The coachman drove them straight up to a big cottage with four windows and wings of rooms in the yard. The awakened Stepan Trofimovich hurriedly walked in and went straight to the second room, the best and most spacious in the house. His sleepy face acquired a most bustling expression. He explained at once to the mistress, a tall and sturdy woman of about forty with very black hair and all but a moustache, that he required the whole room for himself "and that the door be shut and no one be let in, parce que nous avons à parler."[cxcviii]
"Oui, j'ai beaucoup à vous dire, chère amie,[cxcix] I'll pay you, I'll pay you!" he waved the mistress away.
Though he was hurrying, he moved his tongue somehow stiffly. The mistress listened with displeasure, but in token of agreement kept her silence, in which, however, one could sense a certain menace. He noticed none of this and hurriedly (he was in a terrible hurry) requested that she go and serve dinner at once as soon as possible, "without the least delay."
Here the woman with the moustache could bear it no longer.
"This isn't an inn, mister, we don't serve dinners for travelers. Some boiled crayfish or a samovar, we have nothing else. There won't be fresh fish till tomorrow."
But Stepan Trofimovich began waving his arms, repeating with wrathful impatience: "I'll pay, only be quick, be quick." They settled on fish soup and roast chicken; the landlady declared that there was not a chicken to be found in the whole village; however, she agreed to go and look, but with an air as though she were doing an extraordinary favor.
As soon as she left, Stepan Trofimovich instantly sat down on the sofa and sat Sofya Matveevna down next to him. There were both armchairs and a sofa in the room, but of dreadful appearance. Generally, the whole room, rather spacious (with a partition behind which stood a bed), with its yellow, old, torn wallpaper, with dreadful mythological lithographs on the walls, with a long row of icons and bronze triptychs[202] in the front corner, with its strange assortment of furniture, presented an unsightly mixture of the urban and the aboriginally peasant. But he did not even glance at it all, did not even look out the window at the vast lake which began about seventy feet from the cottage.
"At last we're by ourselves, and we won't let anyone in! I want to tell you everything, everything, from the very beginning."
Sofya Matveevna stopped him, even with strong uneasiness:
"Is it known to you, Stepan Trofimovich..."
"Comment, vous savez déjà mon nom?"[cc] he smiled joyfully.
"I heard it today from Anisim Ivanovich, when you were talking with him. But this, for my part, I will be so bold as to tell you..."
And in a quick whisper, glancing back at the closed door to be sure no one was eavesdropping, she told him that here, in this village, there is trouble, sir. That all the local peasants, though fishermen, in fact make a business of charging summer visitors whatever price they like. The village is not on a main route, but is out of the way, and the only reason to come here is that the steamer stops here, but when the steamer does not come, as always happens the moment the weather turns bad, there will be a crowd of people waiting for several days, and then all the houses in the village will be occupied, and that is just what the owners wait for; because they triple the price for everything, and the proprietor here is proud and haughty, because he is very rich for these parts—his net alone is worth a thousand roubles.
Stepan Trofimovich looked into Sofya Matveevna's extremely animated face all but with reproach, and several times made a gesture to stop her. But she held her own and finished: according to what she said, she had already come there in the summer with one "very noble lady, sir," from town, and had also stayed overnight waiting for the steamer to come, even two whole days, sir, and had suffered such grief that it was terrible to remember. "Now you, Stepan Trofimovich, were pleased to ask for this room for yourself alone, sir... It's just to warn you, sir... There, in the other room, there are already guests, an elderly man, a young man, and also some lady with children, and by tomorrow before two o'clock there'll be a houseful, because if there hasn't been a steamer for two days, it will surely come tomorrow. So for a separate room, and for having just asked for dinner, sir, and for making it bad for the other guests, they'll demand so much from you that it's even unheard-of in the capitals, sir..."
But he was suffering, truly suffering:
"Assez, mon enfant, I pray you; nous avons notre argent, et après—et après le bon Dieu. And I'm even surprised that you, with the loftiness of your notions... Assez, assez, vous me tourmentez,"[cci] he said hysterically, "our whole future is ahead of us, and you... you make me fear for the future ..."
He immediately began telling the whole story, hurrying so much that at first it was even hard to understand. It took a long time. The fish soup was served, the chicken was served, the samovar, finally, was served, and he went on talking... What came out was somewhat strange and morbid, but he was indeed ill. This was a sudden straining of his mental powers, which, of course—and Sofya Matveevna foresaw it with anguish throughout his story—could not but lead immediately afterwards to a great loss of strength in his already unsettled organism. He started almost from childhood, when "with fresh breast he ran over the fields"; only an hour later did he reach his two marriages and Berlin life. I would not dream of laughing, however. There was something truly lofty for him here and, to use the newest language, almost a struggle for existence. He saw before him her whom he had already pre-elected for his future path, and he was hastening to initiate her, so to speak. His genius must no longer remain a secret to her... Perhaps he was greatly exaggerating with regard to Sofya Matveevna, but he had already elected her. He could not be without a woman. He himself saw clearly from her face that she hardly understood him at all, even in the most capital things.
"Ce n 'est rien, nous attendrons,[ccii] and meanwhile she can understand by intuition..."
"My friend, all I need is your heart alone!" he kept exclaiming, interrupting his narrative, "and this dear, charming look with which you are gazing at me now. Oh, do not blush! I've already told you..."
The fogginess increased greatly for poor, trapped Sofya Matveevna when the story turned almost into a whole dissertation on the subject of how no one had ever been able to understand Stepan Trofimovich and of how "talents perish in our Russia." It was "all so very intelligent," she later reported dejectedly. She listened with obvious suffering, her eyes slightly popping out. And when Stepan Trofimovich threw himself into humor and the wittiest barbs concerning our "progressive and dominating ones," she made an attempt, from grief, to smile a couple of times in response to his laughter, but it came out worse than tears, so that in the end Stepan Trofimovich himself became abashed and struck out with even greater passion and spite at the nihilists and "new people." Here he simply frightened her, and she only got a bit of respite, though a most deceptive one, when the romance proper began. A woman is always a woman, be she even a nun. She smiled, shook her head, blushed deeply all at once and lowered her eyes, thereby sending Stepan Trofimovich into utter admiration and inspiration, so that he even added quite a lot. His Varvara Petrovna came out as a most lovely brunette ("the admiration of Petersburg and a great many European capitals"), and her husband had died, "cut down by a bullet at Sebastopol," solely because he felt unworthy of her love, giving way to his rival—that is, to the same Stepan Trofimovich... "Do not be embarrassed, my quiet one, my Christian!" he exclaimed to Sofya Matveevna, himself almost believing everything he was telling her. "This was something lofty, something so fine that not even once in our lives did we declare it." The reason for such a state of affairs turned out in the ensuing narrative to be a blonde (if not Darya Pavlovna, I really don't know whom Stepan Trofimovich meant). This blonde owed everything to the brunette and, being a distant relation, had grown up in her house. The brunette, having finally noticed the blonde's love for Stepan Trofimovich, withdrew into herself. The blonde, for her part, noticing the brunette's love for Stepan Trofimovich, also withdrew into herself. And so all three of them, languishing in mutual magnanimity, were silent like this for twenty years, withdrawn into themselves. "Oh, what a passion it was, oh, what a passion!" he kept exclaiming, gasping in the most genuine rapture. "I saw the full blossom of her (the brunette's) beauty; daily 'with a sprain in my heart' I saw her passing by me, as if ashamed of her loveliness." (Once he said: "ashamed of her portliness.") At last, he had run away, abandoning all this feverish twenty-year dream. "Vingt ans!" And now, on the high road... Then, in some sort of inflammation of the brain, he began explaining to Sofya Matveevna what must be the significance of their meeting that day, "so accidentally and so fatefully, unto ages of ages." Sofya Matveevna, in terrible embarrassment, finally got up from the sofa; he even made an attempt to go on his knees before her, at which she burst into tears. Twilight was gathering; the two had already spent several hours in the closed room...