"Mon pire, je vous remercie, et vous êtes bien bon, mais ..." [ccxxi]
"No, no, no mais,no maisat all!" Varvara Petrovna exclaimed, leaping from her chair. "Father," she turned to the priest, "this, this is the sort of man, the sort of man ... he'll have to be reconfessed again in an hour. That's the sort of man he is!"
Stepan Trofimovich smiled restrainedly.
"My friends," he said, "God is necessary for me if only because he is the one being who can be loved eternally..."
Either he had really come to believe, or the majestic ceremony of the performed sacrament had shaken him and aroused the artistic receptivity of his nature, but he uttered firmly and, they say, with great feeling, a few words which went directly against many of his former convictions.
"My immortality is necessary if only because God will not want to do an injustice and utterly extinguish the fire of love for him once kindled in my heart. And what is more precious than love? Love is higher than being, love is the crown of being, and is it possible for being not to bow before it? If I have come to love him and rejoice in my love—is it possible that he should extinguish both me and my joy and turn us to naught? If there is God, then I am immortal! Voilà ma profession de foi.” [ccxxii]
"There is God, Stepan Trofimovich, I assure you there is," Varvara Petrovna implored, "give up, drop all your silliness at least once in your life!" (It seems she had not quite understood his profession de foi. )
"My friend," he was growing more and more animated, though his voice broke frequently, "my friend, when I understood ... that turned cheek, I... right then I also understood something else...
J'ai menti toute ma vie,
[ccxxiii]
Varvara Petrovna began to weep. He was searching for someone with his eyes.
"She's here, here she is!" she seized Sofya Matveevna by the hand and brought her to him. He smiled tenderly.
"Oh, I wish so much to live again!" he exclaimed, with an extraordinary rush of energy. "Each minute, each instant of life should be blessedness for man... they should, surely they should! It is man's own duty to arrange it so; it is his law—a hidden but a surely existing one ... Oh, I wish to see Petrusha ... and all of them ... and Shatov!"
I will note that neither Darya Pavlovna, nor Varvara Petrovna, nor even Salzfisch, the latest to come from town, knew anything yet about Shatov.
Stepan Trofimovich was growing more and more excited, morbidly so, beyond his strength.
"The one constant thought that there exists something immeasurably more just and happy than I, fills the whole of me with immeasurable tenderness and—glory—oh, whoever I am, whatever I do! Far more than his own happiness, it is necessary for a man to know and believe every moment that there is somewhere a perfect and peaceful happiness, for everyone and for everything... The whole law of human existence consists in nothing other than a man's always being able to bow before the immeasurably great. If people are deprived of the immeasurably great, they will not live and will die in despair. The immeasurable and infinite is as necessary for man as the small planet he inhabits ... My friends, all, all of you: long live the Great Thought! The eternal, immeasurable Thought! For every man, whoever he is, it is necessary to bow before that which is the Great Thought. Even the stupidest man needs at least something great. Petrusha... Oh, how I want to see them all again! They don't know, they don't know that they, too, have in them the same eternal Great Thought!"
Dr. Salzfisch had not been present at the ceremony. Coming in suddenly, he was horrified and dispersed the gathering, insisting that the sick man should not be disturbed.
Stepan Trofimovich died three days later, by then completely unconscious. He somehow quietly went out, like a burnt-down candle. Varvara Petrovna, after having the funeral service performed there, transferred the body of her poor friend to Skvoreshniki. His grave is within the churchyard and is already covered with a marble slab. The inscription and railing have been left till spring.
In all, Varvara Petrovna's absence from town had lasted some eight days. Along with her, sitting beside her in the carriage, there also arrived Sofya Matveevna, who seemed to have settled with her for good. I will note that as soon as Stepan Trofimovich lost consciousness (that same morning), Varvara Petrovna immediately had Sofya Matveevna removed again, out of the cottage entirely, and tended the sick man herself, alone to the end; but the moment he gave up the ghost, she immediately summoned her. She refused to listen to any objections, terribly frightened though the woman was by her offer (her order, rather) to settle in Skvoreshniki for good.
"That's all nonsense! I myself will go around selling Gospels with you. I have no one in the world now!"
"You do have a son, however," Salzfisch attempted to observe. "I have no son!" Varvara Petrovna snapped out—as if prophetically.
8: Conclusion
All the perpetrated outrages and crimes were discovered extraordinarily quickly, far more quickly than Pyotr Stepanovich had supposed. It began with the unfortunate Marya Ignatievna, who woke up before dawn on the night of her husband's murder, found him missing, and became indescribably worried at not seeing him beside her. The servingwoman Arina Prokhorovna had hired then was spending the night with her. She simply could not calm her down and, as soon as day broke, went running for Arina Prokhorovna herself, assuring the sick woman that she would know where her husband was and when he would be back. Meanwhile, Arina Prokhorovna had troubles of her own: she had already learned from her husband about the night's exploit at Skvoreshniki. He had returned home past ten o'clock looking and feeling terrible; clasping his hands, he threw himself facedown on the bed and kept repeating, shaking with convulsive sobs: "This is not it, this is not it; this is not it at all!" Arina Prokhorovna accosted him and, of course, he ended by confessing everything to her—though to her alone in the whole house. She left him in bed, sternly impressing upon him that "if he wanted to blubber, he should do his howling into the pillow so that no one would hear, and that he'd be a fool if he showed any such appearance tomorrow." She did become a bit pensive and immediately began tiding things up just in case: she managed to hide or destroy completely any unnecessary papers, books, perhaps even tracts. Yet, for all that, she in fact considered that she, her sister, her aunt, the girl student, and perhaps even her lop-eared brother, had nothing much to fear. When the nurse came running for her in the morning, she went to Marya Ignatievna without hesitation. However, she wanted terribly to find out all the sooner whether it was true what her husband had told her yesterday, in a frightened and insane whisper resembling delirium, about Pyotr Stepanovich's counting, with a view to common usefulness, on Kirillov.
But she was too late in coming to Marya Ignatievnas, who, once she had sent the servant off and was left alone, was unable to stand it, got out of bed, and, throwing on herself whatever clothing came to hand, evidently something very light and inappropriate to the season, went to the wing herself to see Kirillov, figuring that he perhaps could tell her most surely about her husband. One can imagine how this woman who had just given birth was affected by what she saw there. Remarkably, she did not read Kirillov's death note, which lay in full view on the table, being so frightened, of course, as to overlook it completely. She ran to her room, seized the infant, and went with him out of the house and down the street. The morning was damp, there was mist. No passers-by were to be met on such an out-of-the-way street. She kept running, breathless, through the cold and oozy mud, and finally began knocking on house doors; at one house they did not open, at another they refused to open for a long time; she left in impatience and began knocking at a third house. This was the house of our merchant Titov. Here she raised a great clamor, shouted, insisted incoherently that "her husband had been killed." Shatov and something of his story were partly known to the Titovs; they were horror-struck that she, having, in her own words, given birth just the day before, was running around the streets in such clothes and in such cold, with a barely covered infant in her arms. At first they thought she was simply raving, the more so as they were unable to make out who had been killed— Kirillov or her husband? Realizing that they did not believe her, she rushed to run farther, but was stopped by force, and they say she cried and struggled terribly. They went to Filippov's house, and in two hours Kirillov's suicide and his death note became known to the whole town. The police accosted the new mother, who was still conscious; and here it came to light that she had not read Kirillov's note, but precisely why she had concluded that her husband had been killed as well—this they could not get out of her. She only cried that "if the other one was killed, then my husband has been killed, too; they were together!" By noon she had fallen into unconsciousness, from which she never emerged, and some three days later she died. The baby caught cold and died even before her. Arina Prokhorovna, not finding Marya Ignatievna and the infant there, and realizing that things were bad, was about to rush home, but stopped at the gate and sent the nurse "to ask the gentleman in the wing if Marya Ignatievna was there or if, perchance, he knew anything about her?" The messenger came back wildly shouting for the whole street to hear. Having convinced her not to shout or tell anyone, employing the well-known argument that "they'll have the law on you," she slipped away from the premises.