The captain gaped, goggle-eyed, and did not reply.
'Listen, Captain,' Stavrogin suddenly began to speak with extreme seriousness, leaning slightly across the table. Up to then he had spoken somehow ambiguously, so that Lebyadkin, experienced in the role of buffoon, remained a bit uncertain until the last moment whether his master was really angry or was only teasing, whether he really had the wild idea of announcing his marriage or was only playing. But now the unusually stern look of Nikolai Vsevolodovich was so convincing that a chill even ran down the captain's spine. 'Listen and tell the truth, Lebyadkin: have you made any denunciation yet, or not? Have you managed to really do anything? Did you send some letter out of foolishness?'
'No, sir, I haven't managed... and wasn't thinking of it,' the captain stared.
'Well, that you weren't thinking of it is a lie. That's why you were begging to go to Petersburg. If you haven't written, you must have blabbed something to somebody. Tell the truth, I've heard a thing or two.'
'To Liputin, while drunk. Liputin is a traitor. I opened my heart to him,' the poor captain whispered.
'Heart or not, there's no need to be a tomfool. If you had a notion, you should have kept it to yourself; smart people are silent nowadays, they don't talk.'
'Nikolai Vsevolodovich!' the captain started to tremble. 'You had no part in anything, it's not you that I...'
'Of course, you wouldn't dare denounce your milch cow.'
'Nikolai Vsevolodovich, consider, consider! ...' and in despair, in tears, the captain began hurriedly telling his story over all those four years. This was a most stupid story of a fool who had been drawn into something that was not his business, and the importance of which he scarcely understood until the very last minute, being occupied with drinking and carousing. He told how, while still in Petersburg, he 'firstly got carried away just out of friendship, like a loyal student, though not being a student,' and, knowing nothing, 'guilty of nothing,' was spreading various papers in stairways, leaving them by the dozens in doorways, behind bellpulls, sticking them in instead of newspapers, bringing them to theaters, tucking them into hats, slipping them into pockets. And later he had started taking money from them, 'for my means, just think of my means, sir!' He had spread 'all sorts of rubbish' over the districts of two provinces. 'Oh, Nikolai Vsevolodovich,' he went on exclaiming, 'what made me most indignant was its being completely against all civic and predominantly fatherland laws! It would suddenly be printed to go out with pitchforks, and remember that he who goes out poor in the morning may come home rich in the evening—just think, sir! I myself used to get the shudders, but I kept spreading them around. Or else suddenly, five or six lines, to the whole of Russia, out of the blue: 'Quick, lock the churches, destroy God, break up marriages, destroy the rights of inheritance, grab your knives'—that's all, and God knows what next. It was with that piece, the one with the five lines, sir, that I almost got caught; the officers of the regiment gave me a beating, but, God bless them, they let me go. And then last year they almost got me when I gave French counterfeit fifty-rouble bills to Korovaev; but, thank God, just then Korovaev drowned in the pond while drunk, and they didn't have time to expose me. Here at Virginsky's I proclaimed the freedom of the social wife. In June I again did some spreading around the ——--- district. They say they'll make me do more of it... Pyotr Stepanovich suddenly let me know that I have to obey; he's been threatening me for a long time. And how he treated me on that Sunday, really! Nikolai Vsevolodovich, I am a slave, I am a worm, but not a god—that is my only difference from Derzhavin.[101] But my means, just think of my means!'
Nikolai Vsevolodovich listened to it all with curiosity.
'Much of that I knew nothing about,' he said. 'Of course, anything could happen with you... Listen,' he said, after some reflection, 'if you like, tell them—well, you know whom—that Liputin was lying, and that you only meant to scare me a bit with a denunciation, thinking that I, too, was compromised, so as to extract more money from me that way... Understand?'
'Nikolai Vsevolodovich, my dear, can I really be threatened with such a danger? I've been waiting only so I could ask you.'
Nikolai Vsevolodovich grinned.
'You certainly won't be allowed to go to Petersburg, even if I give you money for the trip... but, anyhow, it's time I went to Marya Timofeevna,' and he got up from his chair.
'And, Nikolai Vsevolodovich, what about Marya Timofeevna?' 'Just as I said.'
'Can that also be true?'
'You still don't believe it?' 'Can it be that you'll cast me off like an old, worn-out boot?'
'We'll see,' laughed Nikolai Vsevolodovich. 'Well, let me go.'
'Wouldn't you like to order me to stay out on the porch, sir... so as not to overhear something somehow, by chance... because the rooms are tiny.'
'That's a good idea; stay out on the porch. Take the umbrella.'; 'Your umbrella ... am I worth it, sir?' the captain oversweetened.
'Every man is worth an umbrella.'
'At one stroke you define the minimum of human rights...'
But he was now babbling mechanically; he was too overwhelmed by the news, and became totally bewildered. And yet, almost at once, as soon as he stepped out onto the porch and opened the umbrella over him, the usual soothing notion began to hatch in his frivolous and knavish head, that he was being cheated and lied to, and, if so, it was not he who should fear, but he who was feared.
'If they're lying and cheating me, what precisely is the gist of it?' buzzed in his head. The announcement of the marriage seemed absurd to him: 'True, anything can happen with such a wonder-worker; he lives for people's evil. And what if he's afraid himself, after Sunday's affront, and more so than ever before? So he comes running to assure me he's going to announce it himself, for fear I'll announce it. Eh, don't miss your mark, Lebyadkin! And why then come by night, by stealth, if he wants the publicity himself? And if he's afraid, it means he's afraid now, precisely at this moment, precisely in these few days... Eh, don't slip up, Lebyadkin! ...
'He frightens me with Pyotr Stepanovich. Aie, it's scary, aie, it's scary; no, that's where it's really scary! What ever made me blab about it to Liputin! Devil knows what these devils are cooking up, I never could make it out. They've begun to stir again, like five years ago. True, whom could I denounce them to? 'You didn't write to anybody out of foolishness?' Hm. So one could write as if it was out of foolishness? Is he advising me? 'That's why you're going to Petersburg.' The rogue, I just had a dream, and he's already guessed it! As if he himself was pushing me to go. There can only be one of two things here: either he's afraid, again, because he got into some mischief, or ...
