Even at the moment of such an insult (I do feel that I insulted him, though I had no intention of doing so), even at such a moment the man could not get angry!
His lips quivered then not at all out of anger, I will swear to that: he seized me by the arm and uttered his splendid "Go, sir!" decidedly without being angry.
There was dignity, even a great deal of it, even quite unsuited to him (so that, in truth, it was quite comical), but there was no anger.
Maybe he simply began suddenly to despise me.
Two or three times after that, when I met him on the stairs, he suddenly started taking his hat off to me, something he never did before, but he no longer stopped as before, but ran past me in embarrassment.
If he despised me, he did it in his own way: he "humbly despised" me.
But maybe he took his hat off simply out of fear of me, as his creditor's son, because he was constantly in debt to my mother and was never able to get out of it.
And that is even the most likely thing of all.
I wanted to have a talk with him, and I know for certain that in ten minutes he would have started asking my forgiveness; but I reasoned that it was better not to touch him.
At that same time, that is, around the time when Surikov "froze" his baby, around the middle of March, I felt much better for some reason, and that lasted for about two weeks.
I started going out, most often at twilight.
I loved the March twilight, when it turned frosty and the gaslights were lit; I sometimes walked far.
Once, in Shestilavochnaya Street, someone of the "gentlefolk" sort overtook me in the dark; I did not make him out very well; he was carrying something wrapped in paper and was dressed in a short and ugly coat—too light for the season.
When he came to a streetlight, some ten steps ahead of me, I noticed that something fell out of his pocket.
I hastened to pick it up—just in time, because someone in a long kaftan had already rushed for it, but, seeing the object in my hands, did not argue, took a fleeting glance at my hands, and slipped past.
The object was a big morocco wallet of old-fashioned design and tightly stuffed; but for some reason I guessed at first glance that there was anything you like in it, except money.
The passerby who had lost it was already some forty steps ahead of me and soon dropped from sight in the crowd.
I ran and started shouting to him; but as I could only shout "Hey!" he did not turn around.
Suddenly he darted to the left into the gateway of some house.
When I ran into this gateway, where it was very dark, there was no one there.
The house was enormously big, one of those huge things entrepreneurs build to make into little apartments; some of these buildings have as many as a hundred apartments in them.
When I ran through the gateway, I thought I saw a man walking in the far right-hand corner of the enormous courtyard, though I could barely make out anything in the darkness.
I ran to that corner and saw the entrance to a stairway; the stairway was narrow, extremely dirty, and quite unlighted; but I could hear a man running up the stairs above me, and I raced after him, hoping that while the door was being opened for him, I could catch up with him.
And so it happened.
The flights were very short, and there was no end of them, so that I was terribly out of breath; a door opened and closed again on the fifth floor, I guessed that from three flights down.
Before I ran up, caught my breath on the landing, and found the doorbell, several minutes passed.
The door was finally opened for me by a woman who was lighting a samovar in a tiny kitchen; she listened silently to my questions, understood nothing, of course, and silently opened for me the door to the next room, also small, terribly low, with vile necessary furniture and a huge, wide bed under a canopy, on which lay
"Terentyich" (as the woman called to him), drunk, as it seemed to me.
On the table stood an iron night-light with a candle burning down in it and a nearly empty bottle.
Terentyich grunted something to me lying down and waved towards the next door, while the woman left, so
that nothing remained for me but to open that door.
I did so and went into the next room. This room was still smaller and narrower than the previous one, so that I did not even know where to turn in it; a narrow single bed in the corner took up terribly much space; the rest of the furniture consisted of three simple chairs heaped with all sorts of rags and a very simple wooden kitchen table in front of an old oilcloth sofa, so that it was almost impossible to pass between the table and the bed.
The same iron night-light with a tallow candle as in the other room burned on the table, and on the bed squealed a tiny baby, maybe only three weeks old, judging by its cry; it was being "changed," that is, put into a clean diaper, by a sick and pale woman, young-seeming, in extreme neglige, and perhaps just beginning to get up after her confinement; but the baby would not be quiet and cried in anticipation of the lean breast.
On the sofa another child slept, a three-year-old girl, covered, it seemed, with a tailcoat.
By the table stood a gentleman in a very shabby frock coat (he had already taken his coat off and it was lying on the bed), unwrapping the blue paper in which about two pounds of wheat bread and two small sausages were wrapped. On the table, besides that, there was a teapot with tea and some scattered pieces of black bread.
An unlocked suitcase showed from under the bed, and two bundles with some rags stuck out.
In short, there was terrible disorder.
It seemed to me, at first glance, that both of them—the gentleman and the lady—were decent people, but reduced by poverty to that humiliating state in which disorder finally overcomes every attempt to struggle with it and even reduces people to the bitter necessity of finding in this disorder, as it increases daily, some bitter and, as it were, vengeful sense of pleasure.
When I came in, this gentleman, who had come in just before me and was unwrapping his provisions, was talking rapidly and heatedly with his wife; she, though she had not yet finished swaddling the baby, had already begun to whimper; the news must have been bad, as usual.
The face of this gentleman, who was about twenty-eight by the look of it, swarthy and dry, framed in black side-whiskers, with his chin shaved till it gleamed, struck me as rather respectable and even agreeable; it was sullen, with a sullen gaze, but with some morbid tinge of a pride that was all too easily irritated.
When I came in, a strange scene took place.
There are people who take extreme pleasure in their irritable touchiness, and especially when it reaches (which always happens very quickly) the ultimate limit in them; in that instant it even seems they would rather be offended than not offended.
Afterwards these irritable people always suffer terrible remorse, if they are intelligent, naturally, and able to realize that they had become ten times angrier than they should have.
For some time this gentleman looked at me in amazement, and his wife in fright, as if it were dreadfully outlandish that anyone should come into their room; but suddenly he fell upon me almost in a rage; I had not yet managed to mumble even a couple of words, but he, especially seeing that I was decently dressed, must have considered himself dreadfully offended that I dared to look so unceremoniously into his corner and see all his hideous situation, which he was so ashamed of himself.
Of course, he was glad of the chance to vent his anger for all his misfortunes at least on someone.
There was a moment when I even thought he would start fighting; he grew pale, like a woman in hysterics, and frightened his wife terribly.
"How dare you come in like that?
Out!" he shouted, trembling and even barely articulating the words.
But suddenly he saw his wallet in my hand.
"It seems you dropped it," I said as calmly and drily as I could. (Anyhow, that was the only proper way.)