Ivan Ivanovitch flew into a terrible passion: “Yes, sir, I am a general, and a lieutenant-general, and I have served my Tsar, and you, sir, are a puppy and an infidel!”
An outrageous scene followed. Next day the incident was exposed in print, and they began getting up a collective protest against Varvara Petrovna's disgraceful conduct in not having immediately turned the general out. In an illustrated paper there appeared a malignant caricature in which Varvara Petrovna, Stepan Trofimovitch, and General Drozdov were depicted as three reactionary friends. There were verses attached to this caricature written by a popular poet especially for the occasion. I may observe, for my own part, that many persons of general's rank certainly have an absurd habit of saying, “I have served my Tsar “... just as though they had not the same Tsar as all the rest of us, their simple fellow-subjects, but had a special Tsar of their own.
It was impossible, of course, to remain any longer in Petersburg, all the more so as Stepan Trofimovitch was overtaken by a complete fiasco. He could not resist talking of the claims of art, and they laughed at him more loudly as time went on. At his last lecture he thought to impress them with patriotic eloquence, hoping to touch their hearts, and reckoning on the respect inspired by his “persecution.” He did not attempt to dispute the uselessness and absurdity of the word “fatherland,” acknowledged the pernicious influence of religion, but firmly and loudly declared that boots were of less consequence than Pushkin; of much less, indeed. He was hissed so mercilessly that he burst into tears, there and then, on the platform. Varvara Petrovna took him home more dead than alive. “On m'a traits, comme un vieux bonnet de coton, ” he babbled senselessly. She was looking after him all night, giving him laurel-drops and repeating to him till daybreak, “You will still be of use; you will still make your mark; you will be appreciated ... in another place.”
Early next morning five literary men called on Varvara Petrovna, three of them complete strangers, whom she had ever set eyes on before. With a stern air they informed her that they had looked into the question of her magazine, and had brought her their decision on the subject. Varvara Petrovna had never authorised anyone to look into or decide anything concerning her magazine. Their decision was that, having founded the magazine, she should at once hand it over to them with the capital to run it, on the basis of a co-operative society. She herself was to go back to Skvoreshniki, not forgetting to take with her Stepan Trofimovitch, who was “out of date.” From delicacy they agreed to recognise the right of property in her case, and to send her every year a sixth part of the net profits. What was most touching about it was that of these five men, four certainly were not actuated by any mercenary motive, and were simply acting in the interests of the “cause.”
“We came away utterly at a loss,” Stepan Trofimovitch used to say afterwards. “I couldn't make head or tail of it, and kept muttering, I remember, to the rumble of the train:
'Vyek, and vyek, and Lyov Kambek, Lyov Kambek and vyek, and vyek.'
and goodness knows what, all the way to Moscow. It was only in Moscow that I came to myself — as though we really might find something different there.”
“Oh, my friends!” he would exclaim to us sometimes with fervour, '' you cannot imagine what wrath and sadness overcome your whole soul when a great idea, which you have long cherished as holy, is caught up by the ignorant and dragged forth before fools like themselves into the street, and you suddenly meet it in the market unrecognisable, in the mud, absurdly set up, without proportion, without harmony, the plaything of foolish louts! No! In our day it was not so, and it was not this for which we strove. No, no, not this at all. I don't recognise it. ... Our day will come again and will turn all the tottering fabric of to-day into a true path. If not, what will happen? . . .”
VII
Immediately on their return from Petersburg Varvara Petrovna sent her friend abroad to “recruit”; and, indeed, it was necessary for them to part for a time, she felt that. Stepan Trofimovitch was delighted to go.
“There I shall revive!” he exclaimed. “There, at last, I shall set to work!” But in the first of his letters from Berlin he struck his usual note:
“My heart is broken!” he wrote to Varvara Petrovna. “I can forget nothing! Here, in Berlin, everything brings back to me my old past, my first raptures and my first agonies. Where is she? Where are they both? Where are you two angels of whom I was never worthy? Where is my son, my beloved son? And last of all, where am I, where is my old self, strong as steel. firm as a rock, when now some Andreev, our orthodox clown with a beard, pent briser man existence en deux”— and so on.
As for Stepan Trofimovitch's son, he had only seen him twice in his life, the first time when he was born and the second time lately in Petersburg, where the young man was preparing to enter the university. The boy had been all his life, as we have said already, brought up by his aunts (at Varvara Petrovna's expense) in a remote province, nearly six hundred miles from Skvoreshniki. As for Andreev, he was nothing more or less than our local shopkeeper, a very eccentric fellow, a self-taught archaeologist who had a passion for collecting Russian antiquities and sometimes tried to outshine Stepan Trofimovitch in erudition and in the progressiveness of his opinions. This worthy shopkeeper, with a grey beard and silver-rimmed spectacles, still owed Stepan Trofimovitch four hundred roubles for some acres of timber he had bought on the latter's little estate (near Skvoreshniki). Though Varvara Petrovna had liberally provided her friend with funds when she sent him to Berlin, yet Stepan Trofimovitch had, before starting, particularly reckoned on getting that four hundred roubles, probably for his secret expenditure, and was ready to cry when Andreev asked leave to defer payment for a month, which he had a right to do, since he had brought the first installments of the money almost six months in advance to meet Stepan Trofimovitch's special need at the time.