“He left a wife and child,” said Startchenko. “I would forbid neurasthenics and all people whose nervous system is out of order to marry, I would deprive them of the right and possibility of multiplying their kind. To bring into the world nervous, invalid children is a crime.”

“He was an unfortunate young man,” said Von Taunitz, sighing gently and shaking his head. “What a lot one must suffer and think about before one brings oneself to take one’s own life,…a young life! Such a misfortune may happen in any family, and that is awful. It is hard to bear such a thing, insufferable.…”

And all the girls listened in silence with grave faces, looking at their father. Lyzhin felt that he, too, must say something, but he couldn’t think of anything, and merely said:

“Yes, suicide is an undesirable phenomenon.”

He slept in a warm room, in a soft bed covered with a quilt under which there were fine clean sheets, but for some reason did not feel comfortable: perhaps because the doctor and Von Taunitz were, for a long time, talking in the adjoining room, and overhead he heard, through the ceiling and in the stove, the wind roaring just as in the Zemstvo hut, and as plaintively howling: “Oo-oo-oo-oo!”

Van Taunitz’s wife had died two years before, and he was still unable to resign himself to his loss and, whatever he was talking about, always mentioned his wife; and there was no trace of a prosecutor left about him now.

“Is it possible that I may some day come to such a condition?” thought Lyzhin, as he fell asleep, still hearing through the wall his host’s subdued, as it were bereaved, voice.

The examining magistrate did not sleep soundly. He felt hot and uncomfortable, and it seemed to him in his sleep that he was not at Von Taunitz’s, and not in a soft clean bed, but still in the hay at the Zemstvo hut, hearing the subdued voices of the witnesses; he fancied that Lesnitsky was close by, not fifteen paces away. In his dreams he remembered how the insurance agent, black-haired and pale, wearing dusty high boots, had come into the bookkeeper’s office. “This is our insurance agent.…”

Then he dreamed that Lesnitsky and Loshadin the constable were walking through the open country in the snow, side by side, supporting each other; the snow was whirling about their heads, the wind was blowing on their backs, but they walked on, singing: “We go on, and on, and on.…”

The old man was like a magician in an opera, and both of them were singing as though they were on the stage:

“We go on, and on, and on!…You are in the warmth, in the light and snugness, but we are walking in the frost and the storm, through the deep snow.…We know nothing of ease, we know nothing of joy.…We bear all the burden of this life, yours and ours.…Oo-oo-oo-oo! We go on, and on, and on.…”

Lyzhin woke and sat up in bed. What a confused, bad dream! And why did he dream of the constable and the agent together? What nonsense! And now while Lyzhin’s heart was throbbing violently and he was sitting on his bed, holding his head in his hands, it seemed to him that there really was something in common between the lives of the insurance agent and the constable. Don’t they really go side by side holding each other up? Some tie unseen, but significant and essential, existed between them, and even between them and Von Taunitz and between all men—all men; in this life, even in the remotest desert, nothing is accidental, everything is full of one common idea, everything has one soul, one aim, and to understand it it is not enough to think, it is not enough to reason, one must have also, it seems, the gift of insight into life, a gift which is evidently not bestowed on all. And the unhappy man who had broken down, who had killed himself—the “neurasthenic,” as the doctor called him—and the old peasant who spent every day of his life going from one man to another, were only accidental, were only fragments of life for one who thought of his own life as accidental, but were parts of one organism—marvellous and rational—for one who thought of his own life as part of that universal whole and understood it. So