These last words Vassilyev pronounced in a faint, failing voice.  He was exhausted, and sank into silence.  A pause followed.  I began scrutinising his face.  It was as pale as a dead man’s.  It seemed as though life were almost extinct in him, and only the signs of the suffering that the “vain and fatuous” man was feeling betrayed that it was still alive.  It was painful to look at that face, but what must it have been for Vassilyev himself who yet had the strength to argue and, if I were not mistaken, to pose?

“You here—­are you here ?” he asked suddenly, raising himself on his elbow.  “My God, just listen!”

I began listening.  The rain was pattering angrily on the dark window, never ceasing for a minute.  The wind howled plaintively and lugubriously.

“’And I shall be whiter than snow, and my ears will hear gladness and rejoicing.’” Madame Mimotih, who had returned, was reading in the drawing-room in a languid, weary voice, neither raising nor dropping the monotonous dreary key.

“It is cheerful, isn’t it?” whispered Vassilyev, turning his frightened eyes towards me.  “My God, the things a man has to see and hear!  If only one could set this chaos to music!  As Hamlet says, ’it would—­

“Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed, The very faculties of eyes and ears.”

How well I should have understood that music then!  How I should have felt it!  What time is it?”

“Five minutes to three.”

“Morning is still far off.  And in the morning there’s the funeral.  A lovely prospect!  One follows the coffin through the mud and rain.  One walks along, seeing nothing but the cloudy sky and the wretched scenery.  The muddy mutes, taverns, woodstacks. . . .  One’s trousers drenched to the knees.  The never-ending streets.  The time dragging out like eternity, the coarse people.  And on the heart a stone, a stone!”

After a brief pause he suddenly asked:  “Is it long since you saw General Luhatchev?”

“I haven’t seen him since last summer.”

“He likes to be cock of the walk, but he is a nice little old chap.  And are you still writing?”

“Yes, a little.”

“Ah. . . .  Do you remember how I pranced about like a needle, like an enthusiastic ass at those private theatricals when I was courting Zina?  It was stupid, but it was good, it was fun. . . .  The very memory of it brings back a whiff of spring. . . .  And now!  What a cruel change of scene!  There is a subject for you!  Only don’t you go in for writing ‘the diary of a suicide.’  That’s vulgar and conventional.  You make something humorous of it.”

“Again you are . . . posing,” I said.  “There’s nothing humorous in your position.”

“Nothing laughable?  You say nothing laughable?” Vassilyev sat up, and tears glistened in his eyes.  An expression of bitter distress came into his pale face.  His chin quivered.

“You laugh at the deceit of cheating clerks and faithless wives,” he said, “but no clerk, no faithless wife has cheated as my fate has cheated me!  I have been deceived as no bank depositor, no duped husband has ever been deceived!  Only realise what an absurd fool I have been made!  Last year before your eyes I did not know what to do with myself for happiness.  And now before your eyes. . . .”