“Ouf!” sighed Samoylenko.  He paused and asked quietly:  “You said the other day that people like Laevsky ought to be destroyed. . . .  Tell me, if you . . . if the State or society commissioned you to destroy him, could you . . . bring yourself to it?”

“My hand would not tremble.”

IX

When they got home, Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna went into their dark, stuffy, dull rooms.  Both were silent.  Laevsky lighted a candle, while Nadyezhda Fyodorovna sat down, and without taking off her cloak and hat, lifted her melancholy, guilty eyes to him.

He knew that she expected an explanation from him, but an explanation would be wearisome, useless and exhausting, and his heart was heavy because he had lost control over himself and been rude to her.  He chanced to feel in his pocket the letter which he had been intending every day to read to her, and thought if he were to show her that letter now, it would turn her thoughts in another direction.

“It is time to define our relations,” he thought.  “I will give it her; what is to be will be.”

He took out the letter and gave it her.

“Read it.  It concerns you.”

Saying this, he went into his own room and lay down on the sofa in the dark without a pillow.  Nadyezhda Fyodorovna read the letter, and it seemed to her as though the ceiling were falling and the walls were closing in on her.  It seemed suddenly dark and shut in and terrible.  She crossed herself quickly three times and said: 

“Give him peace, O Lord . . . give him peace. . . .”

And she began crying.

“Vanya,” she called.  “Ivan Andreitch!”

There was no answer.  Thinking that Laevsky had come in and was standing behind her chair, she sobbed like a child, and said: 

“Why did you not tell me before that he was dead?  I wouldn’t have gone to the picnic; I shouldn’t have laughed so horribly. . . .  The men said horrid things to me.  What a sin, what a sin!  Save me, Vanya, save me. . . .  I have been mad. . . .  I am lost. . . .”

Laevsky heard her sobs.  He felt stifled and his heart was beating violently.  In his misery he got up, stood in the middle of the room, groped his way in the dark to an easy-chair by the table, and sat down.

“This is a prison . . .” he thought.  “I must get away . . .  I can’t bear it.”

It was too late to go and play cards; there were no restaurants in the town.  He lay down again and covered his ears that he might not hear her sobbing, and he suddenly remembered that he could go to Samoylenko.  To avoid going near Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, he got out of the window into the garden, climbed over the garden fence and went along the street.  It was dark.  A steamer, judging by its lights, a big passenger one, had just come in.  He heard the clank of the anchor chain.  A red light was moving rapidly from the shore in the direction of the steamer:  it was the Customs boat going out to it.