eg you to save him, do you understand? I used to know him
eight years ago, I might almost say I was his friend," cried Pyotr
Stepanovitch, completely carried away. "But I am not bound to give you
an account of my past life," he added, with a gesture of dismissal. "All
this is of no consequence; it's the case of three men and a half, and
with those that are abroad you can't make up a dozen. But what I
am building upon is your humanity and your intelligence. You will
understand and you will put the matter in its true light, as the foolish
dream of a man driven crazy... by misfortunes, by continued misfortunes,
and not as some impossible political plot or God knows what!"

He was almost gasping for breath.

"H'm. I see that he is responsible for the manifestoes with the axe,"
Lembke concluded almost majestically. "Excuse me, though, if he were the
only person concerned, how could he have distributed it both here and
in other districts and in the X province... and, above all, where did he
get them?"

"But I tell you that at the utmost there are not more than five people
in it--a dozen perhaps. How can I tell?"

"You don't know?"

"How should I know?--damn it all."

"Why, you knew that Shatov was one of the conspirators."

"Ech!" Pyotr Stepanovitch waved his hand as though to keep off the
overwhelming penetration of the inquirer. "Well, listen. I'll tell you
the whole truth: of the manifestoes I know nothing--that is, absolutely
nothing. Damn it all, don't you know what nothing means?... That
sub-lieutenant, to be sure, and somebody else and some one else here...
and Shatov perhaps and some one else too--well, that's the lot of
them... a wretched lot.... But I've come to intercede for Shatov. He
must be saved, for this poem is his, his own composition, and it was
through him it was published abroad; that I know for a fact, but of the
manifestoes I really know nothing."

"If the poem is his work, no doubt the manifestoes are too. But what
data have you for suspecting Mr. Shatov?"

Pyotr Stepanovitch, with the air of a man driven out of all patience,
pulled a pocket-book out of his pocket and took a note out of it.

"Here are the facts," he cried, flinging it on the table.

Lembke unfolded it; it turned out to be a note written six months before
from here to some address abroad. It was a brief note, only two lines:

"I can't print 'A Noble Personality' here, and in fact I can do nothing;
print it abroad."

Lemb