acute and agonizing
his mental distress became. It might be compared with the story of
a hermit who tried to cut a dwelling-place for himself in a virgin
forest; the more zealously he worked with his axe, the thicker the
forest grew. In the end Ivan Dmitritch, seeing it was useless, gave
up reasoning altogether, and abandoned himself entirely to despair
and terror.

He began to avoid people and to seek solitude. His official work
had been distasteful to him before: now it became unbearable to
him. He was afraid they would somehow get him into trouble, would
put a bribe in his pocket unnoticed and then denounce him, or that
he would accidentally make a mistake in official papers that would
appear to be fraudulent, or would lose other people's money. It is
strange that his imagination had never at other times been so agile
and inventive as now, when every day he thought of thousands of
different reasons for being seriously anxious over his freedom and
honour; but, on the other hand, his interest in the outer world,
in books in particular, grew sensibly fainter, and his memory began
to fail him.

In the spring when the snow melted there were found in the ravine
near the cemetery two half-decomposed corpses--the bodies of an
old woman and a boy bearing the traces of death by violence. Nothing
was talked of but these bodies and their unknown murderers. That
people might not think he had been guilty of the crime, Ivan Dmitritch
walked about the streets, smiling, and when he met acquaintances
he turned pale, flushed, and began declaring that there was no
greater crime than the murder of the weak and defenceless. But this
duplicity soon exhausted him, and after some reflection he decided
that in his position the best thing to do was to hide in his
landlady's cellar. He sat in the cellar all day and then all night,
then another day, was fearfully cold, and waiting till dusk, stole
secretly like a thief back to his room. He stood in the middle of
the room till daybreak, listening without stirring. Very early in
the morning, before sunrise, some workmen came into the house. Ivan
Dmitritch knew perfectly well that they had come to mend the stove
in the kitchen, but terror told him that they were police officers
disguised as workmen. He slipped stealthily out of the flat, and,
overcome by terror, ran along the street without his cap and coat.
Dogs raced after him barking, a peasant shouted somewhere behind
him, the wind whistled