"What conceit!"
"That's only humour," someone more reasonable suggested.
"Spare me your humour."
"I call it impudence, gentlemen!"
"Well, he's finished now, anyway!"
"Ech, what a dull show!"
But all these ignorant exclamations in the back rows (though they were confined to the back rows) were drowned in applause from the other half of the audience.
They called for Karmazinov.
Several ladies with Yulia Mihailovna and the marshal's wife crowded round the platform.
In Yulia Mihailovna's hands was a gorgeous laurel wreath resting on another wreath of living roses on a white velvet cushion.
"Laurels!" Karmazinov pronounced with a subtle and rather sarcastic smile.
"I am touched, of course, and accept with real emotion this wreath prepared beforehand, but still fresh and unwithered, but I assure you, mesdames, that I have suddenly become so realistic that I feel laurels would in this age be far more appropriate in the hands of a skilful cook than in mine...."
"Well, a cook is more useful," cried the divinity student, who had been at the "meeting" at Virginsky's.
There was some disorder.
In many rows people jumped up to get a better view of the presentation of the laurel wreath.
"I'd give another three roubles for a cook this minute," another voice assented loudly, too loudly; insistently, in fact.
"So would I."
"And I."
"Is it possible there's no buffet?..."
"Gentlemen, it's simply a swindle...."
It must be admitted, however, that all these unbridled gentlemen still stood in awe of our higher officials and of the police superintendent, who was present in the hall.
Ten minutes later all had somehow got back into their places, but there was not the same good order as before.
And it was into this incipient chaos that poor Stepan Trofimovitch was thrust.
IV
I ran out to him behind the scenes once more, and had time to warn him excitedly that in my opinion the game was up, that he had better not appear at all, but had better go home at once on the excuse of his usual ailment, for instance, and I would take off my badge and come with him.
At that instant he was on his way to the platform; he stopped suddenly, and haughtily looking me up and down he pronounced solemnly:
"What grounds have you, sir, for thinking me capable of such baseness?"
I drew back.
I was as sure as twice two make four that he would not get off without a catastrophe.
Meanwhile, as I stood utterly dejected, I saw moving before me again the figure of the professor, whose turn it was to appear after Stepan Trofimovitch, and who kept lifting up his fist and bringing it down again with a swing.
He kept walking up and down, absorbed in himself and muttering something to himself with a diabolical but triumphant smile.
I somehow almost unintentionally went up to him. I don't know what induced me to meddle again.
"Do you know," I said, "judging from many examples, if a lecturer keeps an audience for more than twenty minutes it won't go on listening.
No celebrity is able to hold his own for half an hour."
He stopped short and seemed almost quivering with resentment.
Infinite disdain was expressed in his countenance.
"Don't trouble yourself," he muttered contemptuously and walked on.
At that moment Stepan Trofimovitch's voice rang out in the hall.
"Oh, hang you all," I thought, and ran to the hall.
Stepan Trofimovitch took his seat in the lecturer's chair in the midst of the still persisting disorder.
He was greeted by the first rows with looks which were evidently not over-friendly. (Of late, at the club, people almost seemed not to like him, and treated him with much less respect than formerly.) But it was something to the good that he was not hissed.
I had had a strange idea in my head ever since the previous day: I kept fancying that he would be received with hisses as soon as he appeared.
They scarcely noticed him, however, in the disorder.
What could that man hope for if Karmazinov was treated like this?
He was pale; it was ten years since he had appeared before an audience.
From his excitement and from all that I knew so well in him, it was clear to me that he, too, regarded his present appearance on the platform as a turning-point of his fate, or something of the kind.
That was just what I was afraid of.
The man was dear to me.
And what were my feelings when he opened his lips and I heard his first phrase?
"Ladies and gentlemen," he pronounced suddenly, as though resolved to venture everything, though in an almost breaking voice.