Page 598 - the-idiot

politeness. His house impressed me much; it is like a burial-
ground, he seems to like it, which is, however, quite natural.
Such a full life as he leads is so overflowing with absorbing
interests that he has little need of assistance from his sur-
roundings.
‘The visit to Rogojin exhausted me terribly. Besides, I had
felt ill since the morning; and by evening I was so weak that
I took to my bed, and was in high fever at intervals, and
even delirious. Colia sat with me until eleven o’clock.
‘Yet I remember all he talked about, and every word we
said, though whenever my eyes closed for a moment I could
picture nothing but the image of Surikoff just in the act of
finding a million roubles. He could not make up his mind
what to do with the money, and tore his hair over it. He
trembled with fear that somebody would rob him, and at
last he decided to bury it in the ground. I persuaded him
that, instead of putting it all away uselessly underground,
he had better melt it down and make a golden coffin out of
it for his starved child, and then dig up the little one and put
her into the golden coffin. Surikoff accepted this suggestion,
I thought, with tears of gratitude, and immediately com-
menced to carry out my design.
‘I thought I spat on the ground and left him in disgust.
Colia told me, when I quite recovered my senses, that I had
not been asleep for a moment, but that I had spoken to him
about Surikoff the whole while.
‘At moments I was in a state of dreadful weakness and
misery, so that Colia was greatly disturbed when he left me.
‘When I arose to lock the door after him, I suddenly