are both madmen, there's no denying that! You see, he shocked you - and you came unhinged, since you evidently had the ground prepared for it. But what you describe undoubtedly took place in reality. But it's so extraordinary that even Stravinsky, a psychiatrist of genius, did not, of course, believe you. Did he examine you?' (Ivan nodded.) 'Your interlocutor was at Pilate's, and had breakfast with Kant, and now he's visiting Moscow.' 'But he'll be up to devil knows what here! Oughtn't we to catch him somehow?' the former, not yet definitively quashed Ivan still raised his head, though without much confidence, in the new Ivan. 'You've already tried, and that will do for you,' the guest replied ironically. 'I don't advise others to try either. And as for being up to something, rest assured, he will be! Ah, ah! But how annoying that it was you who met him and not I. Though it's all burned up, and the coals have gone to ashes, still, I swear, for that meeting I'd give Praskovya Fyodorovna's bunch of keys, for I have nothing else to give. I'm destitute.' 'But what do you need him for?' The guest paused ruefully for a long time and twitched, but finally spoke: `You see, it's such a strange story, I'm sitting here for the same reason you are - namely, on account of Pontius Pilate.' Here the guest looked around fearfully and said: The thing is that a year ago I wrote a novel about Pilate.' 'You're a writer?' the poet asked with interest. The guest's face darkened and he threatened Ivan with his fist, then said: `I am a master.' He grew stern and took from the pocket of his dressing-gown a completely greasy black cap with the letter 'M' embroidered on it in yellow silk. He put this cap on and showed himself to Ivan both in profile and full face, to prove that he was a master. `She sewed it for me with her own hands,' he added mysteriously. 'And what is your name?' 'I no longer have a name,' the strange guest answered with gloomy disdain. `I renounced it, as I generally did everything in life. Let's forget it.' Then at least tell me about the novel,' Ivan asked delicately. 'If you please, sir. My life, it must be said, has taken a not very ordinary course,' the guest began. ... A historian by education, he had worked until two years ago at one of the Moscow museums, and, besides that, had also done translations. 'From what languages?' Ivan interrupted curiously. 'I know five languages besides my own,' replied the guest, 'English, French, German, Latin and Greek. Well, I can also read Italian a little.' 'Oh, my!' Ivan whispered enviously. ... The historian had lived solitarily, had no family anywhere and almost no acquaintances in Moscow. And, just think, one day he won a hundred thousand roubles. 'Imagine my astonishment,' the guest in the black cap whispered, 'when I put my hand in the basket of dirty laundry and, lo and behold, it had the same number as in the newspaper. A state bond [1],'' he explained, 'they gave it to me at the museum.' ... Having won a hundred thousand roubles, Ivan's mysterious guest acted thus: bought books, gave up his room on Myasnitskaya ... 'Ohh, that accursed hole! ...' he growled. ...and rented from a builder, in a lane near the Arbat, two rooms in the basement of a little house in the garden. He left his work at the museum and began writing a novel about Pontius Pilate. 'Ah, that was a golden age!' the narrator whispered, his eyes shining. `A completely private little apartment, plus a front hall with a sink in it,' he underscored for some reason with special pride, 'little windows just level with the paved walk leading from the gate. Opposite, only four steps away, near the fence, lilacs, a linden and a maple. Ah, ah, ah! In winter it was very seldom that I saw someone's black feet through my window and heard the snow crunching under them. And in my stove a fire was eternally blazing! But suddenly spring came and through the dim glass I saw lilac bushes, naked at first, then dressing themselves up in green. And it was then, last spring, that something happened far more delightful than getting a hundred thousand roubles. And that, you must agree, is a huge sum of money!' That's true,' acknowledged the attentively listening Ivan. 'I opened my little windows and sat in the second, quite minuscule room.' The guest began measuring with his arms: 'Here's the sofa, and another sofa opposite, and a little table between them, with a beautiful night lamp on it, and books nearer the window, and here a small writing table, and in the first room - a huge room, one hundred and fifty square feet! - books, books and the stove. Ah, what furnishings I had! The extraordinary smell of the lilacs! And my head was getting light with fatigue, and Pilate was flying to the end...' 'White mantle, red lining! I understand!' Ivan exclaimed. 'Precisely so! Pilate was flying to the end, to the end, and I already knew that the last words of the novel would be: "... the fifth procurator of Judea, the equestrian Pontius Pilate". Well, naturally, I used to go out for a walk. A hundred thousand is a huge sum, and I had an excellent suit. Or I'd go and have dinner in some cheap restaurant. There was a wonderful restaurant on the Arbat, I don't know whether it exists now.' Here the guest's eyes opened wide, and he went on whispering, gazing at the moon: 'She was carrying repulsive, alarming yellow flowers in her hand. Devil knows what they're called, but for some reason they're the first to appear in Moscow. And these flowers stood out clearly against her black spring coat. She was carrying yellow flowers! Not a nice colour. She turned down a lane from Tverskaya and then looked back. Well, you know Tverskaya! Thousands of people were walking along Tverskaya, but I can assure you that she saw me alone, and looked not really alarmed, but even as if in pain. And I was struck not so much by her beauty as by an extraordinary loneliness in her eyes, such as no one had ever seen before! Obeying this yellow sign, I also turned down the lane and followed her. We walked along the crooked, boring lane silently, I on one side, she on the other. And, imagine, there was not a soul in the lane. I was suffering, because it seemed to me that it was necessary to speak to her, and I worried that I wouldn't utter a single word, and she would leave, and I'd never see her again. And, imagine, suddenly she began to speak: ' "Do you like my flowers?" 'I remember clearly the sound of her voice, rather low, slightly husky, and, stupid as it is, it seemed that the echo resounded in the lane and bounced off the dirty yellow wall. I quickly crossed to her side and, coming up to her, answered: '"No!" 'She looked at me in surprise, and I suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, understood that all my life I had loved precisely this woman! Quite a thing, eh? Of course, you'll say I'm mad?' 'I won't say anything,' Ivan exclaimed, and added: 'I beg you, go on!' And the guest continued. 'Yes, she looked at me in surprise, and then, having looked, asked thus: '"You generally don't like flowers?" 'It seemed to me there was hostility in her voice. I was walking beside her, trying to keep in step, and, to my surprise, did not feel the least constraint. ' "No, I like flowers, but not this kind," I said. '"Which, then?" '"I like roses." 'Then I regretted having said it, because she smiled guiltily and threw the flowers into the gutter. Slightly at a loss, I nevertheless picked them up and gave them to her, but she, with a smile, pushed the flowers away, and I carried them in my hand. 'So we walked silently for some time, until she took the flowers from my hand and threw them to the pavement, then put her own hand in a black glove with a bell-shaped cuff under my arm, and we walked on side by side.' 'Go on,' said Ivan, 'and please don't leave anything out!' 'Go on?' repeated the visitor. 'Why, you can guess for yourself how it went on.' He suddenly wiped an unexpected tear with his right sleeve and continued: `Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once. As lightning strikes, as a Finnish knife strikes! She, by the way, insisted afterwards that it wasn't so, that we had, of course, loved each other for a long, long time, without knowing each other, never having seen each other, and that she was living with a different man ... as I was, too, then ... with that, what's her ...' 'With whom?' asked Homeless. With that... well... with ...' replied the guest, snapping his fingers. 'You were married?' 'Why, yes, that's why I'm snapping... With that... Varenka ... Manechka ... no, Varenka ... striped dress, the museum ... Anyhow, I don't remember. 'Well, so she said she went out that day with yellow flowers in her hand so that I would find her at last, and that if it hadn't happened, she would have poisoned herself, because her life was empty. 'Yes, love struck us instantly. I knew it that same day, an hour later, when, without having noticed the city, we found ourselves by the Kremlin wall on the embankment. We talked as if we had parted only the day before, as if we had known each other for many years. We arranged to meet the next day at the same place on the Moscow River, and we did. The May sun shone down on us. And soon, very soon, this woman became my secret wife. 'She used to come to me every afternoon, but I would begin waiting for her in the morning. This waiting expressed itself in the moving around of objects on the table. Ten minutes before, I would sit down by the little window and begin to listen for the banging of the decrepit gate. And how curious: before my meeting with her, few people came to our yard - more simply, no one came - but now it seemed to me that the whole city came flocking there. 'Bang goes the gate, bang goes my heart, and, imagine, it's inevitably somebody's dirty boots level with my face behind the window. A knife-grinder. Now, who needs a knife-grinder in our house? To sharpen what? What knives? 'She would come through the gate once, but my heart would pound no less than ten times before that, I'm not lying. And then, when her hour came and the hands showed noon, it even wouldn't stop pounding until, almost without tapping, almost noiselessly, her shoes would come even with my window, their black suede bows held tightly by steel buckles. 'Sometimes she would get mischievous, pausing at the second window and tapping the glass with her toe. That same instant I would be at the window, but the shoe would be gone, the black silk blocking the light would be gone - I'd go and open the door for her. `No one knew of our liaison, I assure you of that, though it never happens. Her husband didn't know, her acquaintances didn't know. In the old house where I had that basement, people knew, of course, they saw that some woman visited me, but they didn't know her name.' `But who is she?' asked Ivan, intrigued in the highest degree by this love story. The guest made a gesture signifying that he would never tell that to anyone, and went on with his story. Ivan learned that the master and the unknown woman loved each other so deeply that they became completely inseparable. Ivan could clearly picture to himself the two rooms in the basement of the house, where it was always twilight because of the lilacs and the fence. The worn red furniture, the bureau, the clock on it which struck every half hour, and books, books, from the painted floor to the sooty ceiling, and the stove. Ivan learned that his guest and his secret wife, from the very first days of their liaison, had come to the conclusion that fate itself had thrown them together at the corner of Tverskaya and that lane, and that they had been created for each other for all time. Ivan learned from the guest's story how the lovers would spend the day. She would come, and put on an apron first thing, and in the narrow front hall where stood that same sink of which the poor patient was for some reason so proud, would light the kerosene stove on the wooden table, prepare lunch, and set it out on the oval table in the first room. When the May storms came and water rushed noisily through the gateway past the near-sighted windows, threatening to flood their last refuge, the lovers would light the stove and bake potatoes in it. Steam rose from the potatoes, the black potato skins dirtied their fingers. Laughter came from the basement, the trees in the garden after rain shed broken twigs, white clusters. When the storms ended and sultry summer came, there appeared in the vase the long-awaited roses they both loved. The man who called himself a master worked feverishly on his novel, and this novel also absorbed the unknown woman. 'Really, there were times when I'd begin to be jealous of it on account of her,' the night visitor come from the moonlit balcony whispered to Ivan. Her slender fingers with sharply filed nails buried in her hair, she endlessly reread what he had written, and after rereading it would sit sewing that very same cap. Sometimes she crouched down by the lower shelves or stood by the upper ones and wiped the hundreds of dusty spines with a cloth. She foretold fame, she urged him on, and it was then that she began to call him a master. She waited impatiently for the already promised last words about the fifth procurator of Judea, repeated aloud in a sing-song voice certain phrases she liked, and said that her life was in this novel. It was finished in the month of August, was given to some unknown typist, and she typed it in five copies. And finally the hour came when he had to leave his secret refuge and go out into life. `And I went out into life holding it in my hands, and then my life ended,' the master whispered and drooped his head, and for a long time nodded the woeful black cap with the yellow letter 'M' on it. He continued his story, but it became somewhat incoherent, one could only understand that some catastrophe had then befallen Ivan's guest. 'For the first time I found myself in the world of literature, but now, when it's all over and my ruin is clear, I recall it with horror!' the master whispered solemnly and raised his hand. 'Yes, he astounded me greatly, ah, how he astounded me!' 'Who?' Ivan whispered barely audibly, fearing to interrupt the agitated narrator. 'Why, the editor, I tell you, the editor! Yes, he read it all right. He looked at me as if I had a swollen cheek, looked sidelong into the corner, and even tittered in embarrassment. He crumpled the manuscript needlessly and grunted. The questions he asked seemed crazy to me. Saving nothing about the essence of the novel, he asked me who I was, where I came from, and how long I had been writing, and why no one had heard of me before, and even asked what in my opinion was a totally idiotic question: who had given me the idea of writing a novel on such a strange theme? Finally I got sick of him and asked directly whether he would publish the novel or not. Here he started squirming, mumbled something, and declared that he could not decide the question on his own, that other members of the editorial board had to acquaint themselves with my work - namely, the critics Latunsky and Ariman, and the writer Mstislav Lavrovich. [2] He asked me to come in two weeks. I came in two weeks and was received by some girl whose eyes were crossed towards her nose from constant lying.' That's Lapshennikova, the editorial secretary,' Ivan said with a smirk. He knew very well the world described so wrathfully by his guest. `Maybe,' the other snapped, 'and so from her I got my novel back, already quite greasy and dishevelled. Trying to avoid looking me in the eye, Lapshennikova told me that the publisher was provided with material for two years ahead, and therefore the question of printing my novel, as she put it, "did not arise". `What do I remember after that?' the master muttered, rubbing his temple. 'Yes, red petals strewn across the tide page, and also the eyes of my friend. Yes, those eyes I remember.' The story of Ivan's guest was becoming more confused, more filled with all sorts of reticences. He said something about slanting rain and despair in the basement refuge, about having gone elsewhere. He exclaimed in a whisper that he did not blame her in the least for pushing him to fight - oh, no, he did not blame her! Further on, as Ivan heard, something sudden and strange happened. One day our hero opened a newspaper and saw in it an article by the critic Ariman, [3] in which Ariman warned all and sundry that he, that is, our hero, had attempted to foist into print an apology for Jesus Christ. 'Ah, I remember, I remember!' Ivan cried out. 'But I've forgotten your name!' 'Let's leave my name out of it, I repeat, it no longer exists,' replied the guest. 'That's not the point. Two days later in another newspaper, over the signature of Mstislav Lavrovich, appeared another article, in which its author recommended striking, and striking hard, at Pilatism and at the icon-dauber who had ventured to foist it (again that accursed word!) into print. 'Dumbfounded by this unheard-of word "Pilatism", I opened a third newspaper. There were two articles in it, one by Latunsky, the other signed with the initials "N.E." I assure you, the works of Ariman and Lavrovich could be counted as jokes compared with what Latunsky wrote. Suffice it to say that Latunsky's article was entitled "A Militant Old Believer". [4] I got so carried away reading the article about myself that I didn't notice (I had forgotten to lock the door) how she came in and stood before me with a wet umbrella in her hand and wet newspapers as well. Her eyes flashed fire, her trembling hands were cold. First she rushed to kiss me, then, in a hoarse voice, and pounding the table with her fist, she said she would poison Latunsky.' Ivan grunted somewhat embarrassedly, but said nothing. 'Joyless autumn days set in,' the guest went on. 'The monstrous failure with this novel seemed to have taken out a part of my soul. Essentially speaking, I had nothing more to do, and I lived from one meeting with her to the next. And it was at that time that something happened to me. Devil knows what, Stravinsky probably figured it out long ago. Namely, anguish came over me and certain forebodings appeared. "The articles, please note, did not cease. I laughed at the first of them. But the more of them that appeared, the more my attitude towards them changed. The second stage was one of astonishment. Some rare falsity and insecurity could be sensed literally in every line of these articles, despite their threatening and confident tone. I had the feeling, and I couldn't get rid of it, that the authors of these articles were not saying what they wanted to say, and that their rage sprang precisely from that. And then, imagine, a third stage came - of fear. No, not fear of these articles, you understand, but fear of other things totally unrelated to them or to the novel. Thus, for instance, I began to be afraid of the dark. In short, the stage of mental illness came. It seemed to me, especially as I was falling asleep, that some very cold and pliant octopus was stealing with its tentacles immediately and directly towards my heart. And I had to sleep with the light on. 'My beloved changed very much (of course, I never told her about the octopus, but she could see that something was going wrong with me), she became thinner and paler, stopped laughing, and kept asking me to forgive her for having advised me to publish an excerpt. She said I should drop everything and go to the south, to the Black Sea, and spend all that was left of the hundred thousand on the trip. 'She was very insistent, and to avoid an argument (something told me I was not to go to the Black Sea), I promised her that I'd do it one of those days. But she said she would buy me the ticket herself. Then I took out all my money - that is, about ten thousand roubles - and gave it to her. ' "Why so much?" she was surprised. 'I said something or other about being afraid of thieves and asked her to keep the money until my departure. She took it, put it in her purse, began kissing me and saying that it would be easier for her to die than to leave me alone in such a state, but that she was expected, that she must bow to necessity, that she would come the next day. She begged me not to be afraid of anything. 'This was at dusk, in mid-October. And she left. I lay down on the sofa and fell asleep without turning on the light. I was awakened by the feeling that the octopus was there. Groping in the dark, I barely managed to turn on the light. My pocket watch showed two o'clock in the morning. I was falling ill when I went to bed, and I woke up sick. It suddenly seemed to me that the autumn darkness would push through the glass and pour into the room, and I would drown in it as in ink. I got up a man no longer in control of himself. I cried out, the thought came to me of running to someone, even if it was my landlord upstairs. I struggled with myself like a madman. I had strength enough to get to the stove and start a fire in it. When the wood began to crackle and the stove door rattled, I seemed to feel slightly better. I dashed to the front room, turned on the light there, found a bottle of white wine, uncorked it and began drinking from the bottle. This blunted the fear somewhat - at least enough to keep me from running to me landlord - and I went back to me stove. I opened the little door, so that the heat began to burn my face and hands, and whispered: ' "Guess that trouble has befallen me ... Come, come, come! ..." 'But no one came. The fire roared in the stove, rain lashed at the windows. Then the final thing happened. I took the heavy manuscript of the novel and the draft notebooks from the desk drawer and started burning them. This was terribly hard to do, because written-on paper burns reluctantly. Breaking my fingernails, I tore up the notebooks, stuck them vertically between the logs, and ruffled the pages with the poker. At times the ashes got the best of me, choking the flames, but I struggled with them, and the novel, though stubbornly resisting, was nevertheless perishing. Familiar words flashed before me, the yellow climbed steadily up the pages, but the words still showed through it. They would vanish only when the paper turned black, and I finished them off with the poker. `Just then someone began scratching quietly at the window. My heart leaped, and having stuffed the last notebook into the fire, I rushed to open the door. Brick steps led up from the basement to the door on the yard. Stumbling, I ran up to it and asked quietly: ' "Who's there?" 'And that voice, her voice, answered: 'It's me...' 'I don't remember how I managed with the chain and hook. As soon as she stepped inside, she clung to me, trembling, all wet, her cheeks wet and her hair uncurled. I could only utter the word: ' "You ... you? ...", and my voice broke, and we ran downstairs. `She freed herself of her overcoat in the front hall, and we quickly went into the first room. With a soft cry, she pulled out of the stove with her bare hands and threw on to the floor the last of what was there, a sheaf that had caught fire from below. Smoke filled the room at once. I stamped out the fire with my feet, and she collapsed on the sofa and wept irrepressibly and convulsively. 'When she calmed down, I said: ' "I came to hate this novel, and I'm afraid. I'm ill. Frightened." 'She stood up and said: ' "God, how sick you are. Why is it, why? But I'll save you. I'11 save you. What is all this?" `I saw her eyes swollen with smoke and weeping, felt her cold hands stroke my forehead. '"I'll cure you, I'll cure you," she was murmuring, clutching my shoulders. "You'll restore it. Why, why didn't I keep a copy?" 'She bared her teeth with rage, she said something else inarticulately. Then, compressing her lips, she began to collect and smooth out the burnt-edged pages. It was some chapter from the middle of the novel, I don't remember which. She neatly stacked the pages, wrapped them in paper, tied them with a ribbon. All her actions showed that she was full of determination, and that she had regained control of herself. She asked for wine and, having drunk it, spoke more calmly: ' "This is how one pays for lying," she said, "and I don't want to lie any more. I'd stay with you right now, but I'd rather not do it that way. I don't want it to remain for ever in his memory that I ran away from him in the middle of the night. He's never done me any wrong ... He was summoned unexpectedly, there was a fire at the factory. But he'll be back soon. I'll talk with him tomorrow morning, I'll tell him that I love another man and come back to you for ever. Or maybe you don't want that? Answer me." ' "Poor dear, my poor dear," I said to her. "I won't allow you to do it. Things won't go well for me, and I don't want you to perish with me." ' "Is that the only reason?" she asked, and brought her eyes dose to mine. '"The only one." 'She became terribly animated, she dung to me, put her arms around my neck and said: ' "I'm perishing with you. In the morning I'll be here." 'And so, the last thing I remember from my life is a strip of light from my front hall, and in that strip of light an uncurled strand of hair, her beret and her eyes filled with determination. I also remember the black silhouette in the outside doorway and the white package. ' "I'd see you home, but it's beyond my strength to come back alone. I'm afraid." ' "Don't be afraid. Bear with it for a few hours. Tomorrow morning I'll be here." `Those were her last words in my life ... Shh! ... `the patient suddenly interrupted himself and raised a finger. 'It's a restless moonlit night tonight.' He disappeared on to the balcony. Ivan heard little wheels roll down the corridor, someone sobbed or cried out weakly. When everything grew still, the guest came back and announced that room 120 had received an occupant. Someone had been brought, and he kept asking to be given back his head. The two interlocutors fell anxiously silent, but, having calmed down, they returned to the interrupted story. The guest was just opening his mouth, but the night was indeed a restless one. There were still voices in the corridor, and the guest began to speak into Ivan's ear, so softly that what he told him was known only to the poet, apart from the first phrase: 'A quarter of an hour after she left me, there came a knock at my window ...' What the patient whispered into Ivan's ear evidently agitated him very much. Spasms repeatedly passed over his face. Fear and rage swam and flitted in his eyes. The narrator pointed his hand somewhere in the direction of the moon, which had long since left the balcony. Only when all sounds from outside ceased to reach them did the guest move away from Ivan and begin to speak more loudly: 'Yes, and so in mid-January, at night, in the same coat but with the buttons torn off, [5] I was huddled with cold in my little yard. Behind me were snowdrifts that hid the lilac bushes, and before me and below - my little windows, dimly lit, covered with shades. I bent down to the first of them and listened - a gramophone was playing in my rooms. That was all I heard, but I could not see anything. I stood there a while, then went out the gate to the lane. A blizzard was frolicking in it. A dog, dashing under my feet, frightened me, and I ran away from it to the other side. The cold, and the fear that had become my constant companion, were driving me to frenzy. I had nowhere to go, and the simplest thing, of course, would have been to throw myself under a tram-car on the street where my lane came out. From far off I could see those light-filled, ice-covered boxes and hear their loathsome screeching in the frost. But, my dear neighbour, the whole thing was that fear possessed every cell of my body. And, just as I was afraid of the dog, so I was afraid of the tram-car. Yes, there is no illness in this place worse than mine, I assure you!' `But you could have let her know,' said Ivan, sympathizing with the poor patient. 'Besides, she has your money. She did keep it, of course?' 'You needn't doubt that, of course she kept it. But you evidently don't understand me. Or, rather, I've lost the ability I once had for describing things. However, I'm not very sorry about that, since I no longer have any use for it. Before her,' the guest reverently looked out at the darkness of the night, `there would lie a letter from a madhouse. How can one send letters from such an address ... a mental patient? ... You're joking, my friend! Make her unhappy? No, I'm not capable of that.' Ivan was unable to object to this, but the silent Ivan sympathized with the guest, he commiserated with him. And the other, from the pain of his memories, nodded his head in the black cap and spoke thus: 'Poor woman ... However, I have hopes that she has forgotten me ...' 'But you may recover ...' Ivan said timidly. 'I am incurable,' the guest replied calmly. 'When Stravinsky says he will bring me back to life, I don't believe him. He is humane and simply wants to comfort me. I don't deny, however, that I'm much better now. Yes, so where did I leave off? Frost, those flying trams... I knew that this clinic had been opened, and set out for it on foot across the entire city. Madness! Outside the city I probably would have frozen to death, but chance saved me. A truck had broken down, I came up to the driver, it was some three miles beyond the city limits, and to my surprise he took pity on me. The truck was coming here. And he took me along. I got away with having my left toes frostbitten. But they cured that. And now this is the fourth month that I've been here. And, you know, I find it not at all bad here. One mustn't make grandiose plans, dear neighbour, really! I, for instance, wanted to go all around the globe. Well, so it turns out that I'm not going to do it. I see only an insignificant piece of that globe. I suppose it's not the very best there is on it, but, I repeat, it's not so bad. Summer is coming, the ivy will twine up on to the balcony. So Praskovya Fyodorovna promises. The keys have broadened my possibilities. There'll be the moon at night. Ah, it's gone! Freshness. It's falling past midnight. Time to go.' Tell me, what happened afterwards with Yeshua and Pilate?' Ivan asked. 'I beg you, I want to know.' 'Ah, no, no,' the guest replied with a painful twitch. 'I cannot recall my novel without trembling. And your acquaintance from the Patriarch's Ponds would do it better than I. Thank you for the conversation. Goodbye.' And before Ivan could collect his senses, the grille closed with a quiet clang, and the guest vanished. CHAPTER 14. Glory to the Cock! His nerves gave out, as they say, and Rimsky fled to his office before they finished drawing up the report. He sat at his desk and stared with inflamed eyes at the magic banknotes lying before him. The findirector's wits were addled. A steady hum came from outside. The audience poured in streams from the Variety building into the street. Rimsky's extremely sharpened hearing suddenly caught the distant trill of a policeman. That in itself never bodes anything pleasant. But when it was repeated and, to assist it, another joined in, more authoritative and prolonged, and to them was added a clearly audible guffawing and even some hooting, the findirector understood at once that something else scandalous and vile had happened in the street. And that, however much he wanted to wave it away, it was closely connected with the repulsive sance presented by the black magician and his assistants. The keen-eared findirector was not mistaken in the least. As soon as he cast a glance out the window on to Sadovaya, his face twisted, and he did not whisper but hissed: 'So I thought!' In the bright glare of the strongest street lights he saw, just below him on the sidewalk, a lady in nothing but a shift and violet bloomers. True, there was a little hat on the lady's head and an umbrella in her hands. The lady, who was in a state of utter consternation, now crouching down, now making as if to run off somewhere, was surrounded by an agitated crowd, which produced the very guffawing that had sent a shiver down the fin-director's spine. Next to the lady some citizen was flitting about, trying to tear off his summer coat, and in his agitation simply unable to manage the sleeve in which his arm was stuck. Shouts and roaring guffaws came from yet another place - namely, the left entrance - and turning his head in that direction, Grigory Danilovich saw a second lady, in pink underwear. She leaped from the street to the sidewalk, striving to hide in the hallway, but the audience pouring out blocked the way, and the poor victim other own flightiness and passion for dressing up, deceived by vile Fagott's firm, dreamed of only one thing - falling through the earth. A policeman made for the unfortunate woman, drilling the air with his whistle, and after the policeman hastened some merry young men in caps. It was they who produced the guffawing and hooting. A skinny, moustachioed cabby flew up to the first undressed woman and dashingly reined in his bony, broken-down nag. The moustached face was grinning gleefully. Rimsky beat himself on the head with his fist, spat, and leaped back from the window. For some time he sat at his desk listening to the street. The whistling at various points reached its highest pitch, then began to subside. The scandal, to Rimsky's surprise, was somehow liquidated with unexpected swiftness. It came time to act. He had to drink the bitter cup of responsibility. The telephones had been repaired during the third part. He had to make calls, to tell what had happened, to ask for help, lie his way out of it, heap everything on Likhodeev, cover up for himself, and so on. Pah, the devil! Twice the upset director put his hand on the receiver, and twice he drew it back. And suddenly, in the dead silence of the office, the telephone burst out ringing by itself right in the findirector's face, and he gave a start and went cold. 'My nerves are really upset, though!' he thought, and picked up the receiver. He recoiled from it instantly and turned whiter than paper. A soft but at the same time insinuating and lewd female voice whispered into the receiver: 'Don't call anywhere, Rimsky, it'll be bad ...' The receiver straight away went empty. With goose-flesh prickling on his back, the findirector hung up the telephone and for some reason turned to look at the window behind him. Through the scant and still barely greening branches of a maple, he saw the moon racing in a transparent cloud. His eyes fixed on the branches for some reason, Rimsky went on gazing at them, and the longer he gazed, the more strongly he was gripped by fear. With great effort, the findirector finally turned away from the moonlit window and stood up. There could no longer be any question of phone calls, and now the findirector was thinking of only one thing - getting out of the theatre as quickly as possible. He listened: the theatre building was silent. Rimsky realized that he had long been the only one on the whole second floor, and a childish, irrepressible fear came over him at this thought. He could not think without shuddering of having to walk alone now along the empty corridors and down the stairs. Feverishly he seized the hypnotist's banknotes from the table, put them in his briefcase, and coughed so as to cheer himself up at least a little. The cough came out slightly hoarse, weak. And here it seemed to him that a whiff of some putrid dankness was coming in under the office door. Shivers ran down the findirector's spine. And then the clock also rang out unexpectedly and began to strike midnight. And even its striking provoked shivers in the findirector. But his heart definitively sank when he heard the English key turning quietly in the lock. Clutching his briefcase with damp, cold hands, the findirector felt that if this scraping in the keyhole were to go on any longer, he would break down and give a piercing scream. Finally the door yielded to someone's efforts, opened, and Varenukha noiselessly entered the office. Rimsky simply sank down into the armchair where he stood, because his legs gave way. Drawing a deep breath, he smiled an ingratiating smile, as it were, and said quietly: 'God, you frightened me...' Yes, this sudden appearance might have frightened anyone you like, and yet at the same time it was a great joy: at least one little end peeped out in this tangled affair. Well, tell me quickly! Well? Well?' Rimsky wheezed, grasping at this little end. 'What does it all mean?!' `Excuse me, please,' the entering man replied in a hollow voice, closing the door, 'I thought you had already left.' And Varenukha, without taking his cap off, walked to the armchair and sat on the other side of the desk. It must be said that Varenukha's response was marked by a slight oddity which at once needled the findirector, who could compete in sensitivity with the seismograph of any of the world's best stations. How could it be? Why did Varenukha come to the findirector's office if he thought he was not there? He had his own office, first of all. And second, whichever entrance to the building Varenukha had used, he would inevitably have met one of the night-watchmen, to all of whom it had been announced that Grigory Danilovich was staying late in his office. But the findirector did not spend long pondering this oddity - he had other problems. 'Why didn't you call? What are all these shenanigans about Yalta?' "Well, it's as I was saying,' the administrator replied, sucking as if he were troubled by a bad tooth. 'He was found in the tavern in Pushkino.' `In Pushkino?! You mean just outside Moscow?! What about the telegrams from Yalta?!' 'The devil they're from Yalta! He got a telegrapher drunk in Pushkino, and the two of them started acting up, sending telegrams marked "Yalta", among other things.' 'Aha ... aha ... Well, all right, all right...' Rimsky did not say but sang out. His eyes lit up with a yellow light. In his head there formed the festive picture of Styopa's shameful dismissal from his job. Deliverance! The findirector's long-awaited deliverance from this disaster in the person of Likhodeev! And maybe Stepan Bogdanovich would achieve something worse than dismissal... The details!' said Rimsky, banging the paperweight on the desk. And Varenukha began giving the details. As soon as he arrived where the findirector had sent him, he was received at once and given a most attentive hearing. No one, of course, even entertained the thought that Styopa could be in Yalta. Everyone agreed at once with Varenukha's suggestion that Likhodeev was, of course, at the Yalta in Pushkino. `Then where is he now?' the agitated findirector int