Demons

pension and holding Tuesday gatherings of your friends, who bear no resemblance to anything. Farewell, Stepan Trofimovich.'

'Alea jacta est!' he bowed deeply to her and returned home half dead with agitation.

6: Pyotr Stepanovich Bustles About

I

The day of the fete had been finally fixed, yet von Lembke was growing more and more sad and pensive. He was full of strange and sinister forebodings, and this worried Yulia Mikhailovna greatly. True, all was not well. Our soft former governor had left the administration in some disorder; at the present moment cholera was approaching; there had been a great loss of cattle in some parts; fires had raged all summer in towns and villages, and among the people a foolish murmuring about arson was more and more taking root. Robbery had increased twice over the previous scale. All of this would, of course, have been more than ordinary had there not been other, weightier reasons which disrupted the peace of the hitherto happy Andrei Antonovich.

What struck Yulia Mikhailovna most was that he was becoming taciturn and, strangely, more secretive every day. And what, she wondered, did he have to be secretive about? True, he rarely opposed her, and for the most part was perfectly obedient. On her insistence, for example, two or three highly risky and all but illegal measures were passed with a view to strengthening the governor's power. Several sinister connivances took place with the same aim; people deserving of the courts and Siberia, for example, were put up for awards solely at her insistence. It was decided to leave certain complaints and inquiries systematically unanswered. All this was found out afterwards. Lembke not only signed everything, but did not even discuss the question of the extent of his wife's participation in the fulfillment of his duties. Instead, at times he would suddenly bridle at 'perfect trifles,' which surprised Yulia Mikhailovna. Naturally, he felt a need to reward himself for days of obedience with little moments of rebellion. Unfortunately, Yulia Mikhailovna, for all her perspicacity, was unable to understand this noble refinement of a noble character. Alas! she could not be bothered, and that was the cause of many misunderstandings.

It is not for me to tell of certain things, nor would I be able to. To discuss administrative errors is not my business either, and so I shall also omit entirely the whole administrative side. In beginning this chronicle, I set myself other tasks. Besides, much will be uncovered by the investigation that has now been ordered in our province, one need only wait a bit. However, we still cannot avoid certain explanations.

But to continue with Yulia Mikhailovna. The poor lady (I feel very sorry for her) might have attained all that so attracted and beckoned to her (fame and the rest) quite without such strong and eccentric moves as she set herself from the very first. But either from an excess of poetry, or from the long, sad failures of her early youth, she felt suddenly, with the change in her lot, that she was somehow even all too especially called, almost anointed, one 'o'er whom this tongue of flame blazed up,'^[128] and it was in this tongue that the trouble consisted; after all, it is not a chignon that can go on any woman's head. But there is nothing more difficult than to convince a woman of this truth; on the contrary, anyone who chooses to yes her will succeed, and they all vied with one another in yessing her. The poor woman suddenly found herself the plaything of the most various influences, at the same time fully imagining herself to be original. Many artful dodgers feathered their own nests and took advantage of her simpleheartedness during the brief term of her governorship. And what a hash came of it, under the guise of independence! At the same time she liked large-scale landholding, and the aristocratic element, and the strengthening of the governor's power, and the democratic element, and the new institutions, and order, and freethinking, and little social ideas, and the strict tone of an aristocratic salon, and the all but pot-house casualness of the young people that surrounded her. She dreamed of giving happiness and reconciling the irreconcilable, or, more exactly, of uniting all and sundry in the adoration of her own person. She also had her favorites; she was very fond of Pyotr Stepanovich, who acted, incidentally, through the crudest flattery. But she also liked him for another reason, a most wondrous one and most characteristically revealing of the poor lady: she kept hoping he would point her to a whole state conspiracy! Difficult as it is to imagine, this was so. It seemed to her, for some reason, that there must be a state conspiracy lurking in the province. Pyotr Stepanovich, by his silence in some cases and his hints in others, contributed to the rooting of her strange idea. Whereas she imagined him to be connected with everything revolutionary in Russia, yet at the same time devoted to her to the point of adoration. Uncovering a conspiracy, earning the gratitude of Petersburg, furthering one's career, influencing the youth by 'indulgence' so as to keep them on the brink—all this got along quite well in her fantastic head. After all, she had saved, she had won over Pyotr Stepanovich (of this she was for some reason irrefutably certain), and so she would save others. Not a one, not a one of them would perish, she would save them all; she would sort them out; and thus she would report on them; she would act with a view to higher justice, and even history and all of Russian liberalism would perhaps bless her name; and the conspiracy would be uncovered even so. All profits at once.

But, even so, it was necessary that Andrei Antonovich be a bit brighter for the fete. He absolutely had to be cheered up and reassured. She sent Pyotr Stepanovich to him on this mission, in hopes that he might influence his despondency in some reassuring way known only to himself. Perhaps even with some information delivered, so to speak, at first mouth. She trusted entirely to his adroitness. It was long since Pyotr Stepanovich had been in Mr. von Lembke's study. He flew in precisely at a moment when the patient was in a particularly tense mood.

II

A certain combination had occurred which Mr. von Lembke was simply unable to resolve. In one district (the same one in which Pyotr Stepanovich had recently been feasting) a certain sub-lieutenant had been subjected to a verbal reprimand by his immediate commander. This had happened in front of the whole company. The sub- lieutenant was still a young man, recently come from Petersburg, always sullen and taciturn, with an air of importance, but at the same time short, fat, red-cheeked. He could not endure the reprimand and suddenly charged at his commander with some sort of unexpected shriek that astonished the whole company, his head somehow savagely lowered; struck him and bit him on the shoulder as hard as he could; they were barely able to pull him away. There was no doubt that he had lost his mind; in any case it was discovered that he had been noted lately for the most impossible oddities. For example, he had thrown two icons belonging to his landlord out of his apartment, and chopped one of them up with an axe; and in his room he had placed the works of Vogt, Moleschott, and Buchner^[129] on stands like three lecterns, and before each lectern kept wax church candles burning. From the number of books found in his place it could be concluded that he was a well-read man. If he had had fifty thousand francs, he might have sailed off to the Marquesas Islands like that 'cadet' mentioned with such merry humor by Mr. Herzen in one of his works.^[130] When he was taken, a whole bundle of the most desperate tracts was found in his pockets and in his lodgings.

Tracts are an empty affair of themselves, and in my opinion not at all worrisome. As if we haven't seen enough of them. Besides, these were not even new tracts: exactly the same ones, it was said later, had been spread recently in Kh—— province, and Liputin, who had been in the district capital and the neighboring province about a month and a half earlier, insisted that he had already seen exactly the same leaflets there. But what chiefly struck Andrei Antonovich was that just at the same time the manager of the Shpigulin factory turned in to the police two or three bundles of exactly the same leaflets as the sublieutenant's, which had been left at the factory during the night. The bundles had not even been undone yet, and none of the workers had had time to read even one. The fact was silly, but Andrei Antonovich fell to pondering strenuously. The affair appeared unpleasantly complicated to him.