Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (410 page)

On the other hand, Myshkin, too, though he was perfectly right in assuring Lebedyev that he had nothing to tell him, and that nothing special had happened to him, may have been mistaken. Something very strange certainly was happening to all of them; nothing had happened, and yet, at the same time, a great deal had happened. Varvara Ardalionova, with her unfailing feminine instinct, had guessed this last fact.

It is very difficult, however, to explain in proper orderly fashion how it came to pass that every one in the Epanchins’ house was struck at once by the same idea, that something vital had happened to Aglaia, and that her fate was being decided. But as soon as this idea had flashed upon all of them, at once all insisted that they had felt misgivings about it and foreseen it long ago; that it had been clear since the episode of the “poor knight,” and even before, only, at that time, they were unwilling to believe in anything so absurd. So the sisters declared; Lizaveta Prokofyevna, of course, had foreseen and known everything long before anyone, and her “heart had ached about it” long ago; but, whether she had known it long ago or not, the thought of the prince suddenly became very distasteful to her, because it threw her so completely out of her reckoning. Here was a question which required an immediate answer; but not only was it impossible to answer it, but poor Lizaveta Prokofyevna, however much she struggled, could not even see the question quite clearly. It was a difficult matter. “Was the prince a good match, or not? Was it all a good thing, or not? If it were not a good thing (and undoubtedly it was not) in what way was it not good? And if, perhaps, it were good (and that was also possible) in what way was it good, again?” The head of the family himself, Ivan Fyodorovitch, was of course first of all surprised, but immediately afterwards made the confession that, “By Jove, he’d had an inkling of it all this time, now and again, he seemed to fancy something of the sort.” He relapsed into silence at the threatening glance of his wife; he was silent in the morning, but, in the evening, alone with his wife and compelled to speak, suddenly and, as it were, with unwonted boldness he gave vent to some unexpected opinions. “I say, after all, what did it amount to?” (Silence.) “All this was very strange of course if it were true, and he didn’t dispute it, but. . . .” (Silence again.) “And, on the other hand, if one looked at the thing without prejudice, the prince was a most charming fellow, upon my word, and . . . and, and — well, the name, our family name, all that would have the air, so to say, of keeping up the family name which had fallen low in the eyes of the world, that was, looking at it from that point of view, because they knew what the world was; the world was the world, but still the prince was not without fortune if it was only a middling one; he had . . . and, and, and” (prolonged silence, and a complete collapse). When Lizaveta Prokofyevna heard her husband’s words, her anger was beyond all bounds.

In her opinion all that had happened was “unpardonable and criminal follv, a sort of fantastic vision, stupid and absurd!” In the first place, “this little prince was a sickly idiot, and in the second place — a fool; he knew nothing of the world and had no place in it. To whom could one present him, where was one to put him? He was an impossible sort of democrat; he hadn’t even got a post. . . and . . . and what would Princess Byelokonsky say? And was this, was this the sort of husband they had imagined and planned for Aglaia?” The last argument, of course, was the chief one. At this reflection the mother’s heart shuddered, bleeding and weeping, though, at the same time, something quivered within it, whispering to her, “In what way is the prince not what is wanted?” And that protest of her own heart was what gave Lizaveta Prokofyevna more trouble than anything.

Aglaia’s sisters were for some reason pleased at the thought of Myshkin. It didn’t even strike them as very strange; in short, they might at any moment have gone over to his side completely. But they both made up their minds to keep quiet. It had been noticed as an invariable rule in the family that the more obstinate and emphatic Lizaveta Prokofyevna’s opposition and objection were on any matter of dispute, the surer sign it was for all of them that she was already almost on the point of agreeing about it. But Alexandra did not find it possible to be perfectly silent. Her mother, who had chosen her long ago as her adviser, was calling for her every minute now, and asking for her opinions and still more for her recollections; that is, “How it had all come to pass? How was it nobody saw it? Why did no one say anything? What was the meaning of that horrid ‘poor knight’? Why was she alone, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, doomed to worry about everything, to notice and foresee everything, while the others did nothing but count the crows,” and so on, and so on. Alexandra was on her guard at first, and confined herself to remarking that she thought her father’s idea rather true, that in the eyes of the world the choice of Prince Myshkin as the husband of one of the Epanchins might seem very satisfactory. Gradually getting warmer, she even added that the prince was by no means “a fool,” and never had been; and as for his consequence — there was no knowing what a decent man’s consequence would depend upon in a few years’ time among us in Russia; whether on the successes in the service that were once essential, or on something else. To all this her mamma promptly retorted that Alexandra was “a Nihilist, and this was all their hateful ‘woman-question.’” Half an hour later she set off for town and from there to Kamenny Island to find Princess Byelokonsky, who happened, fortunately, to be in Petersburg at the time, though she was soon going away. Princess Byelokonsky was Aglaia’s godmother.

The “old princess” listened to Lizaveta Prokofyevna’s feverish and desperate outpourings, and was not in the least moved by the tears of the harassed mother; she even looked at her sarcastically. The old lady was a terrible despot; she would not allow even her oldest friends to be on an equal footing with her, and she looked on Lizaveta Prokofyevna simply as her protege, as she had been thirty-five years before, and she never could reconcile herself to the abruptness and independence of her character. She observed among otherthings that “they were, as usual, in much too great a hurry, and were making a mountain out of a molehill; that so far as she heard, she was not convinced that anything serious had really happened; and wouldn’t it be better to wait until there was something to go upon? That the prince, in her opinion, was a nice young man, though sickly, eccentric, and of little consequence. The worst point about him was that he was openly keeping a mistress.” Madame Epanchin was well aware that the princess was rather cross at the failure of “Vfevgeny Pavlovitch whom she had introduced to them. She went home to Pavlovsk in a state of greater irritation than when she had set out, and she fell foul of every one at once, chiefly, on the ground that “they’d all gone crazy,” and that things were not done like that by anyone whatever except by them. “Why were they in such a hurry? What has happened? So far as I can judge I cannot see that anything has happened! Wait till there’s something to go upon! Ivan Fyodorovitch is always fancying things and making mountains out of molehills.”

The upshot of it was that they must keep calm, wait and look on coolly. But alas! the calm did not last ten minutes. The first blow to her composure was the news of what had happened during her absence at Kamennv Island. (Madame Epanchin’s visit had taken place on the day after Myshkin had paid a vist after midnight instead of at nine o’clock.) In reply to their mother’s impatient questions, the sisters answered in detail to begin with that “nothing special had happened during her absence,” that the prince had come, that for a long time, quite half an hour, Aglaia had not come down to see him, that afterwards she came down and at once asked Myshkin to play chess; that the prince did not know how to play and Aglaia had beaten him at once; that she was very lively and had scolded the prince, who was horribly ashamed of his ignorance; she had laughed at him dreadfully, so that they were sorry to look at him. Then she suggested a game of cards, “fools.” But that had turned out quite the other way. The prince played fools in masterly fashion, like a professor; Aglaia had even cheated and changed cards, and had stolen tricks from under his very nose, and yet he had made a “fool” of her five times running. Aglaia got fearfully angry, quite forgot herself, in fact; she said such biting and horrid things to the prince that at last he left off laughing, and turned quite pale when she told him at last that “she wouldn’t set foot in the room as long as he were there, and that it was positively disgraceful of him to come to them, especially at night, past twelve o’clock, after all that had happened” Then she slammed the door and went out. The prince walked out as though from a funeral, in spite of all their efforts to console him. All of a sudden, a quarter of an hour after the prince had gone, Aglaia had run downstairs to the verandah in such haste that she had not dried her eyes, and they were still wet with tears. She ran down because Kolya had come bringing a hedgehog. They had all begun looking at the hedgehog. Kolya explained that the hedgehog was not his; that he was out for a walk with a schoolfellow, Kostya Lebedyev, who had stayed in the street and was too shy to come in, because he was carrying a hatchet; that they had just bought the hedgehog and the hatchet from a peasant they had met. The peasant had sold them the hedgehog for fifty kopecks, and they had persuaded him to sell the hatchet, too, because “he might just as well,” and it was a very good hatchet. All of a sudden Aglaia had begun worrying Kolya to sell her the hedgehog; she got very excited about it, and even called Kolya “darling.” For a long time Kolya would not consent, but at last he gave way and summoned Kostya Lebedyev, who did in fact come in carrying a hatchet and very much abashed. But then it had suddenly appeared that the hedgehog was not theirs at all, but belonged to another, a third boy, called Petrov, who had given the two of them money to buy Schlosser’s “History” for him from a fourth boy, which, the latter, being in want of money, was selling cheap; that they had been going to buy Schlosser’s “History,” but they hadn’t been able to resist buying the hedgehog, so that it followed that the hedgehog and the hatchet belonged to the third boy, to whom they were carrying them instead of Schlosser’s “History.” But Aglaia had so insisted that at last they made up their minds and sold her the hedgehog. As soon as Aglaia had bought the hedgehog, she had, with Kolya’s help, placed it in a wicker basket, and covered it with a table-napkin, then she began asking Kolya to take it straight to the prince from her, begging him to accept it as a sign of her “profound respect.” Kolya agreed, delighted, and promised to do it without fail, but began immediately pestering her to know “what was meant bv the hedqehoq and by making him such a present?”

Aglaia had answered that it was not his business. He answered that he was convinced there was some allegory in it. Aglaia had been angry, and flew out at him, saying that he was nothing but a “silly boy.” Kolya at once retorted that if it were not that he respected her sex and, what was more, his own convictions, he would have shown her on the spot that he knew how to answer such insults. It had ended, however, in Kolya’s carrying off the hedgehog in delight, and Kostya Lebedyev had run after him. Aglaia, seeing that Kolya was swinging the basket too much, could not resist calling to him from the verandah: “Please, don’t drop it, Kolya darling!” as though she had not been quarrelling with him just before. Kolya had stopped, and he, too, as though he had not been quarrelling, had shouted with the utmost readiness: “I won’t drop him, Aglaia Ivanovna, don’t you be uneasy!” and had run on again at full speed. After that Aglaia had laughed tremendously and gone up to her own room exceedingly pleased, and had been in high spirits the rest of the day.

Lizaveta Prokofyevna was completely confounded by this account. One might ask why? But she was evidently in a morbid state of mind. Her apprehension was aroused to an extreme point, above all, by the hedgehog. What did the hedgehog mean? What compact underlay it? What was understood by it? What did it stand for? What was its cryptic message? Moreover, the luckless Ivan Fyodorovitch, who happened to be present during the inquisition, spoilt the whole business by his reply. In his opinion there was no cryptic message in it, and the hedgehog “was simply a hedgehog and nothing more — at most it meant a friendly desire to forget the past and make it up; in a word it was all mischief, but harmless and excusable.”

We may note in parenthesis that he had guessed right. Myshkin returned home after being dismissed and ridiculed by Aglaia, and sat for half an hour in the blackest despair, when Kolya suddenly appeared with the hedgehog. The sky cleared at once. Myshkin seemed to rise again from the dead; he questioned Kolya, hung on every word he said, repeated his questions ten times over, laughed like a child, and continually shook hands with the two laughing boys who gazed at him so frankly. The upshot of it was that Aglaia forgave him, and that he could go and see her again that evening, and that was for him not only the chief thing but everything.

“What children we still are, Kolya! and . . . and . . . how nice it is that we are such children,” he cried at last, joyfully.

“The simple fact is she’s in love with you, prince, that’s all about it!” Kolya answered authoritatively and impressively.

Myshkin flushed, but this time he said nothing, and Kolya simply laughed and clapped his hands. A minute later Myshkin laughed too, and he was looking at his watch every five minutes to see how time was going and how long it was till evening.

But Madame Epanchin’s mood got the upper hand of her, and at last she could not help giving way to hysterical excitement. In spite of the protests of her husband and daughters, she immediately sent for Aglaia in order to put the fatal question to her, and to extort from her a perfectly clear and final answer: “To make an end of it once for all, to be rid of it, and not to refer to it again!”

“I can’t exist till evening without knowing!” And only then they all realised to what an absurd pass they had brought things. They could get nothing out of Aglaia except feigned amazement, indignation, laughter and jeers at the prince and at all who questioned her. Lizaveta Prokofyevna lay on her bed and did not come down till evening tea, when Myshkin was expected. She awaited his coming with a tremor, and almost went into hysterics when he appeared.