The Idiot (62 page)

‘There’s no one here who is worthy of such words!’ Aglaya burst out. ‘None of them, none of them here are worthy of your little finger, nor your heart! You are more honourable than them all, nobler than them all, better than them all, kinder than them all, cleverer than them all! There are people here who are unworthy to bend down and pick up the handkerchief you’ve dropped ... Why do you humiliate yourself and make yourself lower than them all? Why have you twisted everything in yourself, why is there no pride in you?’

‘Merciful Lord, who would have thought it?’ Lizaveta Prokofyevna threw up her hands.

‘The poor knight! Hurrah!’ Kolya cried in rapture.

‘Be quiet! ... How dare they insult me here in your home!’ Aglaya suddenly hurled at Lizaveta Prokofyevna, now in that hysterical condition when no limits are any longer observed and when all obstacles are set aside. ‘Why does everyone, every single person, torment me? Why do they all make my life a misery because of you, Prince? I will not marry you, not for anything! Understand that, never, and not for anything! Understand it! How could one possibly marry someone as absurd as you? Take a look at yourself in the mirror, the way you’re standing now! ... Why, why do they tease me, saying I’m going to marry you? You must know the answer! You’re in the conspiracy with them!’

‘No one has ever teased you!’ Adelaida muttered in alarm.

‘No one has ever had anything like that in their minds, nothing like that has been said!’ exclaimed Alexandra Ivanovna.

‘Who’s been teasing her? When did they tease her? Who could have said that to her? Is she raving, or isn’t she?’ Lizaveta Prokofyevna addressed them all, trembling with anger.

‘Everyone’s been saying it, every single person, for a whole three days! I will never, never marry him!’

Having shouted this out, Aglaya dissolved into bitter tears, covered her face with her handkerchief, and flopped into a chair.

‘But he hasn’t asked you yet ...’

‘I haven’t asked you, Aglaya Ivanovna,’ the prince suddenly blurted out.

‘Wha-at?’ Lizaveta Prokofyevna drawled suddenly in surprise, indignation and horror. ‘What on e-e-arth?’

She was unwilling to believe her ears.

‘I meant ... I meant,’ the prince began to tremble, ‘I merely wanted to explain to Aglaya Ivanovna ... to have the honour of explaining that I have never had the intention of ... having the honour of asking for her hand ... even some day ... I’m not to blame for this in any way, I swear to God, I’m not to blame, Aglaya Ivanovna! I’ve never wanted to, and it has never been in my mind, I will never want to, you’ll see: rest assured! Some cruel person has slandered me to you! You mustn’t worry!’

As he said this, he approached Aglaya. She took away the handkerchief with which she had been covering her face, gave a quick glance at him and his frightened figure, made sense of his words and suddenly burst into loud laughter, straight in his face - such cheerful and irrepressible laughter, such absurd and mocking laughter that Adelaida was the first to lose her self-restraint, especially when she also cast a glance at the prince; she rushed to her sister, embraced her and began to laugh the same irrepressible, schoolgirlish, cheerful laughter. As he looked at them, the prince suddenly also began to smile and with a joyful and happy expression began to repeat:

‘Well, thank God, thank God!’

Now Alexandra too could no longer restrain herself, and she began to laugh at the top of her voice. It seemed that there would be no end to the laughter of all three.

‘Let’s go for our walk, let’s go for our walk!’ cried Adelaida. ‘All of us together, and the prince must come, too; there’s no reason for you to leave, you dear man! What a dear man he is, Aglaya! Don’t you think so, Mama? What’s more, I absolutely, absolutely must give him a kiss and a hug for ... for his being so candid with Aglaya just now. Maman, dear, will you allow me to give him a kiss? Aglaya! Allow me to give your prince a kiss!’ cried the mischievous girl, and she really did jump over to the prince and give him a kiss on the forehead. He seized her hands and pressed them tightly, so that Adelaida almost exclaimed, gave her a look of infinite delight and suddenly, swiftly brought her hand to his lips and kissed it three times.

‘But let’s be off!’ called Aglaya. ‘Prince, you shall escort me. May he do that,
Maman?
A suitor who has refused me? After all, you’ve refused me for ever, haven’t you, Prince? But that’s not the way, that’s not the way to give your arm to a lady, don’t you know how to take a lady by the arm? That’s the way, come along now, we shall go ahead of them all, do you want to walk ahead of them all,
tête-à-tête?’

She spoke without cease, still laughing in gusts.

‘Thank God! Thank God!’ Lizaveta Prokofyevna kept repeating, not knowing herself why she was so happy.

‘Exceedingly strange people!’ thought Prince Shch., for perhaps the hundredth time since he had begun to associate with them, but ... he liked these strange people. Regarding the prince, it was possible that he did not like him very much; as they all went out to take their walk, Prince Shch. had a somewhat frowning and worried look.

Yevgeny Pavlovich, it seemed, was in a most cheerful frame of mind. All the way to the station he amused Alexandra and Adelaida, who laughed with a rather excessive readiness at his jokes, to a point where he fleetingly began to suspect that they might not be listening to him at all. This thought made him suddenly burst out laughing, with extreme and complete sincerity (such was his character!). The sisters, who were, as a matter of fact, in a most festive mood, kept casting looks at Aglaya and the prince, who were walking in front; it was plain that the younger sister had posed them a major riddle. Prince Shch. kept trying to talk to Lizaveta Prokofyevna about irrelevant matters, perhaps in order to divert her, and had bored her dreadfully. She seemed quite distraught, replied inappropriately, and sometimes did not reply at all. But Aglaya Ivanovna’s riddles were not yet at an end that evening. The last one fell to the lot of the prince alone. When they had gone about a hundred paces from the dacha, Aglaya said to her stubbornly silent
chevalier
in a quick half-whisper:

‘Look to the right.’

The prince cast a glance.

‘Look more closely. Do you see that bench, in the park, over there where those three big trees are ... the green bench?’

The prince replied that he saw it.

‘Don’t you like that spot? I sometimes come and sit here early, at about seven in the morning, when everyone is still asleep.’

The prince muttered that it was a beautiful spot.

‘And now leave me, I don’t want to walk arm in arm with you any more. Or rather, walk arm in arm with me, but don’t say a word to me. I want to think in private ...’

The warning was in any case unnecessary: the prince would probably not have uttered a single word all the way, even without being instructed. When he heard about the bench, his heart began to beat horribly. A moment later he pulled himself together and, with shame, drove away the absurd thought.

As everyone knows and as everyone at least asserts, the public that assembles in the Pavlovsk pleasure gardens on weekdays is more ‘select’ than on Sundays and holidays, when ‘all kinds of people’ come visiting from the city. The ladies’ dresses are not festive, but they are elegant. It is the accepted custom to meet by the bandstand. The band is perhaps the finest of our park bands, and plays the latest things. Propriety and decorum are exceedingly well observed, in spite of a certain general air of homeliness, and even intimacy. Acquaintances, all of whom are dacha-dwellers, meet to take a look at one another. Many do this with genuine pleasure and come only for this purpose; but there are also those who come only to listen to the band. Scandals are extremely rare, though they do happen, even on weekdays. But such things are inevitable, after all.

On this occasion the evening was a beautiful one, and there was quite a large crowd. All the seats near the band were taken. Our company settled down on chairs a little to the side, near the left-hand exit from
the park. The crowd and the band enlivened Lizaveta Prokofyevna somewhat and diverted the young ladies; they contrived to exchange glances with some of the people they knew, and nodded politely to one or two of them from afar; they managed to examine the dresses, observe some strange eccentricities, discuss them, and smile mockingly. Yevgeny Pavlovich also did a lot of bowing to people he knew. Aglaya and the prince, who were still together, had already drawn some attention. Soon several young men of their acquaintance came to talk to the mother and the young ladies; two or three of them stayed to converse; they were all friends of Yevgeny Pavlovich. Among them was a young and very handsome officer, very cheerful, very talkative; he hurried to talk to Aglaya and did his utmost to draw her attention. Aglaya was very kind to him, and smiled and laughed a great deal. Yevgeny Pavlovich asked the prince’s permission to introduce this friend to him; the prince barely understood what was required, but the introduction went ahead and the two of them bowed and shook hands with each other. Yevgeny Pavlovich’s friend asked a question, but the prince seemed not to reply to it, or mumbled something to himself so strangely that the officer gave him a very fixed look, then glanced at Yevgeny Pavlovich, realized at once why the latter had arranged this introduction, smiled a slightly sardonic smile, and turned again to Aglaya. Only Yevgeny Pavlovich noticed that Aglaya suddenly blushed at this.

The prince had not even noticed that others were talking and paying their compliments to Aglaya; from time to time he even almost forgot that he was sitting beside her. Sometimes he felt like going away somewhere, vanishing completely, and he would really have liked a gloomy, deserted place where he could be alone with his thoughts, and no one would know where he was. Or at least be at home, on the veranda, but with no one else there, neither Lebedev nor Lebedev’s children; to throw himself on his sofa, bury his head in the pillow and lie like that for a day, a night, another day. At times he dreamed of the mountains, and one particular spot in the mountains which he always liked to remember, and where he had been fond of going when he had lived there, looking down from there at the village, the barely visible white thread of the waterfall below, the white clouds, the old abandoned castle. Oh, how he would have liked to be there now and think of only one thing - oh! all his life about that one thing - it would be enough for a thousand years! And to be forgotten, forgotten here entirely. Oh, that was what was needed, it would be better if no one knew him at all and this whole vision were simply something in a dream. But wasn’t it all the same, whether it was in a dream or waking? Sometimes he suddenly began to stare at Aglaya and keep his gaze on her for five minutes at a time; but his look was very strange: it was if he were gazing at an object that was a mile away from him, or as if at a portrait, rather than Aglaya herself.

‘Why are you looking at me like that, Prince?’ she asked suddenly, breaking off her cheerful conversation and laughter with those around her. ‘I’m afraid of you; I keep thinking you want to reach out and touc
h my face with your finger. Don’t you think that’s what he looks like, Yevgeny Pavlych?’

The prince listened, in apparent surprise at being addressed, then took it in, though perhaps not quite understanding, did not reply, but seeing that she and everyone else were laughing, suddenly opened his mouth and began to laugh himself. The laughter grew louder all round; the officer, who was apparently a humorous fellow, simply exploded with laughter. Aglaya suddenly whispered angrily to herself:

‘An idiot!’

‘Good Lord! Can she really ... a man like that ... has she really gone quite mad?’ Lizaveta Prokofyevna ground out between her teeth.

‘It’s a joke. It’s the same joke as with the “poor knight” that time,’ Alexandra whispered firmly in her ear. ‘That’s all it is! She’s tearing him to pieces again. Only this joke has gone too far; it must be put a stop to,
Maman!
Earlier she was carrying on like an actress and frightening us out of pure mischief ...’

‘It’s a good thing she picked on an idiot like him,’ Lizaveta Prokofyevna parried back in a whisper. Her daughter’s remark had come as a relief to her, all the same.

But the prince had heard himself being called an idiot, and he gave a start, though not because of that. He forgot the ‘idiot’ at once. In the crowd, however, not far from the place where he was sitting, somewhere at the side - he could not have pointed to the exact spot - a face, a pale face, with dark, curly hair, a familiar, very familiar smile and gaze - fleeted into view and disappeared. It was very possible that it was merely something he had imagined; of the whole vision all that remained to him was the impression of a crooked smile, a pair of eyes and the fancy light green tie the fleeting gentleman was wearing. Whether this gentleman had vanished in the crowd or slipped through into the park, the prince could also not have determined.

A moment later, however, he suddenly began to look around him quickly and anxiously; this first vision might be the harbinger and predecessor of a second vision. That must be certain. Had he really forgotten about a possible encounter when they set off for the park? To be sure, when he entered the park he seemed to be quite unaware that he was going there - such was his state of mind. If he had been able to be more attentive, he would have noticed a quarter of an hour earlier that Aglaya was also looking around her, apparently in some unease, from time to time, as though she were searching for something. Now that his own unease had become very noticeable, Aglaya’s agitation and anxiety had increased, and as soon as he looked back, she too looked round. The resolution of their anxious feelings soon ensued.

From the same side exit from the park, near which the prince and the whole Yepanchin company were sitting, a crowd of at least ten people suddenly appeared. At the head of the crowd were three women; two of them were wonderfully pretty, and there was nothing strange in the
fact that so many admirers were moving in their train. But about both admirers and women there was something peculiar, something not quite like the rest of the public that had gathered to hear the band. Almost everyone noticed them at once, but for the most part tried to pretend they did not see them at all, and only a few of the young people smiled at them as they spoke to one another in low voices. Not to see them at all was impossible: they were openly displaying themselves, talking loudly, laughing. One might have supposed that among them were many who were intoxicated, though some of them seemed to be dressed in smart and elegant costumes; but there were also people who looked very strange indeed, in strange clothes, with strangely excited faces; among them were several military men; there were some who were not young at all; there were those who were comfortably dressed, in wide and elegantly cut clothes, with rings and cuff-links, in magnificent coal-black wigs and side-whiskers and with particularly noble, though somewhat fastidious, expressions on their faces, but who are avoided like the plague in society. Among our suburban gatherings, of course, there are those people who are distinguished by their extraordinary propriety and who have a particularly good reputation; but even the most cautious man cannot constantly protect himself against a brick falling from the house next door. That brick was now preparing to fall on the decorous audience that had gathered to hear the band.