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shoot themselves?” he answered himself, and opening his eyes, he saw
with wonder an embroidered cushion beside him, worked by Varya, his
brother’s wife. He touched the tassel of the cushion, and tried to think
of Varya, of when he had seen her last. But to think of anything
extraneous was an agonizing effort. “No, I must sleep!” He moved the
cushion up, and pressed his head into it, but he had to make an effort
to keep his eyes shut. He jumped up and sat down. “That’s all over for
me,” he said to himself. “I must think what to do. What is left?” His
mind rapidly ran through his life apart from his love of Anna.
“Ambition? Serpuhovskoy? Society? The court?” He could not
come to a pause anywhere. All of it had had meaning before, but now
there was no reality in it. He got up from the sofa, took off his coat,
undid his belt, and uncovering his hairy chest to breathe more freely,
walked up and down the room. “This is how people go mad,” he
repeated, “and how they shoot themselves...to escape humiliation,” he
added slowly.
He went to the door and closed it, then with fixed eyes and clenched
teeth he went up to the table, took a revolver, looked round him, turned
it to a loaded barrel, and sank into thought. For two minutes, his head
bent forward with an expression of an intense effort of thought, he
stood with the revolver in his hand, motionless, thinking.
“Of course,” he said to himself, as though a logical, continuous, and
clear chain of reasoning had brought him to an indubitable conclusion.
In reality this “of course,” that seemed convincing to him, was simply
the result of exactly the same circle of memories and images through
which he had passed ten times already during the last hour—memo-
ries of happiness lost forever. There was the same conception of the
senselessness of everything to come in life, the same consciousness of
humiliation. Even the sequence of these images and emotions was the
same.
“Of course,” he repeated, when for the third time his thought passed
again round the same spellbound circle of memories and images, and
pulling the revolver to the left side of his chest, and clutching it vigor-
ously with his whole hand, as it were, squeezing it in his fist, he pulled
the trigger. He did not hear the sound of the shot, but a violent blow on
his chest sent him reeling. He tried to clutch at the edge of the table,
dropped the revolver, staggered, and sat down on the ground, looking
about him in astonishment. He did not recognize his room, looking up
from the ground, at the bent legs of the table, at the wastepaper basket,
and the tiger-skin rug. The hurried, creaking steps of his servant com-
ing through the drawing room brought him to his senses. He made an
effort at thought, and was aware that he was on the floor; and seeing
blood on the tiger-skin rug and on his arm, he knew he had shot
himself.
“Idiotic! Missed!” he said, fumbling after the revolver. The re-
volver was close beside him—he sought further off. Still feeling for it,
he stretched out to the other side, and not being strong enough to keep
his balance, fell over, streaming with blood.
The elegant, whiskered manservant, who used to be continually
complaining to his acquaintances of the delicacy of his nerves, was so
panic-stricken on seeing his master lying on the floor, that he left him
losing blood while he ran for assistance. An hour later Varya, his
brother’s wife, had arrived, and with the assistance of three doctors,
whom she had sent for in all directions, and who all appeared at the
same moment, she got the wounded man to bed, and remained to
nurse him.