Demons

you on foot on the high road. Foolish folk, sir.'

'I... It's... You know, Anisim, I made a wager, as Englishmen do, that I could get there on foot, and I...'

Sweat stood out on his forehead and temples.

'Must be so, sir, must be so...' Anisim listened with merciless curiosity. But Stepan Trofimovich could not bear it any longer. He was so abashed that he wanted to get up and leave the cottage. But the samovar was brought in, and at the same moment the book-hawker, who had stepped out somewhere, came back. He turned to her with the gesture of a man saving his own life, and offered her tea. Anisim yielded and walked away.

Indeed, perplexity had been emerging among the peasants.

'Who is this man? Found walking down the road, says he's a teacher, dressed like a foreigner, reasons like a little child, answers nonsensically, as if he'd run away from somebody, and he's got money!' There was beginning to be some thought of reporting to the authorities—'since anyway things are not so quiet in town.' But Anisim settled it all that same minute. Stepping out to the front hall, he told everyone who cared to listen that Stepan Trofimovich was not really a teacher, but was 'himself a great scholar and occupied with great studies, and was a local landowner himself and had lived for the past twenty-two years with the full general's widow Stavrogin, in place of the chiefest man in the house, and had great respect from everyone in town. He used to leave fifty or a hundred roubles of an evening in the gentlemen's club, and in rank he was a councillor, which is the same as a lieutenant colonel in the army, just one step lower than full colonel. And that he's got money is because through the full general's widow Stavrogin he has more money than you could count,' and so on and so forth.

'Mais c'est une dame, et tres comme il faut,'^[clxxix] Stepan Trofimovich was resting from Anisim's attack, observing with pleasant curiosity his neighbor, the book-hawker, who, however, was drinking her tea from the saucer with sugar on the side.^[200] 'Ce petit morceau de sucre ce n'est rien^[clxxx] ... There is in her something noble and independent and at the same time—quiet. Le comme il faut tout pur,^[clxxxi] only of a somewhat different sort.'

He soon learned from her that she was Sofya Matveevna Ulitin, and actually lived in ——, where she had a widowed sister, a tradeswoman; she herself was also a widow, and her husband, a sublieutenant who had risen to that rank from sergeant major, had been killed at Sebastopol.^[201]

'But you're so young, vous n'avez pas trente ans. '^[clxxxii]

'Thirty-four, sir,' Sofya Matveevna smiled.

'So, you also understand French?'

'A little, sir; I lived in a noble house for four years after that and picked it up from the children there.'

She told him that being left after her husband at the age of eighteen, she had stayed for a while in Sebastopol 'as a sister of mercy,' and had then lived in various places, sir, and now here she was going around selling the Gospel.

'Mais mon Dieu, it wasn't you who were involved in that strange, even very strange, story in our town?'

She blushed; it turned out to have been she.

'Ces vauriens, ces malheureux!^[clxxxiii] . . .' he tried to begin, in a voice trembling with indignation; a painful and hateful recollection echoed tormentingly in his heart. For a moment he became as if oblivious.

'Hah, she's gone again,' he suddenly came to himself, noticing that she was no longer beside him. 'She steps out frequently and is preoccupied with something, I notice she's even worried... Bah, je deviens egoiste . . .'^[clxxxiv]

He looked up and again saw Anisim, this time in the most threatening circumstances. The whole cottage was filled with peasants, all apparently dragged there by Anisim. The proprietor was there, and the peasant with the cow, and another two peasants (they turned out to be coachmen), and some other half-drunk little man, dressed like a peasant but clean-shaven, who resembled a besotted tradesman and was talking more than anyone else. And they were all discussing him, Stepan Trofimovich. The peasant with the cow stood his ground, insisting that along the shore would be about a thirty-mile detour, and that it had to be by steamer-boat. The half-drunk tradesman and the proprietor hotly objected:

'Because, dear brother, if it's by steamer-boat, of course, His Excellency will have a closer way across the lake; that's right enough; except the way things are now, the steamer-boat may not even go.'

'It will, it will, it'll go for another week,' Anisim was the most excited of all.

'Maybe so! but it doesn't come on schedule, because it's late in the year, and sometimes they wait three days in Ustyevo.'

'It'll come tomorrow, tomorrow at two o'clock it'll come on schedule. You'll get to Spasov still before evening, sir, right on schedule,' Anisim was turning himself inside out.

'Mais qu 'est-ce qu 'il a, cet homme, '^[clxxxv] Stepan Trofimovich trembled, fearfully awaiting his fate.

The coachmen, too, stepped up and began bargaining; they were asking three roubles to Ustyevo. Others shouted that he wouldn't be doing badly, that it was the right price, just the same price they charged all summer for going from here to Ustyevo.

'But... it's also nice here... And I don't want to,' Stepan Trofimovich started mumbling.

'Right, sir, it's just as you say, right now it's really nice in Spasov, and you'll make Fyodor Matveevich so glad.'

'Mon Dieu, mes amis, all this is so unexpected for me.'

At last Sofya Matveevna came back. But she sat on the bench quite crushed and sad.