The Idiot (34 page)

‘Everything’s ready!’ several voices rang out.

‘Troikas are waiting, with bells!’

Nastasya Filippovna snatched up the parcel.

‘Ganka, I’ve had an idea: I want to reward you, because why should you lose everything? Rogozhin, would he crawl to Vasilyevsky Island for three roubles?’

‘He would!’

‘Well then, listen, Ganya, I want to look at your soul for the last time; you’ve tormented me for a whole three months; now it’s my turn. Do you see this parcel, it contains a hundred thousand! In a moment I’m going to throw it into the fireplace, into the flames, in front of everyone, they’re all witnesses! As soon as the flames catch hold of it - crawl into the fireplace, but without gloves, mind, with your bare hands, your sleeves rolled up, and pull the parcel out of the fire! If you pull it out it’s yours, the whole hundred thousand is yours! You’ll burn your fingers a tiny bit — but I mean, it’s a hundred thousand, think of it! It won’t take long to pull it out! And I’ll feast my eyes on your soul as you crawl into the fire for my money. All are witnesses that the parcel will be yours! And if you don’t crawl, it will burn away: I won’t let anyone else have it. Keep away! Keep away, all of you! It’s my money! I took it for a night with Rogozhin. It’s my money, isn’t it, Rogozhin?’

‘It’s yours, my joy! It’s yours, my queen!’

‘Well, then keep away, all of you, I shall do as I want! Don’t interfere! Ferdyshchenko, rake up the fire!’

‘Nastasya Filippovna, my hands won’t rise to the task!’ replied the stunned Ferdyshchenko.

‘E-ech!’ cried Nastasya Filippovna. She seized the tongs, raked two smouldering logs and, as soon as the flames leapt up, threw the parcel on them.

A shout went up all round; many even crossed themselves.

‘She’s gone mad, she’s gone mad!’ came the cry from all round.

‘Shouldn’t we ... shouldn’t we ... tie her up?’ whispered the general to Ptitsyn, ‘or send for the ... I mean, she’s gone mad, hasn’t she? Hasn’t she?’

‘N-no, this may not quite be madness,’ whispered Ptitsyn, trembling and pale as a handkerchief, unable to take his eyes off the smouldering parcel.

‘She’s mad, isn’t she? I mean, she’s mad?’ the general insisted to Totsky.

‘I told you she was a
colourful
woman,’ muttered the also rather pale Afanasy Ivanovich.

‘But I mean to say, dash it, a hundred thousand! ...’

‘Good Lord, good Lord!’ came the cry from all round. They all began to crowd around the fireplace, they all clambered to look, they all exclaimed ... Some even jumped on to chairs in order to look over the heads of the others. Darya Alexeyevna darted through to the other room and whispered something in terror to Katya and Pasha. The beautiful German lady ran away.

‘Dear lady! Queen! All powerful one!’ howled Lebedev, crawling on his hands and knees before Nastasya Filippovna and stretching out his arms towards the fireplace. ‘A hundred thousand! A hundred thousand! I saw it myself, they wrapped it up in front of me! Dear lady! Your highness! Order me into the fireplace: I’ll crawl right in, I’ll put my grey-haired head right into the flames! ... A sick wife who’s lost the use of her legs, thirteen children — all orphans, I buried my father last week, he was starving, Nastasya Filippovna!’ — and having howled this out, he began to crawl towards the fireplace.

‘Keep away!’ Nastasya Filippovna began to shout, pushing him back. ‘Make room, all of you! Ganya, but why are you standing there? Don’t be ashamed! Crawl! You’re in luck!’

But Ganya had already endured too much that day and that evening and was not prepared for this last unexpected ordeal. The crowd parted before them into two halves, and he remained eye to eye with Nastasya Filippovna, at a distance of three paces from her. She stood right by the fireplace, waiting, not lowering her burning, fixed gaze from him. Ganya, in evening dress, his hat in his hand, and his gloves, stood before her silently and meekly, his arms folded, looking at the fire. An insane smile wandered across his face, which was as pale as a handkerchief. To be sure, he was unable to take his eyes off the flames, off the smouldering parcel; but something new seemed to have ascended into his soul; as though he had sworn to endure the torture; he did not move from where he stood; after a few moments it became clear to them all that he would not go to retrieve the parcel, that he did not want to.

‘I say, it will burn, and make a fool of you,’ Nastasya Filippovna shouted to him. ‘I mean, you’ll want to hang yourself afterwards, I’m not joking!’

The fire that had initially leaped up between the two smouldering logs nearly went out when the parcel fell on it, weighing it down. But a small blue flame still clung to one corner of the lower log, from underneath. At last a long, thin tongue of flame licked the parcel, too, the fire took hold and ran up the corners of the paper, and suddenly the whole parcel flared up in the fireplace and a bright flame shot upwards. Everyone gasped.

‘Dear lady!’ Lebedev went on howling, again trying to move forwards, but Rogozhin pulled him aside and repulsed him again.

Rogozhin himself had turned into a single, motionless stare. He was unable to tear himself away from Nastasya Filippovna, he was intoxicated, he was in seventh heaven.

‘That’s how a queen behaves!’ he repeated every moment, addressing whoever happened to be around. ‘That’s how our kind behaves!’ he shrieked, beside himself. ‘Well, which of you swindlers would do a thing like that, eh?’

The prince watched in silent sadness.

‘I’ll snatch it out with my teeth for only a thousand!’ Ferdyshchenko began to offer.

‘If I had any teeth I’d do it, too!’ the gentleman with the fists ground out from behind them all in a fit of positive despair. ‘The d-devil take it! It’s burning, it will all burn away!’ he exclaimed, seeing the flame.

‘It’s burning, it’s burning!’ they all cried with one voice, almost all of them trying to get to the fireplace as well.

‘Ganya, don’t be a fool, I tell you for the last time!’

‘Crawl for it!’ roared Ferdyshchenko, hurling himself at Ganya in a genuine frenzy and tugging his sleeve, ‘crawl for it, you wretched braggart! It’ll burn away! Oh, accur-r-r-sed man!’

Ganya pushed Ferdyshchenko away by force, turned and walked towards the door; but, without even having gone two paces, he began to stagger and crashed to the floor.

‘He’s passed out!’ people began to cry all round.

‘Dear lady, it’ll burn away!’ howled Lebedev.

‘It’ll burn away for nothing!’ came a roar from every side.

‘Katya, Pasha, bring him water, spirits!’ cried Nastasya Filippovna, seizing the tongs and snatching out the parcel.

Almost all the outer paper was scorched and smouldering, but it was at once evident that the inside was not touched. The parcel was wrapped in a sheet of newspaper folded round three times, and the money was intact. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Perhaps just a wretched little thousand has been damaged, but the rest is all safe,’ Lebedev said with tender emotion.

‘It’s all his! The whole parcel is his! You hear, gentlemen!’ Nastasya Filippovna proclaimed, putting the parcel beside Ganya. ‘
And he didn’t crawl, he endured! That means his vanity is even greater than his craving for money. Never mind, he’ll come to! He’d have cut my throat, otherwise ... There, he’s coming round. General, Ivan Petrovich, Darya Alexeyevna, Katya, Pasha, Rogozhin, did you hear? The parcel is his, Ganya’s. I’m giving it to him as his own property, as a reward ... well, for whatever it may be! Tell him. Let it lie beside him here ... Rogozhin, quick march! Farewell, Prince, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a human being! Farewell, Afanasy Ivanovich,
merci!’

Rogozhin’s entire gang swept through the rooms with noise, with thunder, with shouts towards the exit, following Rogozhin and Nastasya Filippovna. In the reception room the maids handed her fur coat to her; Marfa the cook came running from the kitchen. Nastasya Filippovna kissed them all several times.

‘But are you really leaving us altogether, little mother? But where are you going? And on your birthday, too, on such a day!’ asked the tearful maids, kissing her hands.

‘I’m going on the streets, Katya, you heard, that is my place, and if not there, then I’ll be a washerwoman! Enough of Afanasy Ivanovich! Give him my farewell greetings, and don’t think ill of me ...’

The prince rushed headlong to the entrance, where everyone was getting into four troikas with bells. The general managed to catch up with him on the staircase.

‘For pity’s sake, Prince, bethink yourself!’ he said, seizing him by the arm. ‘Give her up! You see what she’s like! I say it as a father ...’

The prince looked at him, but not saying a word tore himself free and ran downstairs.

By the entrance from which the troikas had just moved away the general could discern the prince hailing the first cab that came along and telling the driver to follow the troikas to Yekaterinhof. Then the general’s little grey trotter arrived and took the general home, with new hopes and plans, and with the pearl necklace, which the general had not forgotten to take with him. Amidst the plans he fleetingly glimpsed the seductive figure of Nastasya Filippovna once or twice; the general sighed:

‘A pity! A real pity! A lost woman! A mad woman! ... Well, sirs, but it’s not Nastasya Filippovna the prince needs now.’

A few edifying and parting words in this same vein were uttered by two other partners in conversation, guests of Nastasya Filippovna who had decided to go some of the way on foot.

‘You know, Afanasy Ivanovich, they say that something of this kind happens among the Japanese,’ said Ivan Petrovich Ptitsyn. ‘The man who has been insulted apparently goes up to his insulter and says to him: “You’ve insulted me, so I’ve come to slit open my belly in front of you,” and with these words he really does slit open his belly in front of his insulter’s eyes and, it would seem, experiences a s
ense of extreme satisfaction, as though he had really obtained his revenge. There are strange characters in the world, Afanasy Ivanovich!’

‘And you think there was something of that kind here?’ Afanasy Ivanovich replied with a smile. ‘Hm! That’s clever ... and your comparison is an excellent one. But dash it, you saw yourself, dearest Ivan Petrovich, that I did everything I could; I mean, I couldn’t have done any more, could I? But you’ll also agree that there were some capital qualities present in that woman ... brilliant features. I even wanted to shout to her just now, if I could have brought myself to do so in that Sodom, that she herself is my best defence against her accusations. Well, who wouldn’t sometimes be captivated by that woman to the point of forgetting his reason and ... everything? Look at that muzhik Rogozhin, chucking a hundred thousand at her! Granted, everything that happened in there just now was ephemeral, romantic, indecent, but also colourful and original, you will agree. Lord, what might have come of such a character, and with such beauty! But in spite of all my efforts, and an education, even — it’s all gone to waste! An uncut diamond — I’ve said that more than once ...’

And Afanasy Ivanovich heaved a deep sigh.

About two days after the strange incidents at Nastasya Filippovna’s soiree, with which we concluded the first part of our story, Prince Myshkin hurried to leave for Moscow to see about receiving his unexpected inheritance. It was said at the time that there might be other reasons for the haste of his departure; but about this, as about the prince’s adventures in Moscow and in general during his absence from St Petersburg, we can offer very little information. The prince was absent for exactly six months, and even those who had certain reasons for being interested in his fate were unable to find out very much about him during this time. Rumours of a sort did, it is true, reach some of them, though very infrequently, but these were for the most part strange, and almost always contradicted one another. The greatest amount of interest in the prince was shown, of course, in the house of the Yepanchins, to whom he had not even had time to say goodbye before leaving. The general had, however, seen him at the time, and even on two or three occasions; they had had a serious discussion about something. But if Yepanchin saw him, he did not announce it to his family. And on the whole, initially, that is to say for a whole month after the prince’s departure, it was not done to speak of him in the Yepanchins’ house. Only the general’s wife, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, delivered herself right at the outset of the opinion that she had been ‘cruelly mistaken about the prince’. Then, some two or three days later she added, without mentioning the prince this time, but in general terms, that the principal feature of her life was ‘being constantly mistaken about people’. And, at last, some ten days later, irritated at her daughters for some reason, she concluded in the form of a maxim: ‘Enough of mistakes! There shall be no more of them.’ In this connection it cannot be left unnoticed that a rather unpleasant atmosphere had existed in the house for quite some time. There was something in the air that was painful, strained, unspoken, quarrelsome; everyone frowned. Night and day the general was occupied, attending to business; rarely had he been seen so busy and active - especially on official duties. The family were scarcely able to catch a glimpse of him. As for the Yepanchin girls, they expressed no opinions, of course. Quite possibly very little was said even when they were alone. They were proud girls, haughty and sometimes diffident even among themselves, though they understood one another not only from the first verbal hint, but even from the first glance, so that quite often there was no point in any of them saying much.

Only one conclusion could have been drawn by an outside observer, had one happened to be there: that, judging by all the evidence given above, scanty though it may be, the prince had succeeded in leaving a certain impression in the house of the Yepanchins, though he had appeared in it but once, and then only fleetingly. It was, perhaps, an impression of s
imple curiosity, explained by some of the prince’s eccentric conduct. Whatever it was, the impression remained.