could always find a decent woman. And now his brother had found my wife! ‘True, she is not in her first youth, has lost a side tooth, and there is a slight puffiness about her; but it can’t be helped, one has to take advantage of what one can get,’ I imagined him to be thinking. ‘Yes, it is condescending of him to take her for his mistress!’ I said to myself. ‘And she is safe. … No, it is impossible!’ I thought horror-struck. ‘There is nothing of the kind, nothing! There are not even any grounds for suspecting such things. Didn’t she tell me that the very thought that I could be jealous of him was degrading to her? Yes, but she is lying, she is always lying!’ I exclaimed and everything began anew. … There were only two other people in the carriage; an old woman and her husband, both very taciturn, and even they got out at one of the stations and I was quite alone. I was like a caged animal: now I jumped up and went to the window, now I began to walk up and down trying to speed the carriage up; but the carriage with all its seats and windows went jolting on in the same way, just as ours does. …”
Pózdnyshev jumped up, took a few steps, and sat down again.
“Oh, I am afraid, afraid of railway carriages, I am seized with horror. Yes, it is awful!” he continued. “I said to myself, ‘I will think of something else. Suppose I think of the innkeeper where I had tea,’ and there in my mind’s eye appears the innkeeper with his long beard and his grandson, a boy of the age of my Vásya! ‘He will see how the musician kisses his mother. What will happen in his poor soul? But what does she care? She loves …’ and again the same thing rose up in me. ‘No, no … I will think about the inspection of the District Hospital. Oh, yes, about the patient who complained of the doctor yesterday. The doctor has a moustache like Trukhachévski’s. And how impudent he is … they both deceived me when he said he was leaving Moscow,’ and it began afresh. Everything I thought of had some connection with them. I suffered dreadfully. The chief cause of the suffering was my ignorance, my doubt, and the contradictions within me: my not knowing whether I ought to love or