The Essential Chekhov: Plays, Short Stories, Novel & Biography. Anton Chekhov
then opened my door and came in.’
‘Who was it?’
‘I don’t know; it was dark - I did not see… He stood for about a minute and went away again… exactly as you said… He took the key out of my door and opened the next cell. Two minutes later I heard a guttural sound and then a commotion. I thought it was the warder rushing around, and the sounds I took for snores, otherwise I would have raised the alarm.’
‘Fables,’ I said. ‘There was nobody here but you who could have killed Kuz’ma. The warders were all asleep. The wife of one of them, who could not sleep last night, has given evidence that all three warders slept like dead men and never left their beds for a minute; the poor fellows did not know that such brutes as you could be found in this miserable guard-house. They have been serving here for more than twenty years, and during all that time they have never had a single case of a prisoner having escaped, to say nothing of such an abomination as a murder. Now, thanks to you, their life has been turned upside down; I, too, will have to suffer on your account because I did not send you to the town prison, and even gave you the liberty of walking about the corridors. Thank you!’
This was my last conversation with Urbenin. I never spoke to him again, if I do not count the two or three answers I gave to the questions he put to me when he was seated in the dock.
CHAPTER XXXII
I have said that my novel is a story of crime, and now, when the case of the murder of Olga Urbenin has been complicated by another murder, in many ways mysterious and incomprehensible, the reader is entitled to expect that the novel will enter upon its most interesting and exciting phase. The discovery of the criminal, and the reasons for his crime, offer a wide field for the display of ingenuity and sharp-wittedness. Here evil will and cunning are at war with knowledge and skill, a war that is interesting in all its manifestations…
I was the general leading the battle, and the reader has the right to expect me to describe the means that led to my victory. Doubtless he is expecting all sorts of detective finesses such as adorn the novels of Gaboriau and our Shklyarevsky; and I am ready to satisfy his expectations, but… one of the chief characters leaves the field of battle without waiting for the end of the combat - he is not made a participator in the victory; all that he has done so far is lost for him - he goes over into the crowd of spectators. That character in the drama is your humble servant. On the day following the above conversation with Urbenin I received an invitation, or, more correctly speaking, an order to hand in my resignation. The tittle-tattle and talk of our district gossips had done its work… The murder in the guard-house, the evidence that the Assistant Prosecutor had collected, unknown to me, from the servants, and, if the reader still remembers it, the blow I had dealt a muzhik on the head with an oar on the occasion of one of our former revels, had all greatly contributed to my dismissal. The muzhik started the case. All sorts of charges were made. In the course of two days I had to hand over the investigation to the magistrate in charge of specially important cases.
Thanks to the talk and the newspaper reports, the Prosecutor became absorbed in the affair. He came in person to the Count’s estate every other day and assisted at the examinations. The official reports of our doctors were sent to the medical board, and higher. There was even a question of exhuming the bodies and making a fresh post-mortem examination, which, by the way, would have led to nothing.
Urbenin was taken a couple of times to the chief town of the district to have his mental capacities tested, and both times was found quite normal. I was given the part of witness. The new examining magistrates were so carried away by their zeal that even my Polycarp was called as a witness.
A year after my resignation, when I was living in Moscow, I received a summons to appear at Urbenin’s trial. I was glad of the opportunity of seeing again the places to which I was drawn by habit, and I went. The Count, who was residing in Petersburg, did not attend, but sent a medical certificate instead.
The case was tried in our district town in a division of the Court of Justice. Polugradov — that same Polugradov who cleaned his teeth four times a day with red powder - conducted the prosecution; a certain Smirnyaev, a tall, lean, fair-haired man with a sentimental face and long straight hair, acted for the defence. The jury was exclusively composed of shopkeepers and peasants, of whom only four could read and write; the others, when they were given Urbenin’s letters to his wife to read, sweated and got confused. The chief juryman was Ivan Dem’yanych, the shopkeeper from my village, after whom my late parrot had been named.
When I came into the court I did not recognize Urbenin; he had become quite grey, and looked twenty years older. I had expected to read on his face apathy, and indifference to his fate, but I was mistaken. Urbenin was deeply interested in the trial; he raised objections to three of the jurymen, gave long explanations, and questioned the witnesses; he absolutely denied any guilt, and questioned all the witnesses who did not give evidence in his favour, very minutely.
The witness Pshekhotsky deposed that I had had a connection with the late Olga.
‘That’s a lie!’ Urbenin shouted. ‘He lies! I don’t trust my wife, but I trust him!’
When I gave my evidence the counsel for the defence asked me in what relation I stood to Olga, and told me of the evidence Pshekhotsky, whose unwelcome applause I had once earned, had presented. To have spoken the truth would have been to give evidence in favour of the accused. The more depraved the wife, the more lenient the jury is towards the Othello-husband. I understood this… On the other hand, if I spoke the truth I would have wounded Urbenin… in hearing it he would have felt an incurable pain… I thought it better to lie.
‘No,’ I said.
In his speech the Public Prosecutor described Olga’s murder in vivid colours and drew especial attention to the brutality of the murderer, to his malignancy… ‘An old, worn-out voluptuary saw a girl, young and pretty. Knowing the whole horror of her position in the house of her mad father, he enticed her to come to him by offering her board and lodging, and a few bright-coloured rags… She agreed. An old, well-to-do husband is more easily endured than a mad father and poverty. But she was young, and youth, gentlemen of the jury, possesses its own inalienable rights… A girl brought up on novels, in the midst of nature, sooner or later was bound to fall in love…’ And so on in the same style. It finished up with ‘He who had not given her anything more than his age and a few bright-coloured rags, seeing his prize slipping away from him, becomes as furious as an animal newly branded. He had loved her like an animal and must hate like an animal,’ etc., etc.
In charging Urbenin with Kuz’ma’s murder, Polugradov drew special attention to the stealthy processes, well thought out and weighed, that accompanied the murder of a ‘sleeping man who the day before had had the imprudence to give testimony against him’. ‘I suppose you cannot doubt that Kuz’ma wanted to tell the Public Prosecutor something specially concerning him.’
The counsel for the defence, Smirnyaev, did not deny Urbenin’s guilt; he only begged them to admit that Urbenin had acted under the influence of a state of temporary insanity, and to have indulgence for him. When describing how painful the feelings of jealousy are, he cited as an example Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’. He looked at that ‘universal human figure’ from every side, giving extracts from various critics, and became so confused that the presiding judge had to stop him with the remark that ‘a knowledge of foreign literature was not obligatory for the jurymen’.
Taking advantage of having the last word, Urbenin called God to witness that he was not guilty either in deed or thought.
‘It is all the same to me where I am - in this district where everything reminds me of my unmerited shame and of my wife, or in penal servitude; but it is the fate of my children that is troubling me.’
And, turning to the public, Urbenin began to cry, and begged that his children might be cared for.
‘Take them. The Count will not lose the opportunity of