The Idiot (20 page)

‘This man assures me,’ Aglaya said sharply, when the prince had finished reading, ‘that the words:
break it all off
will not compromise me and will not bind me to anything, and himself gives me a written guarantee of this, as you can see from this note. Observe how naively he has hurried to underline certain words, and how crudely his secret motive shows through. He knows, however, that if he broke it all off himself, alone, without waiting for my word and not even telling me about it, without any hopes of me, then I would change my feelings for him and perhaps become his friend. He knows it for certain! But he has a sordid soul: he knows and cannot make up his mind; he knows and yet asks for a guarantee. He is not able to act on faith. He wants me to give him hope of obtaining me in exchange for a hundred thousand. With regard to my earlier word, which he mentions in the note and which is supposed to have illumined his life, he is brazenly lying. I once merely felt sorry for him. But he is insolent and shameless: the thought then at once flashed across his mind that there was the chance of hope; I realized that instantly. Ever since then he has begun to try to ensnare me; he is doing so still. But enough; take the note and give it back to him, in a moment, when you have left our house, of course, not before.’

‘And what shall I say to him in reply?’

‘Nothing, of course. That is the best reply. So you want to stay at his house, do you?’

‘Ivan Fyodorovich himself earlier recommended me to do so,’ said the prince.

‘Then beware of him, I warn you; he will not forgive you now for returning his note to him.’

Aglaya gave the prince’s hand a light squeeze and went out. Her face was serious and frowning, and she did not even smile as she nodded to him in farewell.

‘I’ll be with you in a moment, I’ll just get my bundle,’ said the prince to Ganya, ‘and then we can go.’

Ganya stamped his foot with impatience. His face even darkened with fury. At last they both came out on to the street, the prince holding his bundle.

‘The reply? The reply?’ Ganya pounced on him. ‘What did she say to you? Did you give her the letter?’

The prince silently handed him the note. Ganya was speechless.

‘What? My note!’ he exclaimed. ‘He didn’t even deliver it! Oh, I should have guessed! Oh, damn-ation ... Now I see why she didn’t understand anything just now! But why, why did you not deliver it, oh, damn-ation ...’

‘Forgive me, on the contrary, I succeeded in giving her your note at once, straight after you gave it to me, and exactly as you asked. I had it again because Aglaya Ivanovna gave it back to me just now.’

‘When? When?’

‘As soon as I’d finished writing in her album, and when she asked me to accompany her. (Did you hear?) We went into the dining room and she gave me your note, asked me to read it, and told me to give it back to you.’

‘Re-e-ad it?’ Ganya shouted, almost at the top of his voice. ‘Read it? You read it?’

And again he stood rigid in the middle of the pavement, but so amazed that his mouth even fell open.

‘Yes, I did, just now.’

‘And she herself, she herself let you read it? She herself?’

‘Yes, and you must believe me, I wouldn’t have read it had she not asked me to.’

Ganya said nothing for a minute, working something out with agonizing effort, and then suddenly exclaimed:

‘It can’t be true! She couldn’t possibly have asked to read it. You’re lying! You read it yourself!’

‘I’m telling the truth,’ the prince replied in his earlier, completely imperturbable tone, ‘and you must believe me: I’m very sorry that it makes you feel so bad.’

‘But wretched man, did she not at least say something to you at the time? Did she not make some reply?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Then tell me, tell me, oh, the devi
l! ...’

And Ganya stamped his right foot, in its galosh, twice upon the pavement.

‘As soon as I’d read it, she told me that you were angling for her; that you wanted to compromise her in order to receive hope from her, and, while gaining support from that hope, to give up the other hope of a hundred thousand. That if you had done so without bargaining with her, if you had broken it all off yourself, without asking her for a guarantee in advance, she might perhaps have become your friend. I think that’s all. Yes, also: when, having taken the note, I asked if there was any reply, she said that the best reply would be no reply - I think that’s what she said; I’m sorry if I’ve forgotten her exact words, I’m telling it as I understood it.’

A boundless spite took possession of Ganya, and his rabid fury broke through without any restraint.

‘Hah! So that’s it!’ he ground out. ‘She throws my notes out of the window! Hah!
She
doesn’t bargain - then I will! And we shall see! I’ve a trick or two left yet ... we shall see! ... I’ll make her toe the line! ...’

He grimaced, turned pale, foamed at the mouth; he shook his fist. They walked several yards like this. He stood not on the slightest ceremony with the prince, as though he were in his own room, because he really did consider the prince a total nonentity. But suddenly he thought of something, and pulled himself together.

‘But how was it,’ he suddenly addressed the prince, ‘how was it that you’ (an idiot, he added to himself) ‘were suddenly taken into such confidence only two hours after your first acquaintance? How was that?’

Of all his torments, only envy was missing. It suddenly bit him to the heart.

‘I’m really not able to explain that to you,’ replied the prince.

Ganya looked at him with spite.

‘It wasn’t in order to take you into her confidence that she asked you to go into the dining room, was it? I mean, she was going to give you something, wasn’t she?’

‘I can’t account for it otherwise.’

‘But why, the devil take it? What did you do there? Why did they like you? Listen,’ he said, agitated in every fibre of his being (at that moment everything in him was somehow scattered and seething with disorder, so that he could not gather his thoughts), ‘listen, can’t you remember at least something and work out in order what you actually talked about, all your words, right from the beginning? Didn’t you notice anything, don’t you recall?’

‘Oh, I can easily do that,’ the prince replied. ‘Right at the start, when I came in and was introduced, we began to talk about Switzerland.’

‘Oh, to the devil with Switzerland!’

‘Then about the death penalty ...’

‘The death penalty?’

Yes; it was apropos of something ... then I told them about the three years I lived there, and a story about a poor village girl ...’

‘Oh, to the devil with the poor village girl! Go on!’ Ganya burst out in impatience.

‘Then how Schneider told me his opinion of my character and compelled me to ...’

‘May the deuce swallow Schneider and spit on his opinions! Go on!’

‘Then, apropos of something, I began to talk about faces, that is, the expression of faces, and said that Aglaya Ivanovna was almost as pretty as Nastasya Filippovna. It was then that I let it slip about the portrait ...’

‘But you did not retell, I mean to say, you did not retell what you had earlier heard in the study? Did you? Did you?’

‘I repeat to you, I did not.’

‘Then how the devil ... Bah! Aglaya didn’t show the note to the old woman, did she?’

‘On that account I can most fully guarantee that she did not. I was there throughout; and in any case, she had no time.’

‘Well, perhaps there was something you didn’t notice ... Oh, damn-able idiot!’ he exclaimed, now completely beside himself, ‘he can’t even tell anything properly!’

Ganya, once he had begun to hurl abuse and encountered no resistance, little by little lost all restraint, as is always the case with some people. A little longer, and he would perhaps have begun to spit, so rabidly furious was he. But it was precisely this fury that made him blind; otherwise he would long ago have paid attention to the fact that this ‘idiot’ whom he was slighting in this way was sometimes able only too swiftly and subtly to understand everything and tell it all in an exceedingly satisfactory manner. But suddenly something unexpected happened.

‘I must observe to you, Gavrila Ardalionovich,’ the prince said suddenly, ‘that earlier I really was so unwell that I was indeed almost an idiot; but now I have long since recovered, and so I find it somewhat unpleasant when I am called an idiot to my face. Although you may be forgiven, taking into account the setbacks you have met with, in your vexation you have even abused me a couple of times. I really do not wish it, especially like this, suddenly, right from the outset; and as we are now standing at a crossroads, would it not be better for us to go our separate ways? You can turn to the right, and go home, and I will turn left. I have twenty-five roubles and I’m sure I can find some
hotel garni.’

Ganya was horribly embarrassed, and even blushed with shame.

‘Forgive me, Prince,’ he exclaimed hotly, suddenly changing his abusive tone to one of exceeding politeness, ‘for God’s sake, forgive me! You see what trouble I’m in. You know almost nothing, but if you knew everything you would probably forgive me at least a little; although, of course, I am beyond forgiveness ...’

‘Oh, I don’t need such profuse apologies,’ the prince hurried to reply. ‘I mean, I understand how unpleasant it is for you, and that is why you are being so rude. Well, let us go to your house. I shall come with pleasure ...’

‘No, I can’t let him off the hook that easily,’ Ganya thought to himself, looking spitefully at the prince as they walked, ‘that rogue wheedled everything out of me and then suddenly took off his mask ... That means something. Well, we shall see! Everything will be decided, everything, everything! This very day!’

They were already standing outside the house.

Ganya’s apartment was on the third floor, on a very clean, light and spacious staircase, and consisted of six or seven rooms and roomlets, in themselves unremarkable, but at any rate not quite affordable by a functionary with a family, even if he were in receipt of a two-thousand-rouble salary. It was, however, intended for the keeping of lodgers with meals and service, and had been occupied by Ganya and his household no more than two months earlier, to the very great displeasure of Ganya himself, on the pleas and insistence of Nina Alexandrovna and Varvara Ardalionovna, who wished in their turn to be useful and at least increase the family income somewhat. Ganya would frown and call the keeping of lodgers a disgrace; after this he seemed to become ashamed in society, where he was accustomed to appearing as a brilliant young man with a fine future ahead of him. All these concessions to fate and all this annoying crowdedness - these were deep spiritual wounds for him. For some time now he had begun to be irritated beyond measure and proportion by all kinds of trivial things, and if temporarily he agreed to concede and endure, it was only because he had decided to change and modify all this in a very short space of time. And yet this very change, this way out he had determined on, constituted no small task - a task whose imminent solution threatened to be more troublesome and tormenting than all that had gone before.

The apartment was divided by a corridor, which began right in the entrance hall. On one side of the corridor were the three rooms that were intended to be rented out to ‘specially recommended’ lodgers; in addition, on the same side of the corridor, right at its far end, next to the kitchen, there was a fourth small room, more cramped than all the others, in which retired General Ivolgin himself, the father of the household, had his quarters, sleeping on a broad sofa and obliged to leave or enter the apartment through the kitchen, and by the back stairs. Gavrila Ardalionovich’s thirteen-year-old brother, the school-boy Kolya, was also accommodated in this room; he was also destined to be squeezed in here, to study, sleep on another, very old, narrow and short little sofa, with a sheet full of holes, and, above all, to tend to and look after his father, who was becoming less and less able to manage without this. The prince was allocated the middle of the three rooms; in the first, to the right, lived Ferdyshchenko, while the third, to the left, was still empty. But first Ganya took the prince to the family quarters. These family quarters consisted of a reception room, which was turned, when necessary, into a dining room; a drawing room, which was actually only a drawing room in the morning, and in the evening became Ganya’s study and his bedroom; and, finally, a third room, narrow and always closed: this was the bedroom of Ni
na Alexandrovna and Varvara Ardalionovna. In a word, everything in this apartment was crowded and cramped; Ganya just gritted his teeth and kept going; although he was, and wanted to be, deferential to his mother, it was obvious from one’s first moment in their home that he was the household’s great despot.

Nina Alexandrovna was not alone in the drawing room, Varvara Ardalionovna was sitting with her; they were both occupied with some sort of knitting and were talking to a visitor, Ivan Petrovich Ptitsyn. Nina Alexandrovna appeared to be about fifty, with a thin, drawn face and pronounced dark circles under her eyes. She had an ill and somewhat mournful look, but her face and gaze were rather pleasant; from her first words, a serious character full of genuine dignity announced itself. In spite of her sorrowful look, one sensed in her firmness, and even determination. She was dressed with exceeding modesty, in something black and quite old-lady-like, but her ways, conversation and entire manner revealed a woman who had seen the best society. Varvara Ardalionovna was a girl of about twenty-three, of medium stature and rather thin, with a face which, although it was not markedly pretty, had the secret of appealing without beauty, and being inordinately attractive. She looked very like her mother, was even dressed in the same way as her mother, out of a complete reluctance to array herself in fine clothes. The gaze of her grey eyes might sometimes have been very cheerful and affectionate, if it was not most frequently serious and reflective, sometimes even too much so, especially of late. Firmness and determination were also visible in her face, but one had a sense that this firmness could be even more energetic and enterprising than her mother’s. Varvara Ardalionovna was rather quick-tempered, and her brother was sometimes even rather afraid of this quick temper. The visitor who sat with them now, Ivan Petrovich Ptitsyn, was also rather afraid of it. He was still quite a young man, aged around thirty, modestly but elegantly dressed, with pleasant but somehow excessively sedate manners. A small dark brown beard designated him as someone who was not employed in the civil service.
¹
He was able to converse intelligently and interestingly, but more frequently said nothing. In general he even made a pleasant impression. He was apparently not indifferent to Varvara Ardalionovna and did not hide his feelings. Varvara Ardalionovna treated him in a friendly way, but to some of his questions she still delayed in making a reply, did not like them, even; Ptitsyn was, however, far from being discouraged. Nina Alexandrovna was affectionate towards him, and had recently begun to confide many things to him. It was, however, known that his speciality was the lending of money at high interest on more or less guaranteed security. With Ganya he was on exceedingly close terms.