Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume VII).djvu/250

Rh of his pocket the small object that he had found in the table drawer. Then he looked attentively at the windows of the little lodge. 'If any one catches sight of me this minute,' he thought, 'then, perhaps, I will put it off.' But nowhere was there a sign of one human face  everything seemed dead, everything had turned away from him, gone for ever, left him to the mercy of fate. Only the factory thickly roared and hummed, and overhead fine keen drops of chilly rain began falling.

Then Nezhdanov, glancing through the crooked branches of the tree under which he was standing, at the low, grey, callously blind, damp sky, yawned, shrugged, thought, 'There's nothing else left—I'm not going back to Petersburg, to prison,' flung away his cap, and feeling already all over a sort of mawkish, heavy, overpowering languor, he put the revolver to his breast, pulled the trigger.

Something seemed to strike him at once, not very violently even but he was lying on his back, trying to understand what had happened to him, and how he had just seen Tatyana. He even tried to call her, to say, 'Ah, I don't want ' but now he was numb all over, and there was a whirl of muddy green turning round and round over his face, in his eyes, on his head, in the marrow of his bones—and a sort