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I’ll take it to The Citizen;17 they also exhibited the portrait of some editor. Maybe they’ll print it.
THE MEEK ONE
A FANTASTIC STORY
From the Author
I BEG MY readers’ pardon for giving them this time, instead of the Diary in its usual form, simply a long story. But I have in fact been occupied with this story for the better part of the month. In any case, I beg the readers’ indulgence.
Now about the story itself. I have termed it “fantastic,” though I myself consider it realistic in the highest degree. But there is indeed a fantastic side to it, and namely in the very form of the story, which I find it necessary to clarify beforehand.
The thing is that this is not a story and not notes. Imagine to yourself a husband whose wife is lying on the table,1 a suicide, who a few hours earlier threw herself out the window. He is in bewilderment and has not yet had time to collect his thoughts. He paces his rooms and tries to make sense of what has happened, “to collect his thoughts to a point.” Besides, he is an inveterate hypochondriac, of the sort that talks to himself. Here he is, then, talking to himself, telling the matter over, figuring it out for himself. Despite the seeming consistency of his speech, he contradicts himself several times, both in logic and in feelings. He justifies himself, and accuses her, and launches into extraneous explanations: there is coarseness of thought and heart here; there is also deep feeling. Little by little he actually figures out the matter and collects his “thoughts to a point.” A series of memories he calls up brings him irresistibly to the truth; the truth irresistibly elevates his mind and heart. Toward the end even the tone of the story changes, as compared with its disorderly begi
That is the theme. Of course, the process of telling goes on for several hours, in bits and snatches, and in incoherent form: now he talks to himself, now it is as if he addresses an invisible listener, some judge. But so it always happens in reality. If a stenographer could eavesdrop and write it all down after him, it would come out a bit rougher, less polished than I have presented it, but, for all I can see, the psychological order would perhaps remain the same. Now, this supposition of a stenographer who could write it all down (after which I would polish what was written) is what I call fantastic in this story. But a somewhat similar thing has been allowed in art more than once: Victor Hugo, for instance, in his masterpiece The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Death, employed almost the same method, and though he introduced no stenographer, he allowed for still greater implausibility, supposing that a man condemned to death is able (and has time) to write notes not only on his last day, but even in his last hour and literally his last minute. But had he not allowed this fantasy, the work itself would not exist—the most realistic and truthful of all he wrote.
CHAPTER ONE
I
WHO I WAS AND WHO SHE WAS
…SO LONG as she’s here—everything is still all right: I go over and look every moment; but tomorrow she’ll be taken away and—how am I to stay alone? She’s in the big room now, on a table, we put two card tables together, and the coffin will come tomorrow, a white one, white gros de Naples, but, anyhow, it’s not that… I keep pacing and want to figure it out for myself. It’s already six hours now that I’ve been wanting to figure it out and I simply can’t collect my thoughts to a point. The thing is that I keep pacing, pacing, pacing… Here is how it was. I’ll simply tell it in order (order!). Gentlemen, I’m far from being a writer, and you can see that, and let it be so, but I’ll tell it as I understand it. There’s my whole horror—that I understand everything!
This, if you want to know, that is, if we take it from the very begi
This time, that is, after Moser, she brought an amber cigar holder—a so-so little thing, for an amateur, but once again worth nothing with us, because we take only gold. Since she came after the previous day’s rebellion, I met her sternly. Ster