Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (364 page)

“Do you know what!” said Rogozhin, suddenly more eager, and his eyes kindled. “How is it you give in to me like this? Have you quite got over loving her? You used to be miserable, anyway; I saw that. Then why is it you’ve come here in such haste? From pity?” and his face worked with spiteful mockery. “Ha, ha!”

“You think I am deceiving you now?” Myshkin inquired.

“No, I believe you; but I can’t make it out. One might almost believe that your pity is greater than my love.”

A certain malice and an urgent desire to express himself at once glowed in his face.

“Well, there’s no distinguishing your love from hate,” said Myshkin, smiling. “It will pass, and then perhaps the trouble will be worse. I tell you this, brother Parfyon ...”

“That I shall murder her?”

Myshkin started.

“You will hate her bitterly for this love, for all this torture you are suffering now. What is strangest of all to me is that she can again mean to marry you. When I heard it yesterday, I scarcely believed it, and it made me so unhappy! You see, she has thrown you up twice and run away on the wedding day; so she has some foreboding. What does she find in you now? It’s not your money; that’s nonsense. And no doubt you’ve wasted a good deal of it by now. Can it be simply to get a husband? Why, she could find plenty of others. Any man would be better than you, because you really may murder her; and she knows that only too well now, perhaps. Is it because you love her so passionately? It’s true that may be it. I’ve heard there are women who want just that sort of love. . . . Only . . .” Myshkin stopped and sank into thought.

“Why are you smiling at my father’s portrait again?” asked Rogozhin, who was watching every movement, every change in Myshkin’s face with extraordinary intentness.

“Why did I smile? Oh, it struck me that if it were not for this burden laid upon you, if it were not for this love, you would most likely have become exactly like your father, and in a very short time too. You would have settled down quietly in this house with an obedient and submissive wife; you would have been stern and sparing of words, trusting no one and feeling no desire to; doing nothing but heap up money in dreary silence. At the most you would sometimes have praised the old books and been interested in the Old Believers’ fashion of crossing themselves, and that only in your old age....”

“Laugh away; but, do you know, she said the very same thing not long ago, when she too was looking at that portrait! It’s queer how you both say the same thing now.”

“Why, has she been in your house?” asked Myshkin with interest.

“Yes. She looked a long time at the portrait and asked me about my father. ‘You’d be just such another,’ she laughed to me afterwards. ‘You have strong passions, Parfyon Semyonovitch,’ she said; ‘such passions that you might have been carried by them straight off to Siberia, if you weren’t intelligent too. For you have a great deal of intelligence,’ she said. (Those were her words. Would you believe it? It was the first time I’d heard her say such a thing.) ‘\bu would have soon given up all this silliness, and as you are quite an uneducated man, you would have begun saving money and have settled down like your father in this house with your Skoptsy. Maybe you would have gone over to their faith in the end, and have grown so fond of your money that you would have heaped up not two but ten million perhaps, and have died of hunger on your bags of money. For you are passionate in everything; you push everything to a passion.’ That was just how she talked, almost in those very words. She had never talked to me like that before. You know she always talks nonsense with me, or jeers at me; and, indeed, she began laughing this time; but then she grew so dejected, she walked all over the house, looked at everything, and seemed scared. ‘I’ll change all this and do it up, or if you like I’ll buy another house before we are married.”No, no,’ she said; ‘nothing must be changed here, we’ll live like this. I want to live with your mother,’ she said, ‘when I become your wife.’ I took her to my mother. She was respectful to her, as if she had been her own daughter. For the last two years mother has not been quite in her right mind (she is ill), and since my father died she’s become quite like a child: she can’t talk, she can’t walk, and only bows to every one she sees. If we didn’t feed her, I believe she wouldn’t notice it for three days. I took my mother’s right hand, folded her fingers. ‘Bless her, mother,’ said I; ‘she is going to the altar with me.’ Then she kissed my mother’s hand with feeling. ‘Your mother must have had a great deal of sorrow to bear,’ said she. She saw this book here. ‘What, have you begun reading Russian history?’ (She said to me herself in Moscow once, ‘You should educate yourself. You might at least read Solovyev’s Russian history. \bu know nothing at all.’) ‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘go on reading. I’ll write you a list myself of the books you ought to read first, shall I?’And never, never before had she talked to me like that, so that I was positively amazed. For the first time I breathed like a living man.”

“lam very glad of that, Parfyon,” said Myshkin with sincere feeling, “very glad. Who knows, after all perhaps God will bring you together.”

“That will never be!” Rogozhin cried hotly.

“Listen, Parfyon. Since you love her so, surely you want to gain her respect? And if you want to, you can’t be without hope? I said just now that I was unable to comprehend what makes her marry you. But though I can’t understand it, I have no doubt that there must be a sufficient, sensible reason. She is convinced of your love, but she must believe in some of your good qualities also. It can’t be otherwise. What you said just now confirms this. You told me yourself that she has found it possible to speak to you in quite a different way from how she has spoken and behaved to you before. \bu are suspicious and jealous, and that has made you exaggerate everything you’ve noticed amiss. Of course she doesn’t think so ill of you as you say. If she did, it would be as good as deliberately going to be drowned or murdered to marry you. Is that possible?

Who would deliberately go to be drowned or murdered?”

Parfyon listened with a bitter smile to Myshkin’s eager words. His conviction, it seemed, was not to be shaken.

“How dreadfully you look at me now, Parfyon!” broke from Myshkin with a feeling of dread.

“To be drowned or murdered!” said Rogozhin at last. “Ha! Why, that’s just why she is marrying me, because she expects to be murdered! Do you mean to say, prince, you’ve never yet had a notion of what’s at the root of it all?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Well, perhaps you really don’t understand. He, he! They do say you are . . . not quite right. She loves another man — take that in! Just as I love her now, she loves another man now. And do you know who that other man is? It’s you! What! you didn’t know?”

“Me?”

“You. She has loved you ever since that day — her birthday. Only she thinks it’s out of the question to marry you, because she thinks she would disgrace vou and ruin vour whole life. ‘Everyone knows what I

am,’ she says. She still harps upon that. She told me all this straight out to my face. She is afraid of ruining and of disgracing you; but I don’t matter, she can marry me. So much for what she thinks of me! Notice that too.”

“But why did she run away from you to me and . . . from me ...”

“And from you to me! Ha! Why, all sorts of things come into her head. She is always in a sort of fever now. One day she’ll cry out, ‘I’ll make an end of myself and marry you! Let the wedding be soon.’ She hurries things on, fixes the day, but when the time comes near, she takes fright, or other ideas come to her, God knows! \bu’ve seen it; she cries and laughs and shakes with fever. And what is there strange in her having run away from you? She ran away from you then, because she realised how much she loved you. It was too much for her to stay with you. You said just now that I sought her out in Moscow. That’s not true; she ran to me straight from you of herself. ‘Fix the day,’ she said. ‘I am ready! Give me champagne! Let’s go to the gypsies . . .’ she cries. She would have drowned herself long ago,

if she had not had me; that’s the truth. She doesn’t do that because, perhaps, I am more dreadful than the water. It’s from spite she is marrying me. If she marries me, I tell you for sure it will be from spite. . .

“But how can you .. . how can you!” cried Myshkin, but broke off. He looked at Rogozhin with horror.

“Why don’t you finish?” the latter replied, grinning. “Would you like me to tell you what you are thinking to yourself at this very moment? ‘How can she be his wife after this? How can I let her come to that?’ I know you think that....”

“I didn’t come here with that idea, Parfyon; I tell you it was not that I had in my mind....”

“It may be that you didn’t come with that idea and that wasn’t in your mind, but now it certainly has become your idea. Ha-ha! Well, that’s enough! Why are you so upset? Can you really not have known it? You surprise me!”

“That’s all jealousy, Parfyon; it’s all morbidness. \bu have exaggerated it all immensely,” Myshkin muttered in violent agitation. “What are you doing?”

“Leave it alone,” said Parfyon, and he quickly snatched from Myshkin’s hand a knife which the latter had picked up from the table, and put it back where it had been before, beside the book.

“I feel as though I had known when I was coming to Peters-burg, as though I had foreseen it,” Myshkin went on. “I didn’t want to come here; I wanted to forget everything here, to root it out of my heart! Well, good-bye! ... But what are you doing?”

As he talked Myshkin had absent-mindedly again picked up the same knife from the table, and again Rogozhin took it out of his hands and threw it on the table. It was a plain knife that wouldn’t shut up, with a horn handle, and a blade seven inches long and of about the usual breadth.

Seeing that Myshkin had specially noticed that the knife had been twice taken out of his hands, Rogozhin snatched it up in angry vexation, put it in the book, and flung the book on another table.

“Do you cut the pages with it?” Myshkin asked, but almost mechanically, still apparently absorbed in deep thought.

“Yes.”

“But it’s a garden knife?”

“Yes, it is. Can’t one cut a book with a garden knife?”

“But it’s ... quite a new one.”

“What if it is new? Mayn’t I buy a new knife?” Rogozhin cried in a perfect frenzy at last, growing more exasperated at every word.

Myshkin started and looked intently at Rogozhin. “Ach, we are a set!” he laughed suddenly, rousing himself completely. “Excuse me, brother, when my head is heavy, as it is now, and my illness ... I become utterly, utterly absent-minded and ridiculous. I meant to ask you about something quite different... . I’ve forgotten now. Good-bye! ...”

“Not that way,” said Rogozhin. “I’ve forgotten.”

“This way, this way, come, I’ll show you.”

CHAPTER 4

They went through the same rooms that Myshkin had passed through already; Rogozhin walked a little in front, Myshkin followed him. They went into a big room. On the walls there were several pictures, all of them portraits of bishops or landscapes in which nothing could be distinguished. Over the door leading into the next room there hung a picture of rather strange shape, about two yards in breadth and not more than a foot high. It was a painting of our Saviour who had just been taken from the cross. Myshkin glanced at it as though recalling something, but he was about to pass through the door without stopping. He felt very depressed and wanted to get out of this house as soon as possible. But Rogozhin suddenly stopped before the picture.

“All these pictures here were bought for a rouble or two by my father at auctions,” he said. “He liked pictures. A man who knows about paintings looked at all of them. They are rubbish,’ he said; ‘but that one, that picture over the door there, which was bought for a couple of roubles too,’ he said, ‘was of value.’ When my father was alive one man turned up who was ready to give three hundred and fifty roubles for it; but Savelyev, a merchant who is very fond of pictures, went up to four hundred for it, and last week he offered my brother Semyon Semyonovitch five hundred for it. I’ve kept it for myself.”

“Why, it.. . it’s a copy of a Holbein,” said Myshkin, who had by now examined the picture, “and, though I don’t know much about it, I think it’s a very good copy. I saw the picture abroad and I can’t forget it. But... what’s the matter?”

Rogozhin suddenly turned away from the picture and went on. No doubt his preoccupation and a peculiar, strangely irritable mood which had so suddenly shown itself in him might have explained this abruptness. Yet it seemed strange to Myshkin that the conversation, which had not been begun by him, should have been broken off so suddenly without Rogozhin’s answering him.

“And by the way, Lyov Nikolayevitch, I’ve long meant to ask you, do you believe in God?” said Rogozhin suddenly, after having gone on a few steps.

“How strangely you question me and . . . look after me!” Myshkin could not help observing.

“I like looking at that picture,” Rogozhin muttered after a pause, seeming to have forgotten his question.

“At that picture!” cried Myshkin, struck by a sudden thought. “At that picture! Why, that picture might make some people lose theirfaith.”

“That’s what it is doing,” Rogozhin assented unexpectedly.

They were just at the front door.

“What?” Myshkin stopped short. “What do you mean? I was almost joking, and you are so serious! And why do you ask whether I believe in God?”

“Oh, nothing. I meant to ask you before. Many people don’t believe nowadays. Is it true — you’ve lived abroad — a man told me when he was drunk that there are more who don’t believe in God among us in Russia than in all other countries? ‘It’s easier for us than for them,’ he said, ‘because we have gone further than they have.’ ...”

Rogozhin smiled bitterly. When he had asked his question, he suddenly opened the door and, holding the handle, waited for Myshkin to go out. Myshkin was surprised, but he went out. Rogozhin followed him on to the landing and closed the door behind him. They stood facing one another, as though neither knew where they were and what they had to do next.