The Idiot (55 page)

Suddenly Ippolit got up, horribly pale and with a look of terrible shame, amounting to despair, on his contorted face. This was mainly expressed in his eyes, which stared at the gathering with fear and hatred, and in the forlorn, crooked and abject smile on his trembling lips. He lowered his gaze at once, and dragged himself, staggering and still smiling as before, over to Burdovsky and Doktorenko, who were standing by the exit from the veranda: he was going with them.

‘Well, this is what I was afraid of!’ exclaimed the prince. ‘It was bound to happen!’

Ippolit quickly turned to him with the most rabid hatred, and the whole of his face seemed to be trembling and speaking.

‘Oh, that’s what you were afraid of! “It was bound to happen,” you think? Then be advised that if there is anyone I hate here,’ he began to howl in a hoarse shriek, spray coming from his mouth, ‘(and I hate you all, you all!) - but you, you, you jesuitical, syrupy little thing, you idiot and millionaire benefactor, I hate more than anyone and anything in the world! I understood and hated you long ago, when I first heard abou
t you, I hated you with all the hatred of my soul ... It’s you who’ve brought me to all this! It’s you who’ve made me have an epileptic fit! You’ve reduced a dying man to shame, it’s you, it’s you who’s to blame for my vile cowardice! I’d kill you if I had any life left to live! I don’t need your charity, I won’t accept it from anyone, do you hear, not from anyone, nothing! I was delirious, and don’t dare to exult in your triumph! ... I curse you all once and for all!’

At this point he choked completely.

‘He’s ashamed of his tears!’ whispered Lebedev to Lizaveta Prokofyevna, “This was bound to happen!” Hurrah for the prince! Saw right through him ...’

But Lizaveta Prokofyevna did not even deem him worthy of a glance. She stood, proud and straight, her head thrown back, examining ‘these wretched people’ with contemptuous curiosity. When Ippolit had finished, the general began to shrug his shoulders; she surveyed him wrathfully from head to foot, as though requesting him to account for this movement, and at once turned towards the prince.

‘Thank you, Prince, eccentric friend of our family, for the pleasant evening you have provided for us all. I expect your heart’s now rejoicing that you’ve succeeded in involving us in your follies ... Enough, dear friend of the family, thank you for letting us see what you’re really like, at last.’

She straightened her mantilla indignantly, waiting for ‘those people’ to leave. At that moment a hired droshky, for which Doktorenko had sent Lebedev’s nephew, the gymnasium student, a quarter of an hour earlier, rolled up for them. As soon as his wife had finished, the general at once put in a word as well:

‘Really, Prince, I even did not expect ... after everything, after all our friendly relations ... and, lastly, Lizaveta Prokofyevna ...’

‘How can you, how can you, Father!’ Adelaida Ivanovna exclaimed. She went quickly up to the prince and gave him her hand.

The prince smiled to her with a forlorn look. Suddenly a hot, rapid whisper seemed to scorch his ear.

‘If you don’t get rid of these loathsome people at once, then all my life, all my life I shall hate you!’ Aglaya whispered; she was almost in a frenzy, but turned away before the prince had time to glance at her. By now, however, there was no one left for him to get rid of: they had somehow managed to get Ippolit into the droshky, and it had left.

‘Well, how long is this to continue, Ivan Fyodorovich? What is your opinion? How long am I to endure such mischief from these vicious urchins?’

‘Why, my dear ... I am, of course, ready and ... the prince ...’

Ivan Fyodorovich did, however, offer the prince his hand, but did not succeed in an actual handshake, and ran off after Lizaveta Prokofyevna, who was noisily and angrily leaving the veranda. Adelaida, her fianc
e and Alexandra took their leave of the prince with sincere affection. Yevgeny Pavlovich, the only cheerful person present, did likewise.

‘It turned out the way I thought it would! It’s just a pity that you had to suffer, too, poor fellow,’ he whispered with a most charming smile.

Aglaya walked away without saying goodbye.

But the adventures of that evening were not yet at an end; Lizaveta Prokofyevna had to endure yet one more highly unexpected encounter.

She had not yet managed to descend the flight of steps to the road (which skirted the park), when suddenly a splendid carriage, a carriage, drawn by two white steeds, rushed past the prince’s dacha. In the carriage sat two magnificent ladies. But, having gone no more than ten yards past, the carriage stopped again; one of the ladies quickly turned round, as though she had suddenly spotted some friend she wanted to see.

‘Yevgeny Pavlych! Is it you?’ suddenly cried a resonant, beautiful voice that made the prince start, and, perhaps, also someone else. ‘Oh, how glad I am to have found you at last! I sent a special messenger to you in town; no, two! They’ve been looking for you all day!’

Yevgeny Pavlovich stood on the steps of the veranda as if thunderstruck. Lizaveta Prokofyevna also stood still, but not in frozen horror, like Yevgeny Pavlovich: she looked at the insolent woman just as proudly and with the same cold contempt as five minutes earlier she had looked at ‘those wretched people’, and at once transferred her steady gaze to Yevgeny Pavlovich.

‘Good news!’ the resonant voice continued. ‘Don’t worry about Kupfer’s promissory notes; Rogozhin has bought them for thirty, I managed to persuade him. You can be assured for at least some three months yet. And we’ll probably get something sorted out with Biskup and all that riff-raff, on a friendly basis! Well, so that means everything’s fine. Be happy. Until tomorrow!’

The carriage moved off and quickly disappeared.

‘She’s crazy!’ Yevgeny Pavlovich cried at last, flushed with indignation and looking around him in bewilderment. ‘I’ve no idea what she was talking about! What promissory notes? Who is she?’

Lizaveta Prokofyevna continued to look at him for another two seconds; at last she set off quickly and abruptly for her dacha, and everyone followed her. A minute later Yevgeny Pavlovich announced himself to the prince back on the veranda again, in extreme agitation.

‘Prince, in all truthfulness, do you know what this means?’

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ replied the prince, who was now himself in a state of extreme and morbid tension.

‘No?’

‘No. ’

‘Neither do I,’ Yevgeny Pavlovich suddenly began to laugh. ‘I swear to you, I had nothing to do with those promissory notes, believe me, on my word of honour! ... But what’s the matter, are you feeling faint?’

‘Oh no, no, I assure you, no ...’

Three days went by before the Yepanchins were quite propitiated. The prince, though he blamed himself for many things, as usual, and sincerely expected punishment, still at first had a complete inner conviction that Lizaveta Prokofyevna could not be seriously angry with him, but was really more angry with herself. Thus, by the third day, such a long period of hostility had put him in a very gloomy state of mind, from which there seemed to be no way out. There were other factors at work, too, but one of them stood out among the rest. Throughout all these three days it had grown progressively within the prince’s morbidly sensitive imagination - and of late the prince had been finding himself guilty of two extremes: his extraordinarily ‘senseless and stubborn’ credulity and at the same time an ‘unworthy and gloomy’ suspiciousness. In short, by the end of the third day the incident with the eccentric lady who spoke to Yevgeny Pavlovich from her carriage had acquired frightening and mysterious dimensions in his mind. The essence of the mystery, apart from the other aspects of the matter, was summed up for the prince in a painful question: to wit, was he to blame for this new ‘enormity’, or was it merely ... But he did not get as far as saying who it might be. As for the letters N.F.B., that, in his view, was simply an innocent prank, even a most childish prank, so that it would be shameful, and even in a certain respect almost dishonourable, to give it any sustained reflection.

However, on the very first day after the disgraceful ‘soirée’, for the disorders of which he had been such a primary ‘cause’, the prince had the pleasure that morning of receiving Prince Shch. and Adelaida: they had dropped in ‘mainly in order to inquire about his health’, had done so while taking a walk, the two of them together. Adelaida had just noticed a tree in the park, a wonderful old tree, a spreading one, with long, gnarled branches, covered in young green leaves, with a hollow and a cleft; she must, she absolutely must paint a watercolour of it! And she talked of almost nothing else for the whole half hour of her visit. Prince Shch. was courteous and charming as usual, asked the prince about former times and recalled the circumstances of their first acquaintance: of the previous day’s events almost nothing was said. Adelaida could not restrain herself and admitted, with a smile, that they had dropped in incognito; there, however, the confessions ended, though from this
incog
nito
it was not hard to guess that her parents, and chiefly Lizaveta Prokofyevna, were really rather particularly ill-disposed towards him. But neither about her, nor about Aglaya, nor even about Ivan Fyodorovich did Adelaida and Prince Shch. utter a single word during their visit. As they left to continue their walk, they did not invite the prince to go with them. There was not even a hint of asking him to visit them; in that connection Adelaida even let slip
a very characteristic remark: as she talked about one of her watercolours, she suddenly felt a very strong desire to show it to him. ‘How can we do that quickly? Wait! I’ll send it to you today with Kolya, if he calls, or bring it tomorrow, when I go for a walk with the prince,’ she concluded, at last, her bewilderment, relieved that she had succeeded in solving this problem so neatly and conveniently for all concerned.

At last, when he was almost on the point of taking his leave, Prince Shch. suddenly seemed to remember something:

‘Oh, yes,’ he asked, ‘you don’t know, dear Lev Nikolayevich, who that lady was who shouted to Yevgeny Pavlych from her carriage, do you?’

‘It was Nastasya Filippovna,’ said the prince. ‘Didn’t you realize it was her? Though I don’t know who was with her.’

‘Yes, I know, I heard!’ Prince Shch. interjected. ‘But what was all that shouting of hers about? I confess it really is a mystery to me ... to me and to others.’

Prince Shch. spoke with extreme and visible puzzlement.

‘She was talking about some kind of promissory notes of Yevgeny Pavlovich’s,’ the prince replied very simply. ‘They’d come into Rogozhin’s hands from some moneylender or other, at her request, and Rogozhin was going to wait for Yevgeny Pavlych to redeem them.’

‘I heard it, I heard it, my dear prince, but I mean, that simply could not possibly have been true! With a fortune like that ... To be sure, he used to do such things in the old days, because of carelessness, and I even used to help him out ... But with a fortune like that, to give promissory notes to moneylenders and worry about them - is impossible. And he can’t possibly be so familiar and on such friendly terms with Nastasya Filippovna - that’s the main problem. He swears he knows nothing, and I fully believe him. But the fact is, dear Prince, that I wanted to ask you, do you know anything? That is, has any rumour reached you, by some miracle?’

‘No, I don’t know anything, I assure you that I had no part in it whatsoever.’

‘Oh, what has happened to you, Prince? I simply don’t recognize you today. Do you really think I could possibly suppose you to have a part in a matter like that? ... Well, but of course you’re upset today.’

He embraced him and kissed him.

‘What do you mean, a matter like what? I don’t see any matter “like that”.’

‘Without a doubt, that lady wished to thwart Yevgeny Pavlych in some way, by endowing him in the eyes of witnesses with qualities he does not possess and cannot possess,’ Prince Shch. replied rather thinly.

Prince Lev Nikolayevich was embarrassed, but continued to gaze at the prince fixedly and questioningly; the latter, however, fell silent.

‘Was it not just promissory notes she was talking about, then? Was she not just talking literally yesterday?’ the prince muttered, at last, in a kind of impatience.

‘But look, judge for yourself, what can there be in common between her and Yevgeny Pavlych and ... Rogozhin, of all people, too? I repeat to you, an enormous fortune, which I know all about; another fortune, which he expects from his uncle. Nastasya Filippovna simply ...’

Prince Shch. suddenly fell silent again, evidently because he did not want to continue on the subject of Nastasya Filippovna to the prince.

‘So at any rate he knows her, then?’ Prince Lev Nikolayevich asked suddenly, after a moment’s silence.

‘I think there was something between them; he’s a frivolous sort of fellow, you know! However, if there was something, it was a very long time ago, in the old days, two or three years ago, that is. After all, he was a friend of Totsky’s. But there couldn’t be anything of that kind now, they could never be on such familiar terms! You know yourself that she hasn’t been here; she hasn’t been anywhere. Many people don’t even know now that she’s appeared again. I’ve noticed the carriage for about three days, no more.’

‘It’s a magnificent carriage!’ said Adelaida.

‘Yes, the carriage is magnificent.’

As a matter of fact, both went away on most friendly and, one might say, most brotherly terms with Prince Lev Nikolayevich.

For our hero, on the other hand, this visit represented something of capital importance. We may assume that he himself had suspected many things since the previous night (and perhaps even earlier), but until their visit he had not been able to bring himself to justify his apprehensions completely. But now it was becoming clear: Prince Shch., of course, interpreted the event wrongly, but had none the less come near the truth, had realized that there was an
intrigue.
(‘Perhaps he understands it perfectly,’ thought the prince, ‘but just doesn’t want to express himself openly, and so misinterprets it on purpose.’) Clearest of all was that they (and especially Prince Shch.) had dropped in on him in the hope of some kind of explanation; and, if that were so, it meant they considered that he had a part in the intrigue. In addition, if that was so and really was important, then she must have some dreadful purpose, and what could that purpose be? How dreadful! ‘And how can she be stopped? There’s no possibility of stopping her, if she’s convinced of her purpose!’ The prince knew this from experience. ‘She’s mad. Mad.’