The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky

ALL Mr Golyadkin's time that morning was full of intense activity. Reaching the Nevsky Prospect, our hero ordered the carriage to stop near the Arcades. He jumped out and hurried into one of the arcades, accompanied by Petrushka; there he went straight to a goldsmith's and silversmith's. It was evident from the very look of him that Mr Golyadkin had his hands full with the enormous number of things he had to do. Having bargained for a complete tea and dinner service for something over fifteen hundred paper roubles, managed to get a cigar-case of elaborate design and a full set of shaving equipment in silver included in the total, and finally priced some other useful and pretty little articles, Mr Golyadkin ended by promising to send for the things without fail next morning, or even that day, made a note of the number of the shop and, after listening attentively to the merchant's anxious request for a deposit, promised a deposit as well in due course. After that he hastily took leave of the bewildered merchant and walked further along the row, pestered by a whole pack of shop-assistants, looking round constantly for Petrushka and carefully searching for another shop. In passing, he darted into a moneychanger's to change all his large notes for smaller, and although he lost by the transaction, all the same he changed them, and his wallet became appreciably fatter, which evidently gave him the utmost satisfaction. Finally he stopped in a shop selling all kinds of materials for ladies. Here again, having committed himself to spending a sizable sum of money, Mr Golyadkin promised the proprietress to call without fail for the goods, took the number of the shop and, in answer to a question about a deposit, again stated that there would be a deposit in due course. Then he visited several more shops; in all of them he haggled, priced various articles, and sometimes argued for a long time with the shopkeeper, walking out of the shop and returning to it as many as three times – in short, he displayed extraordinary activity. From the Arcades our hero took his way to a famous furniture-shop, where he chaffered over furniture for six rooms, admired a fashionable and extremely elaborate lady's dressing-table in the latest taste and, assuring the proprietress that he would not fail to send for everything, left the shop in his usual way, with a promise to pay a deposit, and then went on elsewhere and made further purchases. In short, there seemed to be no end to what he had to do. Finally, all this apparently began to be utterly tiresome even to Mr Golyadkin himself. He even began, God knows why, to suffer from the prickings of conscience all of a sudden. He would not now have willingly met, for example, Andrey Philippovich or even Christian Ivanovich. At last the town clocks struck three in the afternoon. When Mr Golyadkin got back into his carriage for the last time, he actually had, out of all the purchases he had made that day, only a pair of gloves and a bottle of scent costing one and a half paper roubles. Since it was still rather early, he ordered his coachman to draw up at a famous restaurant in the Nevsky Prospect, which he had until then known only by reputation, got out of the carriage and went in for something to eat and a rest, and to wait for a certain hour.

Having eaten as a man eats in contemplation of a rich dinnerparty, that is having taken a bite ‘to stay the pangs of hunger', as they say, and drunk one glass of vodka, Mr Golyadkin sat down in an armchair, glanced modestly about him, and peacefully applied himself to the columns of a thick national newspaper. He read a couple of lines, got up, looked at himself in a mirror, straightened his dress and smoothed himself down; then he walked over to the window and looked to see whether his carriage was there. and then sat down and took up the paper again. It was evident that our hero was in an extremely nervous state. Looking at his watch and seeing that it was only a quarter past three and that consequently there was still some time to wait, Mr Golyadkin, finding it awkward to sit there in that fashion, ordered some chocolate, for which, however, he had no great inclination at the moment. When he had drunk the chocolate and observed that the time had progressed a little, he went out to pay his bill. Suddenly somebody slapped his shoulder.