“Get away then, all of you. I shall do as I like with my own--don’t meddle! Ferdishenko, make up the fire, quick!”
“I lost my head!”
| “Are you about to take a wife? I ask,--if you prefer that expression.” |
“‘Perhaps you are exaggerating--if you were to take proper measures perhaps--”
Hippolyte looked around at the laughing guests. The prince observed that his teeth were chattering as though in a violent attack of ague.
“My dear, I am quite ready; naturally... the prince.”
“And what did he mean by that _face_--a face which he so fears, and yet so loves? And meanwhile he really may die, as he says, without seeing Aglaya, and she will never know how devotedly he loves her! Ha, ha, ha! How does the fellow manage to love two of them? Two different kinds of love, I suppose! This is very interesting--poor idiot! What on earth will become of him now?”
Mrs. Epanchin was in the habit of holding herself very straight, and staring before her, without speaking, in moments of excitement.
With these words they all moved off towards the drawing-room, where another surprise awaited them. Aglaya had not only not laughed, as she had feared, but had gone to the prince rather timidly, and said to him:
“That he was a splendid man is perfectly true; you are quite right,” repeated Ivan Petrovitch, but seriously this time. “He was a fine and a worthy fellow--worthy, one may say, of the highest respect,” he added, more and more seriously at each pause; “and it is agreeable to see, on your part, such--”
Mrs. Epanchin, long accustomed to her husband’s infidelities, had heard of the pearls, and the rumour excited her liveliest curiosity and interest. The general remarked her suspicions, and felt that a grand explanation must shortly take place--which fact alarmed him much.
“Oh no! Never.”
| At seven in the evening, the prince sent to request Lebedeff to pay him a visit. Lebedeff came at once, and “esteemed it an honour,” as he observed, the instant he entered the room. He acted as though there had never been the slightest suspicion of the fact that he had systematically avoided the prince for the last three days. |
They certainly were put out, both of them.
“At this very moment, as though divining my thoughts, Rogojin raised his head from his arm and began to part his lips as though he were going to laugh--but he continued to stare at me as persistently as before.
“It is nearly midnight; we are going. Will he come with us, or is he to stay here?” Doktorenko asked crossly of the prince.
| “Just so,” said Lebedeff, with dignity; “and only this very morning I have sent up a letter to the noble lady, stating that I have a matter of great importance to communicate. She received the letter; I know she got it; and she received _me_, too.” |
| Suddenly Hippolyte jumped up as though he had been shot. |
Lebedeff and Colia came rushing up at this moment.
| “I see the ‘poor knight’ has come on the scene again,” said Evgenie Pavlovitch, stepping to Aglaya’s side. |
Aglaya sat next to Evgenie Pavlovitch, and laughed and talked to him with an unusual display of friendliness. Evgenie himself behaved rather more sedately than usual, probably out of respect to the dignitary. Evgenie had been known in society for a long while. He had appeared at the Epanchins’ today with crape on his hat, and Princess Bielokonski had commended this action on his part. Not every society man would have worn crape for “such an uncle.” Lizabetha Prokofievna had liked it also, but was too preoccupied to take much notice. The prince remarked that Aglaya looked attentively at him two or three times, and seemed to be satisfied with his behaviour.
| The undoubted beauty of the family, _par excellence_, was the youngest, Aglaya, as aforesaid. But Totski himself, though an egotist of the extremest type, realized that he had no chance there; Aglaya was clearly not for such as he. |
| “No--I don’t think I should run away,” replied the prince, laughing outright at last at Aglaya’s questions. |
All this caused the general to look grave and important. But, alas! this agreeable state of affairs very soon changed once more.
“No, not a bit of it,” said Ivan Petrovitch, with a sarcastic laugh.
“No, a verbal message; she had hardly time even for that. She begs you earnestly not to go out of the house for a single moment all to-day, until seven o’clock in the evening. It may have been nine; I didn’t quite hear.”
| “You are deviating from the truth, sir, as usual!” she remarked, boiling over with indignation; “you never carried her in your life!” |
“Certainly that isn’t much like quietism,” murmured Alexandra, half to herself.
IX.
“What have you got there?” asked the prince, with some anxiety.
“No, I have really an object in going... That is, I am going on business it is difficult to explain, but...”
| So saying, Rogojin crossed the road. |
They were walking slowly across the garden.
“Rogojin? No, no, my good fellow. I should strongly recommend you, paternally,--or, if you prefer it, as a friend,--to forget all about Rogojin, and, in fact, to stick to the family into which you are about to enter.”
“Yes, that wall of Meyer’s could tell a tale if it liked. There was no spot on its dirty surface that I did not know by heart. Accursed wall! and yet it is dearer to me than all the Pavlofsk trees!--That is--it _would_ be dearer if it were not all the same to me, now!
“You are certainly mistaken; I do not even understand you. What else?”
The prince certainly had darted a rather piercing look at her, and now observed that she had begun to blush violently. At such moments, the more Aglaya blushed, the angrier she grew with herself; and this was clearly expressed in her eyes, which flashed like fire. As a rule, she vented her wrath on her unfortunate companion, be it who it might. She was very conscious of her own shyness, and was not nearly so talkative as her sisters for this reason--in fact, at times she was much too quiet. When, therefore, she was bound to talk, especially at such delicate moments as this, she invariably did so with an air of haughty defiance. She always knew beforehand when she was going to blush, long before the blush came.
“Oh, not cold--believe an old man--not from a cold, but from grief for her prince. Oh--your mother, your mother! heigh-ho! Youth--youth! Your father and I--old friends as we were--nearly murdered each other for her sake.”
| “It was, I assure you, and if not to her then to Rogojin, which is the same thing. Mr. Hippolyte has had letters, too, and all from the individual whose name begins with an A.,” smirked Lebedeff, with a hideous grin. |
| “Nor do I believe it, in spite of the proofs. The girl is self-willed and fantastic, and insane! She’s wicked, wicked! I’ll repeat it for a thousand years that she’s wicked; they _all_ are, just now, all my daughters, even that ‘wet hen’ Alexandra. And yet I don’t believe it. Because I don’t choose to believe it, perhaps; but I don’t. Why haven’t you been?” she turned on the prince suddenly. “Why didn’t you come near us all these three days, eh?” |
| “Well, it’s lucky she has happened upon an idiot, then, that’s all I can say!” whispered Lizabetha Prokofievna, who was somewhat comforted, however, by her daughter’s remark. |
Muishkin stopped short.
“I did not confess anything to you,” said the prince, blushing. “I only answered your question.”
They seemed to need each other’s support, morally, before they dared come in; not one of them would have entered alone but with the rest each one was brave enough. Even Rogojin entered rather cautiously at the head of his troop; but he was evidently preoccupied. He appeared to be gloomy and morose, and had clearly come with some end in view. All the rest were merely chorus, brought in to support the chief character. Besides Lebedeff there was the dandy Zalesheff, who came in without his coat and hat, two or three others followed his example; the rest were more uncouth. They included a couple of young merchants, a man in a great-coat, a medical student, a little Pole, a small fat man who laughed continuously, and an enormously tall stout one who apparently put great faith in the strength of his fists. A couple of “ladies” of some sort put their heads in at the front door, but did not dare come any farther. Colia promptly banged the door in their faces and locked it.
| “Yes--I saw an execution in France--at Lyons. Schneider took me over with him to see it.” |
“Do you know, Totski, this is all very like what they say goes on among the Japanese?” said Ptitsin. “The offended party there, they say, marches off to his insulter and says to him, ‘You insulted me, so I have come to rip myself open before your eyes;’ and with these words he does actually rip his stomach open before his enemy, and considers, doubtless, that he is having all possible and necessary satisfaction and revenge. There are strange characters in the world, sir!”
“Certainly, but not always. You would not have been able to keep it up, and would have ended by forgiving me,” said the prince, after a pause for reflection, and with a pleasant smile.
| “I’ve brought your book back,” he began, indicating a book lying on the table. “Much obliged to you for lending it to me.” |
“No, no! Heaven forbid that we should bring Nina Alexandrovna into this business! Or Colia, either. But perhaps I have not yet quite understood you, Lebedeff?”
“At all events, you’ve disbanded your troop--and you are living in your own house instead of being fast and loose about the place; that’s all very good. Is this house all yours, or joint property?”
In her opinion there was so much disclosed and laid bare by the episode, that, in spite of the chaotic condition of her mind, she was able to feel more or less decided on certain points which, up to now, had been in a cloudy condition.
On reaching the table, he placed upon it a strange-looking object, which he had carried with him into the drawing-room. This was a paper packet, some six or seven inches thick, and eight or nine in length, wrapped in an old newspaper, and tied round three or four times with string.
| “That’ll do, Gania!” cried Varia and Ptitsin. |
| “You seem to be talking nonsense again, Ferdishenko,” growled the general. |
“It is difficult to judge when such beauty is concerned. I have not prepared my judgment. Beauty is a riddle.”
| Evgenie Pavlovitch left the house with strange convictions. He, too, felt that the prince must be out of his mind. |
Hippolyte went out.
“I am very proud, in spite of what I am,” she continued. “You called me ‘perfection’ just now, prince. A nice sort of perfection to throw up a prince and a million and a half of roubles in order to be able to boast of the fact afterwards! What sort of a wife should I make for you, after all I have said? Afanasy Ivanovitch, do you observe I have really and truly thrown away a million of roubles? And you thought that I should consider your wretched seventy-five thousand, with Gania thrown in for a husband, a paradise of bliss! Take your seventy-five thousand back, sir; you did not reach the hundred thousand. Rogojin cut a better dash than you did. I’ll console Gania myself; I have an idea about that. But now I must be off! I’ve been in prison for ten years. I’m free at last! Well, Rogojin, what are you waiting for? Let’s get ready and go.”
So saying she gazed into his eyes, longing to see whether she could make any guess as to the explanation of his motive in coming to her house. The prince would very likely have made some reply to her kind words, but he was so dazzled by her appearance that he could not speak.
| “I should think not. Go on.” |
“Very simply indeed! I found it under the chair upon which my coat had hung; so that it is clear the purse simply fell out of the pocket and on to the floor!”
| “It’s all nonsense on both sides,” snapped out Varia. “Let them alone, mother.” |
| “However, within three weeks my determination was taken, owing to a very strange circumstance. |
The prince rose and took off his mantle, revealing a neat enough morning costume--a little worn, but well made. He wore a steel watch chain and from this chain there hung a silver Geneva watch. Fool the prince might be, still, the general’s servant felt that it was not correct for him to continue to converse thus with a visitor, in spite of the fact that the prince pleased him somehow.
| “Oh no! I know she only laughs at him; she has made a fool of him all along.” |
At the door they met Gania coming in.
Prince S. ran up to her and persuaded her, at last, to come home with them.
| “He has astonished me,” said Ivan Fedorovitch. “I nearly fell down with surprise. I could hardly believe my eyes when I met him in Petersburg just now. Why this haste? That’s what I want to know. He has always said himself that there is no need to break windows.” |
| “Oh, Mr. Lebedeff, I am told you lecture on the Apocalypse. Is it true?” asked Aglaya. |
At the beginning of the evening, when the prince first came into the room, he had sat down as far as possible from the Chinese vase which Aglaya had spoken of the day before.
“Forgiving me! why so? What have I done to need his forgiveness?”
In a word, the incident closed as such incidents do, and the band began to play again. The prince walked away after the Epanchin party. Had he thought of looking round to the left after he had been pushed so unceremoniously into the chair, he would have observed Aglaya standing some twenty yards away. She had stayed to watch the scandalous scene in spite of her mother’s and sisters’ anxious cries to her to come away.
| His wife, Colia, and Ptitsin ran out after him. |
“Oh, you were raving, you were in a fever; you are still half delirious.”
“Would you like some tea? I’ll order some,” she said, after a minute or two of silence.
“And it’s Siberia for sacrilege, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
| “He’s asleep! You were asleep,” she said, with contemptuous surprise. |
| “Well, when we tried it we were a party of people, like this, for instance; and somebody proposed that each of us, without leaving his place at the table, should relate something about himself. It had to be something that he really and honestly considered the very worst action he had ever committed in his life. But he was to be honest--that was the chief point! He wasn’t to be allowed to lie.” |
“But if they were to, would you be dreadfully frightened?”
“It is very distressing, because _who_--? That’s the question!”
“It is quite true; we had agreed upon that point,” said Lebedeff’s nephew, in confirmation.
“He is boring us!”
“I seemed to imagine you exactly as you are--I seemed to have seen you somewhere.”
There was silence for a moment. The prince was taken aback by the suddenness of this last reply, and did not know to what he should attribute it.
| “What are you staring at me like that for?” he muttered. “Sit down.” |