Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (392 page)

as though the dog too felt that there was something ominous, some mystery in it. She moved back slowly facing the reptile, which crept slowly and cautiously towards her, it seemed meaning to dart at her, and sting her. But in spite of her fear, Norma looked very fierce, though she was trembling all over. All at once she slowly bared her terrible teeth and opened her huge red jaws, crouched, prepared for a spring, made up her mind, and suddenly seized the creature with her teeth. The reptile must have struggled to slip away, so that Norma caught it once more as it was escaping, and twice over got it full in her jaws, seeming to gobble it up as it ran. Its shell cracked between her teeth, the tail and legs hanging out of the mouth moved at a tremendous rate. All at once Norma gave a piteous squeal: the reptile had managed to sting her tongue. Whining and yelping she opened her mouth from the pain, and I saw that the creature, though bitten in two, was still wriggling in her mouth, and was emitting, from its crushed body, on to the dog’s tongue, a quantity of white fluid such as comes out of a squashed black-beetle. . . . Then I waked up and the prince came in.

“Gentlemen,” said Ippolit, suddenly breaking off from his reading, and seeming almost ashamed, “I haven’t read this over, but I believe I have really written a great deal that’s superfluous. That dream. .

“That’s true enough,” Ganya hastened to put in.

“There’s too much that’s personal in it, I must own, that is, about myself....”

As he said this, Ippolit had a weary and exhausted air, and wiped the sweat off his forehead with his handkerchief.

“Yes, you’re too much interested in yourself,” hissed Lebedyev.

“I don’tforce anyone, let me say again, gentlemen. If anyone doesn’t want to hear, he can go away.”

“He turns them out ... of another man’s house,” Rogozhin grumbled, hardly audibly.

“And how if we all get up and go away?” said Ferdyshtchenko suddenly. He had till then not ventured to speak aloud.

Ippolit dropped his eyes suddenly and clutched his manuscript. But at the same second he raised his head again, and with flashing eyes and two patches of red on his cheeks, he said, looking fixedly at Ferdyshtchenko:

“You don’t like me at all.”

There was laughter; most of the party did not laugh, however. Ippolit flushed horribly.

“Ippolit,” said Myshkin, “fold up your manuscript and give it to me, and go to bed here in my room. We’ll talk before you go to sleep, and to-morrow; but on condition that you never open these pages. Will you?”

“Is that possible?” Ippolit looked at him in positive amazement. “Gentlemen!” he cried, growing feverishly excited again, “this is a stupid episode, in which I haven’t known how to behave. I won’t interrupt the reading again. If anyone wants to listen, let him.”

He took a hurried gulp of water from the glass, hurriedly put his elbows on the table to shield his face from their eyes, and went on, obstinately reading. But his shame soon passed off.

“The idea,” he went on, “that it’s not worth while to live a few weeks began to come over me really, I fancy, a month ago, when I had four weeks to live; but it only took complete possession of me three days ago, when I came back from that evening at Pavlovsk. The first moment that I fully directly grasped that thought was on the prince’s verandah, at the instant when I was meaning to make a last trial of life, when I wanted to see people and trees (granted I said that myself), when I got excited, insisted on the rights of Burdovsky ‘my neighbour,’ and dreamed that they would all fling wide their arms, and clasp me in them, and beg my forgiveness for something, and I theirs; in short, I behaved like a stupid fool. And it was at that time that a ‘last conviction’ sprang up in me. I wondered how I could have lived for six months without that conviction! I knew for a fact that I had consumption and it was incurable. I didn’t deceive myself, and understood the case clearly. But the more clearly I understood it, the more feverishly I longed to live: I clutched at life, I wanted to live, whatever happened. Admitting that I might well have resented the dark and obscure lot which was to crush me like a fly, and, of course, with no reason, yet why couldn’t I have stopped at resentment? Why did I actually begin living, knowing that I couldn’t begin it now? Why did I try it, knowing that it was useless for me to try anything? And yet I could not even read, and gave up books. What use to read, what use to learn for six months? More than once that thought drove me to fling aside a book.

“Yes, that wall of Meyer’s could tell a story! I have written a great deal on it. There isn’t a spot on that filthy wall which I haven’t studied. Cursed wall! And yet it’s dearer to me than all the trees of Pavlovsk, that is, it would be dearer than all, if everything were not all the same to me now.

“I remember now with what greedy interest I began, at that time, watching their life: I had had no such interest in the past. I used to look forward with cursing and impatience to seeing Kolya, when I was too ill to go out myself. I pried into every detail, and was so interested in every rumour that I believe I became a regular gossip. I couldn’t understand, for instance, why people who had so much life before them did not become rich (and, indeed, I don’t understand it now). I knew one poor fellow, who, I was told afterwards, died of hunger, and I remember that it made me furious: if it had been possible to bring the poor devil back to life, I believe I’d have had him executed. I was sometimes better for weeks at a time and able to go out of doors; but the street exasperated me at last to such a degree that I purposely sat indoors for days together, though I could have gone out like anyone else. I couldn’t endure the scurrying, bustling people, everlastingly dreary, worried and preoccupied, flitting to and fro about me on the pavement. Why their everlasting gloom, uneasiness, and bustle, their everlasting sullen spite (for they are spiteful, spiteful, spiteful). Whose fault is it that they are miserable and don’t know how to live, though they’ve sixty years of life before them? Why did Zarnitzyn let himself die of hunger when he had sixty years of life before him? And each one points to his rags, his toil-worn hands, and cries savagely: ‘We toil like cattle, we labour, we are poor and hungry as dogs! Others don’t toil, and don’t labour, and they are rich!’ (The everlasting story!) Among them, running and struggling from morning to night, is some miserable sniveller like Ivan Fomitch Surikov ‘a gentleman born’ — he lives in our block over my head — always out at elbows, with his buttons dropping off, running errands, and taking messages for all sorts of people, from morning till night. Talk to him — he’s poor, destitute, starving, his wife died, he couldn’t buy medicine for her, his baby was frozen to death in the winter; his elder daughter is a ‘kept mistress’ . . . he’s for ever whimpering and complaining. Oh, I’ve never felt the least, the least pity for these fools, and I don’t now — I say so with pride! Why isn’t he a Rothschild? Whose fault is it that he hasn’t millions, like Rothschild, that he hasn’t a heap of golden imperials and napoleon-d’ors, a perfect mountain, as high as the mounds made in carnival week? If he’s alive he has everything in his power! Whose fault is it he doesn’t understand that?

“Oh, now I don’t care, now I’ve no time to be angry, but then, then I repeat, I literally gnawed my pillow at night and tore my quilt with rage. Oh, how I used to dream then, how I longed to be turned out into the street at eighteen, almost without clothing, almost without covering, to be deserted and utterly alone, without lodging, without work, without a crust of bread, without relations, without one friend in a great town, hungry, beaten (so much the better) but healthy — and then I would show them....

“What would I show?

“Oh, no doubt you think I don’t know how I’ve humilated myself as it is by my ‘Explanation’! Oh, every one of course will look upon me as a sniveller who knows nothing of life, forgetting that I’m not eighteen now, forgetting that to live as I have lived for these six months means as much as living to grey old age! But let them laugh and say that this is all fairy-tales. It’s true, I have told myself fairy-tales, I have filled whole nights in succession with them, I remember them all now.

“But is it for me to tell them now, now when the time for fairy-tales is over, even for me? And to whom? I amused myself with them when I saw clearly that I was forbidden even to learn the Greek grammar, as I once thought of doing. ‘I shall die before I get to the syntax,’ I thought at the first page, and threw the book under the table. It’s lying there still. I’ve forbidden Matryona to pick it up.

“Anyone into whose hands my ‘Explanation’ falls, and who has the patience to read it through, may look upon me as a madman, or as a schoolboy, or, more likely still, as a man condemned to death, for whom it’s natural to believe that every one else thinks too little of life and is apt to waste it too cheaply, and to use it too lazily, too shamelessly, that they’re none, not one of them, worthy of it. Well, I protest that mv reader will be mistaken; and that mv conviction has nothing to do with my being sentenced to death. Ask them, ask them what they all, everyone of them understand by happiness. Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it. Take my word for it, the highest moment of his happiness was just three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew were on the point of returning to Europe in despair. It wasn’t the New World that mattered, even if it had fallen to pieces.

“Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It’s life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all. But what’s the use of talking! I suspect that all I’m saying now is so like the usual commonplaces that I shall certainly be taken for a lower-form schoolboy sending in his essay on ‘sunrise,’ or they’ll say perhaps that I had something to say, but that I did not know how to ‘explain’ it. But I’ll add though that there is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius,

or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you for ever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps, the most important of your ideas. But if I too have failed to convey all that has been tormenting me for the last six months, it will, anyway, be understood that I have paid very dearly for attaining my present ‘last conviction.’ This is what I felt necessary, for certain objects of my own, to put forward in my’Explanation.’ However, I will continue.”

CHAPTER 6

I DON’T want to tell a lie; reality has caught me too on its hook in the course of these six months, and sometimes so carried me away that I forgot my death sentence, or rather did not care to think of it, and even did work. About my circumstances then, by the way. When eight months ago I became very ill I broke off all my ties and gave up all who had been my comrades. As I had always been a rather glum sort of person, my comrades easily forgot me; of course, they’d have forgotten me even apart from that circumstance. My surroundings at home — that is, in my ‘family,’ were solitary too. Five months ago I shut myself up once for all and cut myself off completely from the rooms of the family. They always obeyed me, and no one dared to come in to me,

except at a fixed time to tidy my room and bring me my dinner. My mother obeyed me in fear and trembling and did not even dare to whisper in my presence when I made up my mind sometimes to let her come to me. She was continually beating it into the children not to make a noise and disturb me. I’ll own I often complained of their shouting; they must be fond of me by now! I think I tormented ‘faithful Kolya,’ as I called him, pretty thoroughly too. Latterly even he’s worried me. All that is natural: men are created to torment one another. But I noticed that he put up with my irritability as though he had determined beforehand not to be hard on an invalid. Naturally that irritated me; but I believe he had taken it into his head to imitate the prince in ‘Christian meekness,’ which was rather funny. He’s a boy, young and eager, and of course imitates everything. But I have felt occasionally that it was high time for him to take his own line. I’m very fond of him. I tormented Surikov too, who lives above us and runs errands from morning till night. I was continually proving to him that he was to blame for his own poverty, so that he was scared at last and gave up coming to see me. He’s a very meek man, the meekest of beings. (N.B. They say meekness is a tremendous power. I must ask the prince about that, it’s his expression.) But in March, when I went upstairs to see ‘the frozen’ baby, as he called it, and accidentally smiled at the corpse of his baby, for I began to explain to Surikov again that it was ‘his own fault,’ the sniveller’s lips began trembling, and seizing my shoulder with one hand, he pointed to the door with the other, and softly, almost in a whisper in fact, said: ‘Go, sir!’

“I went away, and I liked that very much, liked it at the time, even at the very minute when he showed me out. But for long afterwards his words produced a painful impression on me when I remembered them: a sort of contemptuous pity for him, which I didn’t want to feel at all. Even at the moment of such an insult (I felt that I had insulted him, though I didn’t mean to), even at such a moment he could not get angry! His lips trembled, not from anger, I swear. He seized my arm and uttered his magnificent ‘Go, sir!’ absolutely without anger. There was dignity, a good deal of it, indeed, quite incongruous with him, in fact (so that, to tell the truth, there was something very comical about it), but there was no anger. Perhaps it was simply that he suddenly felt contempt for me. When I’ve met him two or three times on the stairs since then, he began taking off his hat to me, which he never used to do before; but he didn’t stop as he used to, but ran by in confusion. If he did despise me it was in his own fashion: he despised me meekly. But perhaps he simply took off his hat to me as to the son of a creditor. For he always owes my mother money and can never extricate himself from his debts. And, in fact, that’s the most likely explanation. I meant to have it out with him, and I know he would have begged my pardon within ten minutes; but I decided it was better to let him alone.