Demons

Years passed and his career got established. He always served in prominent places, and always under his tribesmen's command, and in the end he served his way up to quite a significant rank, compared with his age. He had long wanted to marry, and had long been cautiously on the lookout. In secret from the authorities, he sent a novella to a magazine, but it was not published. To make up for that he glued together an entire railway station with a train, and again it came out as a most successful little thing: people left the station with suitcases and bags, children and dogs, and got into the cars. Conductors and porters walked about, the bell rang, the signal was given, and the train started on its way. He sat for a whole year over this clever piece. But all the same he had to get married. The circle of his acquaintances was quite wide, primarily in the German world; but he also moved in Russian spheres, through his superiors, of course. Finally, when he had already turned thirty-eight, he also received an inheritance. His uncle, the baker, died and left him a bequest of thirteen thousand. Now it was just a matter of the right position. Mr. von Lembke, despite the rather high cut of the sphere in which he served, was a very modest man. He would have been quite satisfied with some independent little government post, with being in charge of the delivery of government firewood, or some such plum, and that for the rest of his life. But here, instead of some anticipated Mina or Ernestina, all at once Yulia Mikhailovna turned up. His career immediately rose another degree in prominence. The modest and precise von Lembke felt that he, too, was capable of ambition.

Yulia Mikhailovna owned two hundred souls, by the old way of reckoning, and, besides that, brought big co

In preparation for coming to our town, Yulia Mikhailovna worked assiduously on her husband. In her opinion, he was not without abilities, knew how to make an entrance and show himself, knew how to listen with a grave air and say nothing, had picked up a few quite decent poses, could even make a speech, even had some odds and ends of ideas, and had picked up the gloss of the latest indispensable liberalism. But all the same it troubled her that he was somehow none too receptive, and, after his long, eternal search for a career, was decidedly begi

The thing was that from the very first step the young Verkhovensky showed a decided disrespect for Andrei Antonovich, and assumed some strange rights over him, and Yulia Mikhailovna, always so jealous of her husband's significance, simply refused to notice it; at least she attached no importance to it. The young man became her favorite, ate, drank, and all but slept in the house. Von Lembke set about defending himself, called him "young man" in public, patted him patronizingly on the shoulder, but made no impression: Pyotr Stepanovich went on laughing in his face, as it were, even while apparently talking seriously, and said the most unexpected things to him in public. Once, on returning home, he found the young man in his study, asleep on the sofa, uninvited. The latter explained that he had stopped by and, finding no one home, had "caught himself a good nap." Von Lembke was offended and again complained to his wife; laughing at his irritability, she remarked caustically that it was he who seemed unable to put himself on a real footing; at least with her "this boy" never allowed himself any familiarity, and, in all events, he was "naïve and fresh, though outside the bounds of society." Von Lembke pouted. On that occasion she got them to make peace. Pyotr Stepanovich did not really apologize, but got off with some coarse joke which in other circumstances could have been taken as a new insult, but in the present case was taken as repentance. The weak point lay in Andrei Antonovich's having made a blunder at the very begi

"And did you tell him about your little church, too?" she fluttered, almost frightened.

Von Lembke decidedly took to pondering, and pondering was bad for him and was forbidden by his doctors. Aside from the fact that there turned out to be much trouble with the province, of which we shall speak later, there was another matter here, and he even suffered in his heart, not merely in his official pride. On entering into marriage, Andrei Antonovich had by no means envisioned the possibility of future family strife and discord. This was not what he had always imagined in his dreams of Mina and Ernestina. He felt himself unable to endure family storms. Yulia Mikhailovna finally had a frank talk with him.

"You can't be angry at this," she said, "if only because you are three times more sensible and immeasurably higher on the social ladder. There are many leftovers of former freethinking ways in the boy—just mischief, in my opinion—but one must be gradual, not sudden. We should cherish our young people; my way is to indulge them and keep them on the brink."

"But he says the devil knows what," objected von Lembke. "I can't be tolerant when he asserts publicly and in my presence that the government purposely gets the people drunk on vodka so as to brutalize them and keep them from rebelling. Imagine my role when I'm forced to listen to that in front of everyone."

As he said this, von Lembke recalled a conversation he had had recently with Pyotr Stepanovich. With the i