Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (419 page)

Ippolit went out. Myshkin had no reason for asking anyone to spy for him, even if he had been capable of doing so. Aglaia’s command that he should stay at home was now almost explained. Perhaps she meant to come and fetch him, or perhaps it was that she did not want him to turn up there and so had told him to stay at home. That might be so, too. His head was in a whirl; the whole room was turning round. He lay down on the sofa and closed his eyes.

In either case it was final, conclusive. Myshkin did not think of Aglaia as a young lady, or a boarding-school miss. He felt now that he had been uneasy for a long time, and that it was just something of this kind he had been dreading. But what did she want to see her for? A shiver ran over Myshkin’s whole body. He was in a fever again.

No, he didn’t look on her as a child! He had been horrified by some of her views, some of her sayings of late. He sometimes fancied that she had seemed too reserved, too controlled, and he remembered that this had alarmed him. He had been trying during those days not to think about it, he had dismissed oppressive ideas; but what lay hidden in that soul? The thought had worried him for a long time, though he had faith in that soul. And now all this must be settled and revealed that day. An awful thought! And again— “that woman!” Why did it always seem to him that that woman was bound to appear at the last moment, and tear asunder his fate like a rotten thread? That it had always seemed so he was ready to swear now, though he was almost delirious. If he had tried to forget “her” of late, it was simply because he was afraid of her. Did he love that woman or hate her? He had not put that question to himself once that day. His heart was clear on one point: he knew whom he loved. ... He was not so much afraid of the meeting of the two, not of the strangeness, not of the unknown cause of that meeting, not of what it might lead to, whatever it might be — he was afraid of Nastasya Filippovna. He remembered a few days later that all through those feverish hours her eyes, her glance, were before him, her words in his ears — strange words, though little remained of them in his memory, when those feverish hours of misery were over. He scarcely remembered that Vera had brought him his dinner,

that he ate it, and did not know whether he slept after dinner or not. All he knew was that he only began to see things clearly that evening, when Aglaia came towards him on the verandah, and he jumped up from the sofa and went to meet her. It was a quarter past seven. Aglaia was entirely alone, dressed simply, as it seemed hastily, in a light burnous. Her face was pale as it had been that morning, and her eyes glittered with a dry, hard light. He had never seen such an expression in her eyes. She looked at him attentively.

“You are quite ready,” she observed quietly, and with apparent composure. “You are dressed and have your hat in your hand. So you’ve been warned, and I know by whom — Ippolit?”

“Yes, he told me . . ,” muttered Myshkin, more dead than alive.

“Come along. “Vbu know that you must escort me there. You are strong enough to go out, I suppose?”

“I’m strong enough, but... is this possible?”

He broke off instantly and could say no more. This was his one attempt to restrain the mad girl, and after it he followed her like a slave. Confused as his ideas were, he realised that she would certainly go there even without him, and that therefore he was bound to go with her in any case. He divined how strong her determination was. It was beyond him to check this wild impulse. They walked in silence the whole way, scarcely uttering a word. He only noticed that she knew the way well, and when he wanted to go a rather longer way because the road was more deserted, and suggested this to her, she seemed to listen with strained attention and answered abruptly:

“It’s all the same!”

When they had almost reached Darya Alexeyevna’s abode (a big, old, wooden house) there came down the steps a gorgeously dressed lady with a young girl. They both got into an elegant carriage which stood waiting at the steps, talking and laughing loudly. They did not once glance at the approaching couple and seemed not to notice them. As soon as the carriage had driven off, the door instantly opened a second time, and Rogozhin, who had been waiting there, admitted Myshkin and Aglaia and closed the door behind them.

“There’s no one in the whole house now, except us four,” he observed aloud, and looked strangely at Myshkin.

In the first room they went into, Nastasya Filippovna was waiting. She too was dressed very simply and all in black. She stood up to greet them, but did not smile or even give Myshkin her hand.

Her intent and uneasy eyes were fastened on Aglaia. The two ladies sat at a little distance from one another — Aglaia on a sofa in a corner of the room, Nastasya Filippovna at the window. Myshkin and Rogozhin did not sit down, and she did not invite them to do so. Myshkin looked with perplexity and, as it were, with pain at Rogozhin, but the latter still wore the same smile. The silence lasted some moments.

At length an ominous look passed over Nastasya Filippovna’s face. Her gaze grew obstinate, hard, and full of hatred, and it was riveted all the time upon her visitors. Aglaia was evidently confused, but not intimidated. As she walked in, she scarcely looked at her rival, and, for the time, sat with downcast eyes, as though musing. Once or twice she looked, as it were, casually round the room. There was an unmistakable shade of disgust on her face, as though she were afraid of contamination here. She mechanically arranged her dress, and even once restlessly changed her seat, moving to the other end of the sofa. She was hardly perhaps conscious of her actions; but their unconsciousness made them even more insulting. At last she looked resolutely straight into Nastasya Filippovna’s face and read at once all that was revealed in the ominous gleam in her rival’s eyes. Woman understood woman. Aglaia shuddered.

“You know, of course, why I asked you to come,” she brought out at last, but in a very low voice, and pausing once ortwice even in this brief sentence.

“No, I know nothing about it,” Nastasya Filippovna answered, drily and abruptly.

Aglaia flushed. Perhaps it struck her suddenly as strange and incredible that she should be sitting here with that woman in “that woman’s” house, and hanging upon her answer. At the first sound of Nastasya Filippovna’s voice a sort of shiver ran over her. All this, of course, “that woman” saw quite clearly.

“You understand everything ... but you pretend not to understand on purpose,” said Aglaia, almost in a whisper, looking sullenly at the floor.

“Why should I?” Nastasya Filippovna smiled.

“You want to take advantage of my position, of my being in your house,” Aglaia brought out, awkwardly and absurdly.

“You’re responsible for your position, not I,” said Nastasya Filippovna, suddenly flaring up. “\bu’re not here at my invitation, but I at yours, and I don’t know to this hour with what object.”

Aglaia raised her head haughtily.

“Restrain your tongue. That is your weapon and I’ve not come to fight you with it.”

“Ah! “Vbu have come to fight me then! Would you believe it, I thought that you were ... cleverer...”

They looked at one another, no longer concealing their spite. One of them was a woman who had lately written those letters to the other. And now it all fell to pieces at their first meeting. And yet not one of the four persons in the room seemed at that moment to think it strange. Myshkin, who would not the day before have believed in the possibility of it even in a dream, now stood, gazed and listened as though he had foreseen this long ago. The most fantastic dream seemed to have changed suddenly into the most vivid and sharply defined reality. One of these women, at that moment, so despised the other, and so keenly desired to express this feeling to her (possibly she had come simply to do so, as Rogozhin said next day) that, unaccountable as the other was with her disordered intellect and sick soul, it seemed that no idea she had adopted beforehand could have been maintained against the malignant, purely feminine contempt of her rival. Myshkin felt sure that Nastasya Filippovna would not mention the letters of her own accord. He could guess from her flashing eyes what those letters must be costing her now; and he would have given half his life that Aglaia should not speak of them.

But Aglaia seemed suddenly to pull herself together, and instantly mastered herself.

“You misunderstand me,” she said. “I have not come here to fight you, though I don’t like you. I... I came ... to speak to you as one human being to another. When I sent for you, I had already made up my mind what to speak to you about, and I won’t depart from that decision now, though you should not understand me at all. That will be the worse for you and not for me. I wanted to answer what you have written to me, and to answer you in person, because I thought it more convenient. Hear my answer to all your letters. I felt sorry for Prince Lyov Nikolayevitch from that day when I first made his acquaintance, and heard afterwards what happened at your party. I felt sorry for him, because he is such a simple-hearted man and in his simplicity believed that he might be happy . . . with a woman ... of such a character. What I was afraid offer him came to pass. “Vbu were incapable of loving him, you tortured him, you tortured him and abandoned him. You could not love him, because you were too proud ... no, not proud, that’s a mistake, but too vain . . . that’s not it, either, it’s your self-love which amounts almost to madness, of which your letters to me are a proof. “Vbu couldn’t love a simple-hearted man like him, and very likely you secretly despised him and laughed at him. You can love nothing but your shame and the continual thought that you’ve been brought to shame and humiliated. If your shame were less or you were free from it altogether, you’d be more unhappy . . .” (Aglaia enjoyed pronouncing these too rapidly uttered but long prepared and pondered words — words she had brooded over before she had dreamed of the present interview; with malignant eyes she watched their effect on Nastasya Filippovna’s face, distorted with agitation). “You remember,” she went on, “he wrote me a letter then. He says that you know about that letter and have read it, in fact. From that letter I understood it all and understood it correctly. He confirmed that himself lately, that is, everything I’m telling you, word for word, indeed. After the letter I waited. I guessed that you were sure to come here, because you can’t exist without Petersburg; you are still too young and too good-looking for the provinces. Though, indeed, those are not my words either,” she added, blushing hotly, and from that moment the colour did not leave her face, till she finished speaking. “When I saw the prince again, I felt dreadfully hurt and wounded on his account. Don’t laugh. If you laugh, you’re not worthy to understand that.”

“You see that I’m not laughing,” Nastasya Filippovna pronounced sternly and mournfully.

“It’s nothing to me, though, laugh as much as you like. When I began to question him, he told me that he had ceased to love you long ago, that even the memory of you was a torture to him, but that he was sorry for you . . . and that when he thought of you, it always pierced his heart. I have to tell you, too, that I have never in my life met a man like him for noble simplicity, and boundless trustfulness. I understood from the way he talked that anyone who chose could deceive him, and that he would forgive anyone afterwards who had deceived him, and that was why I grew to love him ...”

Aglaia paused for a moment as though amazed, as though hardly able to believe her own ears that she could have uttered such words. But at the same time an infinite pride shone in her eyes. She seemed by now to be beyond caring, even if “that woman” did laugh at once at the avowal that had broken from her.

“I’ve told you all, and now, no doubt, you understand what I want of you?”

“Perhaps I do understand, but tell me yourself,” Nastasya Filippovna answered softly.

There was a glow of anger in Aglaia’s face.

“I want to learn from you,” she pronounced firmly and distinctly, “what right you have to meddle in his feelings for me? By what right you have dared to send me letters? What right you have to be continually declarinq to him and to me that vou love him, after abandoning him of your own accord and running away from him in such an insulting and degrading way.”

“I have never declared either to him or to you that I love him,” Nastasya Filippovna articulated with an effort, “and . . . you are right that I did run away from him,” she added, hardlyaudibly.

“Never declared it ‘to him or to me’!” cried Aglaia. “How about your letters? Who asked you to begin matchmaking and persuading me to marry him? Wasn’t that a declaration? Why do you force yourself upon us? I thought at first that you wanted to rouse in me an aversion for him by interfering with us, and so make me give him up. It was only afterwards that I guessed what it meant. “Vbu simply imagined that you were doing something wonderful and heroic with all these pretences. Why, are you capable of loving him if you love your vanity so dearly? Why didn’t you simply go away from here instead of writing me absurd letters? Why don’t you even now marry the generous man who loves you so much that he honours you with the offer of his hand? It’s quite clear why — if you marry Rogozhin, what grievance will you have to complain of? You’ll have had too much honour done you. “Vfevgeny Pavlovitch said that you’d read too much poetry and have had ‘too much education for your . . . position’; that you’re a blue stocking and live in idleness. Add to that your vanity and one gets the full explanation of you.”

“And don’t you live in idleness?”

Too hurriedly, too crudely, the contest had reached such an unexpected point, unexpected indeed, for when Nastasya Filippovna set off for Pavlovsk, she still had dreams of something different, though no doubt her forebodings were rather of ill than good. Aglaia was absolutely carried away by the impulse of the moment, as though she were falling down a precipice and could not resist the dreadful joy of vengeance. It was positively strange for Nastasya Filippovna to see Aglaia like this. She looked at her and seemed as though she could not believe her eyes, and was completely at a loss for the first moment. Whether she were a woman who had read too much poetry as Yevgeny Pavlovitch had said, or simply mad, as Myshkin was convinced, in any case this woman — though she sometimes behaved with such cynicism and impudence — was really far more modest, soft, and trustful than might have been believed. It’s true that she was full of romantic notions, of self-centered dreaminess and capricious fantasy, but yet there was much that was strong and deep in her . . . Myshkin understood that. There was an expression of suffering in his face. Aglaia noticed this and trembled with hatred.