Текст книги "The Idiot"
Автор книги: Федор Достоевский
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Of course, with such a conviction, he ought to have waited for Rogozhin at home, in his hotel room; but he was as if unable to bear his new thought, jumped up, seized his hat, and ran. It was now almost quite dark in the corridor: "What if he comes out of that corner now and stops me by the stairs?" flashed in him as he approached the familiar spot. But no one came out. He went down under the gateway, walked out to the sidewalk, marveled at the dense crowd of people who came pouring outside at sunset (as
always in Petersburg at vacation time), and went in the direction of Gorokhovaya Street. Fifty paces from the inn, at the first intersection, in the crowd, someone suddenly touched his elbow and said in a low voice, just at his ear:
"Lev Nikolaevich, come with me, brother, you've got to."
It was Rogozhin.
Strange: the prince began telling him, suddenly, with joy, babbling and almost not finishing the words, how he had been expecting him just now in the corridor, at the inn.
"I was there," Rogozhin answered unexpectedly, "let's go."
The prince was surprised by the answer, but he was surprised at least two minutes later, when he understood. Having understood the answer, he became frightened and began studying Rogozhin. The man was walking almost half a step ahead, looking straight in front of him and not glancing at anyone he met, giving way to them all with mechanical care.
"Then why didn't you ask for me in my room ... if you were at the inn?" the prince asked suddenly.
Rogozhin stopped, looked at him, thought, and, as if not understanding the question at all, said:
"So, now, Lev Nikolaevich, you go straight on here, right to the house, you know? And I'll go along the other side. And watch out that we keep together ..."
Having said this, he crossed the street, stepped onto the opposite sidewalk, looked whether the prince was following, and seeing that he was standing and staring at him, waved his hand in the direction of Gorokhovaya and went on, constantly turning to look at the prince and beckoning to him to follow. He was obviously heartened to see that the prince had understood him and did not cross the street to join him. It occurred to the prince that Rogozhin had to keep an eye out for someone and not miss him on the way, and that that was why he had crossed to the other side. "Only why didn't he tell me who to look for?" They went some five hundred paces that way, and suddenly the prince began to tremble for some reason; Rogozhin still kept looking back, though more rarely; the prince could not help himself and beckoned to him with his hand. The man at once came across the street to him.
"Is Nastasya Filippovna at your house?"
"Yes."
"And was it you who looked at me from behind the curtain earlier?"
"It was . . ."
"Then why did you . . ."
But the prince did not know what to ask further and how to finish the question; besides, his heart was pounding so hard that it was difficult for him even to speak. Rogozhin was also silent and looked at him as before, that is, as if pensively.
"Well, I'm going," he said suddenly, preparing to cross the street again, "and you go, too. Let's stay separated in the street . . . it's better for us that way ... on different sides . . . you'll see."
When they finally turned from two different sidewalks onto Gorokhovaya and approached Rogozhin's house, the prince's legs again began to give way under him, so that he had difficulty walking. It was nearly ten o'clock in the evening. The windows on the old lady's side were open as before, Rogozhin's were closed, and the drawn white blinds seemed to have become still more noticeable in the twilight. The prince came up to the house from the opposite sidewalk; Rogozhin stepped onto the porch from his sidewalk and waved his hand to him. The prince went up to him on the porch.
"Even the caretaker doesn't know about me now, that I've come back home. I told him earlier that I was going to Pavlovsk, and I said the same thing at my mother's," he whispered with a sly and almost contented smile. "We'll go in and nobody'll hear."
He already had the key in his hand. Going up the stairs, he turned and shook his finger at the prince to step more quietly, quietly opened the door to his rooms, let the prince in, carefully came in after him, locked the door behind him, and put the key in his pocket.
"Let's go," he said in a whisper.
He had begun speaking in a whisper still on the sidewalk in Liteinaya. Despite all his external calm, he was in some deep inner anguish. When they entered the big room, just before his study, he went up to the window and beckoned mysteriously to the prince:
"So when you rang my bell earlier, I guessed straight off that it was you all right; I tiptoed to the door and heard you talking with Pafnutyevna, and I'd already been telling her at dawn: if you, or somebody from you, or anybody else starts knocking at my door, she shouldn't tell about me under any pretext; and especially if you came asking for me yourself, and I told her your name. And then, when you left, it occurred to me: what if he's standing there now and spying on me, or watching from the street? I went up to this
same window, raised the curtain a bit, looked, and you were standing there looking straight at me . . . That's how it was."
"And where is . . . Nastasya Filippovna?" the prince brought out breathlessly.
"She's . . . here," Rogozhin said slowly, as if waiting a bit before he answered.
"But where?"
Rogozhin raised his eyes to the prince and looked at him intently:
Let's go . . .
He kept speaking in a whisper and without hurrying, slowly and, as before, with some strange pensiveness. Even when he was telling about the curtain, it was as if he wanted to express something different with his story, despite all the expansiveness of the telling.
They went into the study. A certain change had taken place in this room since the prince had been there: a green silk damask curtain was stretched across the whole room, with openings at both ends, separating the study from the alcove in which Rogozhin's bed was set up. The heavy curtain was drawn and the openings were closed. But it was very dark in the room; the Petersburg "white" summer nights were beginning to turn darker, and if it had not been for the full moon, it would have been difficult to see anything in Rogozhin's dark rooms with the blinds drawn. True, it was still possible to make out faces, though not very clearly. Rogozhin's face was very pale, as usual; his eyes looked intently at the prince, with a strong gleam, but somehow motionlessly.
"Why don't you light a candle?" asked the prince.
"No, better not," Rogozhin replied and, taking the prince by the hand, he bent him down onto a chair; he sat down facing him and moved the chair so that his knees almost touched the prince's. Between them, a little to the side, was a small, round table. "Sit down, let's sit a while!" he said, as if persuading him to sit down. They were silent for a minute. "I just knew you'd stay in that same inn," he began, as people sometimes do, approaching the main conversation by starting with extraneous details, not directly related to the matter. "As soon as I stepped into the corridor, I thought: maybe he's sitting and waiting for me now, like me him, this same minute? Did you go to the teacher's widow's?"
"I did," the prince could barely speak for the strong pounding of his heart.
"I thought about that, too. There'll be talk, I thought . . . and then I thought: I'll bring him here to spend the night, so that this night together . . ."
"Rogozhin! Where is Nastasya Filippovna?" the prince suddenly whispered and stood up, trembling in every limb. Rogozhin got up, too.
"There," he whispered, nodding towards the curtain.
"Asleep?" whispered the prince.
Again Rogozhin looked at him intently, as earlier.
"Okay, let's go! . . . Only you . . . Well, let's go!"
He raised the curtain, stopped, and again turned to the prince.
"Come in!" he nodded towards the opening, inviting him to go first. The prince went in.
"It's dark here," he said.
"You can see!" Rogozhin muttered.
"I can barely see . . . the bed."
"Go closer," Rogozhin suggested quietly.
The prince took one step closer, then another, and stopped. He stood and peered for a minute or two; neither man said anything all the while they were there by the bed; the prince's heart was pounding so that it seemed audible in the dead silence of the room. But his eyes were accustomed now, so that he could make out the whole bed; someone was sleeping there, a completely motionless sleep; not the slightest rustle, not the slightest breath could be heard. The sleeper was covered from head to foot with a white sheet, but the limbs were somehow vaguely outlined; one could only see by the raised form that a person lay stretched out there. Scattered in disorder on the bed, at its foot, on the chair next to the bed, even on the floor, were the taken-off clothes, a costly white silk dress, flowers, ribbons. On the little table by the head of the bed, the taken-off and scattered diamonds sparkled. At the foot of the bed some lace lay crumpled in a heap, and against this white lace, peeping from under the sheet, the tip of a bare foot was outlined; it seemed carved from marble and was terribly still. The prince looked and felt that the more he looked, the more dead and quiet the room became. Suddenly an awakened fly buzzed, flew over the bed, and alighted by its head. The prince gave a start.
"Let's get out," Rogozhin touched his arm.
They went out, sat down again in the same chairs, again facing each other. The prince was trembling more and more, and did not take his questioning eyes off Rogozhin's face.
"You're trembling, I notice, Lev Nikolaevich," Rogozhin said at last, "almost like when your disorder comes over you, remember, how it was in Moscow? Or the way it was once before a fit. And I just can't think what I'm going to do with you now ..."
The prince listened, straining all his powers to understand, and still asking with his eyes.
"It was you?" he finally managed to say, nodding towards the curtain.
"It was . . . me . . ." Rogozhin whispered and looked down.
They were silent for about five minutes.
"Because," Rogozhin suddenly began to go on, as if he had not interrupted his speech, "because if it's your illness, and a fit, and shouting now, somebody may hear it in the street or the courtyard, and they'll figure that people are spending the night in the apartment; they'll start knocking, they'll come in . . . because they all think I'm not home. I didn't light a candle so they wouldn't suspect that in the street or the courtyard. Because when I'm not home, I take the key with me, and nobody comes in for three or four days, even to tidy up, that's how I set it up. Now, so they won't know we're spending the night..."
"Wait," said the prince, "I asked the caretaker and the old woman earlier whether Nastasya Filippovna hadn't spent the night. So they already know."
"I know you asked. I told Pafnutyevna that Nastasya Filippovna came yesterday and left for Pavlovsk yesterday, and that she spent ten minutes at my place. They don't know she spent the night– nobody knows. Yesterday we came in very quietly, like you and me today. I thought to myself on the way that she'd refuse to go in quietly—forget it! She talked in a whisper, walked on tiptoe, gathered her dress up all around her so it wouldn't rustle, and held it with her hands, she shook her finger at me on the stairs—all because she was frightened of you. On the train it was like she was completely crazy, all from fear, and she herself wanted to come here to spend the night; I first thought I'd take her to the teacher's widow's—forget it! 'He'll find me there,' she says, 'at dawn, but you can hide me, and tomorrow morning I'll go to Moscow,' and then she wanted to go to Orel somewhere. And as she was getting ready for bed, she kept saying we'd go to Orel. . ."
"Wait, what about now, Parfyon, what do you want now?"
"See, I just have doubts about you trembling all the time. We'll spend the night here together. There's no other bed here than that
one, so I decided to take the pillows from the two sofas, and I'll arrange them next to each other there, by the curtain, for you and me, so we're together. Because if they come in, they'll start looking and searching, they'll see her at once and take her out. They'll start questioning me, I'll tell them it was me, and they'll take me away at once. So let her lie here now, next to us, next to me and you . . ."
"Yes, yes!" the prince agreed warmly.
"Meaning not to confess or let them take her out."
"N-not for anything!" the prince decided. "No, no, no!"
"That's how I decided, too, so as not to give her up, man, not for anything, not to anybody! We'll spend the night quietly. Today I left the house only for one hour, in the morning, otherwise I was always by her. And then in the evening I went to get you. I'm also afraid it's stuffy and there'll be a smell. Do you notice the smell or not?"
"Maybe I do, I don't know. By morning there will be."
"I covered her with oilcloth, good American oilcloth, and the sheet's on top of the oilcloth, and I put four uncorked bottles of Zhdanov liquid there, they're standing there now."
"It's like there ... in Moscow?"
"Because of the smell, brother. But she's lying there so ... In the morning, when it's light, have a look. What, you can't get up?" Rogozhin asked with timorous surprise, seeing the prince trembling so much that he could not stand up.
"My legs won't work," the prince murmured. "It's from fear, I know it . . . The fear will pass, and I'll get up . . ."
"Wait, I'll make up the bed meanwhile, and then you can lie down . . . and I'll lie down with you . . . and we'll listen . . . because I don't know yet, man ... I don't know everything yet, man, so I'm telling you ahead of time, so you'll know all about it ahead of time ..."
Muttering these vague words, Rogozhin began to make up the beds. It was clear that he had perhaps thought of these beds as early as that morning. He himself had spent the past night lying on the sofa. But two people could not lie on the sofa, and he absolutely wanted to make up beds now side by side, and that was why, with great effort, he now dragged pillows of various sizes from both sofas all the way across the room, right up to the opening in the curtain. The bed got made up anyhow; he went over to the prince, took him tenderly and rapturously by the arm, got him to his feet, and led him to the bed; but it turned out that the prince
could walk by himself; which meant that "the fear was passing"; and yet he still went on trembling.
"Because, brother," Rogozhin began suddenly, laying the prince down on the left, better, pillows and himself stretching out on the right side, without undressing and thrusting both hands behind his head, "it's hot now, and sure to smell . . . I'm afraid to open the windows; but at my mother's there are pots of flowers, a lot of flowers, and they have such a wonderful smell; I thought I might bring them here, but Pafnutyevna would guess, because she's a curious one."
"She's a curious one," agreed the prince.
"We could buy some bouquets and lay flowers all around her? But I think it'd be a pity, friend, to cover her with flowers!"
"Listen . . ." the prince asked, as if in confusion, as if groping for precisely what he had to ask and forgetting it at once, "listen, tell me: what did you use? A knife? That same one?"
"That same one."
"Wait now! I also want to ask you, Parfyon ... I have a lot to ask you, about everything . . . but to begin with, you'd better tell me, from the first beginning, so that I know: did you want to kill her before my wedding, before the ceremony, on the church porch, with the knife? Did you want to or not?"
"I don't know if I wanted to or not..." Rogozhin replied drily, as if he even marveled somewhat at the question and could not comprehend it.
"You never brought the knife to Pavlovsk with you?"
"I never brought it. I can only tell you this about the knife, Lev Nikolaevich," he added, after a pause. "I took it out of the locked drawer this morning, because the whole thing happened this morning, between three and four. I kept it like a bookmark in a book . . . And . . . and this is still a wonder to me: the knife seemed to go in about three inches ... or even three and a half. . . just under the left breast. . . but only about half a tablespoon of blood came out on her nightshirt; no more than that ..."
"That, that, that," the prince suddenly raised himself up in terrible agitation, "that, that I know, that I've read about . . . it's called an internal hemorrhage . . . Sometimes there isn't even a drop. If the blow goes straight to the heart . . ."
"Wait, do you hear?" Rogozhin suddenly interrupted quickly and sat up fearfully on his bed. "Do you hear?"
"No!" the prince said quickly and fearfully, looking at Rogozhin.
"Footsteps! Do you hear? In the big room . . ."
They both began to listen.
"I hear," the prince whispered firmly.
"Footsteps?"
"Footsteps."
"Should we shut the door or not?"
"Shut it..."
They shut the door, and both lay down again. There was a long silence.
"Ah, yes!" the prince suddenly whispered in the same agitated and hurried whisper, as if he had caught the thought again and was terribly afraid of losing it again, even jumping up a little on his bed, "yes ... I wanted . . . those cards! cards . . . They say you played cards with her?"
"I did," Rogozhin said after some silence.
"Where are . . . the cards?"
"They're here ..." Rogozhin said after a still longer silence, "here . . ."
He pulled a used deck, wrapped in paper, out of his pocket and handed it to the prince. The prince took it, but as if in perplexity. A new, sad, and cheerless feeling weighed on his heart; he suddenly realized that at that moment, and for a long time now, he had not been talking about what he needed to talk about, and had not been doing what he needed to do, and that these cards he was holding in his hands, and which he was so glad to have, would be no help, no help at all now. He stood up and clasped his hands. Rogozhin lay motionless, as if he did not see or hear his movements; but his eyes glittered brightly through the darkness and were completely open and motionless. The prince sat on a chair and began to look at him in fear. About half an hour went by; suddenly Rogozhin cried out loudly and abruptly and began to guffaw, as if forgetting that he had to talk in a whisper:
"That officer, that officer . . . remember how she horsewhipped that officer at the concert, remember, ha, ha, ha! A cadet, too . . . a cadet . . . came running ..."
The prince jumped up from the chair in new fright. When Rogozhin quieted down (and he did suddenly quiet down), the prince quietly bent over him, sat down beside him, and with a pounding heart, breathing heavily, began to examine him. Rogozhin did not turn his head to him and even seemed to forget about him. The prince watched and waited; time passed, it began
to grow light. Now and then Rogozhin sometimes suddenly began to mutter, loudly, abruptly, and incoherently; began to exclaim and laugh; then the prince would reach out his trembling hand to him and quietly touch his head, his hair, stroke it and stroke his cheeks . . . there was nothing more he could do! He was beginning to tremble again himself, and again he suddenly lost the use of his legs. Some completely new feeling wrung his heart with infinite anguish. Meanwhile it had grown quite light; he finally lay down on the pillows, as if quite strengthless now and in despair, and pressed his face to the pale and motionless face of Rogozhin; tears flowed from his eyes onto Rogozhin's cheeks, but perhaps by then he no longer felt his own tears and knew nothing about them . . . In any case, when, after many hours, the door opened and people came in, they found the murderer totally unconscious and delirious. The prince was sitting motionless on the bed beside him, and each time the sick man had a burst of shouting or raving, he quietly hastened to pass his trembling hand over his hair and cheeks, as if caressing and soothing him. But he no longer understood anything of what they asked him about, and did not recognize the people who came in and surrounded him. And if Schneider himself had come now from Switzerland to have a look at his former pupil and patient, he, too, recalling the state the prince had sometimes been in during the first year of his treatment in Switzerland, would have waved his hand now and said, as he did then: "An idiot!"
XII
Conclusion
The teacher's widow, having galloped to Pavlovsk, went straight to Darya Alexeevna, who had been upset since the previous day, and, having told her all she knew, frightened her definitively. The two ladies immediately decided to get in touch with Lebedev, who was also worried in his quality as his tenant's friend and in his quality as owner of the apartment. Vera Lebedev told them everything she knew. On Lebedev's advice, they decided that all three of them should go to Petersburg so as to forestall the more quickly "what might very well happen." And so it came about that the next morning, at about eleven o'clock, Rogozhin's apartment was opened in the presence of the police, Lebedev, the
ladies, and Rogozhin's brother, Semyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, who was quartered in the wing. What contributed most to the success of the affair was the evidence of the caretaker, who had seen Parfyon Semyonovich and his guest going in from the porch and as if on the quiet. After this evidence they did not hesitate to break down the door, which did not open to their ringing.
Rogozhin survived two months of brain fever and, when he recovered—the investigation and the trial. He gave direct, precise, and perfectly satisfactory evidence about everything, as a result of which the prince was eliminated from the case at the very beginning. Rogozhin was taciturn during his trial. He did not contradict his adroit and eloquent lawyer, who proved clearly and logically that the crime he had committed was the consequence of the brain fever, which had set in long before the crime as a result of the defendant's distress. But he did not add anything of his own in confirmation of this opinion and, as before, clearly and precisely, confirmed and recalled all the minutest circumstances of the event that had taken place. He was sentenced, with allowance for mitigating circumstances, to Siberia, to hard labor, for fifteen years, and heard out his sentence sternly, silently, and "pensively." All his enormous fortune, except for a certain, comparatively speaking, rather small portion spent on the initial carousing, went to his brother, Semyon Semyonovich, to the great pleasure of the latter. Old Mrs. Rogozhin goes on living in this world and seems to recall her favorite son Parfyon occasionally, but not very clearly: God spared her mind and heart all awareness of the horror that had visited her sad house.
Lebedev, Keller, Ganya, Ptitsyn, and many other characters of our story are living as before, have changed little, and we have almost nothing to tell about them. Ippolit died in terrible anxiety and slightly sooner than he expected, two weeks after Nastasya Filippovna's death. Kolya was profoundly struck by what had happened; he became definitively close to his mother. Nina Alexandrovna fears for him, because he is too thoughtful for his years; a good human being will perhaps come out of him. Incidentally, partly through his efforts, the further fate of the prince has been arranged: among all the people he had come to know recently, he had long singled out Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky; he was the first to go to him and tell him all the details he knew about what had happened and about the prince's present situation. He was not mistaken: Evgeny Pavlovich took the warmest interest in the fate
of the unfortunate "idiot," and as a result of his efforts and concern, the prince ended up abroad again, in Schneider's Swiss institution. Evgeny Pavlovich himself, who has gone abroad, intends to stay in Europe for a very long time, and candidly calls himself "a completely superfluous man in Russia," visits his sick friend at Schneider's rather often, at least once every few months; but Schneider frowns and shakes his head more and more; he hints at a total derangement of the mental organs; he does not yet speak positively of incurability, but he allows himself the saddest hints. Evgeny Pavlovich takes it very much to heart, and he does have a heart, as he has already proved by the fact that he receives letters from Kolya and even sometimes answers those letters. But besides that, yet another strange feature of his character has become known; and as it is a good feature, we shall hasten to mark it: after each visit to Schneider's institution, Evgeny Pavlovich, besides writing to Kolya, sends yet another letter to a certain person in Petersburg, with a most detailed and sympathetic account of the state of the prince's illness at the present moment. Apart from the most respectful expressions of devotion, there have begun to appear in these letters (and that more and more often) certain candid accounts of his views, ideas, feelings—in short, something resembling friendly and intimate feelings have begun to appear. This person who is in correspondence (though still rather rarely) with Evgeny Pavlovich, and who has merited his attention and respect to such a degree, is Vera Lebedev. We have been quite unable to find out exactly how such relations could have been established; they were established, of course, on the occasion of the same story with the prince, when Vera Lebedev was so grief-stricken that she even became ill, but under what circumstances the acquaintance and friendship came about, we do not know. We have made reference to these letters mainly for the reason that some of them contain information about the Epanchin family and, above all, about Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchin. Evgeny Pavlovich, in a rather incoherent letter from Paris, told of her that, after a brief and extraordinary attachment to some émigré, a Polish count, she had suddenly married him, against the will of her parents, who, if they did finally give their consent, did so only because the affair threatened to turn into an extraordinary scandal. Then, after an almost six-month silence, Evgeny Pavlovich informed his correspondent, again in a long and detailed letter, that during his last visit to Professor Schneider in Switzerland, he had met all the Epanchins there (except, of course, Ivan
Fyodorovich, who, on account of business, stays in Petersburg) and Prince Shch. The meeting was strange: they all greeted Evgeny Pavlovich with some sort of rapture; Adelaida and Alexandra even decided for some reason that they were grateful to him for his "angelic care of the unfortunate prince." Lizaveta Prokofyevna, seeing the prince in his sick and humiliated condition, wept with all her heart. Apparently everything was forgiven him. Prince Shch. voiced several happy and intelligent truths on the occasion. It seemed to Evgeny Pavlovich that he and Adelaida had not yet become completely close with each other; but the future seemed to promise a completely willing and heartfelt submission of the ardent Adelaida to the intelligence and experience of Prince Shch. Besides, the lessons endured by the family had affected her terribly and, above all, the last incident with Aglaya and the émigré count. Everything that had made the family tremble as they gave Aglaya up to this count, everything had come true within half a year, with the addition of such surprises as they had never even thought of. It turned out that this count was not even a count, and if he was actually an émigré, he had some obscure and ambiguous story. He had captivated Aglaya with the extraordinary nobility of his soul, tormented by sufferings over his fatherland, and had captivated her to such an extent that, even before marrying him, she had become a member of some foreign committee for the restoration of Poland and on top of that had ended up in the Catholic confessional of some famous padre, who had taken possession of her mind to the point of frenzy. The count's colossal fortune, of which he had presented nearly irrefutable information to Lizaveta Prokofyevna and Prince Shch., had turned out to be completely nonexistent. What's more, some six years after the marriage, the count and his friend, the famous confessor, had managed to bring about a complete quarrel between Aglaya and her family, so that they had not seen her for several months already ... In short, there was a lot to tell, but Lizaveta Prokofyevna, her daughters, and even Prince Shch. had been so struck by all this "terror" that they were even afraid to mention certain things in conversation with Evgeny Pavlovich, though they knew that even without that, he was well acquainted with the story of Aglaya Ivanovna's latest passions. Poor Lizaveta Prokofyevna wanted to be in Russia and, as Evgeny Pavlovich testified, she bitterly and unfairly criticized everything abroad: "They can't bake good bread anywhere, in the winter they freeze like mice in the cellar," she said. "But here at least I've had
a good Russian cry over this poor man," she added, pointing with emotion to the prince, who did not recognize her at all. "Enough of these passions, it's time to serve reason. And all this, and all these foreign lands, and all this Europe of yours, it's all one big fantasy, and all of us abroad are one big fantasy . . . remember my words, you'll see for yourself!" she concluded all but wrathfully, parting from Evgeny Pavlovich.
NOTES
For many details in the following notes we are indebted to the commentaries in volume 9 of the Soviet Academy of Sciences edition (Leningrad, 1974).
PART ONE
1. Eydkuhnen is a railway station on the border between Prussia and what was then Russian-occupied Poland.
