Following in the wake of the crowd of sightseers, I succeeded, without asking questions, in reaching the chief centre of danger, where at last I saw Lembke, whom I was seeking at Yulia Mihailovna's request.
His position was strange and extraordinary.
He was standing on the ruins of a fence. Thirty paces to the left of him rose the black skeleton of a two-storied house which had almost burnt out. It had holes instead of windows at each story, its roof had fallen in, and the flames were still here and there creeping among the charred beams.
At the farther end of the courtyard, twenty paces away, the lodge, also a two-storied 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.