The possessed or, The devils
building, was beginning to burn, and the firemen were doing their utmost
to save it. On the right the firemen and the people were trying to save
a rather large wooden building which was not actually burning, though
it had caught fire several times and was inevitably bound to be burnt in
the end. Lembke stood facing the lodge, shouting and gesticulating. He
was giving orders which no one attempted to carry out. It seemed to me
that every one had given him up as hopeless and left him. Anyway,
though every one in the vast crowd of all classes, among whom there
were gentlemen, and even the cathedral priest, was listening to him
with curiosity and wonder, no one spoke to him or tried to get him away.
Lembke, with a pale face and glittering eyes, was uttering the most
amazing things. To complete the picture, he had lost his hat and was
bareheaded.
"It's all incendiarism! It's nihilism! If anything is burning, it's
nihilism!" I heard almost with horror; and though there was nothing to
be surprised at, yet actual madness, when one sees it, always gives one
a shock.
"Your Excellency," said a policeman, coming up to him, "what if you were
to try the repose of home?... It's dangerous for your Excellency even to
stand here."
This policeman, as I heard afterwards, had been told off by the chief
of police to watch over Andrey Antonovitch, to do his utmost to get him
home, and in case of danger even to use force--a task evidently beyond
the man's power.
"They will wipe away the tears of the people whose houses have been
burnt, but they will burn down the town. It's all the work of four
scoundrels, four and a half! Arrest the scoundrel! He worms himself into
the honour of families. They made use of the governesses to burn down
the houses. It's vile, vile! Aie, what's he about?" he shouted, suddenly
noticing a fireman at the top of the burning lodge, under whom the roof
had almost burnt away and round whom the flames were beginning to flare
up. "Pull him down! Pull him down! He will fall, he will catch fire, put
him out!... What is he doing there?"
"He is putting the fire out, your Excellency."
"Not likely. The fire is in the minds of men and not in the roofs of
houses. Pull him down and give it up! Better give it up, much better!
Let it put itself out. Aie, who is crying now? An old woman! It's an old
woman shouting. Why have they forgotten the old woman?"
There actually was an old woman crying on the ground floor of the
burning lodge. She was an old creature of eighty, a relation of the
shopkeeper who owned the house. But she had not been forgotten; she had
gone back to the burning house while it was still possible, with the
insane idea of rescuing her feather bed from a corner room which was
still untouched. Choking with the smoke and screaming with the heat, for
the room was on fire by the time she reached it, she was still trying
with her decrepit hands to squeeze her feather bed through a broken
window pane. Lembke rushed to her assistance. Every one saw him run up
to the window, catch hold of one corner of the feather bed and try with
all his might to pull it out. As ill luck would have it, a board fell at
that moment from the roof and hit the unhappy governor. It did not
kill him, it merely grazed him on the neck as it fell, but Andrey
Antonovitch's career was over, among us at least; the blow knocked him
off his feet and he sank on the ground unconscious.
The day dawned at last, gloomy and sullen. The fire was abating; the
wind was followed by a sudden calm, and then a fine drizzling rain fell.
I was by that time in another part, some distance from where Lembke had
fallen, and here I overheard very strange conversations in the crowd. A
strange fact had come to light. On the very outskirts of the quarter,
on a piece of waste land beyond the kitchen gardens, not less than fifty
paces from any other buildings, there stood a little wooden house which
had only lately been built, and this solitary house had been on fire at
the very beginning, almost before any other. Even had it burnt down, it
was so far from other houses that no other building in the town could
have caught fire from it, and, vice versa, if the whole riverside
had been burnt to the ground, that house might have remained intact,
whatever the wind had been. It followed that it had caught fire
separately and independently and therefore not accidentally. But the
chief point was that it was not burnt to the ground, and at daybreak
strange things were discovered within it. The owner of this new house,
who lived in the neighbourhood, rushed up as soon as he saw it in flames
and with the help of his neighbours pulled apart a pile of faggots which
had been heaped up by the side wall and set fire to. In this way he
saved the house. But there were lodgers in the house--the captain, who
was well known in the town, his sister, and their elderly servant, and
these three persons--the captain, his sister, and their servant--had
been murdered and apparently robbed in the night. (It was here that the
chief of police had gone while Lembke was rescuing the feather bed.)
By morning the news had spread and an immense crowd of all classes, even
the riverside people who had been burnt out had flocked to the waste
land where the new house stood. It was difficult to get there, so dense
was the crowd. I was told at once that the captain had been found lying
dressed on the bench with his throat cut, and that he must have been
dead drunk when he was killed, so that he had felt nothing, and he had
"bled like a bull"; that his sister Marya Timofeyevna had been "stabbed
all over" with a knife and she was lying on the floor in the doorway, so
that probably she had been awake and had fought and struggled with the
murderer. The servant, who had also probably been awake, had her skull
broken. The owner of the house said that the captain had come to see him
the morning before, and that in his drunken bragging he had shown him a
lot of money, as much as two hundred roubles. The captain's shabby old
green pocket-book was found empty on the floor, but Marya Timofeyevna's
box had not been touched, and the silver setting of the ikon had not
been removed either; the captain's clothes, too, had not been disturbed.
It was evident that the thief had been in a hurry and was a man familiar
with the captain's circumstances, who had come only for money and knew
where it was kept. If the owner of the house had not run up at that
moment the burning faggot stack would certainly have set fire to the
house and "it would have been difficult to find out from the charred
corpses how they had died."
So the story was told. One other fact was added: that the person who
had taken this house for the Lebyadkins was no other than Mr. Stavrogin,
Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, the son of Varvara Petrovna. He had come
himself to take it and had had much ado to persuade the owner to let
it, as the latter had intended to use it as a tavern; but Nikolay
Vsyevolodovitch was ready to give any rent he asked and had paid for six
months in advance.
"The fire wasn't an accident," I heard said in the crowd.
But the majority said nothing. People's faces were sullen, but I did
not see signs of much indignation. People persisted, however, in
gossiping about Stavrogin, saying that the murdered woman was his wife;
that on the previous day he had "dishonourably" abducted a young lady
belonging to the best family in the place, the daughter of Madame
Drozdov, and that a complaint was to be lodged against him in
Petersburg; and that his wife had been murdered evidently that he might
marry the young lady. Skvoreshniki was not more than a mile and a half
away, and I remember I wondered whether I should not let them know the
position of affairs. I did not notice, however, that there was anyone
egging the crowd on and I don't want to accuse people falsely, though I
did see and recognised at once in the crowd at the fire two or three
of the rowdy lot I had seen in the refreshment-room. I particularly
remember one thin, tall fellow, a cabinet-maker, as I found out later,
with an emaciated face and a curly head, black as though grimed with
soot. He was not drunk, but in contrast to the gloomy passivity of the
crowd seemed beside himself with excitement. He kept addressing the
people, though I don't remember his words; nothing coherent that he said
was longer than "I say, lads, what do you say to this? Are things to go
on like this?" and so saying he waved his arms.
CHAPTER III. A ROMANCE ENDED
I
FROM THE LARGE BALLROOM of Skvoreshniki (the room in which the last
interview with Varvara Petrovna and Stepan Trofimovitch had taken place)
the fire could be plainly seen. At daybreak, soon after five in the
morning, Liza was standing at the farthest window on the right looking
intently at the fading glow. She was alone in the room. She was wearing
the dress she had worn the day before at the matinée--a very smart light
green dress covered with lace, but crushed and put on carelessly and
with haste. Suddenly noticing that some of the hooks were undone in
front she flushed, hurriedly set it right, snatched up from a chair the
red shawl she had flung down when she came in the day before, and put
it round her neck. Some locks of her luxuriant hair had come loose and
showed below the shawl on her right shoulder. Her face looked weary and
careworn, but her eyes glowed under her frowning brows. She went up to
the window again and pressed her burning forehead against the cold pane.
The door opened and Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch came in.
"I've sent a messenger on horseback," he said. "In ten minutes we shall
hear all about it, meantime the servants say that part of the riverside
quarter has been burnt down, on the right side of the bridge near the
quay. It's been burning since eleven o'clock; now the fire is going
down."
He did not go near the window, but stood three steps behind her; she did
not turn towards him.
"It ought to have been light an hour ago by the calendar, and it's still
almost night," she said irritably.
"'Calendars always tell lies,'" he observed with a polite smile, but,
a little ashamed; he made haste to add: "It's dull to live by the
calendar, Liza."
And he relapsed into silence, vexed at the ineptitude of the second
sentence. Liza gave a wry smile.
"You are in such a melancholy mood that you cannot even find words to
speak to me. But you need not trouble, there's a point in what you said.
I always live by the calendar. Every step I take is regulated by the
calendar. Does that surprise you?"
She turned quickly from the window and sat down in a low chair.
"You sit down, too, please. We haven't long to be together and I want to
say anything I like.... Why shouldn't you, too, say anything you like?"
Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch sat beside her and softly, almost timidly took
her hand.
"What's the meaning of this tone, Liza? Where has it suddenly sprung
from? What do you mean by 'we haven't long to be together'? That's the
second mysterious phrase since you waked, half an hour ago."
"You are beginning to reckon up my mysterious phrases!" she laughed.
"Do you remember I told you I was a dead woman when I came in yesterday?
That you thought fit to forget. To forget or not to notice."
"I don't remember, Liza. Why dead? You must live."
"And is that all? You've quite lost your flow of words. I've lived my
hour and that's enough. Do you remember Christopher Ivanovitch?"
"No I don't," he answered, frowning.
"Christopher Ivanovitch at Lausanne? He bored you dreadfully. He always
used to open the door and say, 'I've come for one minute,' and then stay
the whole day. I don't want to be like Christopher Ivanovitch and stay
the whole day."
A look of pain came into his face.