his, you will say, is on a level with theft.
Yes, but I care nothing for fine feelings now. I have endured dozens
of your dinners and suppers when you said and did what you liked,
and I had to hear, to look on, and be silent. I don't want to make
you a present of my silence. Besides, if there is not a living soul
at hand who dares to tell you the truth without flattery, let your
flunkey Stepan wash your magnificent countenance for you."

I did not like this beginning, but I did not care to alter it.
Besides, what did it matter?

The big windows with their dark curtains, the bed, the crumpled
dress coat on the floor, and my wet footprints, looked gloomy and
forbidding. And there was a peculiar stillness.

Possibly because I had run out into the street without my cap and
goloshes I was in a high fever. My face burned, my legs ached. . . .
My heavy head drooped over the table, and there was that kind of
division in my thought when every idea in the brain seemed dogged
by its shadow.

"I am ill, weak, morally cast down," I went on; "I cannot write to
you as I should like to. From the first moment I desired to insult
and humiliate you, but now I do not feel that I have the right to
do so. You and I have both fallen, and neither of us will ever rise
up again; and even if my letter were eloquent, terrible, and
passionate, it would still seem like beating on the lid of a coffin:
however one knocks upon it, one will not wake up the dead! No efforts
could warm your accursed cold blood, and you know that better than
I do. Why write? But my mind and heart are burning, and I go on
writing; for some reason I am moved as though this letter still
might save you and me. I am so feverish that my thoughts are
disconnected, and my pen scratches the paper without meaning; but
the question I want to put to you stands before me as clear as
though in letters of flame.

"Why I am prematurely weak and fallen is not hard to explain. Like
Samson of old, I have taken the gates of Gaza on my shoulders to
carry them to the top of the mountain, and only when I was exhausted,
when youth and health were quenched in me forever, I noticed that
that burden was not for my shoulders, and that I had deceived myself.
I have been, moreover, in cruel and continual pain. I have endured
cold, hunger, illness, and loss of liberty. Of personal happiness
I know and have known nothing. I have no home; my memories are
bitter, and my conscience is often in dread