The Idiot (103 page)

During these final days Ippolit also provided the prince with diversion; he sent for him very often. They were waiting close by, in a small cottage; the small children, Ippolit’s brother and sister, were at least glad of the dacha, because they could escape away from the sick man into the garden; as for the poor captain’s widow, she remained constantly at his command and was quite his victim; the prince had daily to separate them and reconcile them, and the sick man continued to call him his ‘nurse’, at the same time apparently not daring not to despise him for his role of conciliator. He bore an exceeding grudge against Kolya, as the latter almost never came to see him, remaining at first with his dying father, and then with his widowed mother. At last, he set as the target of his mockery the prince’s imminent marriage to Nastasya Filippovna, and ended by insulting the prince and eventually driving him wild with anger: the prince stopped visiting him. Two days later the captain’s widow dragged herself along in the morning and in tears begged the prince to call on them, otherwise
he
would devour her. She added that he wanted to reveal a great secret. The prince left. Ippolit wanted to make his peace, began
to cry and after his tears, of course, grew even more hostile and embittered, though he was afraid to show it. He was very poorly, and everything about him showed that now he was soon going to die. As for the secret, there was none, apart from urgent pleas, expressed in a voice panting with agitation (possibly artificial), so to speak, to ‘beware of Rogozhin’. ‘He’s the kind of man who won’t give up what belongs to him; he’s not like you or me, Prince: if he wants something, he really will stop at nothing ...’ etcetera, etcetera. The prince began to question him more closely, wishing to obtain some facts; but facts there were none, only personal emotions and impressions. To his exceeding satisfaction, at length, Ippolit ended by giving the prince a dreadful fright. At first the prince was unwilling to answer some of his strange questions, and merely smiled at the advice to ‘even flee abroad; there are Russian priests everywhere, and you can get married there’. But, at last, Ippolit ended with the following thought: ‘You see, it’s just that I’m afraid for Aglaya Ivanovna: Rogozhin knows how much you love her; a love for a love; you’ve taken Nastasya Filippovna away from him, and he will kill Aglaya Ivanovna; though she isn’t yours now, all the same it will be distressing for you, won’t it?’ He attained his goal: when he left him, the prince was not his own man.

These warnings about Rogozhin came the day before the wedding. That same evening, for the last time before the wedding, the prince had a meeting with Nastasya Filippovna; but Nastasya Filippovna was not in a position to be able to reassure him, and had even of late, on the contrary, been intensifying his confusion more and more. Previously, several days earlier, that is, at her meeting with him, she had made every attempt to cheer him up, being dreadfully alarmed by his melancholy look; had even tried to sing to him; but most often had told him all the humorous stories she could remember. The prince had almost always pretended to laugh a great deal, and sometimes really did laugh at the brilliant wit and radiant emotion with which she sometimes told her stories when she got carried away, something that often happened. And when she saw the prince’s laughter, saw the effect she had on him, she was delighted and began to feel proud of herself. But now her sadness and pensiveness were growing almost by the hour. His opinions concerning Nastasya Filippovna were established, and of course, had they not been, everything about her would now have seemed to him mysterious and incomprehensible. But he sincerely believed that she could still recover. He had been perfectly truthful in telling Yevgeny Pavlovich that he loved her sincerely and completely, and in his love for her there really was something like an inclination towards some pitiful and ailing child whom it is difficult and even impossible to leave to its own devices. He had not explained his feelings about her to anyone and did not even like to talk about them, unless it was impossible to avoid that subject of conversation; when he and Nastasya Filippovna were alone together they never talked about ‘feelings’, as though they had both promised each other not to. In their usual
cheerful and animated conversation anyone could take part. Darya Alexeyevna said later that throughout this entire period she simply feasted her eyes and rejoiced as she looked at them.

But it was this same view of Nastasya Filippovna’s emotional and mental state that relieved him, to some extent, of many other perplexities. She was now a completely different woman from the one he had known some three months earlier. He did not even reflect now, for example, on why then she had run away from marrying him, with tears, with curses and reproaches, yet now insisted on a wedding as soon as possible. ‘It must be that she’s not afraid now, as she was then, that marrying me would be a disaster for her,’ thought the prince. Such a swiftly revived confidence in herself could not, in his view, be natural to her. Again, that confidence could not have proceeded merely from her hatred for Aglaya: Nastasya Filippovna was able to feel rather more deeply than that. Was it perhaps out of apprehension at her fate with Rogozhin? In a word, all these reasons could have played a part along with others; but what was clearer to him than anything else was that her poor, sick mind had not been able to take the strain. All this, though in a way it relieved him from perplexity, gave him no rest or peace throughout this time. Occasionally it was as if he were trying not to think about anything; he apparently viewed the marriage as a sort of unimportant formality; he placed very little value on his own fate. As for objections and conversations like the one he had had with Yevgeny Pavlovich, in those he would have been quite unable to reply, feeling himself to be quite incompetent, and therefore abstained from any conversations of that kind.

He did, however, notice that Nastasya Filippovna knew and understood all too well what Aglaya meant to him. It was merely that she did not say anything, but he saw her ‘face’ when sometimes she encountered him at that time, right at the beginning, when he was getting ready to go to the Yepanchins. When the Yepanchins left, she positively beamed. However unobservant and slow-witted he might be, he began to be troubled by the thought that Nastasya Filippovna was going to create some kind of scandal in order to drive Aglaya out of Pavlovsk. The noise and clamour in all the dachas about the wedding was, of course, in part kept going by Nastasya Filippovna in order to irritate her rival. Since it was hard to meet the Yepanchins, one day Nastasya Filippovna, making the prince get into her barouche, instructed the coachman to drive right past the windows of their dacha. This was a dreadful surprise for the prince; as usual, he realized what was happening only when it was already too late to mend matters and when the barouche had already driven right past the windows. He did not say anything, but was ill for two days afterwards; Nastasya Filippovna did not repeat the experiment. In the last days before the wedding she began to reflect a great deal; she always ended by conquering her sadness and becoming cheerful again, but somehow more quietly, not so noisily, not so happily cheerful as before, in the so recent past. The
prince redoubled his attention. He found it curious that she would never talk to him about Rogozhin. Only once, some five days before the wedding, a message arrived from Darya Alexeyevna asking him to go there without delay, as Nastasya Filippovna was feeling very ill. He found her in a condition that resembled total insanity: she was screaming, trembling, shouting that Rogozhin was hiding in the garden, in their house, that she had just seen him, that he was going to kill her at night ... cut her throat! She was unable to calm herself for the whole of that day. But that same evening, when the prince looked in to see Ippolit for a moment, the captain’s widow, who had just returned from the city, where she had gone on some trivial business of hers, told him that Rogozhin had called in to see her that day in St Petersburg and had asked her questions about Pavlovsk. To the prince’s question as to precisely when Rogozhin had called in, the captain’s widow mentioned almost the very hour at which Nastasya Filippovna was supposed to have seen him that day, in her garden. The matter was explained as a simple mirage; Nastasya Filippovna had gone to see the captain’s widow in order to make more detailed inquiries, and had her mind put exceedingly at rest.

On the eve of the wedding the prince left Nastasya Filippovna in great animation: arrived from the dressmaker’s in St Petersburg were the fine garments, the wedding dress, the head-dresses, etcetera, etcetera, she was to wear the next day. The prince had not expected that she would be excited by these fine garments; he himself praised them all, and his praise made her even happier. But she let something slip: she had already heard that there was indignation in the town and that some rakes really were arranging a
charivari,
with music and even poetry, specially written, and that this almost had the approval of the rest of society. And so now more than ever she wanted to hold her head high before them, eclipse them all with the taste and expensive allure of her garments - ‘let them shout, let them whistle, if they dare!’ The thought of this alone made her eyes flash. She also had another secret dream, but she did not talk of it aloud: she dreamed that Aglaya, or at least one of her emissaries, would be in the crowd, incognito, in the church, watching and observing, and she was preparing herself for that. She parted from the prince entirely preoccupied with these thoughts, at about eleven that evening; but it had not yet struck midnight when a messenger came running to the prince from Darya Alexeyevna‘s, telling him to ‘come quickly, she is very bad’. The prince found his bride locked in her bedroom, in tears, in despair, in hysterics; for a long time she could hear nothing that was said to her through the locked door, at last opened it, admitted the prince alone, locked the door behind him and fell before him on her knees. (Such at least was the account given by Darya Alexeyevna, who had managed to peep round the corner.)

‘What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing to you?’ she kept exclaiming, convulsively embracing his legs.

For a whole hour the prince sat with her; what they talked of, we do not know. According to Darya Alexeyevna’s account, they parted an hour later, reconciled and happy. The prince sent someone to inquire again that evening, but Nastasya Filippovna was already asleep. In the morning, before she awoke, two more emissaries from the prince came to see Darya Alexeyevna, and a third emissary was charged with informing the prince that ‘around Nastasya Filippovna there is now a whole swarm of dressmakers and
coiffeuses
from St Petersburg, that there is not a trace of last night’s trouble, that she is busy, as only a beauty like her can be busy before her wedding, with her costume, and that now, at this very moment, an extraordinary congress is in session to decide precisely which diamonds she should wear, and how they should be worn.’ The prince was completely reassured.

The entire anecdote about this wedding was told in the following manner, and, it seems, with accuracy, by competent persons:

The wedding ceremony was fixed for eight o‘clock in the evening; Nastasya Filippovna was ready by seven. From six o’clock, crowds of people who had come to gape gradually began to assemble around Lebedev’s dacha, but especially outside Darya Alexeyevna’s house; from seven o’ clock the church also began to fill. Vera Lebedeva and Kolya were in the most dreadful state of apprehension for the prince; however, their hands were full at home: they were making the arrangements for the reception and hospitality in the prince’s rooms. As a matter of fact, almost no kind of gathering was proposed for after the altar ceremony; apart from the persons indispensable during the performance of nuptials, Lebedev had invited the Ptitsyns, Ganya, the doctor with the St Anne’s ribbon and Darya Alexeyevna. When the prince inquired of Lebedev why he had taken it into his head to invite the doctor, who was ‘almost a total stranger’, Lebedev replied complacently: ‘He has a medal, he’s a respected man, sir, it’s for appearance, sir’ - and this made the prince laugh. Keller and Burdovsky, in tailcoats and gloves, looked very proper; though Keller still kept causing the prince and his principals some anxiety by certain open tendencies towards battle, viewing in a most hostile manner the crowd of people who had gathered near the house in order to gape. At last, at half-past seven, the prince set off for the church, in a carriage. We should observe, by the way, that he himself had been expressly unwilling to omit a single one of the accepted habits and customs; all was done publicly, manifestly, openly and ‘properly’. In the church, somehow managing to pick his way through the crowd, to the accompaniment of the constant whispering and exclamations of the public, under the leadership of Keller, who cast menacing glances to right and to left, the prince concealed himself for a time in the altar, while Keller set off to fetch the bride, finding at the front steps of Darya Alexeyevna’s house a crowd not only twice or three times more dense than the one at the prince’s, but even perhaps three times more unconstrained in its familiarity. Ascending the front steps, he heard such exclamations tha
t he could no longer endure and was about to turn to the public with the intention of delivering a suitable speech, but was fortunately stopped by Burdovsky and Darya Alexeyevna herself, who came running down the steps; they seized hold of him and led him inside by force. Keller was irritable and in a hurry. Nastasya Filippovna rose, took one more glance at herself in the mirror, observed with a ‘crooked’ smile, as Keller recounted it later, that she was ‘as pale as a corpse’, bowed devoutly to the icon and went out on to the front steps. A hubbub of voices greeted her appearance. To be sure, for an initial moment there were laughter, applause, whistles, almost; but a moment later, other voices rang out:

‘What a beautiful woman!’ came the cry from the crowd.

‘She isn’t the first, and she won’t be the last!’