I had had was suddenly flung into this moment. I was
in our sitting-room now, pitch dark because shutters had been placed
outside the windows to guard against bullets. I stood there in my
shirt and drawers: shuddering, shivering with hatred of myself,
shivering with fear of Semyonov, shivering above all, with a
desperate, agonising, torturing hunger for Marie. Semyonov's voice had
appalled me. I hadn't realised before how strongly I had relied on his
not truly caring for her. Everything in the man had seemed to persuade
me of this, and I had even flattered myself on my miserable
superiority to him, that I was the true faithful lover and he the
vulgar sensualist. How small now I seemed beside him!--and how I
feared him! Then I was at sudden fierce grip with the beast!... At
grips at last!

I had once before, on another night, been tempted to kill myself, but
that had been nothing to this. Now sick and ill, faint for food, I
swayed there on the floor, hearing always in my ear--"Give way! Give
way!... You'll be in front of him, you'll have left him behind you, he
can do nothing ... a moment more and you can be with her--and he
cannot reach you!"

I do not know how long I fought there. I was not fighting with an evil
devil, a fearful beast as in my dreams I had always imagined it--I was
fighting myself: every weakness in the past to which I had ever
surrendered, every little scrap of personal history, every slackness
and cowardice and lethargy was there on the floor against me.

I don't know what it was that prevented me stealing back to my room,
fetching my revolver and so ending it. I could see Marie close to me,
to be reached by the stretching of a finger. I could see myself living
on, always conscious of Semyonov, his thick beastly confident body
always there between myself and her.

I sank into the last depths of self-despair and degradation. No fine
thing saved me, no help from noble principles, nothing fine. The whole
was as sordid as possible. I knew, even as I struggled, that I was a
silly figure there, with my bony ugliness, in my shirt and drawers,
my hair on end and my teeth chattering. But I responded, I suppose, to
some little pulse of manly obstinacy that beat somewhere in me. I
would _not_ be beaten by the Creature. Even in the middle of it I
realised that this was the hardest tussle of my life and worth
fighting. I know too that some thought of Nikitin came to me as
though, in some way, my failure woul