Demons

her with contempt and unconcealed derision. Stepan Trofimovich hinted to me afterwards, in bitter moments, that it was then that she had begun to envy him. Of course, she understood that she ought not to associate with these people, but still she received them avidly, with all of a woman's hysterical impatience, and, above all, kept expecting something. At her evenings she spoke little, though she could speak, but rather listened. They talked about the abolition of censorship, about spelling reform, about replacing Russian letters with Roman, about someone's exile the day before, about some scandal in the Passage, about the advantages of dividing Russia into a free federation of nationalities, about abolishing the army and navy, about restoring Poland up to the Dnieper, about peasant reform and tracts, about the abolition of inheritance, the family, children, and priests, about women's rights, about Kraevsky's house, for which no one would ever forgive Mr. Kraevsky, and so on and so forth. ^[16] It was clear that among this rabble of new people there were many swindlers, but it was also unquestionable that there were many honest and even quite attractive persons, despite certain nonetheless surprising nuances. The honest ones were far more incomprehensible than the rude and dishonest ones; but it was not clear who was making use of whom. When Varvara Petrovna announced her idea of publishing a magazine, still more people came flocking to her, but accusations also immediately flew in her face that she was a capitalist and an exploiter of labor. The unceremoniousness of the accusations was equaled only by their unexpectedness. The elderly general Ivan Ivanovich Drozdov, a former friend and fellow officer of the late general Stavrogin, a most worthy man (though in his own way), known to all of us here, extremely obstinate and irritable, who ate terribly much and was terribly afraid of atheism, began arguing at one of Varvara Petrovna's evenings with a famous young man. The latter said straight off: 'Well, you're a general if you talk like that,' meaning that he could not even find any worse abuse than a general. Ivan Ivanovich got extremely fired up: 'Yes, sir, I am a general, a lieutenant general, and I've served my sovereign, and you, sir, are a brat and an atheist!' An impossible scandal took place. Next day the incident was exposed in the press and signatures were gathered under a collective letter against the 'outrageous act' of Varvara Petrovna in not wishing to throw the general out at once. A caricature appeared in an illustrated magazine, caustically portraying Varvara Petrovna, the general, and Stepan Trofimovich together as three retrograde cronies; the picture was accompanied by some verses written by a people's poet solely for the occasion. I will add, for my part, that in fact many persons with the rank of general have the habit of saying ludicrously: 'I have served my sovereign...' as if they did not have the same sovereign as the rest of us, the sovereign's ordinary subjects, but their own special one.

To remain any longer in Petersburg was, of course, impossible, the more so in that Stepan Trofimovich also suffered a final fiasco. He could not help himself and started proclaiming the rights of art, and they started laughing at him all the louder. At his last reading he decided to employ civic eloquence, fancying he would touch people's hearts and counting on their respect for his 'exile.' He unquestioningly agreed that the word 'fatherland' was useless and comical; he also agreed with the notion of the harmfulness of religion; but he loudly and firmly proclaimed that boots are lower than Pushkin, even very much so.^[17] He was hissed so mercilessly that he burst into tears right there, publicly, before he even got off the platform. Varvara Petrovna brought him home more dead than alive. 'On m'a traite comme un vieux bonnet de coton!'^[i] he babbled senselessly. She spent the whole night looking after him, gave him laurel water, and kept telling him until dawn: 'You are still useful; you will still make your appearance; you will be appreciated... elsewhere.'

The very next day, early in the morning, five writers called on Varvara Petrovna, three of them complete strangers whom she had never set eyes on before. They announced to her with stern faces that they had looked into the case of her magazine and had brought her their decision about it. Varvara Petrovna had decidedly never asked anyone to look into or decide anything about her magazine. The decision was that, after founding the magazine, she should at once turn it over to them, along with the capital, under the rights of a free co-operative; and she herself should leave for Skvoreshniki, and not forget to take along Stepan Trofimovich, 'who was obsolete.' From delicacy they agreed to acknowledge her right of ownership and to send her one sixth of the net income annually. Most touching of all was that, of these five people, four certainly had no mercenary motive, but were busying themselves only for the sake of the 'common cause.'

'We left as if in a daze,' Stepan Trofimovich used to say. 'I was unable to sort anything out and, I remember, kept muttering to the click-clack of the wheels:

Vek and Vek and Lev Kambek, Lev Kambek and Vek and Vek…^[18] and devil knows what else, all the way to Moscow. It was only in Moscow that I came to my senses—as if indeed I could have found anything different there! Oh, my friends,' he sometimes exclaimed, inspired, 'you cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one's whole soul when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children! No! It was not so in our day, that is not what we strove for. No, no, not that at all. I recognize nothing... Our day will come once more, and once more turn all this wavering, all this present, onto a firm path. Otherwise what will there be?...'

VII

Immediately after their return from Petersburg, Varvara Petrovna sent her friend abroad—to 'rest'; besides, they needed to be apart for a time, so she felt. Stepan Trofimovich was delighted to go. 'I shall resurrect there!' he kept exclaiming. 'There I shall finally take up my studies!' But with his first letters from Berlin he struck his perennial note. 'My heart is broken,' he wrote to Varvara Petrovna. 'I can forget nothing! Here in Berlin everything reminds me of the old days, of my past, my first raptures, and my first torments. Where is she? Where are they both? Where are you, my two angels, of whom I was never worthy? Where is my son, my beloved son? Where, finally, am I, I myself, my former self, strong as steel and unshakable as rock, while now some Andrejeff, un Orthodox clown in a beard, peut briser mon existence en deux,'^[ii] etc., etc. As for Stepan Trofimovich's son, he had seen him only twice in his life, the first time when he was born, and the second time recently in Petersburg, where the young man was preparing to enter the university. The boy, as has already been mentioned, had been brought up all his life by his aunts (at Varvara Petrovna's keeping), in —— province, five hundred miles from Skvoreshniki. And as for Andrejeff—that is, Andreev—he was simply one of our local merchants, a shopkeeper, a great eccentric, a self-taught archaeologist and passionate collector of Russian antiquities, who had occasional altercations with Stepan Trofimovich on learned matters, but above all to do with trends. This venerable merchant, with a gray beard and big silver spectacles, still owed Stepan Trofimovich four hundred roubles for the purchase of several acres of timber on his little estate (near Skvoreshniki). Though Varvara Petrovna lavishly provided her friend with means on sending him to Berlin, Stepan Trofimovich had still been counting especially on getting those four hundred roubles before he left, probably for his secret expenses, and nearly wept when Andrejeff asked him to wait a month—which, by the way, he had the right to do, since he had paid the first installment almost half a year ahead of time, because Stepan Trofimovich had had special need of it then. Varvara Petrovna read this first letter greedily and, having underlined in pencil the exclamation: 'Where are you both?' dated it and locked it away in a box. He was, of course, recalling his two deceased wives. In the second letter that came from Berlin there was a variation in the tune: 'I work twelve hours a day ['Or maybe just eleven,' Varvara Petrovna grumbled], burrowing in the libraries, checking, taking notes, rushing about; have called on professors. Renewed my acquaintance with the excellent Dundasov family. How charming Nadezhda Nikolaevna is, even now! She sends her regards. Her young husband and all three nephews are in Berlin. In the evenings I converse with the young people till dawn, and we have almost Athenian nights,^[19] though only in terms of refinement and elegance; it is all quite noble: there is a lot of music, Spanish airs, dreams of universal renewal, the idea of eternal beauty, the Sistine Madonna,^[20] a light shot through with darkness, but then there are spots even on the sun! Oh, my friend, my noble, faithful friend! In my heart I am with you and am yours, always with you alone, en tout pays, even dans le pays de Makar et de ses veaux,^[iii] of which you remember we so often spoke, trembling, in Petersburg, before our departure. I recall it