“And I’ve been that way for a long time...more than a month...a month and a half, maybe...Yes, more than a month, because I found out about this on the Trinity...”
Platonov quickly rubbed his forehead with his hand. “Wait a while, I’ve recalled it...This was that day I was there together with the students...isn’t that so?”
“That’s right, Sergei Ivanovich, that’s so...”
“Ah, Jennka,” said Platonov reproachfully and with regret. “For do you know, that after this two of the students got sick...Wasn’t it from you?”
Jennka wrathfully and disdainfully flashed her eyes.
“Perhaps even from me...How should I know? There were a lot of them...I remember there was this one, now, who was even trying to pick a fight with you all the time ...A tall sort of fellow, fair-haired, in pince-nez...”
“Yes, yes...That’s Sobashnikov. They passed the news to me...That’s he...that one was nothing—a little coxcomb! But then the other—him I’m sorry for. Although I’ve known him long, somehow I never made the right inquiries about his name...I only remember that he comes from some city or other—Poliyansk...Zvenigorodsk... His comrades called him Ramses...When the physicians—he turned to several physicians—when they told him irrevocably that he had the lues, he went home and shot himself...And in the note that he wrote there were amazing things, something like this: I supposed all the meaning of life to be in the triumph of mind, beauty and good; with this disease I am not a man, but junk, rottenness, carrion; a candidate for a progressive paralytic. My human dignity cannot reconcile itself to this. But guilty in all that has happened, and therefore in my death as well, am I alone; for that I, obeying a momentary bestial inclination, took a woman without love, for money. For that reason have I earned the punishment which I myself lay upon me...”
“I am sorry for him...” added Platonov quietly.
Jennka dilated her nostrils.
“But I, now, not the very least bit.”