Текст книги "Demons"
Автор книги: Федор Достоевский
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"And you also allow me to put my name on your subscription list. I will tell Stepan Trofimovich and ask him myself."
Varvara Petrovna returned home utterly enchanted; she stood like a rock for Yulia Mikhailovna, and for some reason was now thoroughly angry with Stepan Trofimovich; and he, poor man, sat at home and did not even know anything.
"I'm in love with her, I don't understand how I could have been so mistaken about this woman," she said to Nikolai Vsevolodovich and to Pyotr Stepanovich, who ran by that evening.
"But you still ought to make peace with the old man," Pyotr Stepanovich proposed, "he's in despair. You've exiled him to the kitchen altogether. Yesterday he met your carriage, bowed, and you turned away. You know, we'll bring him forward; I have some designs on him, and he can still be useful."
"Oh, he's going to read."
"That's not all I meant. And I also wanted to run by and see him today myself. So shall I tell him?"
"If you wish. I don't know how you'll arrange it, though," she said irresolutely. "I intended to talk with him myself and wanted to fix a day and place." She frowned deeply.
"Well, no point in fixing a day. I'll simply tell him."
"Please do. Add, however, that I'll be sure to fix a day. Be sure to add that."
Pyotr Stepanovich ran off, grinning. Generally, as far as I recall, he was somehow especially angry at that time and even allowed himself extremely impatient escapades with almost everyone. Strangely, everyone somehow forgave him. Generally, the opinion became established that he should be looked upon somehow specially. I will observe that he was extremely angry about Nikolai Vsevolodovich's duel. It caught him off guard; he even turned green when he was told. Perhaps his vanity suffered here: he learned of it only the next day, when everybody knew.
"But you really had no right to fight," he whispered to Stavrogin five days later, meeting him by chance in the club. Remarkably, they had not met anywhere during those five days, though Pyotr Stepanovich ran by Varvara Petrovna's almost every day.
Nikolai Vsevolodovich looked at him silently, with a distracted air, as if not understanding what it was about, and went on without stopping. He was going through the big hall of the club towards the buffet.
"You've also been to see Shatov... you want to publish Marya Timofeevna," he went running after him and somehow distractedly seized his shoulder.
Nikolai Vsevolodovich suddenly shook his hand off and quickly turned to him with a menacing frown. Pyotr Stepanovich looked at him, smiling a strange, long smile. It all lasted only a moment. Nikolai Vsevolodovich walked on.
II
He ran over to the old man straight from Varvara Petrovna's, and if he hurried so, it was from sheer spite, to take revenge for a previous offense of which I had no idea until then. The thing was that at their last meeting—namely, a week ago Thursday—Stepan Trofimovich, who, incidentally, had started the argument himself, ended by driving Pyotr Stepanovich out with a stick. He concealed this fact from me then; but now, as soon as Pyotr Stepanovich ran in with his usual smirk, so naively supercilious, and with his unpleasantly curious eyes darting into every corner, Stepan Trofimovich at once gave me a secret sign not to leave the room. Thus their real relations were disclosed to me, for this time I listened to the whole conversation.
Stepan Trofimovich was sitting stretched out on the sofa. He had grown thin and yellow since that Thursday. Pyotr Stepanovich sat down next to him with a most familiar air, tucking his legs under him unceremoniously, and taking up much more space on the sofa than respect for a father demanded. Stepan Trofimovich silently and dignifiedly moved aside.
On the table lay an open book. It was the novel What Is to Be Done? [110] Alas, I must admit one strange weakness in our friend: the fancy that he ought to emerge from his solitude and fight a last battle was gaining more and more of a hold on his seduced imagination. I guessed that he had obtained and was studyingthe novel with a single purpose, so that in the event of an unquestionable confrontation with the "screamers," he would know their methods and arguments beforehand from their own "catechism," and, being thus prepared, would solemnly refute them all in her eyes.Oh, how this book tormented him! At times he would throw it aside in despair and, jumping up from his seat, pace the room almost in a frenzy.
"I agree that the author's basic idea is correct," he said to me feverishly, "but so much the more horrible for that! It's our same idea, precisely ours; we, we were the first to plant it, to nurture it, to prepare it—and what new could they say on their own after us! But, God, how it's all perverted, distorted, mutilated!" he exclaimed, thumping the book with his fingers. "Are these the conclusions we strove for? Who can recognize the initial thought here?"
"Getting yourself enlightened?" Pyotr Stepanovich grinned, taking the book from the table and reading the title. "It's about time. I'll bring you something better if you like."
Stepan Trofimovich again dignifiedly kept silent. I was sitting in the corner on a sofa.
Pyotr Stepanovich quickly explained the reason for his coming. Of course, Stepan Trofimovich was struck beyond measure, and listened in fear, mixed with extreme indignation.
"And this Yulia Mikhailovna is counting on me to come and read for her!"
"I mean, it's not that they need you so much. On the contrary, it's to indulge you and thereby suck up to Varvara Petrovna. But, needless to say, you won't dare refuse to read. And you yourself would even like to, I suppose," he grinned. "You old fogies are all infernally ambitious. Listen, though, it mustn't be too dull. What have you got there, Spanish history or something? Give it to me to look over a few days ahead, otherwise you may put them all to sleep."
The hasty and all too naked rudeness of these barbs was plainly deliberate. He made as if it were impossible to speak with Stepan Trofimovich in any other, more refined language or concepts. Stepan Trofimovich staunchly continued to ignore the insults. But the events he was being informed of produced a more and more staggering impression on him.
"And she herself, herself,said this should be told to me by... you, sir?" he asked, turning pale.
"I mean, you see, she wants to arrange a day and place for a mutual talk with you, the leftovers of your sentimentalizing. You've been flirting with her for twenty years and have got her used to the funniest ways. But don't worry, it's all different now; she herself keeps saying that she's only now beginning 'to have her eyes re-opened.' I explained to her straight out that this whole friendship of yours is just a mutual outpouring of slops. She's told me a lot, friend; pah, what a lackey position you've been in all this time. Even I blushed for you."
"I, in a lackey position?" Stepan Trofimovich could not restrain himself.
"Worse, you've been a sponger, meaning a voluntary lackey. Too lazy to work, but with an appetite for a spot of cash. All this she now understands; anyway, what she tells about you is simply terrible. No, friend, I really had a good laugh over your letters to her; shameful and disgusting. But you're all so depraved, so depraved! There's something eternally depraving in alms—you're a clear example of it!"
"She showed you my letters!"
"All of them. I mean, of course, there was no way I could read them. Pah, how much paper you wasted, there must be more than two thousand letters there... And you know, old man, I think there was a moment between you two when she was ready to marry you. It was most stupid of you to let it slip! I'm speaking from your viewpoint, of course, but still it would have been better than now when you almost married 'someone else's sins,' like a clown, a laughingstock, for money."
"For money! She, she says it was for money!" Stepan Trofimovich cried out in pain.
"And what else? Come now, I'm the one who had to defend you. That's the only way you could justify yourself. She understood that you needed money like everyone else, and that from that point perhaps you were right. I proved to her like two times two that you'd been living for your mutual profit: she as a capitalist, and you as her sentimental clown. By the way, she's not angry about the money, though you've been milking her like a nanny goat. She's just mad because she believed you for twenty years, because you hoodwinked her so much with nobility and made her lie for so long. That she herself was lying she will never admit, but you're going to catch it twice over for that. I don't understand how you never figured out that you'd have to settle accounts one day. You did have some sense after all, didn't you? I advised her yesterday to send you to an almshouse—a decent one, don't worry, nothing to complain of; it seems that's just what she'll do. Remember your last letter to me in Kh– province, three weeks ago?"
"You mean you showed it to her?" Stepan Trofimovich jumped up, horrified.
"But, what else? First thing. The one in which you informed me that she exploited you because she was jealous of your talent—well, and also about 'someone else's sins.' Really, though, friend, how vain you are, incidentally! I laughed my head off. Generally, your letters are quite dull; your style is terrible. I often didn't read them at all, and there's one lying around unopened even now; I'll send it to you tomorrow. But this, this last letter of yours—it's the peak of perfection! How I laughed, how I laughed!"
"Monster! Monster!" Stepan Trofimovich cried out.
"Pah, the devil, one can't even talk with you. What, are you offended again, like last Thursday?"
Stepan Trofimovich drew himself up menacingly. "How dare you speak to me in such language?"
"What language? Simple and clear?"
"But tell me finally, monster, are you my son or not?"
"You should know better than I. Of course, fathers always tend to be blind in such cases..."
"Silence! Silence!" Stepan Trofimovich was shaking all over.
"See, you shout at me and abuse me, as you did last Thursday, you were going to wave your stick at me, but I did find that document then. I spent the whole evening rummaging in my suitcase out of curiosity. True, there's nothing certain, you can be comforted. It's just my mother's note to that little Polack. But judging by her character..."
"One word more and I'll slap your face."
"Look at these people!" Pyotr Stepanovich suddenly turned to me. "See, we've been at it since last Thursday. I'm glad at least that you're here today and can settle it. First the fact: he reproaches me for speaking this way about my mother, but wasn't it he who suggested this very thing into my head? In Petersburg, when I was still at school, didn't he wake me up twice in the night, embracing me and weeping like a woman, and what do you think he told me those nights? These same non-lenten anecdotes about my mother! He was the first I heard them from."
"Oh, that was in the loftiest sense! Oh, you didn't understand me! Nothing, you understood nothing."
"But, still, it comes out meaner your way than mine, meaner, admit it. You see, it's all the same to me, if you like. I mean, from your point. From my viewpoint, don't worry: I don't blame mother; if it's you, it's you, if it's the Polack, it's the Polack, it makes no difference to me. It's not my fault if it came out so stupidly with you in Berlin. As if anything smarter could have come out with you. So, aren't you funny people after that! And does it make any difference to you whether I'm your son or not? Listen," he turned to me again, "he didn't spend a rouble on me all his life, he didn't know me at all till I was sixteen, then he robbed me here, and now he shouts that his heart has ached for me all his life, and poses in front of me like an actor. Really, I'm not Varvara Petrovna, for pity's sake!"
He got up and took his hat.
"I curse you henceforth in my name!" Stepan Trofimovich, pale as death, stretched his hand out over him.
"My, my, what foolishness a man can drive himself into!" Pyotr Stepanovich was even surprised. "Well, good-bye, old man, I'll never come to you again. Send your article ahead of time, don't forget, and try to do it without any humbug, if you can: facts, facts, facts, and, above all, make it short. Good-bye."
III
However, there was also the influence of unrelated causes here. Pyotr Stepanovich indeed had certain designs on his parent. In my opinion, he meant to bring the old man to despair and thus push him into some outright scandal of a certain sort. He needed this for some further, unrelated purposes, of which we shall speak later. At that time he accumulated a great multitude of such diverse designs and calculations—almost all of them fantastic, of course. Besides Stepan Trofimovich, he had in mind yet another martyr. Generally, he had not a few martyrs, as it turned out afterwards; but he was especially counting on this one, and it was Mr. von Lembke himself.
Andrei Antonovich von Lembke belonged to that favored (by nature) tribe which in Russia, according to the records, numbers several hundred thousand, and which is itself perhaps unaware that within her, by its sheer mass, it constitutes a strictly organized union. Not an intentional or invented union, to be sure, but one existing of itself for the entire tribe, without words or agreements, as something morally obligatory, and consisting in the mutual support of all members of this tribe by each other, always, everywhere, and in whatever circumstances. Andrei Antonovich had the honor of being educated in one of those higher Russian institutions filled with young men from families well endowed with connections or wealth. The students of this institution were intended, almost immediately upon finishing their studies, to occupy rather significant positions in one of the departments of the government service. Andrei Antonovich had one uncle who was a lieutenant colonel in the engineers, and another who was a baker; yet he wormed his way into this higher school and met there quite a few similar tribesmen. He was a merry companion; quite dull as a student, but everyone liked him. And when, in the upper grades, many of the young men, predominantly Russians, learned to talk about rather lofty contemporary questions, and with an air as if they had only to wait till graduation and then they would resolve them all—Andrei Antonovich continued to occupy himself with the most innocent schoolboy pranks. He made everyone laugh, true, though only with quite unsophisticated escapades, cynical at most, but he set that as his goal. One time he would blow his nose somehow remarkably when the teacher addressed a question to him during a lecture—making both his comrades and the teacher laugh; another time he would present some cynical tableau vivant in the dormitory, to general applause; or he would play, solely on his nose (and quite skillfully), the overture to Fra Diavolo. [111] He was also distinguished by his deliberate slovenliness, which for some reason he found witty. In his very last year he took to scribbling little Russian verses. His own tribal language he knew quite ungrammatically, like many of his tribe in Russia. This propensity for verse brought him together with a schoolmate, gloomy and as if downtrodden by something, the son of some poor general, one of the Russians, who was regarded at the institute as a great future writer. The latter treated him patronizingly. But it so happened that three years after graduation, this gloomy comrade, who had abandoned his career for the sake of Russian literature and, as a consequence, was already parading around in torn boots, his teeth chattering from the cold, wearing a summer coat in the depths of autumn, unexpectedly met by chance, near the Anichkov Bridge, his former protégé "Lembka," as everyone, by the way, had called him at school. And what do you think? He did not even recognize him at first sight and stopped in surprise. Before him stood an impeccably dressed young man, with wonderfully tended side-whiskers of a reddish hue, wearing a pince-nez, patent-leather boots, the freshest gloves, in a full-cut overcoat from Charmeur's, and with a briefcase under his arm. Lembke treated his comrade benignly, gave him his address, and invited him to call on him some evening. It also turned out that he was no longer "Lembka," but von Lembke. The comrade did call on him, however, if only out of spite. At the stairway, rather unattractive, and certainly not the main one, though laid with red baize, he was met and questioned by a doorkeeper. A bell rang out upstairs. But instead of the riches the visitor expected to meet, he found his "Lembka" in a side room, a very small one, dark and decrepit-looking, divided in two by a large dark green curtain, furnished with very decrepit, though soft, dark green furniture, and with dark green shades on its narrow and high windows. Von Lembke lodged with some very distant relative, a general, whose protégé he was. He met his guest amiably, was serious and gracefully polite. They also talked of literature, but within decent limits. A servant in a white tie brought some weakish tea with small, round, dry biscuits. The comrade, out of spite, asked for seltzer water. It was served, but with some delay, and Lembke seemed embarrassed at calling the servant an extra time and giving him an order. However, he himself asked whether the visitor wanted a bite to eat, and was obviously pleased when the latter declined and finally left. The simple fact was that Lembke was starting his career and was sponging on the general, a fellow tribesman, but an important one.
At that time he was sighing after the general's fifth daughter, and this seemed to be reciprocated. Nevertheless, when the time came, Amalia was given in marriage to an old German factory owner, an old comrade of the old general's. Andrei Antonovich did not weep much, but glued together a theater made of paper. The curtains rose, the actors came out, made gestures with their hands; the audience sat in their boxes, the orchestra mechanically moved their bows across their fiddles, the conductor waved his baton, and in the stalls gentlemen and officers clapped their hands. It was all made of paper, all designed and assembled by von Lembke himself; he sat over this theater for half a year. The general purposely organized an intimate little evening, the theater was brought out for display, all five of the general's daughters, the newly wedded Amalia included, her factory owner, and many young girls and women with their Germans, attentively examined and praised the theater; then there was dancing. Lembke was very pleased and soon consoled.
Years passed and his career got established. He always served in prominent places, and always under his tribesmen's command, and in the end he served his way up to quite a significant rank, compared with his age. He had long wanted to marry, and had long been cautiously on the lookout. In secret from the authorities, he sent a novella to a magazine, but it was not published. To make up for that he glued together an entire railway station with a train, and again it came out as a most successful little thing: people left the station with suitcases and bags, children and dogs, and got into the cars. Conductors and porters walked about, the bell rang, the signal was given, and the train started on its way. He sat for a whole year over this clever piece. But all the same he had to get married. The circle of his acquaintances was quite wide, primarily in the German world; but he also moved in Russian spheres, through his superiors, of course. Finally, when he had already turned thirty-eight, he also received an inheritance. His uncle, the baker, died and left him a bequest of thirteen thousand. Now it was just a matter of the right position. Mr. von Lembke, despite the rather high cut of the sphere in which he served, was a very modest man. He would have been quite satisfied with some independent little government post, with being in charge of the delivery of government firewood, or some such plum, and that for the rest of his life. But here, instead of some anticipated Mina or Ernestina, all at once Yulia Mikhailovna turned up. His career immediately rose another degree in prominence. The modest and precise von Lembke felt that he, too, was capable of ambition.
Yulia Mikhailovna owned two hundred souls, by the old way of reckoning, and, besides that, brought big connections with her. Von Lembke, on the other hand, was handsome, and she was already past forty. Remarkably, he did really fall in love with her little by little, as he felt himself more and more a fiancé. On the morning of their wedding day he sent her some verses. She liked it all very much, even the verses: forty is no joke. Soon he was awarded a certain rank and a certain decoration, and then he was appointed to our province.
In preparation for coming to our town, Yulia Mikhailovna worked assiduously on her husband. In her opinion, he was not without abilities, knew how to make an entrance and show himself, knew how to listen with a grave air and say nothing, had picked up a few quite decent poses, could even make a speech, even had some odds and ends of ideas, and had picked up the gloss of the latest indispensable liberalism. But all the same it troubled her that he was somehow none too receptive, and, after his long, eternal search for a career, was decidedly beginning to feel a need for peace. She wanted to pour her ambition into him, and he all of a sudden began gluing together a German church: the pastor came out to preach the sermon, the faithful listened, their hands piously clasped before them, one lady wiping away tears with her handkerchief, one little old man blowing his nose; towards the end a little organ rang out—it had been specially ordered and had already arrived from Switzerland, expense notwithstanding. Yulia Mikhailovna, even with some sort of fright, took the whole work from him as soon as she found out about it, and locked it away in her drawer; she allowed him to write a novel instead, but on the quiet. Since then she began to rely directly on herself alone. The trouble was that there was a fair amount of frivolity in all this, and little measure. Fate had kept her too long among the old maids. Idea after idea now flashed in her ambitious and somewhat fretted mind. She nursed designs, she decidedly wanted to rule the province, dreamed of being surrounded at once, chose her tendency. Von Lembke even got somewhat frightened, though he quickly figured out, with his official's tact, that there was no reason at all for him to be afraid of governorship as such. The first two or three months even passed quite satisfactorily. But then Pyotr Stepanovich turned up, and something strange began to happen.
The thing was that from the very first step the young Verkhovensky showed a decided disrespect for Andrei Antonovich, and assumed some strange rights over him, and Yulia Mikhailovna, always so jealous of her husband's significance, simply refused to notice it; at least she attached no importance to it. The young man became her favorite, ate, drank, and all but slept in the house. Von Lembke set about defending himself, called him "young man" in public, patted him patronizingly on the shoulder, but made no impression: Pyotr Stepanovich went on laughing in his face, as it were, even while apparently talking seriously, and said the most unexpected things to him in public. Once, on returning home, he found the young man in his study, asleep on the sofa, uninvited. The latter explained that he had stopped by and, finding no one home, had "caught himself a good nap." Von Lembke was offended and again complained to his wife; laughing at his irritability, she remarked caustically that it was he who seemed unable to put himself on a real footing; at least with her "this boy" never allowed himself any familiarity, and, in all events, he was "naïve and fresh, though outside the bounds of society." Von Lembke pouted. On that occasion she got them to make peace. Pyotr Stepanovich did not really apologize, but got off with some coarse joke which in other circumstances could have been taken as a new insult, but in the present case was taken as repentance. The weak point lay in Andrei Antonovich's having made a blunder at the very beginning—namely, by imparting his novel to him. Fancying him to be a fervent young man of poetry, and having long dreamed of a listener, one evening, still in the first days of their acquaintance, he read two chapters to him. He listened with unconcealed boredom, yawned impolitely, uttered not a word of praise, but on leaving asked Andrei Antonovich for the manuscript so as to form an opinion at home at his leisure, and Andrei Antonovich gave it to him. Since then, though he ran by every day, he had not returned the manuscript, and laughed in answer to inquiries; finally he announced that he had lost it then and there in the street. When she learned of it, Yulia Mikhailovna became terribly angry with her husband.
"And did you tell him about your little church, too?" she fluttered, almost frightened.
Von Lembke decidedly took to pondering, and pondering was bad for him and was forbidden by his doctors. Aside from the fact that there turned out to be much trouble with the province, of which we shall speak later, there was another matter here, and he even suffered in his heart, not merely in his official pride. On entering into marriage, Andrei Antonovich had by no means envisioned the possibility of future family strife and discord. This was not what he had always imagined in his dreams of Mina and Ernestina. He felt himself unable to endure family storms. Yulia Mikhailovna finally had a frank talk with him.
"You can't be angry at this," she said, "if only because you are three times more sensible and immeasurably higher on the social ladder. There are many leftovers of former freethinking ways in the boy—just mischief, in my opinion—but one must be gradual, not sudden. We should cherish our young people; my way is to indulge them and keep them on the brink."
"But he says the devil knows what," objected von Lembke. "I can't be tolerant when he asserts publicly and in my presence that the government purposely gets the people drunk on vodka so as to brutalize them and keep them from rebelling. Imagine my role when I'm forced to listen to that in front of everyone."
As he said this, von Lembke recalled a conversation he had had recently with Pyotr Stepanovich. With the innocent aim of disarming him with his liberalism, he had shown him his own private collection of all sorts of tracts, from Russia and abroad, which he had been carefully collecting since the year 'fifty-nine, not really as an amateur, but merely out of healthy curiosity. Pyotr Stepanovich, having guessed his aim, stated rudely that there was more sense in one line of some tracts than in certain whole chanceries, "perhaps not excluding your own."
Lembke cringed.
"But with us it's too early, much too early," he said almost pleadingly, pointing to the tracts.
"No, it's not too early; see, you're afraid, so it's not too early."
"But, all the same, here, for example, is an invitation to destroy churches."
"And why not? You're an intelligent man and, of course, not a believer yourself, but you understand only too well that you need belief in order to brutalize the people. Truth is more honest than lying."
"I agree, I agree, I fully agree with you, but for us it's too early, too early ..." von Lembke kept wincing.
"And what sort of government official are you after that, if you yourself agree to destroy churches and march with cudgels to Petersburg, and the only difference is when to do it?"
So rudely caught up, Lembke was sorely piqued.
"It's not that, not that," he was getting carried away, his amour-propre more and more chafed. "Being a young man and, above all, unfamiliar with our goals, you are mistaken. You see, my dearest Pyotr Stepanovich, you call us officials of the government? Right. Independent officials? Right. But, may I ask, how do we act? The responsibility is on us, and as a result we serve the common cause the same as you do. We merely hold together that which you are shaking apart, and which without us would go sprawling in all directions. We're not your enemies, by no means. We say to you: go forward, progress, even shake—all that's old, that is, and has to be remade—but when need be, we will keep you within necessary limits, and save you from yourselves, for without us you will only set Russia tottering, depriving her of a decent appearance, while our task consists precisely in maintaining her decent appearance. Realize that you and we are mutually necessary to each other. In England, the Whigs and Tories are also mutually necessary to each other. So, then, we are the Tories and you are the Whigs, that's precisely how I see it."
Andrei Antonovich even waxed enthusiastic. Ever since Petersburg, he had enjoyed talking intelligently and liberally, and here, furthermore, no one was eavesdropping. Pyotr Stepanovich was silent and bore himself somehow with unusual gravity. This egged the orator on even more.
"Do you know that I, the 'master of the province,’” he went on, pacing the study, "do you know that I, owing to the multitude of my duties, am unable to fulfill even one of them, and, on the other hand, it would be just as correct to say that there is nothing for me to do here. The whole secret is that here everything depends on the views of the government. Suppose the government even establishes a republic, say, out of politics, or to restrain passions, and on the other hand, parallel with that, suppose it strengthens the power of the governors—then we governors will swallow up the republic; not just the republic, we'll swallow up whatever you like, I at least feel I am ready ... In short, if the government sends me a telegram declaring activité dévorante, [lxxxviii] then I'll give them activité dévorante.I said here, right in their faces: 'My dear sirs, for the balancing and flourishing of all provincial institutions, one thing is necessary—an increase of the governor's power.' You see, all these institutions, whether local or legislative, ought, so to speak, to live a double life—that is, they ought to exist (I agree that this is necessary), well, and on the other hand, they ought at the same time not to exist. All depending on the government's view. If the notion should arise that these institutions suddenly seem necessary, I immediately have them available. If the necessity passes, no one will find them anywhere in my province. That is how I understand activité dévorante,and it cannot exist without an increase of the governor's power. We are talking privately. You know, I've already applied to Petersburg about the necessity for a special sentry at the door of the governor's house. I'm awaiting an answer."
