For more than two hours Lavretsky wandered about the streets of town. The night he had spent in the outskirts of Paris returned to his mind. His heart was bursting and his head, dull and stunned, was filled again with the same dark senseless angry thoughts, constantly recurring. “She is alive, she is here,” he muttered with ever fresh amazement. He felt that he had lost Lisa. His wrath choked him; this blow had fallen too suddenly upon him. How could he so readily have believed in the nonsensical gossip of a journal, a wretched scrap of paper? “Well, if I had not believed it,” he thought, “what difference would it have made? I should not have known that Lisa loved me; she would not have known it herself.” He could not rid himself of the image, the voice, the eyes of his wife... and he cursed himself, he cursed everything in the world.
Wearied out he went towards morning to Lemm’s. For a long while he could make no one hear; at last at a window the old man’s head appeared in a nightcap, sour, wrinkled, and utterly unlike the inspired austere visage which twenty-four hours ago had looked down imperiously upon Lavretsky in all the dignity of artistic grandeur.
“What do you want?” queried Lemm. “I can’t play to you every night, I have taken a decoction for a cold.” But Lavretsky’s face, apparently, struck him as strange; the old man made a shade for his eyes with his hand, took a look at his elated visitor, and let him in.
Lavretsky went into the room and sank into a chair. The old man stood still before him, wrapping the skirts of his shabby striped dressing-gown around him, shrinking together and gnawing his lips.
“My wife is here,” Lavretsky brought out. He raised his head and suddenly broke into involuntary laughter.
Lemm’s face expressed bewilderment, but he did not even smile, only wrapped himself closer in his dressing-gown.
“Of course, you don’t know,” Lavretsky went on, “I had imagined... I read in a paper that she was dead.”
“O—oh, did you read that lately?” asked Lemm.
“Yes, lately.”
“O—oh,” repeated the old man, raising his eyebrows. “And she is here?”