The Double

“You lout, you’re drunk! Sleep now, you brigand! But you’re going to get it tomorrow,” Mr. Goliadkin said in a barely audible voice. As for Petrushka, he muttered something more; then he could be heard putting his full weight on the bed, so that the bed creaked, producing a long yawn, stretching out, and finally snoring the sleep of the innocent, as they say. Mr. Goliadkin was neither dead nor alive. Petrushka’s behavior, his hints, which were quite strange, though remote, at which, therefore, there was no point in being angry, the less so as it was all spoken by a drunk man, and, finally, the whole malignant turn that affairs were taking—all this shook Mr. Goliadkin to his foundations. “And I just had to go reprimanding him in the middle of the night,” our hero said, his whole body trembling with some sort of morbid sensation. “And I just couldn’t help dealing with a drunk man! What sense can you expect from a drunk man? His every word is drivel. What was it, however, that he was hinting at, the brigand! Oh, Lord God! And why did I write all those letters, manslayer that I am! suicide that I am! Just couldn’t keep quiet! Had to go driveling! What else! You’re perishing, you’re like an old rag, and yet, no, there’s still vanity, say, my honor’s suffering, say, you must save your honor! Suicide that I am!”

So spoke Mr. Goliadkin, sitting on his sofa and not daring to stir from fear. Suddenly his eye rested on a certain object that aroused his attention to the highest degree. Fearing that the object which aroused his attention was an illusion, a trick of the imagination, he reached out his hand, with hope, with timidity, with indescribable curiosity…No, it was not a trick! not an illusion! A letter, precisely a letter, certainly a letter, and addressed to him…Mr. Goliadkin took the letter from the table. His heart was pounding terribly. “That swindler must have brought it,” he thought, “and put it here, and then forgotten it; it must have happened that way; that’s precisely how it must have happened…” The letter was from the clerk Vakhrameev, a young colleague and erstwhile friend of Mr. Goliadkin’s. “However, I anticipated it all beforehand,” thought our hero, “and everything that will now be in the letter I’ve anticipated as well…” The letter went as follows: