Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (344 page)

“I assure you, you are mistaken,” Myshkin answered calmly and politely. “I didn’t even know you were going to be married.”

“You heard Ivan Fyodorovitch say this morning that everything would be settled to-night at Nastasya Filippovna’s. You repeated it. \bu are lying! From whom could they have found out? Damn it all, who could have told them except you? Didn’t the old woman hint it to me?”

“You must know best who told them, if you really think they hinted at it. I haven’t said a word about it.”

“Did you give the note? An answer?” Ganya interrupted with feverish impatience.

But at that very moment Aglaia came back and Myshkin hadn’t time to answer.

“Here, prince,” she said, laying the album on the table, “choose a page and write me something. Here is a pen, a new one too. You don’t mind it’s being a steel one? I hear that calligraphists never use steel pens.”

Talking to Myshkin she seemed not to notice Ganya’s presence. But while the prince was fixing his pen, looking for a page and making ready, Ganya went up to the fireplace where Aglaia was standing, on Myshkin’s right hand. With a quavering, breaking voice he said almost in her ear:

“One word — one word only from you and I am saved.”

Myshkin turned round quickly and looked at them both. There was real despair in Ganya’s face; he seemed to have uttered those words in desperation without thinking. Aglaia looked at him for a few seconds with exactly the same calm wonder with which she had looked on the prince. And this calm wonder, this surprise, as though she were completely at a loss to understand what was said to her, seemed more terrible to Ganya at that moment than the most withering contempt.

“What am I to write?” asked Myshkin.

“I will dictate to you,” said Aglaia, turning to him. “Are you ready? Write: ‘I don’t make bargains’; then write the day and the month. Show me.”

Myshkin handed her the album.

“Excellent! \bu’ve written it wonderfully. You have an exquisite handwritinq. Thank vou. Good-bve,

prince. Stay,” she added, as though suddenly recollecting something. “Come along, I want to give you something for a keepsake.”

Myshkin followed her, but in the dining-room Aglaia stood still.

“Read this,” she said, handing him Ganya’s note.

Myshkin took the note and looked wonderingly at Aglaia.

“I know you haven’t read it, and that man cannot have confided in you. Read it, I want you to read it.”

The note had evidently been written in haste.

To-day my fate will be decided, you knowin what my. To-day I must give my word irrevocably. I have no claim on your sympathy; I dare not have any hope. But once you uttered a word — one word, and that word lighted the dark night of my life and has been my beacon ever since. Speak one such word again now and you will save me from ruin! Only say to me, “Break off everything, “and I will break it all off to-day. Oh, what will it cost you to say that! That word I only ask for as a sign of your sympathy and compassion forme. Only that-only that! Nothing more, nothing! I dare not dream of hope, fori am not worthy of it. But after a word from you I can accept my poverty again; I shall joyfully endure my hopeless lot. I shall face the struggle; I shall be glad of it; I shall rise up again with renewed strength.

Send me that word of sympathy (only sympathy, I swear)! Do not be angry with the audacity of a desperate and drowning man for making a last effort to save himself from perdition.

G.I.

“This man assures me,” said Aglaia abruptly, when Myshkin had finished reading it, “that the words ‘break it all off’will not compromise me and will bind me to nothing, and gives me a written guarantee of it, as you see, in this note. Observe how naively he hastened to underline certain words, and how coarsely his secret thought shows through it. “Vfet he knows that if he broke it all off of himself, without a word from me, without even speaking of it to me, without expecting anything from me, I should have felt differently to him and perhaps might have become his friend. He knows that for a fact. But he has a dirty soul. He knows it, but can’t bring himself to it; he knows it, but still he asks for a guarantee. He can’t act on faith. He wants me to give him hope of my hand, to make up for the hundred thousand. As for my words in the past of which he speaks in his note, and which he says have lighted up his life, it’s simply an insolent lie. I merely pitied him once. But he is insolent and shameless. He at once conceived a notion that hope was possible for him. I saw it at once. Since then he has begun trying to catch me; he is trying to catch me even now. But enough. Take the note and give it back to him as soon as you are out of the house; not before, of course.”

“And what answer am I to give him?”

“Nothing, of course. That’s the best answer. So you are going to live in his house?”

“Ivan Fyodorovitch himself advised me to this morning,” said Myshkin.

“Then be on your guard with him, I warn you. He won’t forgive you for taking him back his note.”

Aglaia pressed Myshkin’s hand lightly and walked away. Her face was grave and frowning. She did not even smile when she bowed to him at parting.

“I am just coming; I’ll only get my bundle,” said Myshkin to Ganya, “and we will go.”

Ganya stamped with impatience. His face looked black with fury. At last both went out into the street, Myshkin with his bundle in his hand.

“The answer? The answer?” cried Ganya, pouncing upon him. “What did she say to you? Did you give her the letter?”

Myshkin gave him the note without a word. Ganya was petrified.

“What? My letter?” he cried. “He didn’t give it to her. Ach, I might have expected it! Ach, d-d-damnation! ... I see how it was she didn’t understand just now. But how could you — how could you have failed to give it? Oh, d-damna ...”

“Excuse me, on the contrary, I succeeded in giving your note at once, the very minute you’d given it me, and exactly as you asked me to. It’s in my hands again because Aglaia Ivanovna gave it back to me just now.”

“When? When?”

“As soon as I’d finished writing in her album, when she called me. \bu heard her? We went into the dining-room, she gave me the note, told me to read it and to give it to you back.”

“To read it?” Ganya shouted almost at the top of his voice. “To read it? You’ve read it?”

And in amazement he stood stock still again in the middle of the pavement, so astounded that he positively gaped.

“Yes, I’ve just read it.”

“And she gave it you — gave it you herself to read? Herself?”

“Yes; and I assure you I shouldn’t have read it unless she’d asked me to.”

Ganya was silent for a minute, reflecting with painful effort. But suddenly he cried:

“Impossible! She couldn’t have told you to read it. You are lying! You read it of yourself.”

“I am speaking the truth,” answered Myshkin in the same perfectly untroubled voice, “and I assure you I am very sorry that it is so distasteful to you.”

“But, you luckless creature, she must have said something at the time. Surely she made some answer?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Tell me, then, tell me! Oh, damn it!”

And Ganya twice stamped his right foot, wearing a golosh, on the pavement.

“When I’d finished reading it, she told me that you were trying to catch her; that you wanted to compromise her so that she might give you hopes of her hand, and that, secure of that, you wouldn’t lose by abandoning your hopes of a hundred thousand. That if you had done so without bargaining with her and had broken it off without asking for a guarantee from her beforehand, she would perhaps have become your friend. I believe that’s all. Oh, something more. When I asked, after I’d taken the letter, what was the answer, she said that no answer was the best answer. I think that was it. \bu must excuse me if I’ve forgotten her exact words and only repeat it as I understood it.”

Ganya was overcome by intense anger and his fury burst out without restraint.

“Ah, so that’s it!” he snarled. “So my notes are thrown out of the window! Ah, she won’t make bargains — then I will! And we shall see! I have other things to fall back upon. . . . We shall see! I’ll make her smart for it!”

His face was pale and distorted; he foamed at the mouth, he shook his fist. So they walked for some steps. He behaved exactly as though he were alone in his room and made no attempt to keep up appearances before Myshkin, as though he looked upon him as absolutely of no consequence. But suddenly he reflected and pulled himself up.

“But how is it,” he said suddenly, addressing Myshkin, “how is it you” — (“an idiot,” he added to himself)— “are suddenly trusted with such confidence after two hours’ acquaintanceship? How is it?”

Envy was all that was wanted to complete his suffering, and it suddenly stung him to the heart.

“That I can’t explain,” answered Myshkin.

Ganya looked wrathfully at him.

“Was it to make you a present of her confidence that she called you into the dining-room? She was going to give you something.”

“That’s just how I understand it.”

“But, damn it all, why? What have you done? How have you won their hearts? Listen.” He was violently agitated and in a terrible ferment; all his ideas seemed hopelessly scattered. “Listen. Can’t you remember what you’ve been talking about — every word from the beginning, and give some sort of account of it? Don’t you remember noticing anything?”

“Certainly I can,” answered Myshkin. “At the beginning when I first went in and made their acquaintance, we began talking about Switzerland.”

“Confound Switzerland!”

“Then we talked of capital punishment.”

“Capital punishment?”

“Yes, something suggested it. . . . Then I told them how I spent three years out there, and the story of a poor village girl....”

“Damn the poor village girl! What else?”

Ganya was raging with impatience.

“Then how Schneider told me his opinion of my character, and how he forced me to ...”

“Hang Schneider and damn his opinion of you! What else?”

“Then something led up to my speaking of faces, or rather of the expression of faces, and I said that Aglaia Ivanovna was almost as beautiful as Nastasya Filippovna. And that was how I came to mention the portrait....”

“But you didn’t repeat — you didn’t repeat what you heard this morning in the study? You didn’t? You didn’t?”

“I tell you again I did not.”

“How the devil then . . . Bah! Did Aglaia show the note to the old lady?”

“I can assure you positively that she did not do that. I was there all the while, and she hadn’t the time to.”

“But perhaps you missed something. . . . Oh, d-damned idiot!” he exclaimed, completely beside himself. “He can’t even tell anything properly.”

Ganya, having once begun to be abusive and meeting no resistance, lost all restraint, as is always the case with certain sorts of people. A little more and he would have begun to spit, he was so furious. But his fury made him blind, or he would have understood long ago that this “idiot,” whom he was treating so rudely, was sometimes rather quick and subtle in understanding and could give an extremely satisfactory account of things. But something unexpected happened all at once.

“I must tell vou, Gavril Ardalionovitch,” Mvshkin said suddenly, “that I was once so ill that I really was almost an idiot; but I’ve got over that long ago, and so I rather dislike it when people call me an idiot to my face. Though I can excuse it in you in consideration of your ill-luck, but in your vexation you’ve been abusive to me twice already. I don’t like that at all, especially so suddenly at first acquaintance; and so, as we are just at the crossroads, hadn’t we better part? You go to the right to your home, and I go to the left. I’ve got twenty-five roubles, and I shall be sure to find some lodging-house.”

Ganya was dreadfully disconcerted, and even flushed with shame at meeting with such an unexpected rebuff.

“Excuse me, prince,” he cried warmly, dropping his offensive tone for one of extreme politeness. “For mercy’s sake, forgive me! \bu see what trouble I’m in. You know scarcely anything of it as yet, but if you knew all, I am sure you would feel there was some excuse for me. Though, of course, it is inexcusable. .

“Oh, I don’t need so much apology,” Myshkin hastened to answer. “I understand that it’s very horrid for you and that’s why you are rude. Well, let’s go to your house; I’ll come with pleasure.”

“No, I can’t let him go like that now,” Ganya was thinking to himself, looking resentfully at Myshkin on the way. “The rogue got it all out of me, and then removed his mask. . . . There’s something behind it. But we shall see! Everything will be decided — everything! To-day!”

They were by now standing opposite the house.

CHAPTER 8

Ganya’s flat was on the third story, on a very clean, light, spacious staircase, and consisted of six or seven rooms, big and little. Though the flat was ordinary enough, it seemed somewhat beyond the means of a clerk with a family, even with an income of two thousand roubles a year. But it had been taken by Ganya and his family not more than two months before with a view to taking boarders, to the intense annoyance of Ganya himself, to satisfy the urgent desires of his mother and sister, who were anxious to be of use and to increase the family income a little. Ganya scowled and called taking boarders degrading. It made him feel ashamed in the society where he was accustomed to appear as a somewhat brilliant young man with a future before him. All such concessions to the inevitable and all the cramped conditions of his life were a deep inner wound. For some time past he had become extremely and quite disproportionately irritable over every trifle, and if he still consented to submit and to put up with it for a time, it was only because he was resolved to change it all in the immediate future. But that very change, that very way of escape on which he had determined, involved a formidable difficulty — a difficulty the solution of which threatened to be more troublesome and harassing than all that had gone before.

The flat was divided by a passage, into which they stepped at once on entering. On one side of the passage were the three rooms which were intended for “specially recommended” boarders. On the same side of the passage, at the farthest end, next to the kitchen, was a fourth room, smaller than the rest, which was occupied by the father of the family, the retired General Ivolgin. He slept on a wide sofa, and was obliged to go in and out of the flat through the kitchen and by the back staircase. Ganya’s brother, Kolya, a schoolboy of thirteen, shared the same room. He too had to be packed away in it, to do his lessons there, to sleep in ragged sheets on another sofa, very old, short and narrow, and above all to wait on his father and to keep an eye on him, which was becoming more and more necessary. Myshkin was given the middle one of the three rooms; the first on the right was occupied by Ferdyshtchenko, and the one on the left was empty. But Ganya led Myshkin first into the other half of the flat, which consisted of a dining room, of a drawing-room which was a drawing-room only in the morning, being transformed later in the day into Ganya’s study and bedroom; and of a third room, very small and always shut up, where the mother and daughter slept. It was a tight fit, in fact, in the flat. Ganya could only grind his teeth and say nothing. Though he was and wished to be respectful to his mother, it could be seen from the first minute that he was a great despot in his family.