Demons

Plodding after the curious crowd, I made my way, without any inquiries, to the most important and dangerous spot, where I finally caught sight of Lembke, whom I was looking for on instructions from Yulia Mikhailovna herself. His position was astonishing and extraordinary. He was standing on the debris of a fence; to the left of him, about thirty steps away, towered the black skeleton of a nearly burnt-down two-story wooden house, with holes instead of windows on both floors, its roof fallen in, and flames still snaking here and there over the charred beams. At the back of the courtyard, about twenty steps away from the burnt-down house, a cottage, also two-storied, was begi

"It's all arson! It's nihilism! If anything's ablaze, it's nihilism!" I heard all but with horror, and though there was no longer anything to be astonished at, still manifest reality always has something shocking about it.

"Your Excellency," a policeman turned up beside him, "if you'd be so good as to try domestic repose, sir... the way it is, it's even dangerous for Your Excellency to be standing here."

This policeman, as I learned later, was purposely left with Andrei Antonovich by the police chief, to watch over him and try as hard as he could to take him home, and in case of danger even to act with force—a charge obviously beyond the powers of its executor.

"The tears of the burnt-out people will be wiped away, but the town will be burned. It's all four blackguards, four and a half. Arrest the blackguard! He's in it alone, and has slandered the four and a half. He worms himself into the honor of families. Governesses have been used to set houses on fire. This is mean, mean! Aie, what is he doing?" he cried, suddenly noticing a fireman on the roof of the blazing cottage, the roof already burned through under him and fire flaring up all around. "Pull him down, pull him down, he'll fall through, he'll catch fire, put him out... What is he doing up there?"

"Putting it out, Your Excellency."

"Unbelievable. The fire is in people's minds, not on the rooftops. Pull him down and drop it all! Better drop it, drop it! Leave it to itself somehow! Aie, who is that still crying? An old woman! An old woman is shouting, why did you forget the old woman?"

Indeed, a forgotten old woman was shouting on the bottom floor of the blazing cottage, the eighty-year-old relative of the merchant who owned the burning house. But she had not been forgotten; she had gone back into the burning house herself while it was possible, with the insane purpose of dragging her feather bed out of the still untouched corner room. Choking from the smoke and shouting from the heat, because that room, too, had caught fire, she was still trying with all her might to push her feather bed through a broken window with her decrepit hands. Lembke rushed to help her. Everyone saw him run up to the window, seize a corner of the feather bed and begin to pull it through the window with all his might. As bad luck would have it, at that very moment a broken board fell from the roof and struck the unfortunate man. It did not kill him, it merely grazed his neck with one end as it fell, but the career of Andrei Antonovich was over, at least among us; the blow knocked him off his feet, and he collapsed unconscious.

At last came a sullen, gloomy dawn. The fire dwindled; after the wind it suddenly became still, and then came a slow, drizzling rain, as if through a sieve. I was by then in another part of Zarechye, far from the spot where Lembke had fallen, and there in the crowd I heard very strange talk. A strange fact had been discovered: at the edge of the quarter, on a vacant lot beyond the kitchen gardens, not less than fifty steps away from the other buildings, there stood a small, recently built wooden house, and this solitary house had burst into flames almost before any of the others, at the very begi

So ran the account of the affair. Further information was added: that the place had been rented for the captain and his sister personally by Mr. Stavrogin, Nikolai Vsevolodovich, General Stavrogin's widow's boy, that he had come personally to rent it, and had been very insistent, because the owner did not want to let it and was intending to make the house a tavern, but Nikolai Vsevolodovich had spared no expense and handed him money for a year in advance.