He debated and hesitated.
He knew that the house was on Gorokhovaya Street, near Sadovaya, and decided to go there, hoping that before he reached the place he would finally manage to make up his mind.
As he neared the intersection of Gorokhovaya and Sadovaya, he himself was surprised at his extraordinary agitation; he had never expected that his heart could pound so painfully.
One house, probably because of its peculiar physiognomy, began to attract his attention from far away, and the prince later recalled saying to himself:
"That's probably the very house."
He approached with extraordinary curiosity to verify his guess; he felt that for some reason it would be particularly unpleasant if he had guessed right.
The house was big, grim, three-storied, without any architecture, of a dirty green color.
Some, though very few, houses of this sort, built at the end of the last century, have survived precisely on these Petersburg streets (where everything changes so quickly) almost without change.
They are sturdily built, with thick walls and extremely few windows; the ground-floor windows sometimes have grilles.
Most often there is a moneychanger's shop downstairs.
The castrate14 who sits in the shop rents an apartment upstairs.
Both outside and inside, everything is somehow inhospitable and dry, everything seems to hide and conceal itself, and why it should seem so simply from the physiognomy of the house—would be hard to explain.
Architectural combinations of lines, of course, have their own secret.
These houses are inhabited almost exclusively by commercial folk.
Going up to the gates and looking at the inscription, the prince read:
"House of the Hereditary Honorary Citizen Rogozhin."
No longer hesitant, he opened the glass door, which slammed noisily behind him, and started up the front stairway to the second floor.
The stairway was dark, made of stone, crudely constructed, and its walls were painted red.
He knew that Rogozhin with his mother and brother occupied the entire second floor of this dreary house.
The servant who opened the door for the prince led him without announcing him and led him a long way; they passed through one reception hall with faux-marbre walls, an oak parquet floor, and furniture from the twenties, crude and heavy, passed through some tiny rooms, turning and zigzagging, going up two or three steps and then down the same number, and finally knocked at some door.
The door was opened by Parfyon Semyonych himself; seeing the prince, he went pale and froze on the spot, so that for some time he looked like a stone idol, staring with fixed and frightened eyes and twisting his mouth into a sort of smile perplexed in the highest degree—as if he found something impossible and almost miraculous in the prince's visit.
The prince, though he had expected something of the sort, was even surprised.
"Parfyon, perhaps I've come at the wrong time. I'll go, then," he finally said in embarrassment.
"The right time! The right time!" Parfyon finally recollected himself. "Please come in."
They addressed each other as familiars.
In Moscow they had often happened to spend long hours together, and there had even been several moments during their meetings that had left an all too memorable imprint on both their hearts.
Now it was over three months since they had seen each other.
The paleness and, as it were, the quick, fleeting spasm still had not left Rogozhin's face.
Though he had invited his guest in, his extraordinary embarrassment persisted.
As he was showing the prince to a chair and seating him at the table, the prince chanced to turn to him and stopped under the impression of his extremely strange and heavy gaze.
It was as if something pierced the prince and as if at the same time he remembered something—recent, heavy, gloomy.
Not sitting down and standing motionless, he looked for some time straight into Rogozhin's eyes; they seemed to flash more intensely in the first moment.
Finally Rogozhin smiled, but with some embarrassment and as if at a loss.
"Why are you staring like that?" he muttered. "Sit down!"
The prince sat down.
"Parfyon," he said, "tell me straight out, did you know I would come to Petersburg today, or not?"
"That you would come, I did think, and as you see I wasn't mistaken," the man said, smiling caustically, "but how should I know you'd come today?"
The harsh abruptness and strange irritation of the question contained in the answer struck the prince still more.
"But even if you had known I'd come today, why get so irritated?" the prince said softly in embarrassment.
"But why do you ask?"
"This morning, as I was getting off the train, I saw a pair of eyes looking at me exactly the way you were just looking at me from behind."
"Aha!
Whose eyes were they?" Rogozhin muttered suspiciously.
It seemed to the prince that he gave a start.
"I don't know, in the crowd—it even seems to me that I imagined it; I've somehow begun to imagine things all the time.
You know, brother Parfyon, I feel almost the way I did five years ago, when I was still having my fits."
"So, maybe you did imagine it, I don't know ..." Parfyon went on muttering.
The affectionate smile on his face did not suit it at that moment, as if something had been broken in this smile and, try as he might, Parfyon was unable to glue it back together.
"So you're going abroad again, are you?" he asked and suddenly added: "And do you remember us on the train, in the autumn, coming from Pskov, me here, and you ... in a cloak, remember, and those gaiters?"
And Rogozhin suddenly laughed, this time with a sort of overt malice and as if delighted that he had managed to express it at least in some way.