However, since then many years have passed, and the nervous, tormented, and divided nature of people in our time no longer even admits of the need for those direct and integral sensations which were once so sought after by certain gentlemen of the good old days in their restless activity. Nikolai Vsevolodovich would perhaps have looked down on L——n, would even have called him an eternally strutting coward, a cock—though, true, he would not have expressed it aloud. He would shoot his adversary in a duel, and go against a bear if need be, and fight off a robber in the forest—all as successfully and fearlessly as L——n, yet without any sense of enjoyment, but solely out of unpleasant necessity, listlessly, lazily, even with boredom. Anger, of course, constituted a progress over L——n, even over Lermontov. [75]
There was perhaps more anger in Nikolai Vsevolodovich than in those two together, but this anger was cold, calm, and, if one may put it so, reasonable,and therefore the most repulsive and terrible that can be. I repeat once more: I considered him then and consider him still (now that everything is over) to be precisely the sort of man who, if he received a blow in the face or some equivalent offense, would immediately kill his adversary, right there on the spot, and without any challenge to a duel.
And yet, in the present case, something different and wondrous occurred.
As soon as he straightened up, after having swayed so disgracefully to one side, almost as much as half his height, from the slap he had received, and before the mean, somehow as if wet, sound of a fist hitting a face seemed to have faded away in the room, he immediately seized Shatov by the shoulders with both hands; but immediately, at almost the same moment, he jerked both hands back and clasped them behind him. He said nothing, looked at Shatov, and turned pale as a shirt. But, strangely, his eyes seemed to be dying out. Ten seconds later his look was cold and—I'm convinced I'm not lying—calm. Only he was terribly pale. Of course, I do not know what was inside the man, I only saw the outside. It seems to me that if there were such a man, for example, as would seize a red-hot bar of iron and clutch it in his hand, with the purpose of measuring his strength of mind, and in the course of ten seconds would be overcoming the intolerable pain and would finally overcome it, this man, it seems to me, would endure something like what was experienced now, in these ten seconds, by Nikolai Vsevolodovich.
The first to lower his eyes was Shatov, obviously because he was forced to lower them. Then he slowly turned and walked out of the room, but not at all with the same gait as he had just had when approaching. He was walking softly, his shoulders hunched up somehow especially awkwardly, his head bowed, and as if he were reasoning something out with himself. He seemed to be whispering something. He made his way carefully to the door, without brushing against anything or knocking anything over, and he opened the door only a very little way, so as to be able to squeeze through the crack almost sideways. As he was squeezing through, the lock of hair standing up at the back of his head was especially noticeable.
Then, before all cries there came one terrible cry. I saw Lizaveta Nikolaevna seize her maman by the shoulder and Mavriky Nikolaevich by the hand and pull them two or three times, drawing them out of the room, but suddenly she cried out and fell full-length on the floor in a swoon. To this day it is as if I can still hear the back of her head hit the carpet.
Part Two
1: Night
I
Eight days passed. Now, when everything is past and I am writing my chronicle, we know what it was all about; but then we still knew nothing, and, naturally, various things seemed strange to us. Stepan Trofimovich and I, at least, first locked ourselves in and watched timorously from afar. Though I did go out here and there as before and bring him all sorts of news, without which he could not even exist.
Needless to say, the most diverse rumors spread around town—that is, concerning the slap, Lizaveta Nikolaevna's swoon, and the rest of what happened that Sunday. The surprising thing for us was: through whom could it all have come out so quickly and accurately? None of the persons then present would seem to have found any need or profit in breaking the secrecy of what had happened. No servants had been there; Lebyadkin alone might have blabbed something, not so much from malice, because he had left then in great fright (and fear of an enemy destroys any malice against him), but solely from lack of restraint. But Lebyadkin, together with his sister, disappeared without a trace the very next day; he was not in Filippov's house, he had moved to some unknown place, as if he had vanished. Shatov, of whom I wanted to inquire about Marya Timofeevna, locked himself in and, it seems, spent all those eight days sitting in his apartment, and even stopped his lessons in town. He would not receive me. I came to see him on Tuesday and knocked at the door. There was no answer, but being convinced by indubitable evidence that he was at home, I knocked once more. Then he, evidently having jumped off the bed, came up to the door with big strides and shouted to me at the top of his lungs: "Shatov's not home." With that I left.
Stepan Trofimovich and I, not without fearing for the boldness of such a suggestion, but mutually encouraging each other, finally arrived at this thought: we decided that the one and only person who could be to blame for spreading the rumors was Pyotr Stepanovich, though sometime later, in a conversation with his father, he himself asserted that he had found the story already on everyone's lips, predominantly at the club, and perfectly known in the smallest detail to the governor's wife and her husband. Another remarkable thing: on the very next day, Monday evening, I met Liputin and he already knew everything to the last word, which meant that he had doubtless been one of the first to find out.
Many of the ladies (and of the best society) were also curious about the "mysterious lame girl"—as they called Marya Timofeevna. There were some who even insisted on seeing her in person and making her acquaintance, so that those gentlemen who had hastened to tuck the Lebyadkins away had obviously acted opportunely. But in the forefront still stood Lizaveta Nikolaevna's swoon, and "all society" was interested in that, if only because the matter directly concerned Yulia Mikhailovna, as Lizaveta Nikolaevna's relation and patroness. And the chattering that went on! The mysteriousness of the situation was conducive to chatter: both homes were shut tight; Lizaveta Nikolaevna was said to be lying in brain fever; the same was also asserted of Nikolai Vsevolodovich, with repugnant details about a tooth that had supposedly been knocked out and a swollen cheek. In some little corners it was even said that there would perhaps be a murder, that Stavrogin was not a man to bear with such an offense, and that he would kill Shatov, but secretly, as in a Corsican vendetta. This idea was liked; but the majority of our young society people listened to it all with disdain and an air of the most scornful indifference—assumed, of course. In general, the ancient hostility of our society towards Nikolai Vsevolodovich was markedly evident. Even the most solid people were eager to accuse him, though they themselves did not know of what. It was whispered that he had supposedly ruined Lizaveta Nikolaevna's honor, and that there had been an affair between them in Switzerland. Of course, cautious people restrained themselves, and yet everyone listened with appetite. There was talk of other sorts, not general but private, rare, and almost covert— extremely strange talk, the existence of which I mention just to warn the reader, solely with a view to further events in my story. Namely: some said, frowningly and God knows on what grounds, that Nikolai Vsevolodovich had some special business in our province, that in Petersburg, through Count K., he had entered into certain high relations, that he was perhaps even in government service and had been all but entrusted with some mission by someone. When very solid and restrained people smiled at this rumor, observing reasonably that a man who lived by scandals and had begun among us with a swollen jaw did not look like an official, it was observed to them in a whisper that he was serving not quite officially but, so to speak, confidentially, in which case the service itself required that the servant look as little as possible like an official. This observation produced its effect; it was known among us that the zemstvo [76]of our province was looked upon with somewhat special attention in the capital. I repeat, these rumors only flashed and then disappeared without a trace, for a time, at Nikolai Vsevolodovich's first appearance; yet I will note that the cause of many of these rumors was in part several brief but spiteful remarks uttered vaguely and abruptly in the club by Artemy Pavlovich Gaganov, a retired captain of the Guard, recently returned from Petersburg, a rather big landowner of our province and district, a man of society in the capital, and son of the late Pavel Pavlovich Gaganov, that same venerable senior member with whom, over four years before, Nikolai Vsevolodovich had had a confrontation remarkable for its rudeness and suddenness, which I have already mentioned above, at the beginning of my story.