them again. He could not make up his mind to it; he turned away from the
prince in order to avoid looking at him. He could not embrace him.
“Don’t be afraid,” he muttered, indistinctly, “though I have taken your
cross, I shall not murder you for your watch.” So saying, he laughed
suddenly, and strangely. Then in a moment his face became transfigured; he
grew deadly white, his lips trembled, his eyes burned like fire. He stretched
out his arms and held the prince tightly to him, and said in a strangled
voice:
“Well, take her! It’s Fate! She’s yours. I surrender her…. Remember
Rogojin!” And pushing the prince from him, without looking back at him,
he hurriedly entered his own flat, and banged the door.
V.
It was late now, nearly half-past two, and the prince did not find General
Epanchin at home. He left a card, and determined to look up Colia, who had
a room at a small hotel near. Colia was not in, but he was informed that he
might be back shortly, and had left word that if he were not in by half-past
three it was to be understood that he had gone to Pavlofsk to General
Epanchin’s, and would dine there. The prince decided to wait till half-past
three, and ordered some dinner. At half-past three there was no sign of
Colia. The prince waited until four o’clock, and then strolled off
mechanically wherever his feet should carry him.
In early summer there are often magnificent days in St. Petersburg—
bright, hot and still. This happened to be such a day.
For some time the prince wandered about without aim or object. He did
not know the town well. He stopped to look about him on bridges, at street
corners. He entered a confectioner’s shop to rest, once. He was in a state of
nervous excitement and perturbation; he noticed nothing and no one; and he
felt a craving for solitude, to be alone with his thoughts and his emotions,
and to give himself up to them passively. He loathed the idea of trying to
answer the questions that would rise up in his heart and mind. “I am not to
blame for all this,” he thought to himself, half unconsciously.
Towards six o’clock he found himself at the station of the Tsarsko-Selski
railway.
He was tired of solitude now; a new rush of feeling took hold of him, and
a flood of light chased away the gloom, for a moment, from his soul. He
took a ticket to Pavlofsk, and determined to get there as fast as he could, but
something stopped him; a reality, and not a fantasy, as he was inclined to
think it. He was about to take his place in a carriage, when he suddenly
threw away his ticket and came out again, disturbed and thoughtful. A few
moments later, in the street, he recalled something that had bothered him all
the afternoon. He caught himself engaged in a strange occupation which he
now recollected he had taken up at odd moments for the last few hours—it
was looking about all around him for something, he did not know what. He
had forgotten it for a while, half an hour or so, and now, suddenly, the
uneasy search had recommenced.
But he had hardly become conscious of this curious phenomenon, when
another recollection suddenly swam through his brain, interesting him for
the moment, exceedingly. He remembered that the last time he had been
engaged in looking around him for the unknown something, he was
standing before a cutler’s shop, in the window of which were exposed
certain goods for sale. He was extremely anxious now to discover whether
this shop and these goods really existed, or whether the whole thing had
been a hallucination.
He felt in a very curious condition today, a condition similar to that
which had preceded his fits in bygone years.
He remembered that at such times he had been particularly
absentminded, and could not discriminate between objects and persons
unless he concentrated special attention upon them.
He remembered seeing something in the window marked at sixty
copecks. Therefore, if the shop existed and if this object were really in the
window, it would prove that he had been able to concentrate his attention on
this article at a moment when, as a general rule, his absence of mind would
have been too great to admit of any such concentration; in fact, very shortly
after he had left the railway station in such a state of agitation.
So he walked back looking about him for the shop, and his heart beat
with intolerable impatience. Ah! here was the very shop, and there was the
article marked “60 cop.” Of course, it’s sixty copecks, he thought, and
certainly worth no more. This idea amused him and he laughed.
But it was a hysterical laugh; he was feeling terribly oppressed. He
remembered clearly that just here, standing before this window, he had
suddenly turned round, just as earlier in the day he had turned and found the
dreadful eyes of Rogojin fixed upon him. Convinced, therefore, that in this
respect at all events he had been under no delusion, he left the shop and
went on.
This must be thought out; it was clear that there had been no
hallucination at the station then, either; something had actually happened to
him, on both occasions; there was no doubt of it. But again a loathing for all
mental exertion overmastered him; he would not think it out now, he would
put it off and think of something else. He remembered that during his
epileptic fits, or rather immediately preceding them, he had always
experienced a moment or two when his whole heart, and mind, and body
seemed to wake up to vigour and light; when he became filled with joy and
hope, and all his anxieties seemed to be swept away for ever; these
moments were but presentiments, as it were, of the one final second (it was
never more than a second) in which the fit came upon him. That second, of
course, was inexpressible. When his attack was over, and the prince
reflected on his symptoms, he used to say to himself: “These moments,
short as they are, when I feel such extreme consciousness of myself, and
consequently more of life than at other times, are due only to the disease—
to the sudden rupture of normal conditions. Therefore they are not really a
higher kind of life, but a lower.” This reasoning, however, seemed to end in
a paradox, and lead to the further consideration:—“What matter though it
be only disease, an abnormal tension of the brain, if when I recall and
analyze the moment, it seems to have been one of harmony and beauty in
the highest degree—an instant of deepest sensation, overflowing with
unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and completest life?” Vague
though this sounds, it was perfectly comprehensible to Muishkin, though he
knew that it was but a feeble expression of his sensations.
That there was, indeed, beauty and harmony in those abnormal moments,
that they really contained the highest synthesis of life, he could not doubt,
nor even admit the possibility of doubt. He felt that they were not analogous
to the fantastic and unreal dreams due to intoxication by hashish, opium or
wine. Of that he could judge, when the attack was over. These instants were
characterized—to define it in a word—by an intense quickening of the
sense of personality. Since, in the last conscious moment preceding the
attack, he could say to himself, with full understanding of his words: “I
would give my whole life for this one instant,” then doubtless to him it
really was worth a lifetime. For the rest, he thought the dialectical part of
his argument of little worth; he saw only too clearly that the result of these
ecstatic moments was stupefaction, mental darkness, idiocy. No argument
was possible on that point. His conclusion, his estimate of the “moment,”
doubtless contained some error, yet the reality of the sensation troubled
him. What’s more unanswerable than a fact? And this fact had occurred.
The prince had confessed unreservedly to himself that the feeling of intense
beatitude in that crowded moment made the moment worth a lifetime. “I
feel then,” he said one day to Rogojin in Moscow, “I feel then as if I
understood those amazing words—‘There shall be no more time.’” And he
added with a smile: “No doubt the epileptic Mahomet refers to that same
moment when he says that he visited all the dwellings of Allah, in less time
than was needed to empty his pitcher of water.” Yes, he had often met
Rogojin in Moscow, and many were the subjects they discussed. “He told
me I had been a brother to him,” thought the prince. “He said so today, for
the first time.”
He was sitting in the Summer Garden on a seat under a tree, and his mind
dwelt on the matter. It was about seven o’clock, and the place was empty.
The stifling atmosphere foretold a storm, and the prince felt a certain charm
in the contemplative mood which possessed him. He found pleasure, too, in
gazing at the exterior objects around him. All the time he was trying to
forget some thing, to escape from some idea that haunted him; but
melancholy thoughts came back, though he would so willingly have
escaped from them. He remembered suddenly how he had been talking to
the waiter, while he dined, about a recently committed murder which the
whole town was discussing, and as he thought of it something strange came
over him. He was seized all at once by a violent desire, almost a temptation,
against which he strove in vain.
He jumped up and walked off as fast as he could towards the “Petersburg
Side.” [One of the quarters of St. Petersburg.] He had asked someone, a
little while before, to show him which was the Petersburg Side, on the
banks of the Neva. He had not gone there, however; and he knew very well
that it was of no use to go now, for he would certainly not find Lebedeff’s
relation at home. He had the address, but she must certainly have gone to
Pavlofsk, or Colia would have let him know. If he were to go now, it would
merely be out of curiosity, but a sudden, new idea had come into his head.
However, it was something to move on and know where he was going. A
minute later he was still moving on, but without knowing anything. He
could no longer think out his new idea. He tried to take an interest in all he
saw; in the sky, in the Neva. He spoke to some children he met. He felt his
epileptic condition becoming more and more developed. The evening was
very close; thunder was heard some way off.
The prince was haunted all that day by the face of Lebedeff’s nephew
whom he had seen for the first time that morning, just as one is haunted at
times by some persistent musical refrain. By a curious association of ideas,
the young man always appeared as the murderer of whom Lebedeff had
spoken when introducing him to Muishkin. Yes, he had read something
about the murder, and that quite recently. Since he came to Russia, he had
heard many stories of this kind, and was interested in them. His
conversation with the waiter, an hour ago, chanced to be on the subject of
this murder of the Zemarins, and the latter had agreed with him about it. He
thought of the waiter again, and decided that he was no fool, but a steady,
intelligent man: though, said he to himself, “God knows what he may really
be; in a country with which one is unfamiliar it is difficult to understand the
people one meets.” He was beginning to have a passionate faith in the
Russian soul, however, and what discoveries he had made in the last six
months, what unexpected discoveries! But every soul is a mystery, and
depths of mystery lie in the soul of a Russian. He had been intimate with
Rogojin, for example, and a brotherly friendship had sprung up between
them—yet did he really know him? What chaos and ugliness fills the world
at times! What a self-satisfied rascal is that nephew of Lebedeff’s! “But
what am I thinking,” continued the prince to himself. “Can he really have
committed that crime? Did he kill those six persons? I seem to be confusing
things… how strange it all is…. My head goes round… And Lebedeff’s
daughter—how sympathetic and charming her face was as she held the
child in her arms! What an innocent look and child-like laugh she had! It is
curious that I had forgotten her until now. I expect Lebedeff adores her—
and I really believe, when I think of it, that as sure as two and two make
four, he is fond of that nephew, too!”
Well, why should he judge them so hastily! Could he really say what they
were, after one short visit? Even Lebedeff seemed an enigma today. Did he
expect to find him so? He had never seen him like that before. Lebedeff and
the Comtesse du Barry! Good Heavens! If Rogojin should really kill
someone, it would not, at any rate, be such a senseless, chaotic affair. A
knife made to a special pattern, and six people killed in a kind of delirium.
But Rogojin also had a knife made to a special pattern. Can it be that
Rogojin wishes to murder anyone? The prince began to tremble violently.
“It is a crime on my part to imagine anything so base, with such cynical
frankness.” His face reddened with shame at the thought; and then there
came across him as in a flash the memory of the incidents at the Pavlofsk
station, and at the other station in the morning; and the question asked him
by Rogojin about the eyes and Rogojin’s cross, that he was even now
wearing; and the benediction of Rogojin’s mother; and his embrace on the
darkened staircase—that last supreme renunciation—and now, to find
himself full of this new “idea,” staring into shop-windows, and looking
round for things—how base he was!
Despair overmastered his soul; he would not go on, he would go back to
his hotel; he even turned and went the other way; but a moment after he
changed his mind again and went on in the old direction.
Why, here he was on the Petersburg Side already, quite close to the
house! Where was his “idea”? He was marching along without it now. Yes,
his malady was coming back, it was clear enough; all this gloom and
heaviness, all these “ideas,” were nothing more nor less than a fit coming
on; perhaps he would have a fit this very day.
But just now all the gloom and darkness had fled, his heart felt full of joy
and hope, there was no such thing as doubt. And yes, he hadn’t seen her for
so long; he really must see her. He wished he could meet Rogojin; he would
take his hand, and they would go to her together. His heart was pure, he was
no rival of Parfen’s. Tomorrow, he would go and tell him that he had seen
her. Why, he had only come for the sole purpose of seeing her, all the way
from Moscow! Perhaps she might be here still, who knows? She might not
have gone away to Pavlofsk yet.
Yes, all this must be put straight and above-board, there must be no more
passionate renouncements, such as Rogojin’s. It must all be clear as day.
Cannot Rogojin’s soul bear the light? He said he did not love her with
sympathy and pity; true, he added that “your pity is greater than my love,”
but he was not quite fair on himself there. Kin! Rogojin reading a book—
wasn’t that sympathy beginning? Did it not show that he comprehended his
relations with her? And his story of waiting day and night for her
forgiveness? That didn’t look quite like passion alone.
And as to her face, could it inspire nothing but passion? Could her face
inspire passion at all now? Oh, it inspired suffering, grief, overwhelming
grief of the soul! A poignant, agonizing memory swept over the prince’s
heart.
Yes, agonizing. He remembered how he had suffered that first day when
he thought he observed in her the symptoms of madness. He had almost
fallen into despair. How could he have lost his hold upon her when she ran
away from him to Rogojin? He ought to have run after her himself, rather
than wait for news as he had done. Can Rogojin have failed to observe, up
to now, that she is mad? Rogojin attributes her strangeness to other causes,
to passion! What insane jealousy! What was it he had hinted at in that
suggestion of his? The prince suddenly blushed, and shuddered to his very
heart.
But why recall all this? There was insanity on both sides. For him, the
prince, to love this woman with passion, was unthinkable. It would be cruel
and inhuman. Yes. Rogojin is not fair to himself; he has a large heart; he has
aptitude for sympathy. When he learns the truth, and finds what a pitiable
being is this injured, broken, half-insane creature, he will forgive her all the
torment she has caused him. He will become her slave, her brother, her
friend. Compassion will teach even Rogojin, it will show him how to
reason. Compassion is the chief law of human existence. Oh, how guilty he
felt towards Rogojin! And, for a few warm, hasty words spoken in Moscow,
Parfen had called him “brother,” while he—but no, this was delirium! It
would all come right! That gloomy Parfen had implied that his faith was
waning; he must suffer dreadfully. He said he liked to look at that picture; it
was not that he liked it, but he felt the need of looking at it. Rogojin was not
merely a passionate soul; he was a fighter. He was fighting for the
restoration of his dying faith. He must have something to hold on to and
believe, and someone to believe in. What a strange picture that of Holbein’s
is! Why, this is the street, and here’s the house, No. 16.
The prince rang the bell, and asked for Nastasia Philipovna. The lady of
the house came out, and stated that Nastasia had gone to stay with Daria
Alexeyevna at Pavlofsk, and might be there some days.
Madame Filisoff was a little woman of forty, with a cunning face, and
crafty, piercing eyes. When, with an air of mystery, she asked her visitor’s
name, he refused at first to answer, but in a moment he changed his mind,
and left strict instructions that it should be given to Nastasia Philipovna.
The urgency of his request seemed to impress Madame Filisoff, and she put
on a knowing expression, as if to say, “You need not be afraid, I quite
understand.” The prince’s name evidently was a great surprise to her. He
stood and looked absently at her for a moment, then turned, and took the
road back to his hotel. But he went away not as he came. A great change
had suddenly come over him. He went blindly forward; his knees shook
under him; he was tormented by “ideas”; his lips were blue, and trembled
with a feeble, meaningless smile. His demon was upon him once more.
What had happened to him? Why was his brow clammy with drops of
moisture, his knees shaking beneath him, and his soul oppressed with a cold
gloom? Was it because he had just seen these dreadful eyes again? Why, he
had left the Summer Garden on purpose to see them; that had been his
“idea.” He had wished to assure himself that he would see them once more
at that house. Then why was he so overwhelmed now, having seen them as
he expected? just as though he had not expected to see them! Yes, they were
the very same eyes; and no doubt about it. The same that he had seen in the
crowd that morning at the station, the same that he had surprised in
Rogojin’s rooms some hours later, when the latter had replied to his inquiry
with a sneering laugh, “Well, whose eyes were they?” Then for the third
time they had appeared just as he was getting into the train on his way to
see Aglaya. He had had a strong impulse to rush up to Rogojin, and repeat
his words of the morning “Whose eyes are they?” Instead he had fled from
the station, and knew nothing more, until he found himself gazing into the
window of a cutler’s shop, and wondering if a knife with a staghorn handle
would cost more than sixty copecks. And as the prince sat dreaming in the
Summer Garden under a lime-tree, a wicked demon had come and
whispered in his car: “Rogojin has been spying upon you and watching you
all the morning in a frenzy of desperation. When he finds you have not gone
to Pavlofsk—a terrible discovery for him—he will surely go at once to that
house in Petersburg Side, and watch for you there, although only this
morning you gave your word of honour not to see her, and swore that you
had not come to Petersburg for that purpose.” And thereupon the prince had
hastened off to that house, and what was there in the fact that he had met
Rogojin there? He had only seen a wretched, suffering creature, whose state
of mind was gloomy and miserable, but most comprehensible. In the
morning Rogojin had seemed to be trying to keep out of the way; but at the
station this afternoon he had stood out, he had concealed himself, indeed,
less than the prince himself; at the house, now, he had stood fifty yards off
on the other side of the road, with folded hands, watching, plainly in view
and apparently desirous of being seen. He had stood there like an accuser,
like a judge, not like a—a what?
And why had not the prince approached him and spoken to him, instead
of turning away and pretending he had seen nothing, although their eyes
met? (Yes, their eyes had met, and they had looked at each other.) Why, he
had himself wished to take Rogojin by the hand and go in together, he had
himself determined to go to him on the morrow and tell him that he had
seen her, he had repudiated the demon as he walked to the house, and his
heart had been full of joy.
Was there something in the whole aspect of the man, today, sufficient to
justify the prince’s terror, and the awful suspicions of his demon?
Something seen, but indescribable, which filled him with dreadful
presentiments? Yes, he was convinced of it—convinced of what? (Oh, how
mean and hideous of him to feel this conviction, this presentiment! How he
blamed himself for it!) “Speak if you dare, and tell me, what is the
presentiment?” he repeated to himself, over and over again. “Put it into
words, speak out clearly and distinctly. Oh, miserable coward that I am!”
The prince flushed with shame for his own baseness. “How shall I ever look
this man in the face again? My God, what a day! And what a nightmare,
what a nightmare!”
There was a moment, during this long, wretched walk back from the
Petersburg Side, when the prince felt an irresistible desire to go straight to
Rogojin’s, wait for him, embrace him with tears of shame and contrition,
and tell him of his distrust, and finish with it—once for all.
But here he was back at his hotel.
How often during the day he had thought of this hotel with loathing—its
corridor, its rooms, its stairs. How he had dreaded coming back to it, for
some reason.
“What a regular old woman I am today,” he had said to himself each
time, with annoyance. “I believe in every foolish presentiment that comes
into my head.”
He stopped for a moment at the door; a great flush of shame came over
him. “I am a coward, a wretched coward,” he said, and moved forward
again; but once more he paused.
Among all the incidents of the day, one recurred to his mind to the
exclusion of the rest; although now that his self-control was regained, and
he was no longer under the influence of a nightmare, he was able to think of
it calmly. It concerned the knife on Rogojin’s table. “Why should not
Rogojin have as many knives on his table as he chooses?” thought the
prince, wondering at his suspicions, as he had done when he found himself
looking into the cutler’s window. “What could it have to do with me?” he
said to himself again, and stopped as if rooted to the ground by a kind of
paralysis of limb such as attacks people under the stress of some
humiliating recollection.
The doorway was dark and gloomy at any time; but just at this moment it
was rendered doubly so by the fact that the thunder-storm had just broken,
and the rain was coming down in torrents.
And in the semi-darkness the prince distinguished a man standing close
to the stairs, apparently waiting.
There was nothing particularly significant in the fact that a man was
standing back in the doorway, waiting to come out or go upstairs; but the
prince felt an irresistible conviction that he knew this man, and that it was
Rogojin. The man moved on up the stairs; a moment later the prince passed
up them, too. His heart froze within him. “In a minute or two I shall know
all,” he thought.
The staircase led to the first and second corridors of the hotel, along
which lay the guests’ bedrooms. As is often the case in Petersburg houses, it
was narrow and very dark, and turned around a massive stone column.
On the first landing, which was as small as the necessary turn of the stairs
allowed, there was a niche in the column, about half a yard wide, and in this
niche the prince felt convinced that a man stood concealed. He thought he
could distinguish a figure standing there. He would pass by quickly and not
look. He took a step forward, but could bear the uncertainty no longer and
turned his head.
The eyes—the same two eyes—met his! The man concealed in the niche
had also taken a step forward. For one second they stood face to face.
Suddenly the prince caught the man by the shoulder and twisted him
round towards the light, so that he might see his face more clearly.
Rogojin’s eyes flashed, and a smile of insanity distorted his countenance.
His right hand was raised, and something glittered in it. The prince did not
think of trying to stop it. All he could remember afterwards was that he
seemed to have called out:
“Parfen! I won’t believe it.”
Next moment something appeared to burst open before him: a wonderful
inner light illuminated his soul. This lasted perhaps half a second, yet he
distinctly remembered hearing the beginning of the wail, the strange,
dreadful wail, which burst from his lips of its own accord, and which no
effort of will on his part could suppress.
Next moment he was absolutely unconscious; black darkness blotted out
everything.
He had fallen in an epileptic fit.
As is well known, these fits occur instantaneously. The face, especially
the eyes, become terribly disfigured, convulsions seize the limbs, a terrible
cry breaks from the sufferer, a wail from which everything human seems to
be blotted out, so that it is impossible to believe that the man who has just
fallen is the same who emitted the dreadful cry. It seems more as though
some other being, inside the stricken one, had cried. Many people have
borne witness to this impression; and many cannot behold an epileptic fit
without a feeling of mysterious terror and dread.
Such a feeling, we must suppose, overtook Rogojin at this moment, and
saved the prince’s life. Not knowing that it was a fit, and seeing his victim
disappear head foremost into the darkness, hearing his head strike the stone
steps below with a crash, Rogojin rushed downstairs, skirting the body, and
flung himself headlong out of the hotel, like a raving madman.
