The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky

IT was a little before eight o'clock in the morning when Titular Councillor Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin woke from a long sleep, yawned, stretched, and finally opened his eyes completely. He lay motionless in bed, however, for a couple of minutes more, like a man who is not yet quite sure whether he is awake or still asleep, and whether what is happening around him is real and actual or only the continuation of his disordered dreams. Soon, however, Mr Golyadkin's senses began to receive more clearly and distinctly their usual ordinary impressions. The dingy-green, smoke-begrimed, dusty walls of his little room, his mahogany chest-of-drawers, the imitation mahogany chairs, the red-painted table, the Turkish divan covered in reddish oilcloth with a pattern of little green flowers, and finally the clothes hastily removed the day before and flung down in a heap on the sofa, all looked familiarly back at him. Finally, the dull, dirty, grey autumn day peered into the room at him through the cloudy window-panes with a grimace so sour and bad-tempered that Mr Golyadkin could no longer have the slightest doubt: he was not in some far-distant realm but in the capital, in the town of St Petersburg, in his own flat on the fourth floor of a large and imposing building in Shestilavochny Street. Having made this important discovery, Mr Golyadkin convulsively closed his eyes, as though regretting his recent awakening and wishing to bring his sleep back for a minute. But a moment later he leapt from his bed with one bound, probably because he had at last stumbled upon the idea round which his scattered thoughts, not yet reduced to order, had been revolving. As soon as he had sprung out of bed he ran to the small round mirror standing on his chest-of-drawers. Although the sleepy, short-sighted, rather bald figure reflected in the glass was of such an insignificant character that nobody at all would have found it in the least remarkable at first glance, its owner was evidently quite satisfied with all he saw there. ‘It would be a fine thing,' said Mr Golyadkin half aloud, ‘it would be a fine thing if something was wrong with me today, if a pimple had suddenly appeared out of the blue, for example, or something else disastrous had happened; however, for the moment, it's all right; for the moment everything is going well.' Very pleased that everything was going well, Mr Golyadkin put back the mirror where it had been before and, disregarding the fact that he was barefooted and still wore the costume in which he was accustomed to retire to bed, he ran to the window and with great concern began searching with his eyes for something in the courtyard on which the windows of his apartment looked out. Whatever he was looking for in the courtyard was evidently also completely satisfactory; his face lighted up with a complacent smile. Then, but not before glancing behind the partition into the cubby-hole where his servant Petrushka slept, to make sure that Petrushka was not there, he tiptoed to the table, opened a drawer in it, rummaged in the very back of the drawer and finally drew out a shabby green wallet from under some yellowed old papers and odd scraps of rubbish, opened it carefully and peered with cautious enjoyment into its innermost hidden pocket. The packet of green, grey, blue, red and rainbow-coloured paper inside it seemed to look back at Mr Golyadkin in a friendly and approving fashion; with a beaming countenance he laid the open wallet in front of him on the table and briskly rubbed his hands together in token of extreme delight. Finally he took it out, his comforting packet of bank-notes, and began for the hundredth time since the previous day to count them over, carefully rubbing each piece of paper between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Seven hundred and fifty roubles,' he concluded at last in a low voice. ‘Seven hundred and fifty roubles. an impressive sum! It's a nice amount,' he went on, in a voice trembling and somewhat faint with satisfaction, pressing the packet between his hands and smiling significantly, ‘a very nice amount! Anybody at all would think so! I'd like to see the man for whom it was a trifle! That amount could take a man a long way. '

‘But what is going on?' thought Mr Golyadkin; ‘where is Petrushka?' Still in the same costume, he looked behind the partition for the second time. Again Petrushka was not there, there was nothing there but the samovar that was now raging and hissing fiercely, almost beside itself with anger and threatening to boil over any minute, gabbling away in its strange gibberish, lisping and babbling to Mr Golyadkin, probably, something like, ‘Come along, good people, here I am, use me, I'm quite ready and waiting.'