She will be genuinely grieved like a true friend, but secretly she will be pleased.... I shall give her a weapon against me for the rest of my life.
Oh, it's all over with me!
Twenty years of such perfect happiness with her... and now!"
He hid his face in his hands.
"Stepan Trofimovitch, oughtn't you to let Varvara Petrovna know at once of what has happened?" I suggested.
"God preserve me!" he cried, shuddering and leaping up from his place.
"On no account, never, after what was said at parting at Skvoreshniki—never!"
His eyes flashed.
We went on sitting together another hour or more, I believe, expecting something all the time—the idea had taken such hold of us.
He lay down again, even closed his eyes, and lay for twenty minutes without uttering a word, so that I thought he was asleep or unconscious.
Suddenly he got up impulsively, pulled the towel off his head, jumped up from the sofa, rushed to the looking-glass, with trembling hands tied his cravat, and in a voice of thunder called to Nastasya, telling her to give him his overcoat, his new hat and his stick.
"I can bear no more," he said in a breaking voice. "I can't, I can't!
I am going myself."
"Where?" I cried, jumping up too.
"To Lembke.
Cher, I ought, I am obliged.
It's my duty.
I am a citizen and a man, not a worthless chip. I have rights; I want my rights.... For twenty years I've not insisted on my rights. All my life I've neglected them criminally... but now I'll demand them.
He must tell me everything—everything.
He received a telegram.
He dare not torture me; if so, let him arrest me, let him arrest me!"
He stamped and vociferated almost with shrieks.
"I approve of what you say," I said, speaking as calmly as possible, on purpose, though I was very much afraid for him. "Certainly it is better than sitting here in such misery, but I can't approve of your state of mind. Just see what you look like and in what a state you are going there!
Il faut etre digne et calme avec Lembke.
You really might rush at someone there and bite him."
"I am giving myself up.
I am walking straight into the jaws of the lion...."
"I'll go with you."
"I expected no less of you, I accept your sacrifice, the sacrifice of a true friend; but only as far as the house, only as far as the house. You ought not, you have no right to compromise yourself further by being my confederate.
Oh, croyez-moi, je serai calme.
I feel that I am at this moment a la hauteur de tout ce que il y a de plus sacre...."
"I may perhaps go into the house with you," I interrupted him.
"I had a message from their stupid committee yesterday through Vysotsky that they reckon on me and invite me to the fete to-morrow as one of the stewards or whatever it is... one of the six young men whose duty it is to look after the trays, wait on the ladies, take the guests to their places, and wear a rosette of crimson and white ribbon on the left shoulder.
I meant to refuse, but now why shouldn't I go into the house on the excuse of seeing Yulia Mihailovna herself about it?... So we will go in together."
He listened, nodding, but I think he understood nothing.
We stood on the threshold.
"Cher"—he stretched out his arm to the lamp before the ikon—"cher, I have never believed in this, but... so be it, so be it!" He crossed himself. "Allons!"
"Well, that's better so," I thought as I went out on to the steps with him. "The fresh air will do him good on the way, and we shall calm down, turn back, and go home to bed...."
But I reckoned without my host.
On the way an adventure occurred which agitated Stepan Trofimovitch even more, and finally determined him to go on... so that I should never have expected of our friend so much spirit as he suddenly displayed that morning.
Poor friend, kind-hearted friend!
CHAPTER X. FILIBUSTERS.
A FATAL MORNING
The adventure that befell us on the way was also a surprising one.
But I must tell the story in due order.
An hour before Stepan Trofimovitch and I came out into the street, a crowd of people, the hands from Shpigulins' factory, seventy or more in number, had been marching through the town, and had been an object of curiosity to many spectators.
They walked intentionally in good order and almost in silence.
Afterwards it was asserted that these seventy had been elected out of the whole number of factory hands, amounting to about nine hundred, to go to the governor and to try and get from him, in the absence of their employer, a just settlement of their grievances against the manager, who, in closing the factory and dismissing the workmen, had cheated them all in an impudent way—a fact which has since been proved conclusively.
Some people still deny that there was any election of delegates, maintaining that seventy was too large a number to elect, and that the crowd simply consisted of those who had been most unfairly treated, and that they only came to ask for help in their own case, so that the general "mutiny" of the factory workers, about which there was such an uproar later on, had never existed at all.
Others fiercely maintained that these seventy men were not simple strikers but revolutionists, that is, not merely that they were the most turbulent, but that they must have been worked upon by seditious manifestoes.