“You never did see Ancus Marcius, that’s all brag,” cried a voice that sounded full of irritation and even nervous exhaustion.
“Just so,” another voice agreed at once. “There are no such things as ghosts nowadays, nothing but natural science. Look it up in a scientific book.”
“Gentlemen, there was nothing I expected less than such objections,” said Karmazinov, extremely surprised. The great genius had completely lost touch with his Fatherland in Karlsruhe.
“Nowadays it’s outrageous to say that the world stands on three fishes,” a young lady snapped out suddenly. “You can’t have gone down to the hermit’s cave, Karmazinov. And who talks about hermits nowadays?”
“Gentlemen, what surprises me most of all is that you take it all so seriously. However … however, you are perfectly right. No one has greater respect for truth and realism than I have. …”
Though he smiled ironically he was tremendously overcome. His face seemed to express: “I am not the sort of man you think, I am on your side, only praise me, praise me more, as much as possible, I like it extremely. …”
“Gentlemen,” he cried, completely mortified at last, “I see that my poor poem is quite out of place here. And, indeed, I am out of place here myself, I think.”
“You threw at the crow and you hit the cow,” some fool, probably drunk, shouted at the top of his voice, and of course no notice ought to have been taken of him. It is true there was a sound of disrespectful laughter.
“A cow, you say?” Karmazinov caught it up at once, his voice grew shriller and shriller. “As for crows and cows, gentlemen, I will refrain. I’ve too much respect for any audience to permit myself comparisons, however harmless; but I did think …”
“You’d better be careful, sir,” someone shouted from a back row.
“But I had supposed that laying aside my pen and saying farewell to my readers, I should be heard …”
“No, no, we want to hear you, we want to,” a few voices from the front row plucked up spirit to exclaim at last.
“Read, read!” several enthusiastic ladies’ voices chimed in, and at last there was an outburst of applause, sparse and feeble, it is true.
“Believe me, Karmazinov, everyone looks on it as an honour …” the marshal’s wife herself could not resist saying.
“Mr. Karmazinov!” cried a fresh young voice in the back of the hall suddenly. It was the voice of a very young teacher from the district school who had only lately come among us, an excellent young man, quiet and gentlemanly. He stood up in his place. “Mr. Karmazinov, if I had the happiness to fall in love as you have described to us, I really shouldn’t refer to my love in an article intended for public reading. …” He flushed red all over.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” cried Karmazinov, “I have finished. I will omit the end and withdraw. Only allow me to read the six last lines:
“Yes, dear reader, farewell!” he began at once from the manuscript without sitting down again in his chair. “Farewell, reader; I do not greatly insist on our parting friends; what need to trouble you, indeed. You may abuse me, abuse me as you will if it affords you any satisfaction. But best of all if we forget one another forever. And if you all, readers, were suddenly so kind as to fall on your knees and begin begging me with tears, ‘Write, oh, write for us, Karmazinov—for the sake of Russia, for the sake of posterity, to win laurels,’ even then I would answer you, thanking you, of course, with every courtesy, ‘No, we’ve had enough of one another, dear fellow-countrymen, merci! It’s time we took our separate ways!’ Merci, merci, merci!”
Karmazinov bowed ceremoniously, and, as red as though he had been cooked, retired behind the scenes.
“Nobody would go down on their knees; a wild idea!”
“What conceit!”
“That’s only humour,” someone more reasonable suggested.
“Spare me your humour.”
“I call it impudence, gentlemen!”
“Well, he’s finished now, anyway!”
“Ech, what a dull show!”
But all these ignorant exclamations in the back rows (though they were confined to the back rows) were drowned in applause from the other half of the audience. They called for Karmazinov. Several ladies with Yulia Mihailovna and the marshal’s wife crowded round the platform. In Yulia Mihailovna’s hands was a gorgeous laurel wreath resting on another wreath of living roses on a white velvet cushion.
“Laurels!” Karmazinov pronounced with a subtle and rather sarcastic smile. “I am touched, of course, and accept with real emotion this wreath prepared beforehand, but still fresh and unwithered, but I assure you, mesdames, that I have suddenly become so realistic that I feel laurels would in this age be far more appropriate in the hands of a skilful cook than in mine. …”
“Well, a cook is more useful,” cried the divinity student, who had been at the “meeting” at Virginsky’s.
There was some disorder. In many rows people jumped up to get a better view of the presentation of the laurel wreath.
“I’d give another three roubles for a cook this minute,” another voice assented loudly, too loudly; insistently, in fact.
“So would I.”
“And I.”
“Is it possible there’s no buffet? …”
“Gentlemen, it’s simply a swindle. …”
It must be admitted, however, that all these unbridled gentlemen still stood in awe of our higher officials and of the police superintendent, who was present in the hall. Ten minutes later all had somehow got back into their places, but there was not the same good order as before. And it was into this incipient chaos that poor Stepan Trofimovitch was thrust.
IV
I ran out to him behind the scenes once more, and had time to warn him excitedly that in my opinion the game was
