"Well, it's all nonsense!" Varvara Petrovna decided, folding up this letter, too. "If it's Athenian nights until dawn, then he's not sitting twelve hours over books. Was he drunk when he wrote it, or what? This Dundasov woman, how dare she send me her regards? Oh, well, let him have a good time..."
The phrase "dans le pays de Makar et de ses veaux" meant: "where Makar never drove his calves."[21] Stepan Trofimovich sometimes deliberately translated Russian proverbs and popular sayings into French in a most stupid way, though he undoubtedly understood and could have translated them better. He did it from a special sort of chic, and found it witty.
But his good time was not long. He did not hold out even four months, and came rushing back to Skvoreshniki. His last letters consisted of nothing but outpourings of the most tenderhearted love for his absent friend and were literally wet with the tears of separation. There are natures that become extremely attached to home, like lap-dogs. The reunion of the two friends was rapturous. In two days everything was back the old way, and even more boring than the old way. "My friend," Stepan Trofimovich told me two weeks later, as the greatest secret, "my friend, I've discovered something new and... terrible for me: je suis un mere sponger et rien de plus! Mais r-r-rien de plus!"[iv]
VIII
Then came a lull which continued almost unbroken for all these nine years. Hysterical outbursts and weepings on my shoulder, which regularly recurred, did not hinder our prosperity in the least. I am surprised how it could have been that Stepan Trofimovich did not put on weight during that time. His nose only became a little redder, and he grew more benign. Gradually a circle of friends established itself around him, though a perpetually small one. Varvara Petrovna, who had little contact with this circle, was nevertheless acknowledged by us all as our patroness. After the Petersburg lesson, she settled herself permanently in our town; the winters she spent in her town house, and the summers on her suburban estate. Never before had she enjoyed so much importance and influence in our provincial society as during the last seven years, that is, right up to the appointment of our present governor. Our former governor, the mild and unforgettable Ivan Osipovich, was a close relation of hers and had once been the object of her benefactions. His wife trembled at the very thought of displeasing Varvara Petrovna, and the reverence of provincial society even went so far as to resemble something sinful. It was, consequently, good for Stepan Trofimovich as well. He was a member of the club, lost majestically at cards, and earned himself esteem, though many looked upon him as merely a "scholar." Later on, when Varvara Petrovna permitted him to live in a separate house, we felt even more free. We gathered at his place about twice a week; it used to get quite merry, especially when he was generous with the champagne. The wine came from the shop of that same Andreev. Varvara Petrovna paid the bill every six months, and the day of payment was almost always a day of cholerine.
The most long-standing member of the circle was Liputin, a provincial official, no longer a young man, a great liberal and known around town as an atheist. He got married for the second time to a young and pretty woman, took her dowry, and had, besides, three adolescent daughters. He kept his whole family in fear of God and under lock and key, was exceedingly stingy, and had set aside a little house and some capital for himself from his service. He was a restless person, and of low rank besides, little respected in town, and not received in higher circles. Moreover, he was an undisguised gossip and had more than once been punished, and punished painfully, for it—once by some officer, and another time by a landowner, the respectable head of a family. But we loved his sharp wit, his inquisitiveness, his peculiar wicked gaiety. Varvara Petrovna did not like him, but somehow he was always able to get in good with her.
She also did not like Shatov, who became a member of the circle only in the last year. Shatov had been a student, but was expelled from the university after some student incident; as a child he had been Stepan Trofimovich's pupil, and he had been born Varvara Petrovna's serf, the son of her late valet Pavel Fyodorov, and had been the object of her benefactions. She disliked him for his pride and ingratitude, and simply could not forgive him for not coming to her at once after he was expelled from the university; on the contrary, he did not even reply to the letter she specially sent him then, and preferred putting himself in bondage to some civilized merchant as teacher of his children. He went abroad with this merchant's family, more as a baby-sitter than as a tutor; but at the time he wanted very much to go abroad. The children had a governess as well, a pert Russian girl who also joined the household just before their departure and was taken mainly for her cheapness. About two months later the merchant threw her out for "free thoughts." Shatov went trudging after her and soon married her in Geneva. They lived together for about three weeks, and then parted as free people not bound by anything; also, of course, because of poverty. For a long time afterwards he wandered around Europe alone, living God knows how; they say he shined shoes in the streets and worked as a stevedore in some port. Finally, about a year ago, he came back to his own nest here and stayed with an old aunt, whom he buried within a month. His communications with his sister Dasha, who was also Varvara Petrovna's ward and lived with her as her favorite on the most noble footing, were very rare and distant. With us he was perpetually glum and taciturn; but occasionally, when his convictions were touched upon, he became morbidly irritated and quite unrestrained in his language. "Shatov should be tied up before you try reasoning with him," Stepan Trofimovich sometimes joked; yet he loved him. Abroad, Shatov had radically changed some of his former socialist convictions and leaped to the opposite extreme. He was one of those ideal Russian beings who can suddenly be so struck by some strong idea that it seems to crush them then and there, sometimes even forever. They are never strong enough to master it, but they are passionate believers, and so their whole life afterwards is spent in some last writhings, as it were, under the stone that has fallen on them and already half crushed them. In appearance Shatov corresponded completely to his convictions: he was clumsy, blond, shaggy, short, with broad shoulders, thick lips, bushy, beetling white eyebrows, a scowling forehead, and unfriendly eyes stubbornly downcast and as if ashamed of something. There was this one lock of his hair that simply refused to lie flat and was eternally sticking up. He was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. "It no longer surprises me that his wife ran away from him," Varvara Petrovna once allowed, after studying him intently. He tried to dress neatly, despite his extreme poverty. He again refused to turn to Varvara Petrovna for help, but got by on whatever God sent him; he also had some doings with shopkeepers. One time he sat in a shop; then he almost left altogether on a trading ship as a salesman's assistant, but fell ill just before the departure. It is hard to imagine what poverty he was able to endure without even giving it a thought. After his illness, Varvara Petrovna secretly and anonymously sent him a hundred roubles. He found out the secret, however, pondered, accepted the money, and went to Varvara Petrovna to thank her. She received him warmly, but here, too, he shamefully deceived her expectations: he sat for only five minutes, silent, staring dully at the floor and smiling stupidly, and suddenly, without letting her finish speaking and at the most interesting point of the conversation, got up, bowed somehow sideways, hulkily, dissolved in shame, incidentally brushed against her expensive inlaid worktable, which went crashing to the floor and broke, and walked out nearly dead from disgrace. Liputin later upbraided him strongly, not only for accepting the hundred roubles instead of rejecting them with contempt as coming from his former despot-landowner, but for dragging himself there to thank her on top of it. He lived solitarily on the outskirts of town, and did not like it when anyone, even one of us, stopped to see him. He regularly came to Stepan Trofimovich's evenings, and borrowed newspapers and books to read from him.