at is to say an ordinary, crowd of petitioners, even
though there were several of them, into a rebellion which threatened to
shake the foundations of the state. Why did Lembke himself rush at that
idea when he arrived twenty minutes after the messenger? I imagine (but
again it's only my private opinion) that it was to the interest of Ilya
Ilyitch, who was a crony of the factory manager's, to represent the
crowd in this light to Lembke, in order to prevent him from going into
the case; and Lembke himself had put the idea into his head. In the
course of the last two days, he had had two unusual and mysterious
conversations with him. It is true they were exceedingly obscure,
but Ilya Ilyitch was able to gather from them that the governor had
thoroughly made up his mind that there were political manifestoes, and
that Shpigulins' factory hands were being incited to a Socialist rising,
and that he was so persuaded of it that he would perhaps have regretted
it if the story had turned out to be nonsense. "He wants to get
distinction in Petersburg," our wily Ilya Ilyitch thought to himself as
he left Von Lembke; "well, that just suits me."

But I am convinced that poor Andrey Antonovitch would not have desired
a rebellion even for the sake of distinguishing himself. He was a most
conscientious official, who had lived in a state of innocence up to the
time of his marriage. And was it his fault that, instead of an innocent
allowance of wood from the government and an equally innocent Minnchen,
a princess of forty summers had raised him to her level? I know almost
for certain that the unmistakable symptoms of the mental condition
which brought poor Andrey Antonovitch to a well-known establishment in
Switzerland, where, I am told, he is now regaining his energies,
were first apparent on that fatal morning. But once we admit that
unmistakable signs of something were visible that morning, it may well
be allowed that similar symptoms may have been evident the day before,
though not so clearly. I happen to know from the most private sources
(well, you may assume that Yulia Mihailovna later on, not in triumph
but _almost_ in remorse--for a woman is incapable of _complete_
remorse--revealed part of it to me herself) that Andrey Antonovitch had
gone into his wife's room in the middle of the previous night, past
two o'clock in the morning, had waked her up, and had insisted on her
listening to his "ultimatum." He demanded it so insistently t