In the morning, one cloud, heavy and black, had a ragged shape resembling a priest in a cassock with outstretched arms. It was clearly outlined on the pallid background of the upper clouds, and at noon it still had the identically same form.
The right hand, it is true, had become shorter, and the left was stretched out in an ugly fashion and was sending down such a flood of rain that against the dark background of the sky there formed a streak still darker, almost black.
Another huge shaggy lump of a cloud a little farther up hung over the village, threatening to smother it, you would think. Hours later it was still hanging in the same place, the same shaggy monster with outstretched paws, as though ready to pounce upon the earth.
Clouds, clouds, nothing but clouds!
Around five o'clock a change took place, darkness gradually enveloped heaven and earth, and soon the clouds disappeared completely, vanishing beneath a black shroud.
They were the first to go, next followed the forest and the village, then the church, the chapel, the hamlet, the orchard, and finally the manor-house, several yards away.
It has already become quite dark in the room, and there is no light. So what can one do but pace up and down?
A morbid languor seizes Stepan's brain; his entire body, despite its idleness, is filled with an incomprehensible, indescribable feeling of fatigue. Just one thought moves in him and sucks at him—the grave, the grave, the grave!
Those black dots which have recently been moving busily on the dark background of the boggy soil and near the village barns are not oppressed by that thought. They will not perish under the burden of despondency and weariness.
If they do not challenge the sky directly, at least they struggle, build, make enclosures, repair their houses. Stepan did not question whether all this bustle was worth the while, but he was aware that even the nameless dots were incomparably superior to him, that he couldn't even struggle, that he had nothing to build, nothing to repair.
He spent the evenings in the counting-house, because Arina Petrovna refused to supply him with candles.
Several times, through the bailiff, he asked for boots and a fur coat, and was invariably told that boots were not kept in store for him, but that he would be given a pair of felt shoes as soon as the cold spells arrived.
Evidently, Arina Petrovna intended to fulfill her program literally, that was, to sustain her son in such a manner as barely to keep him from starvation.
At first he abused his mother, but then behaved as though he had forgotten all about her.
Even the light of the candles in the counting-room annoyed him, and he began to lock himself in his room and remain all alone in the darkness.
There was just a single refuge left, one that he still dreaded but that attracted him irresistibly, to get drunk and forget deeply, irrevocably, to plunge into the sea of oblivion and never emerge again.
Everything drove him to it, the debauchery of the past, the enforced idleness of the present, his ailing body with the torturing cough, the unbearable asthma, and the constantly increasing pains in his heart.
At last the hour came.
"You must fetch me a bottle of vodka for to-night," he said once to the village clerk in a voice boding little good.
That one bottle of vodka was followed by a long succession of other bottles. After that he got drunk every night.
At nine o'clock, when the light in the counting-house had been put out and the servants had retired to their quarters, he placed a bottle of vodka and a slice of rye bread thickly strewn over with salt on the table.
He did not attack the liquor at once, but approached it stealthily as it were.
Everybody on the place was fast asleep. The mice scudded behind the wall paper and the clock in the counting-house ticked ominously.
Stepan threw off his dressing-gown, and began to stride back and forth in the overheated room, with nothing but a shirt on his back. At times he stopped, went over to the table, searched for the bottle in the darkness, then resumed his restless pacing.
The first tumblers he emptied in a sort of passion, voluptuously swallowing down the burning liquid. But little by little his heart began to beat faster, the blood mounted to his head, and he mumbled incoherently.
His feeble imagination tried to create images, his blunted memory attempted to pierce the mists of the past. But the images were broken and meaningless, and the past remained dim and formless. There was no recollection, either bitter or sweet, as though an impervious wall separated the past from the present.
He was completely filled by the present, which seemed like a prison cell, in which he would be locked up for eternity without consciousness of time or space.
His mind took in nothing but the room, the stove, the three windows in the front wall, the squeaking wooden bed with its mattress worn thin, and the table with the bottle.
As the contents of the bottle decreased and his head grew hotter and hotter, even this boresome sense of the present gradually faded.
His mumblings, to which at first there had been a bit of form, now lost all meaning. His pupils dilated in the attempt to pierce the engulfing darkness. Finally, the darkness itself vanished and its place was taken by a phosphorescent sheen.
It was an endless void, with not a color or a sound, but radiant with sinister splendor.
The void followed him in his wanderings, trod on his heels at every step.
There were no walls, no windows, nothing but this endless vacant splendor.
Dread fell on him, coupled with an irresistible impulse to annihilate even the void.
A few more efforts, and his goal was reached.
His stumbling legs carried a benumbed body, his chest gave forth not a murmur but an inarticulate cry, his very existence seemingly ceased.
A strange stupor took possession of him, in which conscious life had no part, which plumbed the depths of a life independent of and beyond the boundaries of normal existence.
Groans burst from his chest without in the least disturbing his sleep. His organic disease continued its destructive work, without apparently causing him any physical pain.
He rose early in the morning, filled with agonizing longing, disgust and hatred.
It was an inarticulate hatred, without either cause or definite object.
His bloodshot eyes rolled restlessly, his limbs trembled, his heart worked with sickening irregularity, now stopping altogether, now hammering with such violence that his hand involuntarily clutched at his breast.
Not a thought, not a desire!
Objects of immediate perception filled his mind so completely that it was closed to other impressions.
He filled his pipe and lighted it. It dropped from his nerveless fingers. His tongue mumbled something, but seemingly by force of habit only.
He sat in silence and stared at one point.
He felt an intense craving to raise the temperature of his body so that he would feel the presence of life for at least a short while. But he had no way of getting vodka in the daytime.
He had to wait for night to attain those blissful moments when the ground vanished from under his feet and the four odious prison walls were replaced by a shoreless, shining void.
Arina Petrovna had not the slightest idea of how Simple Simon spent his time.
The casual glimmer of feeling which had appeared for a moment during the conversation with the Bloodsucker vanished so precipitately that she was unconscious of its ever having appeared.
It was not a premeditated course of action on her part, but sheer oblivion.