You must have meant him to read it, too, if he had not been drunk?"
Liputin looked at me coldly and ironically.
"What business is it of yours?" he asked suddenly with strange calm.
"What business is it of mine?
You are wearing the steward's badge, too.... Where is Pyotr Stepanovitch?"
"I don't know, somewhere here; why do you ask?"
"Because now I see through it.
It's simply a plot against Yulia Mihailovna so as to ruin the day by a scandal...."
Liputin looked at me askance again.
"But what is it to you?" he said, grinning. He shrugged his shoulders and walked away.
It came over me with a rush.
All my suspicions were confirmed.
Till then, I had been hoping I was mistaken!
What was I to do?
I was on the point of asking the advice of Stepan Trofimovitch, but he was standing before the looking-glass, trying on different smiles, and continually consulting a piece of paper on which he had notes.
He had to go on immediately after Karmazinov, and was not in a fit state for conversation.
Should I run to Yulia Mihailovna?
But it was too soon to go to her: she needed a much sterner lesson to cure her of her conviction that she had "a following," and that every one was "fanatically devoted" to her.
She would not have believed me, and would have thought I was dreaming.
Besides, what help could she be?
"Eh," I thought, "after all, what business is it of mine? I'll take off my badge and go home when it begins." That was my mental phrase, "when it begins"; I remember it.
But I had to go and listen to Karmazinov.
Taking a last look round behind the scenes, I noticed that a good number of outsiders, even women among them, were flitting about, going in and out.
"Behind the scenes" was rather a narrow space completely screened from the audience by a curtain and communicating with other rooms by means of a passage.
Here our readers were awaiting their turns.
But I was struck at that moment by the reader who was to follow Stepan Trofimovitch.
He, too, was some sort of professor (I don't know to this day exactly what he was) who had voluntarily left some educational institution after a disturbance among the students, and had arrived in the town only a few days before.
He, too, had been recommended to Yulia Mihailovna, and she had received him with reverence.
I know now that he had only spent one evening in her company before the reading; he had not spoken all that evening, had listened with an equivocal smile to the jests and the general tone of the company surrounding Yulia Mihailovna, and had made an unpleasant impression on every one by his air of haughtiness, and at the same time almost timorous readiness to take offence.
It was Yulia Mihailovna herself who had enlisted his services.
Now he was walking from corner to corner, and, like Stepan Trofimovitch, was muttering to himself, though he looked on the ground instead of in the looking-glass.
He was not trying on smiles, though he often smiled rapaciously.
It was obvious that it was useless to speak to him either.
He looked about forty, was short and bald, had a greyish beard, and was decently dressed.
But what was most interesting about him was that at every turn he took he threw up his right fist, brandished it above his head and suddenly brought it down again as though crushing an antagonist to atoms.
He went—through this by-play every moment.
It made me uncomfortable.
I hastened away to listen to Karmazinov.
III
There was a feeling in the hall that something was wrong again.
Let me state to begin with that I have the deepest reverence for genius, but why do our geniuses in the decline of their illustrious years behave sometimes exactly like little boys?
What though he was Karmazinov, and came forward with as much dignity as five Kammerherrs rolled into one?
How could he expect to keep an audience like ours listening for a whole hour to a single paper?
I have observed, in fact, that however big a genius a man may be, he can't monopolise the attention of an audience at a frivolous literary matinee for more than twenty minutes with impunity.
The entrance of the great writer was received, indeed, with the utmost respect: even the severest elderly men showed signs of approval and interest, and the ladies even displayed some enthusiasm.
The applause was brief, however, and somehow uncertain and not unanimous.
Yet there was no unseemly behaviour in the back rows, till Karmazinov began to speak, not that anything very bad followed then, but only a sort of misunderstanding.
I have mentioned already that he had rather a shrill voice, almost feminine in fact, and at the same time a genuinely aristocratic lisp.
He had hardly articulated a few words when someone had the effrontery to laugh aloud—probably some ignorant simpleton who knew nothing of the world, and was congenitally disposed to laughter.
But there was nothing like a hostile demonstration; on the contrary people said "sh-h!" and the offender was crushed.