his heart sank and he felt frightened like a child; and it seemed to him
that in this alien, incomprehensible world people wanted to pursue him,
to beat him, to pelt him with filthy words.... He tore down his coat
from the hatstand and ran headlong downstairs.

V

Leaning against the fence, he stood near the house waiting for his
friends to come out. The sounds of the pianos and violins, gay,
reckless, insolent, and mournful, mingled in the air in a sort of chaos,
and this tangle of sounds seemed again like an unseen orchestra tuning
up on the roofs. If one looked upwards into the darkness, the black
background was all spangled with white, moving spots: it was snow
falling. As the snowflakes came into the light they floated round lazily
in the air like down, and still more lazily fell to the ground. The
snowflakes whirled thickly round Vassilyev and hung upon his beard,
his eyelashes, his eyebrows.... The cabmen, the horses, and the
passers-by were white.

"And how can the snow fall in this street!" thought Vassilyev.
"Damnation take these houses!"

His legs seemed to be giving way from fatigue, simply from having run
down the stairs; he gasped for breath as though he had been climbing
uphill, his heart beat so loudly that he could hear it. He was consumed
by a desire to get out of the street as quickly as possible and to go
home, but even stronger was his desire to wait for his companions and
vent upon them his oppressive feeling.

There was much he did not understand in these houses, the souls of