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 would damage _him_. I remembered that night of the Retreat when he had helped me and, as though he were appealing visibly to me there in the room, I responded; I seemed to feel that he was fighting some battle of his own and that my victory would fortify him. I stood with him beside me. So I fought it, fought it with the sweat dripping down my nose and my tongue dry. "No!" something suddenly cried in me. "If she's his, she's his--I will not take her this way!"--then in a snivelling, miserable fashion I began to cry, simply from exhaustion and nerves and headache. I slipped down into a chair. I sat there feeling utterly beaten and yet in some dim way, as one hears a trumpet sounding behind a range of hills, I was triumphant. There with my head on the table and my nose, I believe, in a plate left from some one's last night's supper, I slept a heavy, dreamless sleep. I woke and heard a clock in the room strike three. I got up, stretched my arms, yawned and knew that my head was clear and my brain at peace. I can't describe my feelings better than by saying that it was as though I had put my brain and my heart and all my fears and terrors under a good stiff pump of cold water. I felt a different man from four hours before, although still desperately tired and physically weak.