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XXI

Some one’s hand lay on my shoulder and pushed it several times…. I opened my eyes and in the faint light of the solitary candle, I saw Fustov standing before me. He frightened me. He was staggering; his face was yellow, almost the same colour as his hair; his lips seemed hanging down, his muddy eyes were staring senselessly away. What had become of his invariably amiable, sympathetic expression? I had a cousin who from epilepsy was sinking into idiocy…. Fustov looked like him at that moment.

I sat up hurriedly.

‘What is it? What is the matter? Heavens!’

He made no answer.

‘Why, what has happened? Fustov! Do speak! Susanna?…’

Fustov gave a slight start.

‘She…’ he began in a hoarse voice, and broke off.

‘What of her? Have you seen her?’

He stared at me.

‘She’s no more.’

‘No more?’

‘No. She is dead.’

I jumped out of bed.

‘Dead? Susanna? Dead?’

Fustov turned his eyes away again.

‘Yes; she is dead; she died at midnight.’

‘He’s raving!’ crossed my mind.

‘At midnight! And what’s the time now?’

‘It’s eight o’clock in the morning now.

They sent to tell me. She is to be buried to-morrow.’

I seized him by the hand.

‘Alexander, you’re not delirious? Are you in your senses?’

‘I am in my senses,’ he answered. ‘Directly I heard it, I came straight to you.’

My heart turned sick and numb, as always happens on realising an irrevocable misfortune.

‘My God! my God! Dead!’ I repeated. ‘How is it possible? So suddenly! Or perhaps she took her own life?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Fustov, ‘I know nothing. They told me she died at midnight. And to-morrow she will be buried.’

‘At midnight!’ I thought…. ‘Then she was still alive yesterday when I fancied I saw her in the window, when I entreated him to hasten to her….’

‘She was still alive yesterday, when you wanted to send me to Ivan Demianitch’s,’ said Fustov, as though guessing my thought.

‘How little he knew her!’ I thought again. ‘How little we both knew her! “High-flown,” said he, “all girls are like that.”… And at that very minute, perhaps, she was putting to her lips… Can one love any one and be so grossly mistaken in them?’

Fustov stood stockstill before my bed, his hands hanging, like a guilty man.

XXII

I dressed hurriedly.

‘What do you mean to do now, Alexander?’ I asked.

He gazed at me in bewilderment, as though marvelling at the absurdity of my question. And indeed what was there to do?

‘You simply must go to them, though,’ I began. ‘You’re bound to ascertain how it happened; there is, possibly, a crime concealed. One may expect anything of those people…. It is all to be thoroughly investigated. Remember the statement in her manuscript, the pension was to cease on her marriage, but in event of her death it was to pass to Ratsch. In any case, one must render her the last duty, pay homage to her remains!’

I talked to Fustov like a preceptor, like an elder brother. In the midst of all that horror, grief, bewilderment, a sort of unconscious feeling of superiority over Fustov had suddenly come to the surface in me…. Whether from seeing him crushed by the consciousness of his fault, distracted, shattered, whether that a misfortune befalling a man almost always humiliates him, lowers him in the opinion of others, ‘you can’t be much,’ is felt, ‘if you hadn’t the wit to come off better than that!’ God knows! Any way, Fustov seemed to me almost like a child, and I felt pity for him, and saw the necessity of severity. I held out a helping hand to him, stooping down to him from above. Only a woman’s sympathy is free from condescension.

But Fustov continued to gaze with wild and stupid eyes at me–my authoritative tone obviously had no effect on him, and to my second question, ‘You’re going to them, I suppose?’ he replied–

‘No, I’m not going.’

‘What do you mean, really? Don’t you want to ascertain for yourself, to investigate, how, and what? Perhaps, she has left a letter… a document of some sort….’