The Idiot (39 page)

‘Well, as you like; I’ll manage; you won’t lose out.’

They were both now leaving the garden.

‘I could ... I could ... if you like, I could tell you something very interesting, esteemed Prince, relating to the same subject,’ Lebedev muttered, trailing along by the prince’s side.

The prince came to a halt.

‘Darya Alexeyevna also has a dacha in Pavlovsk, sir.’

‘Well?’

‘And a certain lady person is a friend of hers, and, it seems, plans to visit her often in Pavlovsk.’

‘Well?’

‘Aglaya Ivanovna ...’

‘Oh, enough, Lebedev!’ the prince interrupted, experiencing an unpleasant sensation, as though he had been touched on a sore spot. ‘All that is ... not what you think. Tell me rather, when are you moving? For me, the sooner the better, as I’m in a hotel ...’

As they talked, they came out of the garden and, without going into the house, crossed the courtyard and reached the wicket gate.

‘Well, what could be better?’ Lebedev thought at last. ‘Move straight into my house from the hotel, this very day, and the day after tomorrow we’ll go to Pavlovsk together.’

‘I’ll see,’ said the prince, reflectively, and went out of the gate.

Lebedev watched him go. He was struck by the prince’s sudden air of distraction. As the prince went out, he even forgot to say goodbye, did not even nod, something that was out of character with what Lebedev knew of the prince’s courtesy and consideration.

By now it was getting on for twelve o’clock. The prince knew that at the Yepanchins’ house in town he might find only the general now, attending to his business, and even that was not very likely. It crossed his mind that the general might possibly whisk him off to Pavlovsk at once, and there was a visit that he very much wanted to make before that. At the risk of missing Yepanchin and delaying his trip to Pavlovsk until the following day, the prince made up his mind to go and find the house he so much wanted to visit.

This visit was, however, in a certain sense risky for him. He found himself in a quandary, and hesitated. Of the house he knew that it was situated on Gorokhovaya Street, not far from Sadovaya, and decided to walk there, in the hope that when he arrived at the place he would at last be able to finally make up his mind.

As he approached the intersection of Gorokhovaya and Sadovaya, he was surprised at his own extraordinary agitation; he had not expected that his heart would beat so painfully. One house, probably because of its odd physiognomy, began to attract his attention while he was still some way off, and the prince remembered later that he said to himself: ‘That must be the house.’ With intense curiosity, he went closer to verify his guess; he felt that for some reason he would find it very unpleasant if his guess proved to be correct. This house was large, gloomy, three storeys high, without any architectural merit, a dirty green colour. Some houses in this genre, though very few in number, built at the end of the last century, have survived in precisely these streets of St Petersburg (in which everything alters so quickly) nearly unaltered. They are built solidly, with thick walls and exceedingly few windows; on the ground floor the windows sometimes have bars. Usually the ground floor is taken up by a moneychanger’s shop. The
skopets
¹
who sits in the shop rents the floor above. Both outside and inside the place feels somehow inhospitable and arid, everything appears to be screening and concealing itself, but why it seems this way purely from the house’s physiognomy would be hard to explain. Architectural combinations of lines have their secret, of course. These houses are almost exclusively inhabited by tradesfolk. As he approached the gates and glanced at the inscription, the prince read: ‘The House of Hereditary Distinguished Burgher Rogozhin
²
’.

Ceasing to hesitate, he opened the glass door that slammed noisily behind him, and began to climb the main staircase to the second storey. The staircase was dark, made of stone, crudely constructed, and the walls were coloured with red paint. He knew that the whole second storey of this dreary house was occupied by Rogozhin, with his mother and brother. The servant who opened the door to the prince let him in without
announcing him and led him a long way; they walked through a large hall with walls of ‘imitation marble’, a slatted oak floor, and furniture of the 1820s, crude and heavy; they also walked through some tiny rooms, making sudden detours and zigzags, ascending two or three steps and descending the same number again, and, at last, knocked on a door. The door was opened by Parfyon Semyonych himself; seeing the prince, he turned so pale and went so rigid that for a time he looked like a stone statue, staring with an immobile and frightened gaze, and twisting his mouth into a smile of extreme bewilderment - as though in the prince’s visit he found something impossible and almost miraculous. The prince, although he had expected something of this kind, was positively astonished.

‘Parfyon, perhaps I’ve come at a bad moment, look, I’ll go away,’ he said at last in embarrassment.

‘Not at all! Not at all!’ Parfyon said, recovering himself at last. ‘Welcome, enter!’

They spoke to each other on ‘thou’ terms. In Moscow they had chanced to meet often and spent a lot of time together, there were even some moments in their meetings that had imprinted themselves all too memorably on their hearts. Now, however, it was more than three months since they had seen each other.

The pallor, and a kind of minor, fleeting convulsion, had still not left Rogozhin’s face. Though he had invited his guest in, his extraordinary embarrassment continued. As he was showing the prince to the armchairs and seating him at the table, the prince happened to turn round to face him and stopped under the effect of his exceedingly strange and turbid gaze. Something seemed to transfix the prince, and at the same time he seemed to remember - something recent, painful, and sombre. Without sitting down, for some time he looked Rogozhin straight in the eyes; they seemed to glitter even more powerfully in that initial moment. At last, Rogozhin smiled, but in some discomfiture, and as if at a loss.

‘Why are you staring like that?’ he muttered. ‘Sit down!’

The prince sat down.

‘Parfyon,’ he said, ‘tell me straight, did you know I was coming to St Petersburg today?’

‘That you’d come, I thought as much, and, you see, I wasn’t mistaken,’ the latter added, with a caustic smile, ‘but how could I have known that you’d come today?’

A certain harsh abruptness and the strange irritability of the question contained in the reply struck the prince even more.

‘Well, even if you’d known it was today, why get so irritated?’ the prince said, quietly perplexed.

‘But why do you ask?’

‘Earlier today, when I got off the train, I saw a pair of eyes looking at me in exactly the way you looked at me just now behind me.’

‘Oho! And whose eyes were they, then?’ Rogozhin muttered suspiciously. It seemed to the prince that he gave a start.

‘I don’t know; I think I might even have imagined them in the crowd; I’m beginning to imagine things all the time. I feel, brother Parfyon, almost as I did about five years ago, when I was still having fits.’

‘Well, perhaps you did imagine them; I don’t know ...’ muttered Parfyon.

The affectionate smile on his face did not seem right at that moment, as though something in that smile had broken, and as though he were utterly unable to glue it back together, no matter how he tried.

‘What, off abroad again, are you?’ he asked, suddenly adding: ‘Do you remember our train journey from Pskov last autumn, when I was on my way to this house and you were ... in that cloak, do you remember, those wretched gaiters?’

And Rogozhin suddenly began to laugh, this time with a kind of open malice, and as if he were glad to have succeeded in expressing it in some way.

‘Are you quite settled here?’ asked the prince, surveying the study.

‘Yes, this is my home. Where else would I be?’

‘It’s a long time since we saw one another. I’ve heard things about you that don’t sound like you at all.’

‘People say all kinds of things behind one’s back,’ Rogozhin observed dryly.

‘But you’ve broken up that gang of yours; here you are, not playing pranks any more, but sitting in your father’s house. Well, that’s good. Is the house your own, or do you share it?’

‘It’s mother’s house. She’s through there, along the corridor.’

‘And where does your brother live?’

‘Semyon Semyonych lives in the wing.’

‘Does he have a family?’

‘He’s a widower. Why do you want to know?’

The prince looked, and did not answer; he suddenly fell into reflection and did not seem to hear the question. Rogozhin did not press him, and waited. They were silent for a while.

‘I guessed that this was your house when I was still a hundred yards away,’ said the prince.

‘How was that?’

‘I really don’t know. Your house bears the physiognomy of your whole family and the whole of your Rogozhin way of life, but ask why I came to that conclusion, and I can’t explain it. It’s delirium, of course. I’m even frightened that it troubles me so much. Before it would never have crossed my mind that you would live in a house like this, but as soon as I caught sight of it I at once thought: “Why, but that’s exactly the sort of house he’d be bound to have!”’

‘Nonsense!’ Rogozhin smiled vaguely, not quite comprehending the prince’s obscure thought. ‘My grandfather built this house,’ he observed.
‘Skoptsy
have always lived here, the Khludyakovs, and even now they rent from us.’

‘Such gloom! It’s a gloomy place you live in,’ said the prince, surveying the study.

It was a large room, high-ceilinged, rather dark, crammed with all sorts of furniture - mostly large office desks, bureaux, cupboards, in which ledgers and some kind of documents were kept. A wide, red morocco leather sofa obviously served Rogozhin as a bed. The prince observed on the table beside which Rogozhin had seated him two or three books; one of them, Solovyov’s
History,
³
was open, and there was a bookmark in it. Along the walls, in tarnished gilt frames, hung several oil paintings, dark and soot-begrimed, in which it was hard to discern anything. One full-length portrait drew the prince’s attention: it depicted a man of about fifty, in a frock coat of German cut, but long-skirted, with two state decorations, a very sparse and short greyish beard, a yellow, wrinkled face, and a suspicious, reserved and sorrowful gaze.

‘That’s not your father, is it?’

‘That is indeed who it is,’ Rogozhin answered with an unpleasant smile, as though he were preparing for some instant unceremonious joke about his deceased father.

‘He wasn’t an Old Believer, was he?’

‘No, he went to church, but it’s true that he used to say the old faith was more correct. He also greatly respected the
skoptsy.
This used to be his study. Why did you ask if he was an Old Believer?’

‘Will you be having your wedding here?’

‘Y-yes,’ Rogozhin answered, almost startled by the unexpected question.

‘Will it be soon?’

‘You know yourself that it doesn’t depend on me.’

‘Parfyon, I’m not your enemy and I don’t plan to interfere in anything you do. I repeat this now as I said it earlier, once, on a similar occasion. When your wedding was being prepared in Moscow, I didn’t interfere, you know that. The first time
she
herself came rushing to me, nearly from the altar, beseeching me to “save” her from you. I’m repeating her words to you. Then she ran away from me, too, you tracked her down again and took her to the altar and now, they say, she’s run away from you again here. Is it true? Lebedev informed me of it, and so I came. That there’s harmony between you again I only learned for the first time yesterday on the train from one of your former friends, Zalyozhev, if you want to know. I came here with a purpose: I wanted to finally persuade
her
to go abroad, to restore her health; she is very disturbed both in body and in soul, in her mind especially, and in my opinion requires much looking after. I did not want to accompany her abroad myself, but thought I might arrange all this in my absence. I’m telling you the honest truth. If it really is true that this matter has been resolved between you again, then I won’t show my face to her again and I won’t come and see you any more, e
ither. You know yourself that I’m not deceiving you, because I’ve always been open with you. I’ve never concealed from you my thoughts about this and have always said that to marry you would be her certain ruin. Ruin for you, too ... perhaps even more than for her. If you were to part again, I would be very pleased; but I don’t plan to upset you or come between you. So be assured, and don’t suspect me. And in any case, you yourself know: was I ever your
real
rival, even when she ran away to me? You laughed just now; I know what you were laughing at. Yes, we lived separately there and in different cities, and you know all that for
a fact.
I mean, I explained to you before that I don’t love her with love, but with pity. I think I’m defining that precisely. You said at the time that you understood those words of mine; is it true? Did you understand? My, what a look of hatred you’re giving me! I’ve come to reassure you because you are dear to me. I like you very much, Parfyon. But now I shall go and will never return again. Farewell.’

The prince stood up.

‘Sit with me for a while,’ Parfyon said quietly, not getting up from his seat and leaning his head on his right palm. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve seen you.’

The prince sat down. They both fell silent again.

‘When you’re not there in front of me, I at once feel malice towards you, Lev Nikolayevich. These last three months, when I haven’t seen you, I’ve felt bitter towards you every moment, by God, I have. I could have gone and poisoned you! It was like that. Now you’ve scarcely been sitting with me for quarter of an hour, yet all my malice is passing, and you’re as dear to me as you used to be. Sit with me for a while ...’