orovayev, but, thank
God, Korovayev fell into the pond when he was drunk, and was drowned
in the nick of time, and they didn't succeed in tracking me. Here, at
Virginsky's, I proclaimed the freedom of the communistic life. In June
I was distributing manifestoes again in X district. They say they
will make me do it again.... Pyotr Stepanovitch suddenly gave me to
understand that I must obey; he's been threatening me a long time. How
he treated me that Sunday! Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, I am a slave, I am
a worm, but not a God, which is where I differ from Derzhavin.* But I've
no income, no income!"

Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch heard it all with curiosity.

"A great deal of that I had heard nothing of," he said. "Of course,
anything may have happened to you..., Listen," he said, after a minute's
thought. "If you like, you can tell them, you know whom, that Liputin
was lying, and that you were only pretending to give information to
frighten me, supposing that I, too, was compromised, and that you might
get more money out of me that way.... Do you understand?"

"Dear Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, is it possible that there's such a danger
hanging over me? I've been longing for you to come, to ask you."

Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch laughed.

"They certainly wouldn't let you go to Petersburg, even if I were to
give you money for the journey.*... But it's time for me to see Marya
Timofyevna." And he got up from his chair.

"Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, but how about Marya Timofyevna?"

"Why, as I told you."

"Can it be true?"

"You still don't believe it?"

"Will you really cast me off like an old worn-out shoe?"

"I'll see," laughed Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch. "Come, let me go."

"Wouldn't you like me to stand on the steps... for fear I might by
chance overhear something... for the rooms are small?"

"That's as well. Stand on the steps. Take my umbrella."

"Your umbrella.... Am I worth it?" said the captain over-sweetly.

* The reference is to a poem of Derzhavin's.

"Anyone is worthy of an umbrella."

"At one stroke you define the minimum of human rights...."

But he was by now muttering mechanically. He was too much crushed by
what he had learned, and was completely thrown out of his reckoning. And
yet almost as soon as he had gone out on to the steps and had put up
the umbrella, there his shallow and cunning brain caught again the
ever-present, comforting idea that he was being cheated and deceived,
and if so they were