Stepan Trofimovich was sitting stretched out on the sofa. He had grown thin and yellow since that Thursday. Pyotr Stepanovich sat down next to him with a most familiar air, tucking his legs under him unceremoniously, and taking up much more space on the sofa than respect for a father demanded. Stepan Trofimovich silently and dignifiedly moved aside.

On the table lay an open book. It was the novel What Is to Be Done?^[110]Alas, I must admit one strange weakness in our friend: the fancy that he ought to emerge from his solitude and fight a last battle was gaining more and more of a hold on his seduced imagination. I guessed that he had obtained and was studying the novel with a single purpose, so that in the event of an unquestionable confrontation with the "screamers," he would know their methods and arguments beforehand from their own "catechism," and, being thus prepared, would solemnly refute them all in her eyes. Oh, how this book tormented him! At times he would throw it aside in despair and, jumping up from his seat, pace the room almost in a frenzy.

"I agree that the author's basic idea is correct," he said to me feverishly, "but so much the more horrible for that! It's our same idea, precisely ours; we, we were the first to plant it, to nurture it, to prepare it—and what new could they say on their own after us! But, God, how it's all perverted, distorted, mutilated!" he exclaimed, thumping the book with his fingers. "Are these the conclusions we strove for? Who can recognize the initial thought here?"

"Getting yourself enlightened?" Pyotr Stepanovich grinned, taking the book from the table and reading the title. "It's about time. I'll bring you something better if you like."

Stepan Trofimovich again dignifiedly kept silent. I was sitting in the corner on a sofa.

Pyotr Stepanovich quickly explained the reason for his coming. Of course, Stepan Trofimovich was struck beyond measure, and listened in fear, mixed with extreme indignation.

"And this Yulia Mikhailovna is counting on me to come and read for her!"

"I mean, it's not that they need you so much. On the contrary, it's to indulge you and thereby suck up to Varvara Petrovna. But, needless to say, you won't dare refuse to read. And you yourself would even like to, I suppose," he grinned. "You old fogies are all infernally ambitious. Listen, though, it mustn't be too dull. What have you got there, Spanish history or something? Give it to me to look over a few days ahead, otherwise you may put them all to sleep."

The hasty and all too naked rudeness of these barbs was plainly deliberate. He made as if it were impossible to speak with Stepan Trofimovich in any other, more refined language or concepts. Stepan Trofimovich staunchly continued to ignore the insults. But the events he was being informed of produced a more and more staggering impression on him.

"And she herself, herself, said this should be told to me by... you, sir?" he asked, turning pale.

"I mean, you see, she wants to arrange a day and place for a mutual talk with you, the leftovers of your sentimentalizing. You've been flirting with her for twenty years and have got her used to the funniest ways. But don't worry, it's all different now; she herself keeps saying that she's only now beginning 'to have her eyes re-opened.' I explained to her straight out that this whole friendship of yours is just a mutual outpouring of slops. She's told me a lot, friend; pah, what a lackey position you've been in all this time. Even I blushed for you."

"I, in a lackey position?" Stepan Trofimovich could not restrain himself.

"Worse, you've been a sponger, meaning a voluntary lackey. Too lazy to work, but with an appetite for a spot of cash. All this she now understands; anyway, what she tells about you is simply terrible. No, friend, I really had a good laugh over your letters to her; shameful and disgusting. But you're all so depraved, so depraved! There's something eternally depraving in alms—you're a clear example of it!"

"She showed you my letters!"

"All of them. I mean, of course, there was no way I could read them. Pah, how much paper you wasted, there must be more than two thousand letters there... And you know, old man, I think there was a moment between you two when she was ready to marry you. It was most stupid of you to let it slip! I'm speaking from your viewpoint, of course, but still it would have been better than now when you almost married 'someone else's sins,' like a clown, a laughingstock, for money."

"For money! She, she says it was for money!" Stepan Trofimovich cried out in pain.

"And what else? Come now, I'm the one who had to defend you. That's the only way you could justify yourself. She understood that you needed money like everyone else, and that from that point perhaps you were right. I proved to her like two times two that you'd been living for your mutual profit: she as a capitalist, and you as her sentimental clown. By the way, she's not angry about the money, though you've been milking her like a nanny goat. She's just mad because she believed you for twenty years, because you hoodwinked her so much with nobility and made her lie for so long. That she herself was lying she will never admit, but you're going to catch it twice over for that. I don't understand how you never figured out that you'd have to settle accounts one day. You did have some sense after all, didn't you? I advised her yesterday to send you to an almshouse—a decent one, don't worry, nothing to complain of; it seems that's just what she'll do. Remember your last letter to me in Kh—— province, three weeks ago?"

"You mean you showed it to her?" Stepan Trofimovich jumped up, horrified.

"But, what else? First thing. The one in which you informed me that she exploited you because she was jealous of your talent—well, and also about 'someone else's sins.' Really, though, friend, how vain you are, incidentally! I laughed my head off. Generally, your letters are quite dull; your style is terrible. I often didn't read them at all, and there's one lying around unopened even now; I'll send it to you tomorrow. But this, this last letter of yours—it's the peak of perfection! How I laughed, how I laughed!"

"Monster! Monster!" Stepan Trofimovich cried out.

"Pah, the devil, one can't even talk with you. What, are you offended again, like last Thursday?"

Stepan Trofimovich drew himself up menacingly. "How dare you speak to me in such language?"

"What language? Simple and clear?"

"But tell me finally, monster, are you my son or not?"

"You should know better than I. Of course, fathers always tend to be blind in such cases..."

"Silence! Silence!" Stepan Trofimovich was shaking all over.

"See, you shout at me and abuse me, as you did last Thursday, you were going to wave your stick at me, but I did find that document then. I spent the whole evening rummaging in my suitcase out of curiosity. True, there's nothing certain, you can be comforted. It's just my mother's note to that little Polack. But judging by her character..."

"One word more and I'll slap your face."

"Look at these people!" Pyotr Stepanovich suddenly turned to me. "See, we've been at it since last Thursday. I'm glad at least that you're here today and can settle it. First the fact: he reproaches me for speaking this way about my mother, but wasn't it he who suggested this very thing into my head? In Petersburg, when I was still at school, didn't he wake me up twice in the night, embracing me and weeping like a woman, and what do you think he told me those nights? These same non-lenten anecdotes about my mother! He was the first I heard them from."