watch a fire without a certain pleasure.' This was said to me, word for word, by Stepan Trofimovich, on returning from a night fire he had chanced to witness, and still under the first impression of the spectacle. Of course, that same admirer of night fires will also rush into the fire to save a burning child or an old woman; but that is an altogether different matter.
Plodding after the curious crowd, I made my way, without any inquiries, to the most important and dangerous spot, where I finally caught sight of Lembke, whom I was looking for on instructions from Yulia Mikhailovna herself. His position was astonishing and extraordinary. He was standing on the debris of a fence; to the left of him, about thirty steps away, towered the black skeleton of a nearly burnt-down two-story wooden house, with holes instead of windows on both floors, its roof fallen in, and flames still snaking here and there over the charred beams. At the back of the courtyard, about twenty steps away from the burnt-down house, a cottage, also two-storied, was beginning to blaze, and the firemen were working on it as hard as they could. To the right, the firemen and the people were fighting for a rather large wooden building which was not yet burning, but had already caught fire several times, and was inevitably fated to burn down. Lembke was shouting and gesticulating, his face turned towards the cottage, and issuing orders which no one obeyed. I almost thought he had simply been left there and completely abandoned. At least no one in the dense and extremely diverse crowd that surrounded him, in which, along with all kinds of people, there were also some gentlemen and even the cathedral priest, though they all listened to him with curiosity and astonishment, either spoke to him or tried to lead him away. Lembke, pale, his eyes flashing, was uttering the most astonishing things; to top it off, he was without his hat, and had lost it long ago.
'It's all arson! It's nihilism! If anything's ablaze, it's nihilism!' I heard all but with horror, and though there was no longer anything to be astonished at, still manifest reality always has something shocking about it.
'Your Excellency,' a policeman turned up beside him, 'if you'd be so good as to try domestic repose, sir... the way it is, it's even dangerous for Your Excellency to be standing here.'
This policeman, as I learned later, was purposely left with Andrei Antonovich by the police chief, to watch over him and try as hard as he could to take him home, and in case of danger even to act with force—a charge obviously beyond the powers of its executor.
'The tears of the burnt-out people will be wiped away, but the town will be burned. It's all four blackguards, four and a half. Arrest the blackguard! He's in it alone, and has slandered the four and a half. He worms himself into the honor of families. Governesses have been used to set houses on fire. This is mean, mean! Aie, what is he doing?' he cried, suddenly noticing a fireman on the roof of the blazing cottage, the roof already burned through under him and fire flaring up all around. 'Pull him down, pull him down, he'll fall through, he'll catch fire, put him out... What is he doing up there?'
'Putting it out, Your Excellency.'
'Unbelievable. The fire is in people's minds, not on the rooftops. Pull him down and drop it all! Better drop it, drop it! Leave it to itself somehow! Aie, who is that still crying? An old woman! An old woman is shouting, why did you forget the old woman?'
Indeed, a forgotten old woman was shouting on the bottom floor of the blazing cottage, the eighty-year-old relative of the merchant who owned the burning house. But she had not been forgotten; she had gone back into the burning house herself while it was possible, with the insane purpose of dragging her feather bed out of the still untouched corner room. Choking from the smoke and shouting from the heat, because that room, too, had caught fire, she was still trying with all her might to push her feather bed through a broken window with her decrepit hands. Lembke rushed to help her. Everyone saw him run up to the window, seize a corner of the feather bed and begin to pull it through the window with all his might. As bad luck would have it, at that very moment a broken board fell from the roof and struck the unfortunate man. It did not kill him, it merely grazed his neck with one end as it fell, but the career of Andrei Antonovich was over, at least among us; the blow knocked him off his feet, and he collapsed unconscious.
At last came a sullen, gloomy dawn. The fire dwindled; after the wind it suddenly became still, and then came a slow, drizzling rain, as if through a sieve. I was by then in another part of Zarechye, far from the spot where Lembke had fallen, and there in the crowd I heard very strange talk. A strange fact had been discovered: at the edge of the quarter, on a vacant lot beyond the kitchen gardens, not less than fifty steps away from the other buildings, there stood a small, recently built wooden house, and this solitary house had burst into flames almost before any of the others, at the very beginning of the fire. Even if it had burned down, it could not have transmitted the fire to any town buildings because of the distance, and, vice versa, if the whole of Zarechye had burned down, this one house would have remained untouched, whatever wind was blowing. It appeared to have caught fire separately and independently, so there was something behind it. But the main thing was that it had not had time to burn down, and towards daybreak astonishing things were discovered inside it. The owner of this new house, a tradesman who lived in the nearby quarter, as soon as he saw his new house on fire, rushed to it and managed to save it, with the help of some neighbors, by scattering the burning logs that had been piled against the side wall. But there were tenants living in the house—a captain well known in town, his sister, and with them an elderly servingwoman, and these tenants, the captain, his sister, and the servingwoman, had all three been stabbed to death that night and apparently robbed. (It was here that the police chief had gone when he had left the fire while Lembke was trying to rescue the feather bed.) By morning the news had spread and a huge mass of all sorts of people, even some who had been burned out in Zarechye, poured down to the vacant lot, to the new house. It was so crowded that it was even difficult to get through. I was told at once that the captain had been found with his throat cut, on the bench, dressed, and that he had probably been dead drunk when he was killed, so that he had not even felt it, and that he had bled 'like a bull'; that his sister Marya Timofeevna had been 'stuck all over' with a knife, and was lying on the floor of the doorway, so that she had probably been awake and had struggled and fought with the murderer. The housekeeper, who probably also woke up, had her head completely smashed in. According to the owner's story, the captain had come to see him the day before, in the morning, had boasted and displayed a lot of money, as much as two hundred roubles. The captain's old, worn green wallet was found empty on the floor; but Marya Timofeevna's trunk had not been touched, and the silver casing of her icon had not been touched either; of the captain's clothes, everything turned out to be intact as well; one could see that the thief had been in a hurry, and that he was a man who was familiar with the captain's affairs, had come to take money only, and knew where to find it. If the owner had not come running right away, the logs would have flared up and quite certainly burned the house down, 'and it would have been difficult to learn the truth from charred corpses.'
So ran the account of the affair. Further information was added: that the place had been rented for the captain
