Demons

She remained silent—two minutes, three. 'And sprayed yourself with perfume, getting ready for Dasha...' she suddenly said in a terrible whisper. Stepan Trofimovich simply froze.

'Put on a new tie...' Again about two minutes of silence.

'Remember the little cigar?'

'My friend,' he began mumbling in terror.

'The little cigar, in the evening, by the window ... in the moonlight... after the gazebo ... in Skvoreshniki? Do you remember? Do you remember?' she jumped up from her place, seizing his pillow by two corners and shaking his head together with it. 'Do you remember, you empty, empty, inglorious, fainthearted, eternally, eternally empty man!' she spat out in her furious whisper, keeping herself from shouting. Finally she dropped him and fell onto the chair, covering her face with her hands. 'Enough!' she snapped, straightening up. 'Twenty years are gone, there's no bringing them back; I'm a fool, too.'

'Je vous aimais, ' he again clasped his hands.

'Why keep at me with your aimais, aimais! Enough!' she jumped up again. 'And if you don't go to sleep right now, I'll... You need rest; go to sleep, go to sleep right now, close your eyes. Ah, my God, maybe he wants to have lunch! What do you eat? What does he eat? Ah, my God, where's that woman? Where is she?'

A hubbub began. But Stepan Trofimovich murmured in a weak voice that he would indeed like to sleep for une heure, and then—un bouillon, un the... enfin, il est si heureux.^[ccxix] He lay back and indeed seemed to fall asleep (he was probably pretending). Varvara Petrovna waited a little and then tiptoed out from behind the partition.

She sat down in the proprietors' room, chased the proprietors out, and ordered Dasha to bring her that woman. A serious interrogation began.

'Now, my girl, tell me all the details; sit beside me, so. Well?'

'I met Stepan Trofimovich...'

'Wait, stop. I warn you that if you lie or hold anything back, I'll dig you up out of the ground. Well?'

'Stepan Trofimovich and I ... as soon as I came to Khatovo, ma'am...' Sofya Matveevna was almost suffocating...

'Wait, stop, be quiet; what's all this stammering? First of all, what sort of bird are you?'

The woman told her haphazardly, though in the briefest terms, about herself, beginning with Sebastopol. Varvara Petrovna listened silently, sitting straight-backed on her chair, looking sternly and steadily straight into the narrator's eyes.

'Why are you so cowed? Why do you look at the ground? I like people who look straight and argue with me. Go on.'

She finished telling about their meeting, about the books, about how Stepan Trofimovich treated the peasant woman to vodka...

'Right, right, don't leave out the smallest detail,' Varvara Petrovna encouraged her. Finally, she told of how they had set off and how Stepan Trofimovich had kept talking, 'already completely sick, ma'am,' and even spent several hours here telling her his whole life from the very first beginning.

'Tell me about the life.'

Sofya Matveevna suddenly faltered and was completely nonplussed.

'I couldn't say anything about that, ma'am,' she spoke all but in tears, 'and, besides, I hardly understood anything.'

'Lies—it's impossible that you understood nothing at all.'

'He was telling for a long time about some black-haired noble lady, ma'am,' Sofya Matveevna blushed terribly, incidentally noticing Varvara Petrovna's fair hair and her total lack of resemblance to the 'brunette.'

'Black-haired? What, precisely? Speak!'

'How this noble lady was very much in love with him, ma'am, all her life, a whole twenty years; but she didn't dare open her heart and was ashamed before him, because she was very portly, ma'am...'

'Fool!' Varvara Petrovna snapped out, pensively but resolutely.

Sofya Matveevna was now completely in tears.

'I can't tell anything right about it, because I myself was in great fear for him and couldn't understand him, since he's such an intelligent man...'

'It's not for a crow like you to judge his intelligence. Did he offer you his hand?'

The narrator trembled.

'Did he fall in love with you? Speak! He offered you his hand?' Varvara Petrovna yelled.

'That's nearly how it was, ma'am,' she sobbed. 'Only I took it all for nothing, on account of his illness,' she added firmly, raising her eyes.

'What is your name, name and patronymic?'

'Sofya Matveevna, ma'am.'

'Let it be known to you, then, Sofya Matveevna, that he is the paltriest, the emptiest little man... Lord, Lord! Do