The possessed or, The devils
father and son had, since their meeting in Petersburg, adopted the
fashionable "thou" and "thee," Petrusha's letters had a striking
resemblance to the missives that used to be sent by landowners of the
old school from the town to their serfs whom they had left in charge of
their estates. And now suddenly this eight thousand which would solve
the difficulty would be wafted to him by Varvara Petrovna's proposition.
And at the same time she made him distinctly feel that it never could
be wafted to him from anywhere else. Of course Stepan Trofimovitch
consented.
He sent for me directly she had gone and shut himself up for the whole
day, admitting no one else. He cried, of course, talked well and talked
a great deal, contradicted himself continually, made a casual pun, and
was much pleased with it. Then he had a slight attack of his "summer
cholera"--everything in fact followed the usual course. Then he brought
out the portrait of his German bride, now twenty years deceased, and
began plaintively appealing to her: "Will you forgive me?" In fact he
seemed somehow distracted. Our grief led us to get a little drunk. He
soon fell into a sweet sleep, however. Next morning he tied his cravat
in masterly fashion, dressed with care, and went frequently to look at
himself in the glass. He sprinkled his handkerchief with scent, only a
slight dash of it, however, and as soon as he saw Varvara Petrovna out
of the window he hurriedly took another handkerchief and hid the scented
one under the pillow.
"Excellent!" Varvara Petrovna approved, on receiving his consent. "In
the first place you show a fine decision, and secondly you've listened
to the voice of reason, to which you generally pay so little heed in
your private affairs. There's no need of haste, however," she added,
scanning the knot of his white tie, "for the present say nothing, and I
will say nothing. It will soon be your birthday; I will come to see you
with her. Give us tea in the evening, and please without wine or other
refreshments, but I'll arrange it all myself. Invite your friends, but
we'll make the list together. You can talk to her the day before, if
necessary. And at your party we won't exactly announce it, or make an
engagement of any sort, but only hint at it, and let people know without
any sort of ceremony. And then the wedding a fortnight later, as far
as possible without any fuss.... You two might even go away for a time
after the wedding, to Moscow, for instance. I'll go with you, too,
perhaps... The chief thing is, keep quiet till then."
Stepan Trofimovitch was surprised. He tried to falter that he could
not do like that, that he must talk it over with his bride. But Varvara
Petrovna flew at him in exasperation.
"What for? In the first place it may perhaps come to nothing."
"Come to nothing!" muttered the bridegroom, utterly dumbfoundered.
"Yes. I'll see.... But everything shall be as I've told you, and don't
be uneasy. I'll prepare her myself. There's really no need for you.
Everything necessary shall be said and done, and there's no need for you
to meddle. Why should you? In what character? Don't come and don't write
letters. And not a sight or sound of you, I beg. I will be silent too."
She absolutely refused to explain herself, and went away, obviously
upset. Stepan Trofimovitch's excessive readiness evidently impressed
her. Alas! he was utterly unable to grasp his position, and the question
had not yet presented itself to him from certain other points of view.
On the contrary a new note was apparent in him, a sort of conquering and
jaunty air. He swaggered.
"I do like that!" he exclaimed, standing before me, and flinging wide
his arms. "Did you hear? She wants to drive me to refusing at last. Why,
I may lose patience, too, and... refuse! 'Sit still, there's no need
for you to go to her.' But after all, why should I be married? Simply
because she's taken an absurd fancy into her heart. But I'm a serious
man, and I can refuse to submit to the idle whims of a giddy-woman! I
have duties to my son and...and to myself! I'm making a sacrifice. Does
she realise that? I have agreed, perhaps, because I am weary of life
and nothing matters to me. But she may exasperate me, and then it will
matter. I shall resent it and refuse. _Et enfin, le ridicule_...what will
they say at the club? What will... what will... Laputin say? 'Perhaps
nothing will come of it'--what a thing to say! That beats everything.
That's really... what is one to say to that?... _Je suis un forçat, un
Badinguet, un_ man pushed to the wall...."
And at the same time a sort of capricious complacency, something
frivolous and playful, could be seen in the midst of all these plaintive
exclamations. In the evening we drank too much again.
CHAPTER III. THE SINS OF OTHERS
I
ABOUT A WEEK had passed, and the position had begun to grow more
complicated.
I may mention in passing that I suffered a great deal during that
unhappy week, as I scarcely left the side of my affianced friend, in the
capacity of his most intimate confidant. What weighed upon him most
was the feeling of shame, though we saw no one all that week, and sat
indoors alone. But he was even ashamed before me, and so much so that
the more he confided to me the more vexed he was with me for it. He was
so morbidly apprehensive that he expected that every one knew about it
already, the whole town, and was afraid to show himself, not only at the
club, but even in his circle of friends. He positively would not go out
to take his constitutional till well after dusk, when it was quite dark.
A week passed and he still did not know whether he were betrothed or
not, and could not find out for a fact, however much he tried. He had
not yet seen his future bride, and did not know whether she was to be
his bride or not; did not, in fact, know whether there was anything
serious in it at all. Varvara Petrovna, for some reason, resolutely
refused to admit him to her presence. In answer to one of his first
letters to her (and he wrote a great number of them) she begged him
plainly to spare her all communications with him for a time, because
she was very busy, and having a great deal of the utmost importance to
communicate to him she was waiting for a more free moment to do so, and
that she would let him know _in time_ when he could come to see her. She
declared she would send back his letters unopened, as they were "simple
self-indulgence." I read that letter myself--he showed it me.
Yet all this harshness and indefiniteness were nothing compared with
his chief anxiety. That anxiety tormented him to the utmost and without
ceasing. He grew thin and dispirited through it. It was something of
which he was more ashamed than of anything else, and of which he would
not on any account speak, even to me; on the contrary, he lied on
occasion, and shuffled before me like a little boy; and at the same time
he sent for me himself every day, could not stay two hours without me,
needing me as much as air or water.
Such conduct rather wounded my vanity. I need hardly say that I had
long ago privately guessed this great secret of his, and saw through it
completely. It was my firmest conviction at the time that the revelation
of this secret, this chief anxiety of Stepan Trofimovitch's would not
have redounded to his credit, and, therefore, as I was still young, I
was rather indignant at the coarseness of his feelings and the ugliness
of some of his suspicions. In my warmth--and, I must confess, in my
weariness of being his confidant--I perhaps blamed him too much. I was
so cruel as to try and force him to confess it all to me himself, though
I did recognise that it might be difficult to confess some things. He,
too, saw through me; that is, he clearly perceived that I saw through
him, and that I was angry with him indeed, and he was angry with me
too for being angry with him and seeing through him. My irritation was
perhaps petty and stupid; but the unrelieved solitude of two friends
together is sometimes extremely prejudicial to true friendship. From a
certain point of view he had a very true understanding of some aspects
of his position, and defined it, indeed, very subtly on those points
about which he did not think it necessary to be secret.
"Oh, how different she was then!" he would sometimes say to me about
Varvara Petrovna. "How different she was in the old days when we used to
talk together.... Do you know that she could talk in those days! Can
you believe that she had ideas in those days, original ideas! Now,
everything has changed! She says all that's only old-fashioned twaddle.
She despises the past.... Now she's like some shopman or cashier, she
has grown hard-hearted, and she's always cross...."
"Why is she cross now if you are carrying out her orders?" I answered.
He looked at me subtly.
"_Cher ami_; if I had not agreed she would have been dreadfully angry,
dread-ful-ly! But yet less than now that I have consented."
He was pleased with this saying of his, and we emptied a bottle between
us that evening. But that was only for a moment, next day he was worse
and more ill-humoured than ever.
But what I was most vexed with him for was that he could not bring
himself to call on the Drozdovs, as he should have done on their
arrival, to renew the acquaintance of which, so we heard they were
themselves desirous, since they kept asking about him. It was a source
of daily distress to him. He talked of Lizaveta Nikolaevna with an
ecstasy which I was at a loss to understand. No doubt he remembered in
her the child whom he had once loved. But besides that, he imagined for
some unknown reason that he would at once find in her company a solace
for his present misery, and even the solution of his more serious
doubts. He expected to meet in Lizaveta Nikolaevna an extraordinary
being. And yet he did not go to see her though he meant to do so every
day. The worst of it was that I was desperately anxious to be presented
to her and to make her acquaintance, and I could look to no one but
Stepan Trofimovitch to effect this. I was frequently meeting her, in the
street of course, when she was out riding, wearing a riding-habit and
mounted on a fine horse, and accompanied by her cousin, so-called, a
handsome officer, the nephew of the late General Drozdov--and these
meetings made an extraordinary impression on me at the time. My
infatuation lasted only a moment, and I very soon afterwards recognised
the impossibility of my dreams myself--but though it was a fleeting
impression it was a very real one, and so it may well be imagined
how indignant I was at the time with my poor friend for keeping so
obstinately secluded.
All the members of our circle had been officially informed from the
beginning that Stepan Trofimovitch would see nobody for a time, and
begged them to leave him quite alone. He insisted on sending round a
circular notice to this effect, though I tried to dissuade him. I
went round to every one at his request and told everybody that Varvara
Petrovna had given "our old man" (as we all used to call Stepan
Trofimovitch among ourselves) a special job, to arrange in order some
correspondence lasting over many years; that he had shut himself up to
do it and I was helping him. Liputin was the only one I did not have
time to visit, and I kept putting it off--to tell the real truth I was
afraid to go to him. I knew beforehand that he would not believe one
word of my story, that he would certainly imagine that there was some
secret at the bottom of it, which they were trying to hide from him
alone, and as soon as I left him he would set to work to make inquiries
and gossip all over the town. While I was picturing all this to myself
I happened to run across him in the street. It turned out that he had