“You are certainly in a regular fever and I’ve covered you with my rug; only about the money, I’d rather.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, n’en parlons plus parce que cela me fait mal. Oh, how kind you are!”
He ceased speaking, and with strange suddenness dropped into a feverish shivery sleep. The road by which they drove the twelve miles was not a smooth one, and their carriage jolted cruelly. Stepan Trofimovitch woke up frequently, quickly raised his head from the little pillow which Sofya Matveyevna had slipped under it, clutched her by the hand and asked “Are you here?” as though he were afraid she had left him. He told her, too, that he had dreamed of gaping jaws full of teeth, and that he had very much disliked it. Sofya Matveyevna was in great anxiety about him.
They were driven straight up to a large cottage with a frontage of four windows and other rooms in the yard. Stepan Trofimovitch waked up, hurriedly went in and walked straight into the second room, which was the largest and best in the house. An expression of fussiness came into his sleepy face. He spoke at once to the landlady, a tall, thick-set woman of forty with very dark hair and a slight moustache, and explained that he required the whole room for himself, and that the door was to be shut and no one else was to be admitted, “parce que nous avons à parler. Oui, j’ai beaucoup à vous dire, chère amie. I’ll pay you, I’ll pay you,” he said with a wave of dismissal to the landlady.
Though he was in a hurry, he seemed to articulate with difficulty. The landlady listened grimly, and was silent in token of consent, but there was a feeling of something menacing about her silence. He did not notice this, and hurriedly (he was in a terrible hurry) insisted on her going away and bringing them their dinner as quickly as possible, without a moment’s delay.
At that point the moustached woman could contain herself no longer.
“This is not an inn, sir; we don’t provide dinners for travellers. We can boil you some crayfish or set the samovar, but we’ve nothing more. There won’t be fresh fish till to-morrow.”
But Stepan Trofimovitch waved his hands, repeating with wrathful impatience: “I’ll pay, only make haste, make haste.”
They settled on fish, soup, and roast fowl; the landlady declared that fowl was not to be procured in the whole village; she agreed, however, to go in search of one, but with the air of doing him an immense favour.
As soon as she had gone Stepan Trofimovitch instantly sat down on the sofa and made Sofya Matveyevna sit down beside him. There were several arm-chairs as well as a sofa in the room, but they were of a most uninviting appearance. The room was rather a large one, with a corner, in which there was a bed, partitioned off. It was covered with old and tattered yellow paper, and had horrible lithographs of mythological subjects on the walls; in the corner facing the door there was a long row of painted ikons and several sets of brass ones. The whole room with its strangely ill-assorted furniture was an unattractive mixture of the town element and of peasant traditions. But he did not even glance at it all, nor look out of the window at the vast lake, the edge of which was only seventy feet from the cottage.
“At last we are by ourselves and we will admit no one! I want to tell you everything, everything from the very beginning.”
Sofya Matveyevna checked him with great uneasiness.
“Are you aware, Stepan Trofimovitch?…”
“Comment, vous savez déjà mon nom?” He smiled with delight.
“I heard it this morning from Anisim Ivanovitch when you were talking to him. But I venture to tell you for my part …”
And she whispered hurriedly to him, looking nervously at the closed door for fear anyone should overhear—that here in this village, it was dreadful. That though all the peasants were fishermen, they made their living chiefly by charging travellers every summer whatever they thought fit. The village was not on the high road but an out-of-the-way one, and people only called there because the steamers stopped there, and that when the steamer did not call—and if the weather was in the least unfavourable, it would not—then numbers of travellers would be waiting there for several days, and all the cottages in the village would be occupied, and that was just the villagers’ opportunity, for they charged three times its value for everything—and their landlord here was proud and stuck up because he was, for these parts, very rich; he had a net which had cost a thousand roubles.
Stepan Trofimovitch looked almost reproachfully at Sofya Matveyevna’s extremely excited face, and several times he made a motion to stop her. But she persisted and said all she had to say: she said she had been there before already in the summer “with a very genteel lady from the town,” and stayed there too for two whole days till the steamer came, and what they had to put up with did not bear thinking of. “Here, Stepan Trofimovitch, you’ve been pleased to ask for this room for yourself alone.… I only speak to warn you.… In the other room there are travellers already. An elderly man and a young man and a lady with children, and by to-morrow before two o’clock the whole house will be filled up, for since the steamer hasn’t been here for two days it will be sure to come to-morrow. So for a room apart and for ordering dinner, and for putting out the other travellers, they’ll charge you a price unheard of even in the capital.…”
But he was in distress, in real distress. “Assez, mon enfant, I beseech you, nous avons notre argent—et après, le bon Dieu. And I am surprised that, with the loftiness of your ideas, you … Assez, assez, vous me tourmentez,” he articulated hysterically, “we have all our future before us, and you … you fill me with alarm for the future.”
He proceeded at once to unfold his whole story with such haste that at first it was difficult to understand him. It went on for a long time. The soup was served, the fowl was brought in, followed at last by the samovar, and still he talked on. He told it somewhat strangely and hysterically, and indeed he was ill. It was a sudden, extreme effort of his intellectual faculties, which was bound in his overstrained condition, of course—Sofya Matveyevna foresaw it with distress all the time he was talking—to result immediately afterwards in extreme exhaustion. He began his story almost with his childhood, when, “with fresh heart, he ran about the meadows; it was an hour before he reached his two marriages and his life in Berlin. I dare not laugh, however. It really was for him a matter of the utmost importance, and to adopt the modern jargon, almost a question of struggling for existence.” He saw before him the woman whom he had already elected to share his new life, and was in haste to consecrate her, so to speak. His genius must not be hidden from her.… Perhaps he had formed a very exaggerated estimate of Sofya Matveyevna, but he had already chosen her. He could not exist without a woman. He saw clearly from her face that she hardly understood him, and could not grasp even the most essential part. “Ce n’est rien, nous attendrons, and meanwhile she can feel it intuitively.… My friend, I need nothing but your heart!” he exclaimed, interrupting his narrative, “and that sweet enchanting look with which you are gazing at me now. Oh, don’t blush! I’ve told you already …” The poor woman who had fallen into his hands found much that was obscure, especially when his autobiography almost passed into a complete dissertation on the fact that no one had been ever able to understand Stepan Trofimovitch, and that “men of genius are wasted in Russia.” It was all “so very intellectual,” she reported afterwards dejectedly. She listened in evident misery, rather round-eyed. When Stepan Trofimovitch fell into a humorous vein and threw off witty sarcasms at the expense of our advanced and governing classes, she twice made grievous efforts to laugh in response to his laughter, but the result was worse than tears, so
