This last was the main thing. Something else was beginning to scratch at his poor little heart, something he himself did not yet understand, something connected with the previous evening.

7: The Last Peregrination of Stepan Trofimovich

I

I am convinced that Stepan Trofimovich was very much afraid as he felt the time of his insane undertaking draw near. I am convinced that he suffered very much from fear, especially the night before—that terrible night. Nastasya mentioned later that he had gone to bed late and slept. But that proves nothing; they say men sentenced to death sleep very soundly even the night before their execution. Though he started out with the light of day, when a nervous man always takes heart somewhat (the major, Virginsky's relative, even ceased believing in God as soon as the night was over), I am convinced that he could never before have imagined himself, without horror, alone on the high road and in such a situation. Of course, something desperate in his thoughts probably softened for him, in the beginning, the full force of that terrible feeling of sudden solitude in which he found himself all at once, the moment he left Stasie and the place he had been warming up for twenty years. But, anyhow: even with the clearest awareness of all the horrors awaiting him, he still would have gone out to the high road and gone down it! There was something proud here that he admired despite all. Oh, he could have accepted Varvara Petrovna's luxurious conditions and remained with her bounties "comme un mere sponger"! But he had not accepted her bounties and had not remained. And now he himself was leaving her and raising "the banner of a great idea" and going to die for it on the high road! That is precisely how he must have felt about it; that is precisely how his action must have presented itself to him.

The question also presented itself to me more than once: why did he precisely run away, that is, run with his feet, in the literal sense, and not simply drive off in a carriage? At first I explained it by fifty years of impracticality and a fantastical deviation of ideas under the effect of strong emotion. It seemed to me that the thought of traveling by post in a carriage (even with bells) must have appeared too simple and prosaic to him; pilgrimage, on the other hand, even with an umbrella, was much more beautiful and vengefully amorous. But now, when everything is over, I rather suppose that at the time it all happened in a much simpler way: first, he was afraid to hire a carriage because Varvara Petrovna might get wind of it and hold him back by force, which she would certainly have done, and he would certainly have submitted, and then—good-bye forever to the great idea. Second, in order to travel by post one must at least know where one is going. But to know this precisely constituted his chief suffering at the moment: he could not name or determine upon a place for the life of him. For if he were to decide upon some town, his undertaking would instantly become both absurd and impossible in his own eyes; he sensed that very well. What was he going to do precisely in this town and not in some other? To look for ce marchand?^[clxii]But what marchand? Here again that second and now most dreadful question popped up. In fact, there was nothing more dreadful for him than ce marchand whom he had so suddenly set off headlong in search of, and whom he was quite certainly afraid most of all to find in reality. No, better simply the high road, just simply to go out to it and go down it and not think of anything for as long as it was possible not to think. A high road is something very, very long, which one sees no end to—like human life, like the human dream. There is an idea in the high road; and what sort of idea is there in traveling by post? Traveling by post is the end of any idea. Vive la grande route,^[clxiii] and then it's whatever God sends.

After the sudden and unexpected meeting with Liza, which I have already described, he went on in even greater self-abandon. The high road passed within a quarter mile of Skvoreshniki, and—strangely—he did not even notice at first how he had come upon it. Sound reasoning, or clear awareness at the least, was unbearable to him at that moment. A drizzling rain kept stopping and starting again; but he did not notice the rain, either. He also did not notice how he had shouldered his bag, and how this made it easier for him to walk. He must have gone a half or three quarters of a mile when he suddenly stopped and looked around. Ahead of him the old, black, and deeply rutted road stretched in an endless thread, planted out with its willows; to the right—a bare place, fields harvested long, long ago; to the left—bushes, and beyond them—woods. And far away—far away the faintly noticeable line of the railroad running obliquely, with the smoke of some train on it; but the sound could no longer be heard. Stepan Trofimovich grew a bit timid, but only for a moment. He sighed aimlessly, placed his bag against a willow, and sat down to rest. As he went to sit down, he felt a chill and wrapped himself in a plaid; then, noticing the rain, he opened the umbrella over him. For quite a long time he went on sitting like that, occasionally munching his lips, the handle of the umbrella grasped tightly in his hand. Various images swept before him in feverish succession, rapidly supplanting one another in his mind. "Lise, Lise, " he thought, "and ce Maurice with her... Strange people... But what was this strange fire there, and what were they talking about, and who was murdered? ... I suppose Stasie hasn't had time to find anything out yet and is still waiting for me with coffee... Cards? Did I ever lose people at cards? Hm ... in our Russia, during the time of so-called serfdom... Ah, my God, and Fedka?"

He started up in fright and looked around: "And what if this Fedka is sitting here somewhere behind a bush? They say he has a whole band of highway robbers someplace around here. Oh, God, then I... then I'll tell him the whole truth, that I am to blame... and that I suffered for ten years over him, longer than he was there as a soldier, and... and I'll give him my purse. Hm, j'aien tout quarante roubles; il prendra les roubles et il me tuera tout de même. "^[clxiv]

In fear he closed his umbrella, who knows why, and laid it down beside him. Far away, on the road from town, some cart appeared; he began peering anxiously:

"Grace à Dieu it's a cart, and it's moving slowly; that can't be dangerous. These broken-down local nags ... I always talked about breeding ... It was Pyotr Ilych, however, who talked about breeding in the club, and then I finessed him, et puis, but what's that behind, and ... it seems there's a woman in the cart. A woman and a peasant— cela commence à être rassurant. The woman behind and the peasant in front—c'est très rassurant. They have a cow tied behind by the horns, c'est rassurant au plus haut degré. "^[clxv]

The cart came abreast of him, a rather sturdy and roomy peasant cart. The woman was sitting on a tightly stuffed sack, the peasant on the driver's seat, his legs hanging over on Stepan Trofimovich's side. Behind there indeed plodded a red cow tied by the horns. The peasant and the woman stared wide-eyed at Stepan Trofimovich, and Stepan Trofimovich stared in the same way at them, but after letting them go on about twenty paces, he suddenly got up in haste and went after them. Naturally, it felt more trustworthy in the vicinity of the cart, but when he caught up with it he at once forgot about everything again and again became immersed in his scraps of thoughts and imaginings. He was striding along and certainly did not suspect that for the peasant and the woman he constituted at that moment the most mysterious and curious object one could meet on the high road.