In preparation for coming to our town, Yulia Mikhailovna worked assiduously on her husband. In her opinion, he was not without abilities, knew how to make an entrance and show himself, knew how to listen with a grave air and say nothing, had picked up a few quite decent poses, could even make a speech, even had some odds and ends of ideas, and had picked up the gloss of the latest indispensable liberalism. But all the same it troubled her that he was somehow none too receptive, and, after his long, eternal search for a career, was decidedly beginning to feel a need for peace. She wanted to pour her ambition into him, and he all of a sudden began gluing together a German church: the pastor came out to preach the sermon, the faithful listened, their hands piously clasped before them, one lady wiping away tears with her handkerchief, one little old man blowing his nose; towards the end a little organ rang out—it had been specially ordered and had already arrived from Switzerland, expense notwithstanding. Yulia Mikhailovna, even with some sort of fright, took the whole work from him as soon as she found out about it, and locked it away in her drawer; she allowed him to write a novel instead, but on the quiet. Since then she began to rely directly on herself alone. The trouble was that there was a fair amount of frivolity in all this, and little measure. Fate had kept her too long among the old maids. Idea after idea now flashed in her ambitious and somewhat fretted mind. She nursed designs, she decidedly wanted to rule the province, dreamed of being surrounded at once, chose her tendency. Von Lembke even got somewhat frightened, though he quickly figured out, with his official's tact, that there was no reason at all for him to be afraid of governorship as such. The first two or three months even passed quite satisfactorily. But then Pyotr Stepanovich turned up, and something strange began to happen.
The thing was that from the very first step the young Verkhovensky showed a decided disrespect for Andrei Antonovich, and assumed some strange rights over him, and Yulia Mikhailovna, always so jealous of her husband's significance, simply refused to notice it; at least she attached no importance to it. The young man became her favorite, ate, drank, and all but slept in the house. Von Lembke set about defending himself, called him "young man" in public, patted him patronizingly on the shoulder, but made no impression: Pyotr Stepanovich went on laughing in his face, as it were, even while apparently talking seriously, and said the most unexpected things to him in public. Once, on returning home, he found the young man in his study, asleep on the sofa, uninvited. The latter explained that he had stopped by and, finding no one home, had "caught himself a good nap." Von Lembke was offended and again complained to his wife; laughing at his irritability, she remarked caustically that it was he who seemed unable to put himself on a real footing; at least with her "this boy" never allowed himself any familiarity, and, in all events, he was "naïve and fresh, though outside the bounds of society." Von Lembke pouted. On that occasion she got them to make peace. Pyotr Stepanovich did not really apologize, but got off with some coarse joke which in other circumstances could have been taken as a new insult, but in the present case was taken as repentance. The weak point lay in Andrei Antonovich's having made a blunder at the very beginning—namely, by imparting his novel to him. Fancying him to be a fervent young man of poetry, and having long dreamed of a listener, one evening, still in the first days of their acquaintance, he read two chapters to him. He listened with unconcealed boredom, yawned impolitely, uttered not a word of praise, but on leaving asked Andrei Antonovich for the manuscript so as to form an opinion at home at his leisure, and Andrei Antonovich gave it to him. Since then, though he ran by every day, he had not returned the manuscript, and laughed in answer to inquiries; finally he announced that he had lost it then and there in the street. When she learned of it, Yulia Mikhailovna became terribly angry with her husband.
"And did you tell him about your little church, too?" she fluttered, almost frightened.
Von Lembke decidedly took to pondering, and pondering was bad for him and was forbidden by his doctors. Aside from the fact that there turned out to be much trouble with the province, of which we shall speak later, there was another matter here, and he even suffered in his heart, not merely in his official pride. On entering into marriage, Andrei Antonovich had by no means envisioned the possibility of future family strife and discord. This was not what he had always imagined in his dreams of Mina and Ernestina. He felt himself unable to endure family storms. Yulia Mikhailovna finally had a frank talk with him.
"You can't be angry at this," she said, "if only because you are three times more sensible and immeasurably higher on the social ladder. There are many leftovers of former freethinking ways in the boy—just mischief, in my opinion—but one must be gradual, not sudden. We should cherish our young people; my way is to indulge them and keep them on the brink."
"But he says the devil knows what," objected von Lembke. "I can't be tolerant when he asserts publicly and in my presence that the government purposely gets the people drunk on vodka so as to brutalize them and keep them from rebelling. Imagine my role when I'm forced to listen to that in front of everyone."
As he said this, von Lembke recalled a conversation he had had recently with Pyotr Stepanovich. With the innocent aim of disarming him with his liberalism, he had shown him his own private collection of all sorts of tracts, from Russia and abroad, which he had been carefully collecting since the year 'fifty-nine, not really as an amateur, but merely out of healthy curiosity. Pyotr Stepanovich, having guessed his aim, stated rudely that there was more sense in one line of some tracts than in certain whole chanceries, "perhaps not excluding your own."
Lembke cringed.
"But with us it's too early, much too early," he said almost pleadingly, pointing to the tracts.
"No, it's not too early; see, you're afraid, so it's not too early."
"But, all the same, here, for example, is an invitation to destroy churches."
"And why not? You're an intelligent man and, of course, not a believer yourself, but you understand only too well that you need belief in order to brutalize the people. Truth is more honest than lying."
"I agree, I agree, I fully agree with you, but for us it's too early, too early ..." von Lembke kept wincing.
"And what sort of government official are you after that, if you yourself agree to destroy churches and march with cudgels to Petersburg, and the only difference is when to do it?"
So rudely caught up, Lembke was sorely piqued.
"It's not that, not that," he was getting carried away, his amour-propre more and more chafed. "Being a young man and, above all, unfamiliar with our goals, you are mistaken. You see, my dearest Pyotr Stepanovich, you call us officials of the government? Right. Independent officials? Right. But, may I ask, how do we act? The responsibility is on us, and as a result we serve the common cause the same as you do. We merely hold together that which you are shaking apart, and which without us would go sprawling in all directions. We're not your enemies, by no means. We say to you: go forward, progress, even shake—all that's old, that is, and has to be remade—but when need be, we will keep you within necessary limits, and save you from yourselves, for without us you will only set Russia tottering, depriving her of a decent appearance, while our task consists precisely in maintaining her decent appearance. Realize that you and we are mutually necessary to each other. In England, the Whigs and Tories are also mutually necessary to each other. So, then, we are the Tories and you are the Whigs, that's precisely how I see it."
Andrei Antonovich even waxed enthusiastic. Ever since Petersburg, he had enjoyed talking intelligently and liberally, and here, furthermore, no one was eavesdropping. Pyotr Stepanovich was silent and bore himself somehow with unusual gravity. This egged the orator on even more.