And not able to think of anything to say, I hit him two or three times on the face with the roll of paper.  Completely at a loss, and hardly wondering—­I had so completely taken him by surprise—­he leaned his back against the lamp-post and put up his hands to protect his face.  At that moment an army doctor passed, and saw how I was beating the man, but he merely looked at us in astonishment and went on.  I felt ashamed and I ran back to the house.

XII

With my head wet from the snow, and gasping for breath, I ran to my room, and immediately flung off my swallow-tails, put on a reefer jacket and an overcoat, and carried my portmanteau out into the passage; I must get away!  But before going I hurriedly sat down and began writing to Orlov: 

“I leave you my false passport,” I began.  “I beg you to keep it as a memento, you false man, you Petersburg official!

“To steal into another man’s house under a false name, to watch under the mask of a flunkey this person’s intimate life, to hear everything, to see everything in order later on, unasked, to accuse a man of lying—­all this, you will say, is on a level with theft.  Yes, but I care nothing for fine feelings now.  I have endured dozens of your dinners and suppers when you said and did what you liked, and I had to hear, to look on, and be silent.  I don’t want to make you a present of my silence.  Besides, if there is not a living soul at hand who dares to tell you the truth without flattery, let your flunkey Stepan wash your magnificent countenance for you.”

I did not like this beginning, but I did not care to alter it.  Besides, what did it matter?

The big windows with their dark curtains, the bed, the crumpled dress coat on the floor, and my wet footprints, looked gloomy and forbidding.  And there was a peculiar stillness.

Possibly because I had run out into the street without my cap and goloshes I was in a high fever.  My face burned, my legs ached. . . .  My heavy head drooped over the table, and there was that kind of division in my thought when every idea in the brain seemed dogged by its shadow.

“I am ill, weak, morally cast down,” I went on; “I cannot write to you as I should like to.  From the first moment I desired to insult and humiliate you, but now I do not feel that I have the right to do so.  You and I have both fallen, and neither of us will ever rise up again; and even if my letter were eloquent, terrible, and passionate, it would still seem like beating on the lid of a coffin:  however one knocks upon it, one will not wake up the dead!  No efforts could warm your accursed cold blood, and you know that better than I do.  Why write?  But my mind and heart are burning, and I go on writing; for some reason I am moved as though this letter still might save you and me.  I am so feverish that my thoughts are disconnected, and my pen scratches the paper without meaning; but the question I want to put to you stands before me as clear as though in letters of flame.