“Who will hang himself ?” Velchaninov asked in fright.
“He will, he will! During the night he wanted to hang himself from a noose!” the girl said, hurrying and breathless. “I saw it myself! Last night he wanted to hang himself from a noose, he told me, he did! He wanted to before, too, he’s always wanted to… I saw it in the night…”
“It can’t be!” whispered Velchaninov in perplexity. She suddenly rushed to kiss his hands; she wept, barely catching her breath from sobbing, she begged and pleaded with him, but he could understand nothing of her hysterical prattle. And forever after there remained in his memory, there came to him awake and in his dreams, those tormented eyes of a tormented child, who looked at him in mad fear and with her last hope.
“And can it be, can it be that she loves him so much?” he thought jealously and enviously, going back to town in feverish impatience. “She herself said today that she loved her mother more… maybe she hates him and doesn’t love him at all…
“And what is this: hang himself? What was she saying? A fool like him hang himself?… I must find out; I absolutely must find out! I must resolve everything as soon as possible—resolve it definitively!”
VII
HUSBAND AND LOVER KISS
He was in a terrible hurry to “find out.” “I was stunned earlier; I had no time earlier to reflect on it,” he thought, recalling his first encounter with Liza, “but now I must find out.” In order to find out the quicker, he gave orders in his impatience to drive straight to Trusotsky’s place, but changed his mind at once: “No, better if he comes to me himself, and meanwhile I’ll finish this damned business.”
He feverishly got down to business; but this time he felt he was very distracted and ought not to be occupying himself with business matters. At five o’clock, on his way to have dinner, suddenly, for the first time, a funny thought came to his head: what if in fact he was, perhaps, only hindering things by interfering in the lawsuit himself, bustling and hanging out in offices and trying to catch his lawyer, who had begun to hide from him. He laughed merrily at his own supposition. “And if this thought had come to my head yesterday, I’d have been terribly upset,” he added, still more merrily. Despite the merriment, he was growing ever more distracted and impatient; finally he fell to thinking; and though his uneasy mind kept clinging to many things, on the whole the result was not at all what he needed.
“I need him, this man!” he finally decided. “I’ve got to figure him out first and then decide. This is—a duel!”
Returning home at seven o’clock, he did not find Pavel Pavlovich there, which first caused him great surprise, then wrath, and then even despondency; finally, he began to be afraid. “God knows, God knows what it will end with!” he repeated, now pacing the room, now stretching out on the sofa, and constantly looking at his watch. Finally, at around nine o’clock, Pavel Pavlovich did appear. “If the man was being cunning, he couldn’t have wangled anything better than this—the way I’m upset right now,” he thought, suddenly completely cheered up and terribly merry.
To the pert and merry question: why had he taken so long in coming?—Pavel Pavlovich smiled crookedly, sat down casually, not like the day before, and somehow carelessly flung his hat with crape onto another chair. Velchaninov noticed the casualness at once and took it into consideration.
Calmly and without unnecessary words, without his former agitation, he told, as if making a report, how he had taken Liza, how nicely she had been received there, how good it was going to be for her, and little by little, as if completely forgetting Liza, imperceptibly came down to talking only about the Pogoreltsevs—that is, what nice people they were, how long he had known them, what a good and even influential man Pogoreltsev was, and the like. Pavel Pavlovich listened distractedly and from time to time glanced at the narrator, covertly, with a peevish and sly grin.
“What an ardent man you are,” he muttered with some especially nasty smile.
“You, however, are somehow wicked today,” Velchaninov observed vexedly.
“And why shouldn’t I be wicked, sir, like everybody else?” Pavel Pavlovich suddenly heaved himself up, as if pouncing from around a corner; even as if he had just been waiting to pounce.
“That’s entirely as you will,” Velchaninov grinned. “I thought something might have happened to you?”
“And so it did happen, sir!” the man exclaimed, as if boasting that it had happened.
“What is it?”
Pavel Pavlovich waited a little before answering:
“Well, you see, sir, it’s all our Stepan Mikhailovich at his whimsies… Bagautov, a most elegant Petersburg young man, of the highest society, sir.”
“He didn’t receive you again, or what?”
“No-no, this time I precisely was received, I was admitted for the first time, sir, and looked upon the countenance… only it was already a dead man’s!…”
“What-a-at! Bagautov died?” Velchaninov was terribly surprised, though it would seem there was nothing for him to be so surprised at.
“Himself, sir! An unfailing friend of six years! He died yesterday around noon, and I didn’t know! Maybe it was at the very moment when I came to inquire about his health. The funeral and burial are tomorrow, he’s already lying in his little coffin, sir. The coffin’s lined with damson velvet, trimmed with gold braid… he died of nervous fever, sir. I was admitted, admitted, I looked upon his countenance! I told them at the front door that I was considered a true friend, so I was admitted. What has he been pleased to do to me now, this true friend of six years—I ask you? Maybe I came to Petersburg just for his sake alone!”
“But why are you angry with him,” Velchaninov laughed, “he didn’t die on purpose!”
“But I’m saying it in pity; such a precious friend; this is what he meant to me, sir.”
And Pavel Pavlovich suddenly, quite unexpectedly, put two fingers like horns over his bald forehead and went off into a long and quiet titter. He spent a whole half minute sitting like that, with horns and tittering, looking into Velchaninov’s eyes as if reveling in his most sarcastic impudence. The latter was stupefied as if he were seeing some sort of ghost. But his stupefaction lasted no more than a tiny moment; a mocking smile, calm to the point of impudence, slowly came to his lips.
“And what might that signify?” he asked carelessly, drawing out his words.
