think about dying, but still I don't want to die like this, to lie in the earth here. Perhaps I shall be laid up as I was in the spring; I've not fully recovered from that illness yet. I am feeling very dreary just now. Fedora has gone off somewhere
for the whole day and I am sitting alone. And for some time now I've been afraid of being left alone; I always feel as though there were someone else in the room, that someone is talking to me; especially when I begin dreaming about something and suddenly wake up from my brooding, then I feel frightened. That is why I've written you such a long letter; it goes off when I write. Good-bye; I finish my letter because I have neither time nor paper for more. Of the money from pawning my dress and my hat I have only one rouble in silver left. You have given the landlady two roubles in silver; that's very good. She will keep quiet now for a time.
You must improve your clothes somehow. Good-bye, I'm so tired; I don't know why I am growing so feeble. The least work exhausts me. If I do get work, how am I to work? It is that thought that's killing me.
V.D.
September 5. My darling Varinka,
I have received a great number of impressions this morning, my angel. To begin with I had a headache all day. To freshen myself up a bit I went for a walk along Fontanka. It was such a damp, dark evening. By six o'clock it was getting dusk—that is what we are coming to now. It was not raining but there was mist equal to a good rain. There were broad, long stretches of storm-cloud across the sky. There were masses of people walking along the canal bank, and, as ill-luck would have it, the people had such horrible depressing faces, drunken peasants, snub- nosed Finnish women, in high boots with nothing on their heads, workmen, cab-drivers, people hke me out on some errand, boys, a carpenter's apprentice in a striped dressing-gown, thin and wasted-looking, with his face bathed in smutty oil, and a lock in his hand; a discharged soldier seven feet high waiting for somebody to buy a pen-knife or a bronze ring from him. That was the sort of crowd. It seems it was an hour when no other sort of people could be about. Fontanka is a canal for traffic! Such a mass of barges that one wonders how there can be room for them all! On the bridges there are women sitting with wet gingerbread and rotten apples, and they all of them looked so muddy, so drenched. It's dreary walking along Fontanka! The wet granite under one's feet, with tall, black, sooty houses on both sides. Fog
underfoot and fog overhead. How dark and melancholy it was this evening!
When I went back to Gorohovoy Street it Wcis already getting dark and they had begun lighting the gas. I have not been in Gorohovoy Street for quite a long while, J haven't happened to go there. It's a noisy street! What shops, what magnificent establishments; everything is simply shining and resjdendent; materials, flowers mider glass, hats of all sorts with ribbons. One would fancy they were all displayed as a show—^but no: you know there are people who buy all those things and present them to their wives. It's a wealthy street 1 There cire a great many German bakers in Gorohovoy Street, so they must be a very prosperous set of people, too. What numbers of carriages roll by every minute; I wonder the paving is not worn out! Such gorgeous equipages, windows shining like mirrors, silk and velvet inside, and aristocratic footmen wearing epaulettes and carrying a sword; I glanced into all the carriages, there were always ladies in them dressed up to the nines, perhaps countesses and princesses. No doubt it was the hour when they were all hastening to balls and assemblies. It would be interesting to get a closer view of princesses and ladies of rank in general; it must be very nice; I have never seen them; except just cis to- day, a passing glance at their carriages. I thought of you then. Ah, my darling, my own I When I think of you my heart begins aching! Why are you so imlucky, my Varinka? You are every bit as good as any of them. You are good, lovely, well-educated—why has sucJi a cruel fortune fallen to your lot? Why does it happen that a good man is left forlorn and forsaken, while happiness seems thrust upon another? I know, I know, my dear, that it's wrong to tlunk that, that it is free-thinking; but to speak honestly, to speak the whole truth, why is it fate, like a raven, croaks good fortune for one still unborn, while another begins life in the orphan asylum? And you know it often happens that Ivan the fool is favoured by fortune. 'You, Ivan the fool, rummage in the family money bags, eat, drink and be merry, while you, So-and-so, can lick your Ups. That's all you are fit for, you, brother So-and-so!' It's a sin, my darUng, it's a sin to think Uke that, but sometimes one cannot help sin creeping into one's heart. You ought to be driving in such a carriage, my own little dearie. Generals should be craving the favour of a glance from you—not the hkes of us; you ought to be dressed in silk and gold, instead of a little old Hnen gown. You would not
be a thin, delicate little thing, as you are now, but like a little sugar figure, fresh, plump and rosy. And then, I should be happy simply to look in at you from the street through the brightly lighted windows; simply to see your shadow. The thought that you were happy and gay, my pretty httle bird, would be enough to make me gay, too. But as it is, it is not enough that spiteful people have ruined you, a worthless profligate wretch goes and insults you. Because his coat hangs smartly on him, because he stares at you from a golden eyeglass, the shameless fellow, he can do what he likes, and one must lisjen to what he saj^ indulgently, however unseemly it is! Wait a bit—^is it really so, my pretty gentlemen? And why is all this? Because you are an orphan, because you are defenceless, because you have no powerful friend to help and protect you. And what can one call people who are ready to insult an orpheui? They are worthless beasts, not men; simply trash. They are mere ciphers and have no real existence, of that I am convinced. That's what they are like, these people! And to my thinking, my own, the hurdy-gurdy man I met to-day in Gorohovoy Street is more worthy of respect than they are. He goes about the whole day long, hoping to get some wretched spare farthing for food, but he is his own master, he does earn his own living. He won't ask for charity; but he works like a machine wound up to give pleasure. 'Here,' he says, 'I do what I can to give pleasure.' He's a beggar, he's a beggar, it is true, he's a beggar all the same, but he's an honourable beggar; he is cold and weary, but still he works; though it's in his own way, still he works. And there are many honest men, my darling, who, though they earn very little in proportion to the amount and usefulness of their work, yet they bow down to no one and buy their bread of no one. Here I am just like that hurdy-gurdy man—,that is, not at all like him. But in my own sense, in an honourable and aristocratic sense, just as he does, to the best of my abilities, I work as I can. That's enough atxjut me, it's neither here nor there.
I speak of that hurdy-gurdy, my darling, because it has happened that I have felt my poverty twice as much to-day. I stopped to look at the hurdy-gurdy man. I was in such a mood that I stopped to distract my thoughts. I was standing there, and also two cab-drivers, a woman of some sort, and a little girl, such a grubby little thing. The hurdy-gurdy man stopped before the windows of a house. I noticed a little boy about
ten years old; he would have been pretty, but he looked so ill, so frail, with hardly anything but his shirt on and almost barefoot, with his mouth open; he was listening to the music-like a child! He watched the German's dolls dancing, while his own hands and feet were numb with cold; he shivered and nibbled the edge of his sleeve. I noticed that he had a bit of paper of some sort in his hands. A gentleman passed and flung the hurdy-gurdy man some small coin, which fell straight into the box in a little garden in which the toy Frenchman was dancing with the ladies. At the cUnk of the coin the boy started, looked round and evidently thought that I had given the money. He ran up to me, his Uttle hands trembling, his little voice trembUng, he held the paper out to me and said, 'A letter.' I opened the letter; well, it was the usual thing, saying: 'Kind gentleman, a mother's dying with three (iildren hungry, so help us now, and as I am dying I will pray for you, my benefactor, in the next world for not forgetting my babes now.' Well, what of it?—one could see what it meant, an everyday matter, but what could I give him? Well, I gave him nothing, and how sorry I was I TTie boy was poor, blue with cold, perhaps hungry, too, and not lying, smrely he was not lying, I know that for certain. But what is wrong is that these horrid mothers don't take care of their children and send them out half naked in the cold to beg. Maybe she's a weak-willed, silly woman; and there's no one, maybe, to do anything for her, so she simply sits with her legs tucked under her, maybe she's really iU. Well, anjTway, she should apply in the proper quarter. Though, maybe, she's a cheat and sends a hungry, delicate child out on purpose to deceive people, and makes him ill. And what sort of training is it for a poor boy? It simply hardens his heart, he runs about begging, people pass and have no time for Mm. Their hearts are stony, their words are cruel. 'Get away, go along, you are naughty!' that is what he hears from everyone, and the child's heart grows hard, and in vain the poor Uttle frightened boy shivers with cold like a fledgUng faUen out of a broken nest. His hands and feet are frozen, he gasps for breath. The next thing he is coughing, before long disease, Uke an unclean reptile, creeps into his bosom and death is standing over him in some dark corner, no help, no escape, and that's his hfe! That is what life is hke sometimes! Oh, Varinka, it's wretched to hear 'for Christ's sake,' and to pass by and give nothing, telling him 'God will provide.' Sometimes 'for Christ's sake' is all right
(it's not always the same, you know, Varinka), sometimes it's a long, drawling, habitual, practised, regular beggar's whine; it's not so painful to refuse one like that; he's an old hand, a beggar by profession. He's accustomed to it, one thinks; he can cope with it and knows how to cope with it. Sometimes 'for Christ's sake' sounds unaccustomed, rude, terrible—as to-day, when I was taking the letter from the boy, a man standing close to
