The possessed or, The devils
sobbing!), beating himself on the breast almost for five minutes,
getting more and more frantic at Yulia Mihailovna's profound silence. At
last he made a fatal blunder, and let slip that he was jealous of Pyotr
Stepanovitch. Realising that he had made an utter fool of himself, he
became savagely furious, and shouted that he "would not allow them to
deny God" and that he would "send her _salon_ of irresponsible infidels
packing," that the governor of a province was bound to believe in God
"and so his wife was too," that he wouldn't put up with these young
men; that "you, madam, for the sake of your own dignity, ought to have
thought of your husband and to have stood up for his intelligence even
if he were a man of poor abilities (and I'm by no means a man of poor
abilities!), and yet it's your doing that every one here despises me, it
was you put them all up to it!" He shouted that he would annihilate
the woman question, that he would eradicate every trace of it, that
to-morrow he would forbid and break up their silly fête for the benefit
of the governesses (damn them!), that the first governess he came across
to-morrow morning he would drive out of the province "with a Cossack!
I'll make a point of it!" he shrieked. "Do you know," he screamed, "do
you know that your rascals are inciting men at the factory, and that I
know it? Let me tell you, I know the names of four of these rascals and
that I am going out of my mind, hopelessly, hopelessly!..."
But at this point Yulia Mihailovna suddenly broke her silence and
sternly announced that she had long been aware of these criminal
designs, and that it was all foolishness, and that he had taken it too
seriously, and that as for these mischievous fellows, she knew not only
those four but all of them (it was a lie); but that she had not the
faintest intention of going out of her mind on account of it, but, on
the contrary, had all the more confidence in her intelligence and hoped
to bring it all to a harmonious conclusion: to encourage the young
people, to bring them to reason, to show them suddenly and unexpectedly
that their designs were known, and then to point out to them new aims
for rational and more noble activity.
Oh, how can I describe the effect of this on Andrey Antonovitch! Hearing
that Pyotr Stepanovitch had duped him again and had made a fool of him
so coarsely, that he had told her much more than he had told him, and
sooner than him, and that perhaps Pyotr Stepanovitch was the chief
instigator of all these criminal designs--he flew into a frenzy.
"Senseless but malignant woman," he cried, snapping his bonds at one
blow, "let me tell you, I shall arrest your worthless lover at once, I
shall put him in fetters and send him to the fortress, or--I shall jump
out of a window before your eyes this minute!"
Yulia Mihailovna, turning green with anger, greeted this tirade at once
with a burst of prolonged, ringing laughter, going off into peals such
as one hears at the French theatre when a Parisian actress, imported for
a fee of a hundred thousand to play a coquette, laughs in her husband's
face for daring to be jealous of her.
Von Lembke rushed to the window, but suddenly stopped as though rooted
to the spot, folded his arms across his chest, and, white as a corpse,
looked with a sinister gaze at the laughing lady. "Do you know, Yulia,
do you know," he said in a gasping and suppliant voice, "do you know
that even I can do something?" But at the renewed and even louder
laughter that followed his last words he clenched his teeth, groaned,
and suddenly rushed, not towards the window, but at his spouse, with his
fist raised! He did not bring it down--no, I repeat again and again, no;
but it was the last straw. He ran to his own room, not knowing what he
was doing, flung himself, dressed as he was, face downwards on his bed,
wrapped himself convulsively, head and all, in the sheet, and lay so for
two hours--incapable of sleep, incapable of thought, with a load on his
heart and blank, immovable despair in his soul. Now and then he shivered
all over with an agonising, feverish tremor. Disconnected and irrelevant
things kept coming into his mind: at one minute he thought of the old
clock which used to hang on his wall fifteen years ago in Petersburg and
had lost the minute-hand; at another of the cheerful clerk, Millebois,
and how they had once caught a sparrow together in Alexandrovsky
Park and had laughed so that they could be heard all over the park,
remembering that one of them was already a college assessor. I imagine
that about seven in the morning he must have fallen asleep without being
aware of it himself, and must have slept with enjoyment, with agreeable
dreams.
Waking about ten o'clock, he jumped wildly out of bed remembered
everything at once, and slapped himself on the head; he refused his
breakfast, and would see neither Blum nor the chief of the police nor
the clerk who came to remind him that he was expected to preside over
a meeting that morning; he would listen to nothing, and did not want to
understand. He ran like one possessed to Yulia Mihailovna's part of the
house. There Sofya Antropovna, an old lady of good family who had lived
for years with Yulia Mihailovna, explained to him that his wife had set
off at ten o'clock that morning with a large company in three carriages
to Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin's, to Skvoreshniki, to look over the place
with a view to the second fête which was planned for a fortnight later,
and that the visit to-day had been arranged with Varvara Petrovna three
days before. Overwhelmed with this news, Andrey Antonovitch returned to
his study and impulsively ordered the horses. He could hardly wait for
them to be got ready. His soul was hungering for Yulia Mihailovna--to
look at her, to be near her for five minutes; perhaps she would glance
at him, notice him, would smile as before, forgive him... "O-oh! Aren't
the horses ready?" Mechanically he opened a thick book lying on the
table. (He sometimes used to try his fortune in this way with a book,
opening it at random and reading the three lines at the top of the
right-hand page.) What turned up was: _"Tout est pour le mieux dans
le meilleur des mondes possibles."_--Voltaire, _Candide._ He uttered
an ejaculation of contempt and ran to get into the carriage.
"Skvoreshniki!"
The coachman said afterwards that his master urged him on all the way,
but as soon as they were getting near the mansion he suddenly told him
to turn and drive back to the town, bidding him "Drive fast; please
drive fast!" Before they reached the town wall "master told me to stop
again, got out of the carriage, and went across the road into the field;
I thought he felt ill but he stopped and began looking at the flowers,
and so he stood for a time. It was strange, really; I began to feel
quite uneasy." This was the coachman's testimony. I remember the weather
that morning: it was a cold, clear, but windy September day; before
Andrey Antonovitch stretched a forbidding landscape of bare fields from
which the crop had long been harvested; there were a few dying yellow
flowers, pitiful relics blown about by the howling wind. Did he want to
compare himself and his fate with those wretched flowers battered by the
autumn and the frost? I don't think so; in fact I feel sure it was
not so, and that he realised nothing about the flowers in spite of the
evidence of the coachman and of the police superintendent, who drove up
at that moment and asserted afterwards that he found the governor with
a bunch of yellow flowers in his hand. This police superintendent,
Flibusterov by name, was an ardent champion of authority who had only
recently come to our town but had already distinguished himself and
become famous by his inordinate zeal, by a certain vehemence in the
execution of his duties, and his inveterate inebriety. Jumping out of
the carriage, and not the least disconcerted at the sight of what the
governor was doing, he blurted out all in one breath, with a frantic
expression, yet with an air of conviction, that "There's an upset in the
town."
"Eh? What?" said Andrey Antonovitch, turning to him with a stern face,
but without a trace of surprise or any recollection of his carriage and
his coachman, as though he had been in his own study.
"Police-superintendent Flibusterov, your Excellency. There's a riot in
the town."
"Filibusters?" Andrey Antonovitch said thoughtfully.
"Just so, your Excellency. The Shpigulin men are making a riot."
"The Shpigulin men!..."
The name "Shpigulin" seemed to remind him of something. He started and
put his finger to his forehead: "The Shpigulin men!" In silence, and
still plunged in thought, he walked without haste to the carriage,
took his seat, and told the coachman to drive to the town. The
police-superintendent followed in the droshky.
I imagine that he had vague impressions of many interesting things of
all sorts on the way, but I doubt whether he had any definite idea or
any settled intention as he drove into the open space in front of his
house. But no sooner did he see the resolute and orderly ranks of "the
rioters," the cordon of police, the helpless (and perhaps purposely
helpless) chief of police, and the general expectation of which he was
the object, than all the blood rushed to his heart. With a pale face he
stepped out of his carriage.
"Caps off!" he said breathlessly and hardly audibly. "On your knees!"
he squealed, to the surprise of every one, to his own surprise too, and
perhaps the very unexpectedness of the position was the explanation of
what followed. Can a sledge on a switchback at carnival stop short as it
flies down the hill? What made it worse, Andrey Antonovitch had been all
his life serene in character, and never shouted or stamped at anyone;
and such people are always the most dangerous if it once happens that
something sets their sledge sliding downhill. Everything was whirling
before his eyes.
"Filibusters!" he yelled still more shrilly and absurdly, and his voice
broke. He stood, not knowing what he was going to do, but knowing
and feeling in his whole being that he certainly would do something
directly.
"Lord!" was heard from the crowd. A lad began crossing himself; three or
four men actually did try to kneel down, but the whole mass moved three
steps forward, and suddenly all began talking at once: "Your
Excellency... we were hired for a term... the manager... you mustn't
say," and so on and so on. It was impossible to distinguish anything.
Alas! Andrey Antonovitch could distinguish nothing: the flowers were
still in his hands. The riot was as real to him as the prison carts
were to Stepan Trofimovitch. And flitting to and fro in the crowd
of "rioters" who gazed open-eyed at him, he seemed to see Pyotr
Stepanovitch, who had egged them on--Pyotr Stepanovitch, whom he hated
and whose image had never left him since yesterday.
"Rods!" he cried even more unexpectedly. A dead silence followed.
From the facts I have learnt and those I have conjectured, this must
have been what happened at the beginning; but I have no such exact
information for what followed, nor can I conjecture it so easily. There
are some facts, however.
In the first place, rods were brought on the scene with strange
rapidity; they had evidently been got ready beforehand in expectation
by the intelligent chief of the police. Not more than two, or at most
three, were actually flogged, however; that fact I wish to lay stress
on. It's an absolute fabrication to say that the whole crowd of rioters,
or at least half of them, were punished. It is a nonsensical story,
too, that a poor but respectable lady was caught as she passed by
and promptly thrashed; yet I read myself an account of this incident