“I will, I will.”
A minute later the sick man called Pavel Pavlovich again.
“You, you,” he murmured when the man came running and bent over him, “you—are better than I! I understand everything, everything… thank you.”
“Sleep, sleep,” Pavel Pavlovich whispered, and hastened on tiptoe back to his sofa.
As he was falling asleep, the sick man could still hear Pavel Pavlovich quietly and hurriedly making his bed, taking off his clothes, and, finally, putting out the candle and, barely breathing, so as not to make any noise, stretching himself out on the sofa.
Undoubtedly Velchaninov did sleep and fell asleep very soon after the candles were put out; he clearly recalled it afterward. But all the while he slept, till the very moment he woke up, he dreamed that he was not asleep and that it was as if he was quite unable to fall asleep, despite his weakness. Finally, he dreamed he was having a sort of waking delirium and was quite unable to scatter the visions crowding around him, despite the full awareness that it was only delirium and not reality. The visions were all familiar ones; his room was as if filled with people, and the door to the front hall stood open; crowds of people poured in and thronged the stairs. At the table, moved out into the middle of the room, sat a man—exactly as the other time, in the identical dream he had had a month earlier. Just as then, this man sat with his elbow on the table and refused to speak; but now he was wearing a round hat with crape. “What? Could it have been Pavel Pavlovich then, too?” Velchaninov thought—but, peeking into the silent man’s face, he convinced himself that it was someone else entirely. “Why the crape, then?” Velchaninov puzzled. The noise, talk, and clamor of people crowding around the table were terrible. It seemed these people had still greater malice toward Velchaninov than in the other dream; they threatened him with their fists and shouted at him about something with all their might, but precisely what—he was quite unable to make out. “But this is a delirium, I know it!” the thought came to him. “I know that I couldn’t fall asleep and have now gotten up, because I couldn’t stay in bed from anguish!…” However, the shouting and the people, and their gestures, and all—were so vivid, so real, that he sometimes had doubts: “Can it really be a delirium? What do these people want from me, my God! But if it’s not a delirium, then is it possible that such a clamor has not awakened Pavel Pavlovich yet? That he’s here asleep, right here on the sofa?” Finally, something suddenly happened, again as in that other dream; everyone rushed to the stairs and got terribly jammed in the doorway, because a new crowd was pouring into the room from the stairs. These people were carrying something with them, something big and heavy; one could hear the heavy steps of the carriers resounding on the treads of the stairs and their puffing voices hurriedly calling to each other. Everyone in the room cried out: “They’re bringing it, they’re bringing it!” All eyes flashed and turned to Velchaninov; threatening and triumphant, everyone pointed to the stairs. No longer doubting in the least that it was all not delirium but the truth, he stood on tiptoe to see quickly, over people’s heads, what it was that they were bringing. His heart was pounding, pounding, pounding, and suddenly—exactly as then, in that other dream—there came three loud strokes of the doorbell. And once again this was so clear, so tangibly real a ringing, that, of course, such ringing could not have been merely dreamed in a dream!… He cried out and woke up.
But he did not, as then, go racing for the door. What thought guided his first movement and did he even have any sort of thought at that moment?—no, it was as if someone prompted him to what had to be done: he snatched himself from bed and rushed with outstretched arms, as if defending himself and warding off an attack, straight toward where Pavel Pavlovich lay sleeping. His arms at once met other arms already stretched out over him, and he seized them fast; someone therefore already stood bending over him. The curtains were drawn, but it was not totally dark, because a weak light was coming from the other room, where there were no such curtains. Suddenly something cut the palm and fingers of his left hand terribly painfully, and he instantly understood that he had seized the blade of a knife or razor and gripped it tightly in his hand… At the same moment something fell with a single weighty thump to the floor.
Velchaninov was perhaps three times stronger than Pavel Pavlovich, but their struggle continued for a long time, some three full minutes. He soon bent him down to the floor and twisted his arms behind his back, but for some reason he absolutely wanted to bind those twisted arms. With his right hand—his wounded left hand holding the murderer—he began to grope for the curtain cord, could not find it for a long time, but got hold of it at last and tore it from the window. He himself marveled later at the unnatural strength required for that. In all these three minutes neither of them said a word; one could hear only their heavy breathing and the muffled sounds of the struggle. Finally, having twisted and bound Pavel Pavlovich’s arms behind his back, Velchaninov left him on the floor, stood up, opened the window curtain, and raised the blind. It was already light in the solitary street. Opening the window, he stood for a few moments taking deep breaths of air. It was just past four. Closing the window, he walked unhurriedly to the cupboard, took out a clean towel, and wound it very tightly around his left hand to stop the blood flowing from it. Under his feet he found the open razor case, forgotten that morning on the little table just next to the sofa on which Pavel Pavlovich had slept, and locked this case in his bureau with a key. Only after doing all that did he go over to Pavel Pavlovich and begin studying him.
The man had meanwhile managed with effort to get up from the rug and sit in an armchair. He was not dressed, only in his underwear, even without boots. The back and sleeves of his shirt were wet with blood; the blood was not his, but from Velchaninov’s cut hand. Of course, this was Pavel Pavlovich, but it would almost have been possible not to recognize him in the first moment, if one had met him like that by chance—so much had his physiognomy changed. He sat awkwardly straight in the armchair because of his bound arms, his distorted and worn-out face gone green, and shivered from time to time. Intently, but with some dark look, as if not yet distinguishing everything, he gazed at Velchaninov. Suddenly he smiled dully and, nodding at the carafe of water that stood on the table, said in a short half whisper:
“Some water, sir.”
Velchaninov poured some and held the glass for him to drink. Pavel Pavlovich greedily fell upon the water; having taken three gulps, he raised his head, looked very intently into the face of Velchaninov, who was standing before him with the glass in his hand, but said nothing and went on drinking. After finishing the water, he gave a deep sigh. Velchaninov took his pillow, picked up his clothes, and went to the other room, locking Pavel Pavlovich in the first room.
His earlier pain had gone away completely, but he felt a new and extreme weakness after the momentary strain just now of that strength which had come to him from God knows where. He tried to sort the incident out, but his thoughts still connected poorly; the shock had been too strong. His eyes would now close, sometimes even for ten minutes, now he would suddenly give a start, wake up, remember everything, raise his aching hand wrapped in the blood-soaked towel, and start thinking greedily and feverishly. He decided only one thing clearly: that Pavel Pavlovich had really wanted to kill him, but that maybe a quarter of an hour before then he had not known he would kill him. The razor case had maybe only flitted past his eyes during the evening without provoking any thought, and had merely stayed in his memory. (As for the razors, they were always kept in his bureau under lock and key, and it was only the previous morning that Velchaninov had taken them out to shave off some superfluous hairs around his mustache and side-whiskers—something he used to do occasionally.)
“If he had long been planning to kill me, he would have made sure to prepare a knife or a pistol beforehand, and not have counted on my razors, which he had never seen until yesterday evening”—came to his head, among other things.
It finally struck six. Velchaninov collected himself, got dressed, and went to Pavel Pavlovich. Unlocking the door,
