The Idiot (69 page)

‘None of us thinks that,’ the prince replied for them all, ‘and why do you think that anyone has such a thought and what ... what’s this strange idea you have of reading? What have you got there, Ippolit?’

‘What’s he got there? What’s happened to him this time?’ people asked all round.

They all approached, some still munching their zakuski; the package with its red seal drew them all like a magnet.

‘It’s something I wrote yesterday, just after I promised I’d come and stay with you, Prince. I spent all yesterday writing it, carried on into the night and finished it this morning; in the night, towards morning,
I had a dream ...’

‘Wouldn’t it be better to do it tomorrow?’ the prince broke in timidly.

‘Tomorrow “there shall be time no longer”!’ Ippolit laughed hysterically. ‘However, don’t worry, it will only take me forty minutes to read it, well - or an hour ... And you see how interested everyone is; they’ve all come over here; they’re all looking at my seal, and you see, if I hadn’t sealed the article in a package, there would have been no effect! Ha-ha! That’s the meaning of mystery! Shall I unseal it or not, gentlemen?’ he cried, laughing his strange laughter, his eyes glittering. ‘A secret! A secret! Do you remember, Prince, who proclaimed that “there shall be time no longer”? It’s proclaimed by the great and mighty angel in the book of Revelation!’

‘You’d better not read it!’ Yevgeny Pavlovich exclaimed suddenly, but with such an air of alarm, unexpected in him, that many thought it strange.

‘Don’t read it!’ cried the prince, putting his hand on the package.

‘What’s all this reading about? We’re having
zakuski
now,’ someone observed.

‘An article? For a journal, is it?’ someone else inquired.

‘It’s probably boring, isn’t it?’ added a third.

‘Just what have you got there?’ the others inquired. But the prince’s frightened gesture seemed to frighten Ippolit, too.

‘Then ... I shouldn’t read it?’ he whispered to him, almost warily, with a twisted smile on his blue lips. ‘I shouldn’t read it?’ he muttered, looking round at the whole audience, all the eyes and faces, and seeming again to clutch at them all, as if pouncing on them, with his earlier expansiveness. ‘Are you ... afraid?’ he turned to the prince again.

‘Of what?’ asked the latter, his expression altering more and more.

‘Does anyone have a twenty copeck piece?’ Ippolit suddenly leapt up from his chair as though he had been yanked to his feet. ‘Any coin will do.’

‘Here!’ Lebedev gave him one instantly; the thought flashed through his mind that the sick Ippolit had gone mad.

‘Vera Lukyanovna!’ Ippolit asked hurriedly. ‘Take it and throw it on the table: heads or tails? If it’s heads, then I’ll read it!’

Vera cast a frightened look at the coin, at Ippolit, and then at her father, and rather awkwardly, with her head thrown back as though in the conviction that she must not look at the coin, threw it on the table. It was heads.

‘I’ll read it!’ whispered Ippolit, as though crushed by the decision of fate; he could not have turned paler if a death sentence had been read aloud to him. ‘Though actually,’ he started suddenly, after half a minute’s silence, ‘what is this? Did I really cast lots just now?’ He looked ro
und at them all with the same intrusive candour. ‘But I mean, this a remarkable psychological phenomenon!’ he exclaimed suddenly, addressing the prince, in sincere amazement. ‘It’s ... it’s an unfathomable phenomenon, Prince!’ he confirmed, growing animated and as if coming to his senses. ‘Write it down, Prince, remember it, after all, I believe you’re collecting materials on the death penalty ... They told me, ha-ha! Oh God, what senseless absurdity!’ He sat down on the sofa, put both elbows on the table and clutched at his head. ‘I mean, it’s even shameful! ... But what the devil do I care if it’s shameful,’ he raised his head almost immediately. ‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen, I’m unsealing the package,’ he proclaimed with sudden determination. ‘However ... I ... I shan’t force anyone to listen! ...’

With hands trembling from excitement he unsealed the package, took from it several sheets of notepaper covered with small handwriting, placed them in front of him and began to smooth them out.

‘But what is this? What has he got there? What’s going to be read out?’ some muttered gloomily; others said nothing. But all sat down and watched with curiosity. Perhaps they really were expecting something unusual. Vera seized hold of her father’s chair, almost in tears with fright; Kolya was almost in the same state of fright. Lebedev, who had already sat down, suddenly got to his feet, reached for the candles and moved them closer to Ippolit, so he would have more light to read by ...

‘Gentlemen, this ... you’ll see in a moment what it is,’ Ippolit added for some reason, and suddenly began his reading: “‘My Necessary Explanation”! Epigraph:
“Apres
moi
le deluge”
... Pah, the devil take it!’ he exclaimed, as though he had burned himself - ‘Could I seriously have written such a stupid epigraph? ... Look, gentlemen! ... I assure you that all this may, in the last analysis, be the most dreadful rubbish! It merely contains some of my thoughts ... If you think that there’s ... anything mysterious or ... forbidden ... about it ... in short ...’ ‘Why don’t you read it without the preamble,’ Ganya interrupted.

‘Too much talk,’ inserted Rogozhin, who had said nothing all this time.

Ippolit suddenly gave him a look and, when their eyes met, Rogozhin bared his teeth at him with bitter spleen, and slowly articulated some strange words:

‘That’s not the way to go about this business, lad, not the way...’

No one understood what Rogozhin meant, of course, but his words made a rather strange impression on them all; a single common idea touched each of them obliquely. On Ippolit, however, the words had a terrible effect: he began to tremble so violently that the prince stretched out his hand in order to support him, and he would probably have cried out, had not his voice, as it appeared, suddenly choked. For a whole minute he was unable to get a word out and, breathing heavily, looked steadily at Rogozhin. At last, gasping and with extreme effort, he said:

‘So it was you ... you were the one ... you?’

‘What do you mean, I was the one? What did I do?’ Rogozhin answered, bewildered, but Ippolit, flaring up and in an almost rabid fury that suddenly gripped him, harshly and violently exclaimed:

‘You
were in my room last week, at night, at nearly two o’clock in the morning, that day when I came to see you in the morning,
you\\
Confess, it was you?’

‘Last week, at night? Have you gone out of your mind, lad?’

The ‘lad’ again fell silent for a moment, putting his index finger to his forehead, as if trying to work something out: but in his pale, still terror-distorted smile there suddenly flickered something almost cunning, even triumphant.

‘It was you!’ he repeated, at last, almost in a whisper, but with extreme conviction. ‘You came to see me and sat silently in my room on a chair, by the window, for a whole hour; more; between one and three in the morning; then you got up and left when it was getting on for three ... It was you, you! Why you were trying to frighten me, why you came to torment me, I don’t know, but it was you!’

And in his gaze there suddenly flickered an infinite hatred, in spite of the fact that he was still trembling with fear.

‘In a moment, gentlemen, you will learn all this, I ... I ... listen ...’

Again, in terrible haste, he reached for his sheets of paper; they had come loose and had fallen apart, he tried to put them together; they trembled in his trembling hands; it was a long time before he could recover his composure.

At last, the reading began. At first, for about five minutes, the author of the unexpected article still gasped for breath and read incoherently and unevenly; but then his voice became firmer and began fully to express the sense of what was being read. Only sometimes did a rather violent cough interrupt him; half way through the article he grew very hoarse; an extreme animation, which mastered him more and more as he continued to read, attained its highest degree towards the end, as did the painful impression on his listeners. Here is the whole of that ‘article’ :

‘Yesterday morning the prince came to see me; among other things, he tried to persuade me to move to his dacha. I somehow knew that he would be bound to insist on this, that he would blurt straight out to me that at the dacha “it will be easier for me to die among people and trees”, as he puts it. But today he did not say “die”, but “it will be easier to live”, which is, however, almost the same thing for me, in my position. I asked him what he meant with these perpetual “trees” of his, and why he kept going on to me about them - and with astonishment learned from him that I myself had apparently said at that soiree that I had come to Pavlovsk to look at trees for the last time. When I observed to him that it was all the same whether I died under trees or looking out of the window at my bricks, and that the
re was no reason to make such a big thing out of two weeks, he at once agreed with me; but the green leaves and the pure air, in his opinion, could not fail to bring about some sort of physical change in me, and my agitation and
my dreams
would change, too and, perhaps, be relieved. I again observed to him, laughing, that he talked like a materialist. He replied to me with that smile of his that he had always been a materialist. Since he never lies, those words must signify something. His smile is pleasant; I have now studied him more closely. Now I don’t know whether I like him or don’t like him; I don’t have time to bother about that now. My five-month-old hatred of him, I must observe, has begun to abate altogether during the past month. Who knows, perhaps the main reason I came to Pavlovsk was in order to see him. But ... in that case, why did I leave my room? The man who has been condemned to death must not leave his corner; and if I had not made a final decision now, and decided, on the contrary, to wait until the last hour, then, of course, I would not have left my room on any account, and would not have accepted an invitation to go and stay with him to “die” in Pavlovsk.

‘I must hurry and finish this explanation by tomorrow without fail. That means I will not have time to read it over and correct it; I shall read it over tomorrow when I read it to the prince and the two or three witnesses I intend to find at his place. As there will not be one word of falsehood in it, nothing but the truth, final and solemn, I’m already curious what sort of impression it will make on me at the moment when I begin to read it over. As a matter of fact, I ought not to have written the words: “the final and solemn truth”; it’s not worth telling lies for two weeks, because it’s not worth living for two weeks; that’s the best proof that I will write the truth and nothing but. (NB Must not forget the thought: am I not insane at this moment, or rather moments? I was told positively that consumptives in the last stages of the disease sometimes go insane for a while. Check this tomorrow during the reading, from effect on listeners. This question must be resolved with complete exactitude, otherwise I can’t proceed with anything.)

‘It seems to me that I have just written something terribly stupid; but I don’t have the time to correct it, as I said; what is more, I promise myself that I won’t correct a single line of this manuscript, even if I notice that I contradict myself every five lines. At the reading tomorrow I want to determine whether the logical flow of my thought is correct; whether I notice my own mistakes, and whether all I have thought about in this room during the past six months is true or just mere raving.

‘If even two months ago I had had to say farewell to my room altogether and say farewell to Meyer’s wall, then I am sure I would have been sad. But now I don’t feel anything, and yet tomorrow I am leaving this room and the wall, for ever! So my conviction that for two weeks it’s not worth feeling sorry or giving oneself up to any kind of sensation at all has got the better of my nature and may now be in command of all my feelings. But is that true? Is it true that my nature has now been completely vanqui
shed? If they were to put me to torture now, I would probably cry out, and not say that it wasn’t worth crying out and feeling pain because I only have two weeks left to live.

‘But is it true that I have only two weeks left to live, and no more? That day in Pavlovsk I lied: B-n told me nothing and never saw me; but about a week ago they brought a student called Kislorodov
¹
to my room; by conviction he’s a materialist, an atheist and a nihilist, and that’s precisely why I summoned him; I needed a man who would finally tell me the naked truth, without mollycoddling and without ceremony. This he did, and not only with eagerness and without ceremony, but even with evident enjoyment (which I think is going too far). He blurted straight out to me that I only had about a month left; perhaps a little more, if the circumstances were good, but I might die far sooner than that. In his opinion, I might die suddenly, even tomorrow, for example: such things have occurred, and just the other day a young lady, suffering from consumption and in a position similar to my own, in Kolomna, was setting off for the market to buy provisions when she suddenly felt ill, lay down on the sofa, uttered a sigh, and died. All this Kislorodov told me even with a certain bravura that consisted of callousness and indiscretion, and as though in this he were doing me an honour, indicating that he considered me to be the same kind of all-denying, superior being as himself, for whom dying is naturally of no account. In the end the facts were quite clear: a month and no more! I am quite certain he isn’t wrong about it.

‘It surprised me greatly when the prince guessed the other day that I was having “bad dreams”; he said
literally
that in Pavlovsk “my agitation and my
dreams”
would alter. And why dreams? Either he’s a medic or else a man of extraordinary intellect who can guess his way to the truth of very many things. (But that he is, after all, an idiot, of that there can be no doubt.) As if on purpose, just before his arrival I had a pretty dream (as a matter fact, of a kind I now have hundreds of). I fell asleep - I think, an hour before his arrival - and dreamed I was in a room (but not my own). A room larger than my own, with a higher ceiling, better furnished, light; a cupboard, a chest of drawers, a sofa and my bed, large and wide and covered with a green silk quilt. But in this room I observed a horrible creature, some kind of monster. It was like a scorpion, but not a scorpion, more loathsome and far more horrible, precisely because there are no such creatures in nature, and because it had appeared in my room
on purpose,
and in this there was some kind of secret. I studied it very closely: it was brown and covered with a shell-like skin, a reptile, some eight inches long, two fingers thick around the head, tapering off towards the tail, so that the very tip of the tail was no more than a fifth of an inch thick. At two inches from the head two legs stuck out from its body, at an angle of forty-five degrees, one on each side, each four inches in length, so that the whole creature, if looked on from above, presented the aspect of a trident. The head I could not make out, but I saw two feelers, not lo
ng, like two strong needles, and also brown. There were two similar feelers at the tip of the tail and on the end of each leg, making eight feelers in all. The creature was running around the room very quickly, supporting itself with its legs and tail, and as it ran both its body and its legs wriggled like small serpents, at an extraordinary speed, in spite of the shell, and this was most loathsome to watch. I was dreadfully afraid that it would sting me; they had told me it was poisonous, but what tormented me most was: who had sent it into my room, what did they want to do to me and what was the secret behind it? The creature hid under the chest of drawers or the cupboard, crept away into the corners. I squatted up on a chair and squeezed my legs underneath me. It quickly ran obliquely right across the room and vanished somewhere near my chair. I looked around me in terror, but as I was sitting with my legs tucked underneath me, I hoped it would not climb up on to the chair. Suddenly I heard from behind me, almost next to my head, a kind of crackling rustle; I turned round and saw that the reptile was climbing up the wall and was almost level with my head, even touching my hair with its tail, which was twirling and wriggling with incredible speed. I leaped up, and the creature vanished. I was afraid to lie down on the bed in case it had crawled under the pillow. Into the room came my mother and some friend of hers. They began to try to catch the loathsome thing, but were calmer than I, and not even afraid. But they knew nothing. Suddenly the reptile crawled out again; this time it crawled very quietly and as if with some special intention, wriggling slowly, which was even more repulsive, obliquely across the room again, towards the door. At this point my mother opened the door and called Norma, our dog - an enormous Newfoundland, black and shaggy; she died five years ago. She rushed into the room and stood over the loathsome thing as if rooted to the spot. The reptile stopped too, but still wriggling and clacking the ends of its legs and tail against the floor. Animals are not capable of feeling mystical terror, if I am not mistaken; but at that moment it seemed to me that in Norma’s terror there was something apparently very unusual, almost mystical, and that therefore she also had a foreboding, as I did, that there was something very fateful about the beast and that it contained some secret. She slowly backed away from the reptile, which was crawling quietly and cautiously towards her; it apparently intended to rush at her suddenly and sting her. But, in spite of all her terror, Norma looked dreadfully fierce, though she was trembling in every limb. All of a sudden she slowly bared her terrible teeth, opened her enormous red jaws, positioned herself, found the right posture, plucked up her courage and suddenly grabbed the reptile in her teeth. The reptile must have jerked violently, trying to slip away, for Norma caught it again, in flight this time, and twice took it right into her jaws, still in flight, as though swallowing it. The shell crackled in her teeth; the creature’s tail and legs, sticking out of her jaws, moved with horrible speed. Suddenly Norma gave a plaintive yelp: the loathsome thing had managed to sting her tongue. With a yelp and a howl she opened her mouth in pain, and I saw that the ch
ewed-up reptile was still moving across it, emitting from its half-crushed body a large quantity of white fluid, similar to the fluid of a crushed cockroach ... At that point I woke up, and the prince came in.’