Such behavior wounded my pride somewhat. Needless to say, I had long since guessed this chief secret for myself and seen through it all. According to my deepest conviction then, the revealing of this secret, this chief care of Stepan Trofimovich's, would not have added to his credit, and therefore, being still a young man, I was somewhat indignant at the coarseness of his feelings and the ugliness of some of his suspicions. In the heat of passion—and, I confess, finding it boring to be a confidant—I perhaps blamed him too much. In my cruelty, I tried to obtain a full confession from him, though, by the way, I did allow that to confess certain things might prove embarrassing. He, too, understood me thoroughly; that is, he clearly saw that I understood him thoroughly, and that I was even angry with him, and was himself angry with me for being angry with him and for understanding him thoroughly. Perhaps my irritation was petty and stupid; but shared isolation is sometimes extremely damaging to true friendship. From a certain angle he understood some aspects of his position correctly, and even defined it quite subtly in those points about which he did not find it necessary to be secretive.
"Oh, is this how she was then?" he would sometimes let slip about Varvara Petrovna. "Is she the same woman she once was, when she and I used to talk ... Do you know that she was still able to talk then? Can you believe that she had thoughts then, her own thoughts! That's all changed now! She says it was all just the same old blather! She despises the former times... She's become some sort of steward, an economist, a hard person, and she's angry all the time..."
"What is there for her to be angry about, since you've done what she demanded?" I objected to him.
He gave me a subtle look.
"Cher ami, if I hadn't consented she would have been terribly angry, ter-ri-bly! But still less than she is now that I have consented."
He remained pleased with this phrase of his, and we finished a little bottle that evening. But it was only momentary; the next day he was more terrible and morose than ever.
But I was vexed with him most of all because he could not even bring himself to go and pay the necessary call on the just-arrived Drozdovs, to renew the acquaintance, which it was heard they themselves desired, for they had already asked about him, and which grieved him daily. He spoke of Lizaveta Nikolaevna with a sort of rapture which was incomprehensible to me. No doubt he remembered in her the child he had once loved so much; but, besides that, for some unknown reason he fancied that near her he would at once find relief from all his present torments and would even resolve his most important doubts. He hoped to find some extraordinary being in Lizaveta Nikolaevna. And yet he would not go to her, though he made ready to do so every day. The main thing was that at the time I myself wanted terribly to be introduced and recommended to her, for which I had only Stepan Trofimovich to count on. I had been greatly impressed then by my frequent meetings with her—in the street, of course, when she went for an outing on horseback, dressed in a riding habit and mounted on a beautiful horse, accompanied by her so-called relative, a handsome officer, the late General Drozdov's nephew. My blindness lasted only a moment, and soon afterwards I understood all the impossibility of my dream—but it really did exist, if only for a moment, and therefore it may be imagined how indignant I occasionally became with my poor friend at that time for his persistent seclusion.
Our group was officially notified from the very beginning that Stepan Trofimovich would not be receiving for a while and asked to be left in perfect peace. He insisted on a circular notification, though I advised against it. And so I went around, at his request, and gave out to everyone that Varvara Petrovna had charged our "old man" (as we all referred to Stepan Trofimovich among ourselves) with some urgent work putting in order some correspondence from several years past; that he had locked himself in, and I was helping him, and so on and so forth. Only I had no time to go to Liputin and kept postponing it—or, rather, I was afraid to go. I knew beforehand that he would not believe a single word I said, would certainly imagine that there was some secret which we wanted to keep strictly hidden from him alone, and as soon as I left him would at once scuttle off inquiring and gossiping all over town. It so happened that while I was picturing all this to myself, I accidentally ran into him in the street. It turned out that he had already learned everything from the friends I had just notified. But, strangely, he was not only not curious, and asked nothing about Stepan Trofimovich, but, on the contrary, he himself interrupted me when I tried to apologize for not coming to him sooner, and skipped at once to another subject. True, he had stored up a lot to say; he was in an extremely excited state of mind, and was glad to have caught me as a listener. He began talking about town news, about the arrival of the governor's wife "with her new conversations," the opposition that had already formed in the club, how everyone was shouting about the new ideas, and how well it suited them all, and so on and so forth. He talked for nearly a quarter of an hour, and was so amusing that I was unable to tear myself away. Though I could not stand him, I confess that he had a gift for making one listen to him, especially when he was very angry about something. The man was, in my opinion, a natural-born spy. He knew at any moment all the latest news and all the innermost secrets of our town, mostly of the nasty sort, and one marveled at the degree to which he took things to heart that sometimes did not concern him at all. I always thought that the main feature of his character was envy. When, that same evening, I told Stepan Trofimovich about my morning meeting with Liputin and about our conversation, to my surprise he became extremely agitated and asked me a wild question: "Does Liputin know or not?" I started proving to him that he could not possibly have found out so soon, and had no one to find out from; but Stepan Trofimovich held his own. "Believe it or not, then," he finally concluded unexpectedly, "but I am convinced that he not only knows all about our position in all its details, but also knows something beyond that, something you and I do not know yet, and perhaps will never know, or will find out only when it's already too late, when there will be no turning back! ..." I said nothing, but these words hinted at a lot. After that we did not so much as mention Liputin for five days; it was clear to me that Stepan Trofimovich very much regretted having displayed such suspicions before me and having talked too much.
II
One morning—that is, on the seventh or eighth day after Stepan Trofimovich had consented to become engaged—at about eleven o'clock, when I was rushing as usual to my sorrowful friend, I had an adventure on the way.
I met Karmazinov, the "great writer," as Liputin styled him.[46] I had been reading Karmazinov since childhood. His novellas and stories were known to the whole of the previous generation and even to ours; as for me, I reveled in them; they were the delight of my adolescence and youth. Later I grew somewhat cold to his pen; the tendentious novellas he had been writing lately I liked less than his first, original creations, in which there was so much ingenuous poetry; and his most recent works I even did not like at all.
Generally speaking, if I dare express my own opinion in such a ticklish matter, all these gentlemen talents of the average sort, who are usually taken almost for geniuses in their lifetime, not only vanish from people's memory almost without a trace and somehow suddenly when they die, but it happens that even in their lifetime, as soon as a new generation grows up to replace the one in whose time they were active—they are forgotten and scorned by everyone inconceivably quickly. This happens somehow suddenly with us, like a change of sets in the theater. Oh, it is quite another matter than with the Pushkins, Gogols, Molières, Voltaires,[47] with all these figures who came to speak their new word! It is also true that these gentlemen talents of the average sort, in the decline of their venerable age, usually write themselves out in a most pathetic way, without even noticing it at all. Not infrequently it turns out that a writer to whom an extreme profundity of ideas had long been attributed, and from whom an extreme and serious influence upon the movement of society was expected, in the end displays such thinness and puniness in his basic little idea that no one is even sorry that he has managed to write himself out so quickly. But the old graybeards do not notice this and get angry. Their vanity, precisely towards the end of their career, sometimes takes on proportions worthy of wonder. God knows who they begin to think they are—gods, at the least. It was said of Karmazinov that he valued his connections with influential people and with higher society almost more than his soul. It was said that he would meet you, show you kindness, seduce you, charm you with his ingenuousness, especially if he needed you for some reason, and most certainly if you had been recommended to him beforehand. But at the first prince, at the first countess, at the first person he was in fear of, he would regard it as his sacred duty to forget you with the most insulting disdain, like a speck, like a fly, then and there, even before you had time to leave him; he seriously considered it the most lofty and beautiful tone. In spite of his complete self-possession and perfect knowledge of good manners, he was said to be so vain, to the point of such hysterics, that he was simply unable to conceal his authorial petulance, even in those social circles where there was little interest in literature. And if someone chanced to confound him with their indifference, he would be morbidly offended and seek to revenge himself.