"No doubt they had a telegram from Petersburg," Stepan Trofimovitch said suddenly.
"A telegram?
About you?
Because of the works of Herzen and your poem? Have you taken leave of your senses? What is there in that to arrest you for?"
I was positively angry.
He made a grimace and was evidently mortified—not at my exclamation, but at the idea that there was no ground for arrest.
"Who can tell in our day what he may not be arrested for?" he muttered enigmatically.
A wild and nonsensical idea crossed my mind.
"Stepan Trofimovitch, tell me as a friend," I cried, "as a real friend, I will not betray you: do you belong to some secret society or not?"
And on this, to my amazement, he was not quite certain whether he was or was not a member of some secret society.
"That depends, voyez-vous."
"How do you mean 'it depends'?"
"When with one's whole heart one is an adherent of progress and... who can answer it? You may suppose you don't belong, and suddenly it turns out that you do belong to something."
"Now is that possible? It's a case of yes or no."
"Cela date de Petersburg when she and I were meaning to found a magazine there.
That's what's at the root of it.
She gave them the slip then, and they forgot us, but now they've remembered.
Cher, cher, don't you know me?" he cried hysterically.
"And they'll take us, put us in a cart, and march us off to Siberia forever, or forget us in prison."
And he suddenly broke into bitter weeping.
His tears positively streamed.
He covered his face with his red silk handkerchief and sobbed, sobbed convulsively for five minutes.
It wrung my heart.
This was the man who had been a prophet among us for twenty years, a leader, a patriarch, the Kukolnik who had borne himself so loftily and majestically before all of us, before whom we bowed down with genuine reverence, feeling proud of doing so—and all of a sudden here he was sobbing, sobbing like a naughty child waiting for the rod which the teacher is fetching for him.
I felt fearfully sorry for him.
He believed in the reality of that "cart" as he believed that I was sitting by his side, and he expected it that morning, at once, that very minute, and all this on account of his Herzen and some poem!
Such complete, absolute ignorance of everyday reality was touching and somehow repulsive.
At last he left off crying, got up from the sofa and began walking about the room again, continuing to talk to me, though he looked out of the window every minute and listened to every sound in the passage.
Our conversation was still disconnected.
All my assurances and attempts to console him rebounded from him like peas from a wall.
He scarcely listened, but yet what he needed was that I should console him and keep on talking with that object.
I saw that he could not do without me now, and would not let me go for anything.
I remained, and we spent more than two hours together.
In conversation he recalled that Blum had taken with him two manifestoes he had found.
"Manifestoes!" I said, foolishly frightened.
"Do you mean to say you..."
"Oh, ten were left here," he answered with vexation (he talked to me at one moment in a vexed and haughty tone and at the next with dreadful plaintiveness and humiliation), "but I had disposed of eight already, and Blum only found two."
And he suddenly flushed with indignation.
"Vous me mettez avec ces gens-la!
Do you suppose I could be working with those scoundrels, those anonymous libellers, with my son Pyotr Stepanovitch, avec ces esprits forts de lachete?
Oh, heavens!"
"Bah! haven't they mixed you up perhaps?... But it's nonsense, it can't be so," I observed.
"Savez-vous," broke from him suddenly, "I feel at moments que je ferai la-bas quelque esclandre.
Oh, don't go away, don't leave me alone!
Ma carriere est finie aujourd'hui, je le sens.
Do you know, I might fall on somebody there and bite him, like that lieutenant."
He looked at me with a strange expression—alarmed, and at the same time anxious to alarm me.
He certainly was getting more and more exasperated with somebody and about something as time went on and the police-cart did not appear; he was positively wrathful.
Suddenly Nastasya, who had come from the kitchen into the passage for some reason, upset a clothes-horse there.
Stepan Trofimovitch trembled and turned numb with terror as he sat; but when the noise was explained, he almost shrieked at Nastasya and, stamping, drove her back to the kitchen.