"Art!—Art.—You once preached it to me, starving. Art; purity; earnestness; sincerity:—the artist-angel you described for me! And now to me you say 'rest,' and 'wait!' Rest, for me, the accursed? Wait, to me, devil-ridden? I have descended, of my own free will, into hell. For five months I have wallowed there. Art and my soul I sold for the dirt they would buy. They are gone. Can you buy them back? or the decency, honesty, cleanliness, youth, I pawned, for filth and more filth? I am saturated with it. I reek with it. It embraces me with octopus arms. Every kopeck, every rouble, has gone to tighten that embrace. It is not to be loosened. I am hell-bound for eternity. And you speak to me of art!
"Leave me, Ivan Gregoriev, to my own. You can never know me. I hate you now. Irina has gone away. Having brought me to this, I disgust her!—Go thou, then, clean body, clean hands, clean heart!—Ach! I hate—hate—hate!
"And there sits my devil—clothed in the scarlet.—Look on her! Look! Look, for the last time, before I pay her her wage of destruction!—So!—There!—And there!—And there!"
It was the canvas containing his first portrait of Irina. Seizing a palette-knife from a neighboring tray of brushes and paints, he stabbed thrice into the canvas, ripping the picture, wickedly, from top to bottom, from side to side.
"Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! You see her?—I damn her there as she has damned me!—Now you have heard my love, Ivan Mikhailovitch! Now you know!—Go, then, out at that door, carrying your knowledge of me into the wide world.—Take care!—Take care!—It is not only pictures I can kill!—You don't know me yet, I tell you.—Go, I command you! Go!—Go!"
Seizing Ivan's coat and cap from the chair on which they lay, Joseph flung them into their owner's arms. Then for the last time the two faced each other, the sane man gazing earnestly into the other's blazing eyes. Evidently Ivan reached his decision in that look; for, without more ado, he donned his fur garments, and then, without a word, left the room.
It was barely half-past eight o'clock next morning when Ivan remounted the stairs leading to Joseph's rooms, expecting to find the madman sunk in the sleep of exhaustion. He found the door unlocked, and the room—empty. Joseph was gone:—out into Moscow, into the cruelty of the frozen city, penniless, friendless, perhaps still mad! Nor did he ever reappear, in any of his old haunts. Search proved fruitless. Irina had done her work thoroughly. Every effort failed to bring the wanderer up out of the dark unknown. Ivan, bitterly rebelling, tried, in his heart, to hope that that distant Polish hut of his youth knew him again: sheltered, in peaceful dissolution, one of the great talents of the age.