"It came at last," said the man in charge of the luggage depot, "thank
God I won't see your muzzle any more. What's in it?"
"Since when has it been your business, your burjooi honor?" I said, "You did not pay me for buying my belongings, so better keep your trap shut!"
I took the dear old bag—it was Maroosia's before, and came home. What did Mlle. Goroshkin put in the bag in Moscow? I opened the rusty lock—and found my silver toilet kit, razors, "La Question du Maroc," on which the shaving soap had made a big yellow spot, Laferme cigarettes, some linen (the thing I need the most), night slippers, manicuring box, and poor Maroossia's fan,—she wired me to take it to Gurzoof in the last telegram I ever got from her.
The fan was fragrant with her perfume on it; so I shed a few tears. On the inside of the bag was written "All well, write often," and on the bottom of the bag—was this book of my notes. I had decided to sell the silver kit and the fan and get some money as I was very short of it. Both the fan and the silver outfit looked so inharmonious in my little room with a small window on a triste court with a yard full of blindingly white snow.
21
Here is what brought me here:
I could not leave Petrograd on time on account of the house. Nobody wanted it for 800,000. I waited and waited—day after day, week after week. Many and many were giving me advice to leave and were warning me, but I would not listen. When the wire came that poor Maroossia was killed,—I lost interest in life completely. So I was living in Petrograd, until the clash for the Assembly. Then,—perhaps my nerves needed a good shaking up,—I became active again. I went to the Volga Kama for my money,—the were already closed and gave me 150 rubles, and allowed me to take another 150 in a week. I went to the Volkov's. The clerk said that I had no right to withdraw more than 150. I knew the man from Moscow well, and he recognized me from the time that I was coming to Bros. Djamgarov Bank. He was really kind, and said that he could at once arrange that I should receive 80% of my money and the contents in the safe, out of which 10% should be paid to some mysterious commissary. "I advise you to take it. The appetites are growing, and perhaps to-morrow it will be more,—50% or 60%." I wrote out some kind of understanding, by which I sold my rights on the 10th of October to a certain Kagajitsky. That was all fake, as my arrangement was made about the 23rd of November, I guess.
My ticket, for which they asked me 12,000 rubles, was obtained through the cook's sweetheart, and I left Petrograd on the 6th for Moscow on the usual 12:30, and arrived uneventfully at the depot in Moscow next morning at about 10:30.
On the stairs of the Nikolaevsky depot I stopped. Where was I going? In fact I had never thought of it. I had no place, no destination, no desires—nothing. Perhaps only one desire, to avenge myself and all of us.
So I hesitated, for in Moscow they had been shooting right and left for the past week, persecuting the burjoois and officers. I had never felt so helpless and so unnecessary to myself and to others as on this snowy morning in Moscow. Besides, all of the way from Petrograd to Moscow I had had a hideous headache and chills, and I was in a fog of indifference.