Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (402 page)

“What does this mean?” she wrote again. “Yesterday I passed by you and you seemed to blush. It can’t be so. It was my fancy. If you were brought to the filthiest den and shown vice in its nakedness, you should not blush; you are too lofty to resent an insult. “Vbu can hate every one base and low, not for your own sake, but for the sake of others, those whom they wrong. You no one can wrong. Do you know I think you even ought to love me? You are for me the same as for him — a ray of light. An angel cannot hate, cannot help loving. Can one love every one, all men, all one’s neighbours? I have often asked myself that question. Of course not. It’s unnatural indeed. In abstract love for humanity one almost always loves no one but oneself. But that’s impossible for us and you are different. How could you not love anyone, when you cannot compare yourself with anyone, and when you are above every insult, every personal resentment. You alone can love without egoism, you alone can love, not for yourself, but for the sake of him whom vou love. Oh, how bitter it would be for me to find out that you feel shame or anger on account of me. That would be your ruin. You would sink to my level at once.

“Yesterday, after meeting you I went home and invented a picture. Artists always paint Christ as He appears in the Gospel stories. I would paint Him differently. I would imagine Him alone, His disciples must have sometimes left Him alone. I would leave only a little child beside Him. The child would be playing beside Him, perhaps be telling Him something in his childish words. Christ has been listening, but now He is thoughtful. His hand still resting unconsciously on the child’s fair little head. He is looking into the distance at the horizon; thought, great as the whole world, dwells in His eyes. His face is sorrowful. The child leans silent with his elbow on Christ’s knees, his cheek on his little hand and his head turned upwards, and looks intently at Him, pondering as little children sometimes ponder. The sun is setting. . . . That is my picture. You are innocent, and in your innocence lies all your perfection. Oh, only remember that! What have you to do with my passion for you? \bu are now altogether mine, I shall be all my life beside you. ... I shall soon die.”

Finally, in the very last letter stood the words:

“For God’s sake, think nothing of me, and don’t think that I am abasing myself by writing to you like this, or that I belong to the class of people who enjoy abasing themselves, even if from pride. No, I have my consolation; but it is difficult for me to explain it to you. It would be difficult for me to explain it clearly even to myself, although it torments me that I cannot. But I know that I cannot abase myself, even from an access of pride; and of self-abasement from purity of heart I am incapable. And so I do not abase myself at all.

“Why do I so want to bring you together — for your sake, or for my own? For my own sake, of course; for myself, of course, it would solve all my difficulties, I have told myself so long ago. I have heard that your sister Adelaida said of my portrait then that with such beauty one might turn the world upside down. But I have renounced the world. Does it amuse you to hear that from me, meeting me decked in lace and diamonds, in the company of drunkards and profligates? Don’t mind that, I have almost ceased to exist and I know it. God knows what in my stead lives within me. I read that every day in two terrible eyes which are always gazing at me, even when they are not before me. Those eyes are silent now (they are always silent), but I know their secret. His house is gloomy, and there is a secret in it. I’m sure that he has, hidden in his box, a razor, wrapped in silk like that murderer in Moscow; he too lived in the same house with his mother, and kept a razor wrapped in silk to cut a throat with. All the time I was in their house, I kept fancying that somewhere under the floor there might be a corpse hidden there by his father perhaps, wrapped in American leather, like the corpse in the Moscow case, and surrounded in the same way with jars of Zhdanov’s fluid. I could show you the corner. He is always silent: but I know he loves me so much that he can’t help hating me. \bur marriage and ours are to take place together: we have fixed that. I have no secrets from him. I should kill him from terror. . . . But he will kill me first. He laughed just now and said I was raving: he knows I am writing to you.”

And there was much, much more of the same kind of ravinq in those letters. One of them, the second,

written in a small hand, covered two large sheets of note-paper.

At last Myshkin came out of the darkness of the park, where he had been wandering a long time, as he had the previous night. The clear limpid night seemed to him lighter than ever.

“Can it still be so early?” he thought. (He had forgotten to take his watch.) He fancied he heard music somewhere in the distance. “It must be at the station,” he thought, “they’ve certainly not gone there to-day.” As he made the reflection, he saw that he was standing close to the Epanchins’ villa. He knew quite well that he was bound to find himself there at last, and with a beating heart he went up to the steps of the verandah. No one met him. The verandah was empty. He waited, and opened the door into the room. “They never shut that door,” the thought flickered through his mind, but the room was empty too. It was almost dark in it.

He stood still in the middle of the room in perplexity. Suddenly the door opened and Alexandra came in, with a candle in her hand. On seeing Myshkin she was surprised and stopped short before him inquiringly. Obviously she was simply crossing the room from one door to the other, with no idea of finding anyone there.

“How do you come here?” she asked at last.

“I... came in....”

“Maman is not quite well, nor Aglaia either. Adelaida is going to bed, I’m going too. We’ve been at home by ourselves all the evening. Papa and the prince are in Petersburg.”

“I’ve come ... I’ve come to you ... now....”

“Do you know what the time is?”

“N-no.”

“Half-past twelve. We always go to bed by one.”

“Why, I thought it was half-past nine.”

“It doesn’t matter!” she laughed. “And, why didn’t you come in before? We may have been expecting you.”

“I... thought..,” he faltered, moving away.

“Good-bye. To-morrow I shall make them all laugh.”

He went homewards by the road that encircled the park. His heart was beating, his thoughts were in a maze, and everything round him became like a dream. And suddenly, just as yesterday he had twice waked up at the same dream, the same apparition rose again before him. The same woman came out of the park and stood before him, as though she had been waiting for him there. He started, and stood still. She snatched his hand and pressed it tight. “No, this was not an apparition!”

And at last she stood before him, face to face for the first time since their parting. She was saying something to him, but he looked at her in silence; his heart was too full, and ached with anguish. Oh, never could he forget that meeting with her and he always remembered it with the same anguish. She sank on her knees before him on the spot, in the street, like one demented. He stepped back in horror, and she tried to catch his hand to kiss it, and just as in his dream that night, the tears glistened on her long eyelashes.

“Stand up! Stand up!” he said in a frightened whisper, raising her. “Stand up, at once!”

“Are you happy? Happy?” she asked. “Only say one word to me, are you happy now? To-day, this minute? Have you been with her? What did she say?”

She did not qet up. She did not hear him. She questioned him hurriedly, and was in haste to speak, as though she were being pursued.

“I’m going to-morrow as you told me. I won’t. . . . It’s the last time I shall see you. The last time! Now it’s absolutely the last time!”

“Calm yourself, stand up!” he said in despair.

She looked greedily at him, clutching at his hands.

“Good-bye,” she said at last; she got up and went quickly away from him, almost running. Myshkin saw that Rogozhin had suddenly appeared beside her, that he had taken her arm, and was leading her away.

“Wait a minute, prince,” cried Rogozhin, “I’ll be back in five minutes.”

Five minutes later he did, in fact, return. Myshkin was waiting for him at the same place.

“I’ve put her in the carriage,” he said. “It’s been waiting there at the corner since ten o’clock. She knew you’d be at the young lady’s all the evening. I told her exactly what you wrote to me to-day. She won’t write to the young lady again, she’s promised; and she’ll go away from here to-morrow as you wish. She wanted to see you for the last time, though you refused her. We’ve been waiting for you here, on that seat there, to catch you as you came back.”

“Did she take you with her of her own accord?”

“Why not?” grinned Rogozhin. “I saw what I knew before. You’ve read the letters I suppose?”

“Have you really read them?” asked Myshkin, struck by that idea.

“Rather! She showed me each one of them herself. About the razor, too, do you remember, ha-ha!”

“She’s mad!” cried Myshkin, wringing his hands.

“Who knows about that? Perhaps not,” Rogozhin said softly, as though to himself. Myshkin did not answer.

“Well, good-bye,” said Rogozhin. “I’m going away to-morrow too: don’t remember evil against me! And I say, brother,” he added, turning quickly, “why didn’t you answer her question: are you happy or not?”

“No, no, no!” cried Myshkin with unspeakable sadness.

“I should think not, indeed,” laughed Rogozhin maliciously as he went away without looking back.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 1

About a week had passed since the meeting of the two persons of our story on the green seat. One bright morning about half-past ten Varvara Ardalionovna Ptitsyn was returning from visiting some friends, plunged in mournful reflection.

There are people whom it is difficult to describe completely in their typical and characteristic aspect. These are the people who are usually called “ordinary,”

“the majority,” and who do actually make up the vast majority of mankind. Authors for the most part attempt in their tales and novels to select and represent vividly and artistically types rarely met with in actual life in their entirety, though they are nevertheless almost more real than real life itself. Podkolyosin^ as a type is perhaps exaggerated,

but not at all unreal. What numbers of clever people after being introduced by Gogol to Podkolyosin at once discovered that tens and hundreds of their friends and acquaintances were extraordinarily like him. They knew before reading Gogol that their friends were like Podkolyosin, only they did not know what name to give them. In real life, extremely few bridegrooms jump out of windows just before their wedding, for, apart from other considerations, it’s not a convenient mode of escape. Yet how many men, even intelligent and virtuous persons, on the eve of their wedding day have been ready to acknowledge at the bottom of their hearts that they were Podkolyosins. Not all husbands exclaim at every turn “Tu I’a voulu, Georges Dandin!” But how many millions and billions of times that cry from the heart has been uttered by husbands all the world over after the honeymoon, or — who knows? — even perhaps the day after the wedding!

Without entering into deeper considerations, we will simply point out that in actual life typical characteristics are apt to be watered down, and that Georges Dandins and Podkolyosins exist and are moving before our eyes every day, only in a less concentrated form. With the reservation that Georges Dandin in full perfection, as Moliere has portrayed him, may also be met with in real life, though not frequently, we will conclude our reflections, which are beginning to be suggestive of newspaper criticism.

“Vfet the question remains! What is an author to do with ordinary people, absolutely “ordinary,” and how can he put them before his readers so as to make them at all interesting? It is impossible to leave them out of fiction altogether, for commonplace people are at every moment the chief and essential links in the chain of human affairs; if we leave them out, we lose all semblance of truth. To fill a novel completely with types or, more simply, to make it interesting with strange and incredible characters, would be to make it unreal and even uninteresting. To our thinking a writer ought to seek out interesting and instructive features even among commonplace people. When, for instance, the very nature of some commonplace persons lies just in their perpetual and invariable commonplaceness, or better still, when in spite of the most strenuous efforts to escape from the daily round of commonplaceness and routine, they end by being left invariably for ever chained to the same routine, such people acquire a typical character of their own — the character of a commonplaceness desirous above all things of being independent and original without the faintest possibility of becoming so.

To this class of “commonplace” or “ordinary” people belong certain persons of my tale, who have hitherto, I must confess, been insufficiently explained to the reader. Such were Varvara Ardalionovna Ptitsyn, her husband, Mr. Ptitsyn, and her brother, Gavril Ardalionovitch.

There is, indeed, nothing more annoying than to be, for instance, wealthy, of good family, nice-looking, fairly intelligent, and even good-natured, and yet to have no talents, no special faculty, no peculiarity even, not one idea of one’s own, to be precisely “like other people.” To have a fortune, but not the wealth of Rothschild; to be of an honourable family, but one which has never distinguished itself in anyway; to have a pleasing appearance expressive of nothing in particular; to have a decent education, but to have no idea what use to make of it; to have intelligence, but no ideas of one’s own; to have a good heart, but without any greatness of soul; and so on and so on. There is an extraordinary multitude of such people in the world, far more than appears. They may, like all other people, be divided into two classes: some of limited intelligence; others much cleverer. The first are happier. Nothing is easier for “ordinary” people of limited intelligence than to imagine themselves exceptional and original and to revel in that delusion without the slightest misgiving. Some of our young ladies have only to crop their hair, put on blue spectacles, and dub themselves Nihilists, to persuade themselves at once that they have immediately gained “convictions” of their own. Some men have only to feel the faintest stirring of some kindly and humanitarian emotion to persuade themselves at once that no one feels as they do, that they stand in the foremost rank of culture. Some have only to meet with some idea by hearsay, or to read some stray page, to believe at once that it is their own opinion and has sprung spontaneously from their own brain. The impudence of simplicity, if one may so express it, is amazing in such cases. It is almost incredible, but yet often to be met with. This impudence of simplicity, this unhesitating confidence of the stupid man in himself and his talents, is superbly depicted by Gogol in the wonderful character of Lieutenant Pirogov. Pirogov has no doubt that he is a genius, superior indeed to any genius. He is so positive of this that he never questions it; and, indeed, he questions nothing. The great writer is forced in the end to chastise him for the satisfaction of the outraged moral feeling of the reader; but, seeing that the great man simply shook himself after the castigation and fortified himself by consuming a pie, he flung up his hands in amazement and left his readers to make the best of it. I always regretted that Gogol took his great Pirogov from so humble a rank; for he was so self-satisfied that nothing could be easier for him than to imagine himself, as his epaulettes grew thicker and more twisted with years and promotion, an extraordinary military genius; or rather, not imagine it, but simply take it for granted. Since he had been made a general, he must have been a military genius! And how many such have made terrible blunders afterwards on the field of battle! And how manv Piroqovs there have been amonq our writers,