The Possessed | Page 7

life did she say to him:
"I shall never forgive you for that!"
The incident with the baron was the second time, but the first incident
was so characteristic and had so much influence on the fate of Stepan
Trofimovitch that I venture to refer to that too.
It was in 1855, in spring-time, in May, just after the news had reached
Skvoreshniki of the death of Lieutenant-General Gavrogin, a frivolous
old gentleman who died of a stomach ailment on the way to the Crimea,

where he was hastening to 'join the army on active service. Varvara
Petrovna was left a widow and put on deep mourning. She could not, it
is true, deplore his death very deeply, since, for the last four years, she
had been completely separated from him owing to incompatibility of
temper, and was giving him an allowance. (The Lieutenant-General
himself had nothing but one hundred and fifty serfs and his pay,
besides his position and his connections. All the money and
Skvoreshniki belonged to Varvara Petrovna, the only daughter of a very
rich contractor.) Yet she was shocked by the suddenness of the news,
and retired into complete solitude. Stepan Trofimovitch, of course, was
always at her side.
May was in its full beauty. The evenings were exquisite. The wild
cherry was in flower. The two friends walked every evening in the
garden and used to sit till nightfall in the arbour, and pour out their
thoughts and feelings to one another. They had poetic moments. Under
the influence of the change in her position Varvara Petrovna talked
more than usual. She, as it were, clung to the heart of her friend, and
this continued for several evenings. A strange idea suddenly came over
Stepan Trofimovitch: "Was not the inconsolable widow reckoning upon
him, and expecting from him, when her mourning was over, the offer of
his hand?" A cynical idea, but the very loftiness of a man's nature
sometimes increases a disposition to cynical ideas if only from the
many-sidedness of his culture. He began to look more deeply into it,
and thought it seemed like it. He pondered: "Her fortune is immense, of
course, but ..." Varvara Petrovna certainly could not be called a beauty.
She was a tall, yellow, bony woman with an extremely long face,
suggestive of a horse. Stepan Trofimovitch hesitated more and more, he
was tortured by doubts, he positively shed tears of indecision once or
twice (he wept not infrequently). In the evenings, that is to say in the
arbour, his countenance involuntarily began to express something
capricious and ironical, something coquettish and at the same time
condescending. This is apt to happen as it were by accident, and the
more gentlemanly the man the more noticeable it is. Goodness only
knows what one is to think about it, but it's most likely that nothing had
begun working in her heart that could have fully justified Stepan
Trofimovitch's suspicions. Moreover, she would not have changed her
name, Stavrogin, for his name, famous as it was. Perhaps there was

nothing in it but the play of femininity on her side; the manifestation of
an unconscious feminine yearning so natural in some extremely
feminine types. However, I won't answer for it; the depths of the female
heart have not been explored to this day. But I must continue.
It is to be supposed that she soon inwardly guessed the significance of
her friend's strange expression; she was quick and observant, and he
was sometimes extremely guileless. But the evenings went on as before,
and their conversations were just as poetic and interesting. And behold
on one occasion at nightfall, after the most lively and poetical
conversation, they parted affectionately, warmly pressing each other's
hands at the steps of the lodge where Stepan Trofimovitch slept. Every
summer he used to move into this little lodge which stood adjoining the
huge seignorial house of Skvoreshniki, almost in the garden. He had
only just gone in, and in restless hesitation taken a cigar, and not
having yet lighted it, was standing weary and motionless before the
open window, gazing at the light feathery white clouds gliding around
the bright moon, when suddenly a faint rustle made him start and turn
round. Varvara Petrovna, whom he had left only four minutes earlier,
was standing before him again. Her yellow face was almost blue. Her
lips were pressed tightly together and twitching at the corners. For ten
full seconds she looked him in the eyes in silence with a firm relentless
gaze, and suddenly whispered rapidly:
"I shall never forgive you for this!"
When, ten years later, Stepan Trofimovitch, after closing the doors, told
me this melancholy tale in a whisper, he vowed that he had been so
petrified on the spot that he had not seen