He laughed for joy, and even opened his mouth—but suddenly he stood still as though petrified by a terrible thought.
“My God! But she saw me! I demonstrated my face to her for a whole hour. She may meet me somewhere—”
And a long series of possibilities occurred to Mitrofan Krilov; he was an intelligent man, fond of science and art; he frequented theatres, attended various meetings and lectures, and he might meet that girl at any of those places. She never goes alone to such places, he thought; such girls never go alone, but with a whole crowd of student girls and audacious students—and he was terrified at the thought of what might happen when she pointed her finger at him and said: “Here’s a spy!”
“I must take off my spectacles, shave off my beard,” thought Mitrofan. “Never mind the eyes—it may be that the doctor was lying about them. But will my face be changed any if I remove my beard? Is this a beard?”
He touched his thin little beard with his fingers and felt his face.
“Even my beard does not grow properly!” He thought with sorrow and aversion.
“But it is all nonsense. Even if she recognised me it wouldn’t matter. Such a thing must be proven. It must be proven calmly and logically, even as a theorem must be proven.”
He pictured to himself a meeting of the shaggy students, before whom he was defending himself firmly and calmly.
Mitrofan Krilov adjusted his spectacles sternly, with dignity, and smiled contemptuously. Then he began to prove to them—but he convinced himself, to his horror, that all logic and theorem are one thing, while his life was quite another thing, and there were no logic, no proofs in his life to show that Mitrofan Krilov was not a spy. If some one, even that girl, accused him of being a spy, would he find anything definite, clear, convincing in his life by which he could offset this base accusation? Now it seemed to him she looked at him naïvely, with fearless eyes and called him “spy”—and from that straightforward look, and from that cruel word, all the false phantoms of convictions and decency melted away as from fire. Emptiness everywhere. Mitrofan was silent, but his soul was filled with a cry of despair and horror. What did all this mean? Where had it all disappeared? What would he lean upon in order to save himself from falling into that dark and terrible abyss?
“My convictions,” he muttered. “My convictions. Everybody knows them, my convictions. For instance—”