“It is the _heart_ which is the best teacher of refinement and dignity, not the dancing-master,” said her mother, sententiously, and departed upstairs to her own room, not so much as glancing at Aglaya.
“Perhaps,” he thought, “someone is to be with them until nine tonight and she is afraid that I may come and make a fool of myself again, in public.” So he spent his time longing for the evening and looking at his watch. But the clearing-up of the mystery came long before the evening, and came in the form of a new and agonizing riddle.
Marfa Borisovna was about forty years of age. She wore a dressing-jacket, her feet were in slippers, her face painted, and her hair was in dozens of small plaits. No sooner did she catch sight of Ardalion Alexandrovitch than she screamed:
| “The cleverest in the world,” interrupted his uncle hastily. |
| “I will say you are quite wrong, if you wish.” |
| “What, receive him! Now, at once?” asked Mrs. Epanchin, gazing vaguely at her husband as he stood fidgeting before her. |
“Oh, he’s simply a fool,” said Gania.
“He’s got some new idea in his head,” thought Varia. “Are they pleased over there--the parents?” asked Gania, suddenly.
| “You know,” Adelaida continued, “you owe us a description of the Basle picture; but first I wish to hear how you fell in love. Don’t deny the fact, for you did, of course. Besides, you stop philosophizing when you are telling about anything.” |
“Be assured, most honourable, most worthy of princes--be assured that the whole matter shall be buried within my heart!” cried Lebedeff, in a paroxysm of exaltation. “I’d give every drop of my blood... Illustrious prince, I am a poor wretch in soul and spirit, but ask the veriest scoundrel whether he would prefer to deal with one like himself, or with a noble-hearted man like you, and there is no doubt as to his choice! He’ll answer that he prefers the noble-hearted man--and there you have the triumph of virtue! _Au revoir_, honoured prince! You and I together--softly! softly!”
“At once? Now? You must have forgotten...” began the prince.
“My father was just about to be tried when he died,” said the prince, “although I never knew of what he was accused. He died in hospital.”
“I only wished to say that this ‘distortion,’ as Evgenie Pavlovitch expressed it, is met with very often, and is far more the general rule than the exception, unfortunately for Russia. So much so, that if this distortion were not the general rule, perhaps these dreadful crimes would be less frequent.”
“Well, very well, very well!” she said, but quite in a different tone. She was remorseful now, and bent forward to touch his shoulder, though still trying not to look him in the face, as if the more persuasively to beg him not to be angry with her. “Very well,” she continued, looking thoroughly ashamed of herself, “I feel that I said a very foolish thing. I only did it just to try you. Take it as unsaid, and if I offended you, forgive me. Don’t look straight at me like that, please; turn your head away. You called it a ‘horrible idea’; I only said it to shock you. Very often I am myself afraid of saying what I intend to say, and out it comes all the same. You have just told me that you wrote that letter at the most painful moment of your life. I know what moment that was!” she added softly, looking at the ground again.
“Twenty-seventh; very well. Good-bye now; you have a good deal to do, I’m sure, and I must dress and go out. Take your portrait. Give my respects to your unfortunate mother, Nina Alexandrovna. _Au revoir_, dear prince, come in and see us often, do; and I shall tell old Princess Bielokonski about you. I shall go and see her on purpose. And listen, my dear boy, I feel sure that God has sent you to Petersburg from Switzerland on purpose for me. Maybe you will have other things to do, besides, but you are sent chiefly for my sake, I feel sure of it. God sent you to me! Au revoir! Alexandra, come with me, my dear.”
| He had been turned out in disgrace, eventually, and this was the cause of his bad night and quarrelsome day, which ended in his sudden departure into the street in a condition approaching insanity, as recorded before. |
| “Thank you, general; you have behaved very kindly to me; all the more so since I did not ask you to help me. I don’t say that out of pride. I certainly did not know where to lay my head tonight. Rogojin asked me to come to his house, of course, but--” |
II.
Or if that were impossible he would like to be alone at home, on the terrace--without either Lebedeff or his children, or anyone else about him, and to lie there and think--a day and night and another day again! He thought of the mountains--and especially of a certain spot which he used to frequent, whence he would look down upon the distant valleys and fields, and see the waterfall, far off, like a little silver thread, and the old ruined castle in the distance. Oh! how he longed to be there now--alone with his thoughts--to think of one thing all his life--one thing! A thousand years would not be too much time! And let everyone here forget him--forget him utterly! How much better it would have been if they had never known him--if all this could but prove to be a dream. Perhaps it was a dream!
“We have been silent on this subject for three weeks,” said his mother, “and it was better so; and now I will only ask you one question. How can she give her consent and make you a present of her portrait when you do not love her? How can such a--such a--”
| The latter requested him to take a seat once more, and sat down himself. |
“Oh, silence isn’t the word! Softly, softly!”
There were sounds of half-smothered laughter at this.
| “I’ll just get my parcel and we’ll go,” said the prince to Gania, as he re-entered the drawing-room. Gania stamped his foot with impatience. His face looked dark and gloomy with rage. |
| “I angrily turned round in bed and made up my mind that I would not say a word unless he did; so I rested silently on my pillow determined to remain dumb, if it were to last till morning. I felt resolved that he should speak first. Probably twenty minutes or so passed in this way. Suddenly the idea struck me--what if this is an apparition and not Rogojin himself? |
| “Are you going there for some particular reason, or only as a way of getting into her society, and that of her friends?” |
| “Well--that’ll do; now leave me.” |
The general shouted in his fury; but it was to be concluded that his wrath was not kindled by the expressed doubt as to Kapiton’s existence. This was his scapegoat; but his excitement was caused by something quite different. As a rule he would have merely shouted down the doubt as to Kapiton, told a long yarn about his friend, and eventually retired upstairs to his room. But today, in the strange uncertainty of human nature, it seemed to require but so small an offence as this to make his cup to overflow. The old man grew purple in the face, he raised his hands. “Enough of this!” he yelled. “My curse--away, out of the house I go! Colia, bring my bag away!” He left the room hastily and in a paroxysm of rage.
There he lay on the carpet, and someone quickly placed a cushion under his head.
“Who was he?”
“As soon as we reach home give it to me to read.”
“At home, everybody, mother, my sisters, Prince S., even that detestable Colia! If they don’t say it, they think it. I told them all so to their faces. I told mother and father and everybody. Mamma was ill all the day after it, and next day father and Alexandra told me that I didn’t understand what nonsense I was talking. I informed them that they little knew me--I was not a small child--I understood every word in the language--that I had read a couple of Paul de Kok’s novels two years since on purpose, so as to know all about everything. No sooner did mamma hear me say this than she nearly fainted!”
“Lizabetha Prokofievna! Lizabetha Prokofievna! Lizabetha Prokofievna!”
“What nonsense you are all talking! What do you mean by poor knight?”
“It will be well,” she said, “if you put an end to this affair yourself _at once_: but you must allow us to be your witnesses. They want to throw mud at you, prince, and you must be triumphantly vindicated. I give you joy beforehand!”
| “Excuse me, prince, but think what you are saying! Recollect yourself!” |
She went on her knees before him--there in the open road--like a madwoman. He retreated a step, but she caught his hand and kissed it, and, just as in his dream, the tears were sparkling on her long, beautiful lashes.
“When I tried to rid her soul of this gloomy fallacy, she suffered so terribly that my heart will never be quite at peace so long as I can remember that dreadful time!--Do you know why she left me? Simply to prove to me what is not true--that she is base. But the worst of it is, she did not realize herself that that was all she wanted to prove by her departure! She went away in response to some inner prompting to do something disgraceful, in order that she might say to herself--‘There--you’ve done a new act of shame--you degraded creature!’
“But why did she run away to me, and then again from me to--”
“You can stay with him if you like,” said Muishkin.
“I was saying just now, before you came in, prince, that there has been nothing national up to now, about our liberalism, and nothing the liberals do, or have done, is in the least degree national. They are drawn from two classes only, the old landowning class, and clerical families--”
“Better to be of a mess than in a mess! I remember making a joke something like that at the mess in eighteen hundred and forty--forty--I forget. ‘Where is my youth, where is my golden youth?’ Who was it said that, Colia?”
| “I saw him yesterday, and his fingers were all right!” |
Ferdishenko led the general up to Nastasia Philipovna.
“However--admit the fact! Admit that without such perpetual devouring of one another the world cannot continue to exist, or could never have been organized--I am ever ready to confess that I cannot understand why this is so--but I’ll tell you what I _do_ know, for certain. If I have once been given to understand and realize that I _am_--what does it matter to me that the world is organized on a system full of errors and that otherwise it cannot be organized at all? Who will or can judge me after this? Say what you like--the thing is impossible and unjust!
“Oh, indeed! Then it is perhaps as well that I neither _did_ invite you, nor _do_ invite you now. Excuse me, prince, but we had better make this matter clear, once for all. We have just agreed that with regard to our relationship there is not much to be said, though, of course, it would have been very delightful to us to feel that such relationship did actually exist; therefore, perhaps--”
| “I have said above that the determination needed by me for the accomplishment of my final resolve, came to hand not through any sequence of causes, but thanks to a certain strange circumstance which had perhaps no connection whatever with the matter at issue. Ten days ago Rogojin called upon me about certain business of his own with which I have nothing to do at present. I had never seen Rogojin before, but had often heard about him. |
“Are you really throwing us all over, little mother? Where, where are you going to? And on your birthday, too!” cried the four girls, crying over her and kissing her hands.
Lebedeff and Colia came rushing up at this moment.
Nastasia Philipovna, who loved originality and drollery of all kinds, was apparently very fond of this old man, and rang the bell for more tea to stop his coughing. It was now half-past ten o’clock.
“There, look at her,” cried Nastasia, trembling with passion. “Look at this young lady! And I imagined her an angel! Did you come to me without your governess, Aglaya Ivanovna? Oh, fie, now shall I just tell you why you came here today? Shall I tell you without any embellishments? You came because you were afraid of me!”
“Perhaps she wants to laugh at me,” thought the prince, “but no; for if she did she certainly would do so.”
“It is a pity you have taken too much wine, Lebedeff I want to ask you something... but...”
“But it’s not I alone,” cried Colia. “They all talked about it, and they do still. Why, just now Prince S. and Adelaida Ivanovna declared that they upheld ‘the poor knight’; so evidently there does exist a ‘poor knight’; and if it were not for Adelaida Ivanovna, we should have known long ago who the ‘poor knight’ was.”
“Oh, undoubtedly, this person wished somehow, and for some reason, to do Evgenie Pavlovitch a bad turn, by attributing to him--before witnesses--qualities which he neither has nor can have,” replied Prince S. drily enough.
“You have indeed!” said Gania.
| “It was impossible for me to go on living when life was full of such detestable, strange, tormenting forms. This ghost had humiliated me;--nor could I bear to be subordinate to that dark, horrible force which was embodied in the form of the loathsome insect. It was only towards evening, when I had quite made up my mind on this point, that I began to feel easier.” |
She arranged her daughter’s hair, which was not in the least disordered, and gave her a kiss. This was all that she had called her for.
| “But I will, I _will_ run away!” she cried--and her eyes flashed again with anger--“and if you don’t agree I shall go and marry Gavrila Ardalionovitch! I won’t be considered a horrible girl, and accused of goodness knows what.” |
“What, after yesterday? Wasn’t I honest with you?”
| “Well, hardly at all. I wish I were, if only for the sake of justifying myself in her eyes. Nina Alexandrovna has a grudge against me for, as she thinks, encouraging her husband in drinking; whereas in reality I not only do not encourage him, but I actually keep him out of harm’s way, and out of bad company. Besides, he’s my friend, prince, so that I shall not lose sight of him, again. Where he goes, I go. He’s quite given up visiting the captain’s widow, though sometimes he thinks sadly of her, especially in the morning, when he’s putting on his boots. I don’t know why it’s at that time. But he has no money, and it’s no use his going to see her without. Has he borrowed any money from you, prince?” |
“But could anyone possibly eat sixty monks?” objected the scoffing listeners.