Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (423 page)

Myshkin remembered the doctor’s visit. He remembered that Lebedyev had pestered him the evening before about his not being well, and when Myshkin positively declined medical aid, Lebedyev suddenly made his appearance with a doctor, pretending that they had both just come from Ippolit Terentyev, who was much worse, and that the doctor had something to tell Myshkin about the invalid. Myshkin praised Lebedyev, and received the doctor very cordially. They began talking at once of Ippolit. The doctor asked him to qive a minute account of the scene of the attempted suicide, and the prince quite delighted him by his description and explanation of the incident. They talked of the climate of Petersburg, of Myshkin’s affliction, of Switzerland, and of Doctor Schneider. The discussion of Schneider’s system and Myshkin’s stories about him so interested the doctor that he stayed two hours with him smoking Myshkin’s excellent cigars, while Lebedyev produced a delicious liqueur, which was brought in by Vera. Then the doctor, who was a married man and pater-familias, overflowed with such compliments to Vera that he excited her intense indignation. They parted friends. On leaving Myshkin the doctor said to Lebedyev, if every one like that were to be put under control, who would be left to control them? In reply to Lebedyev’s tragic description of the imminent event, the doctor shook his head slyly and cunningly, and observed at last that, even apart from the fact that “there’s nobody a man may not marry,” the fascinating lady, besides being of incomparable beauty, which alone might well attract a wealthy man, was also — so he, at least, had heard— “possessed of a fortune that had come to her from Totsky and Rogozhin, pearls and diamonds, shawls and furniture; and therefore the dear prince’s choice, far from being a proof of peculiar, so to say, glaring foolishness, was rather a testimony to the shrewdness of his worldly wisdom and prudence, and therefore tended to the very opposite conclusion, completely in the prince’s favour, in fact....”

This idea struck Lebedyev too, and he did not go beyond it. “And now,” he added to Myshkin, “you will see nothing from me but devotion and readiness to shed my blood for you, and I’ve come to tell you so.”

Ippolit too had distracted Myshkin’s mind during those days; he sent for him only too often. The family was living in a little house not far off. The little ones, Ippolit’s brother and sister, were glad to be at Pavlovsk, if only because they could escape from the invalid into the garden. The poor captain’s widow was left at his mercy and was completely his victim. Myshkin was obliged to intervene and make peace between them every day, and the invalid still called him his “nurse,” though at the same time he seemed to feel bound to despise him for playing the part of peacemaker. He was in high dudgeon against Kolya because the latter had scarcely visited him of late, having stayed at first beside his dying father and afterwards with his widowed mother. At last he made Myshkin’s approaching marriage to Nastasya Filippovna the butt of his gibes, and ended by offending the prince and making him really angry at last. Myshkin gave up visiting him. Two days later the captain’s widow trotted round in the morning and begged Myshkin, with tears, to come to them or “that fellow would be the death of her.” She added that the invalid wanted to tell him a great secret. Myshkin went.

Ippolit wanted to make it up, wept, and after his tears, of course, felt more spiteful than ever, but was afraid to show his spite. He was very ill, and there was every sign that the end was close at hand. He had no secret to tell him, except some earnest requests — breathless, so to say, with emotion (possibly shammed)— “to beware of Rogozhin.”

“He is a man who will never give up his object. He’s not like you and me, prince; if he wants a thing, nothing will shake him,” &c. &c.

Myshkin began questioning him more in detail, tried to get at facts of some sort. But there were no facts except Ippolit’s personal sentiments and impressions. To his intense gratification, Ippolit did, however, at last succeed in scaring Myshkin thoroughly. At first he was unwilling to respond to some of Ippolit’s questions, and only smiled at his advice “to go abroad; there were Russian priests everywhere, and he could be married there.” But Ippolit ended at last with the suggestion: “It’s for Aglaia Ivanovna I am afraid, you know; Rogozhin knows how you love her. It’s a case of love for love. “Vbu have robbed him of Nastasya Filippovna, he will kill Aglaia Ivanovna; though she’s not yours now, still you’d feel it, wouldn’t you?”

He attained his object. Myshkin left him almost beside himself.

These warnings about Rogozhin came the day before the wedding. Myshkin saw Nastasya Filippovna that evening for the last time before the wedding. But she was not in a state to reassure him. On the contrary, she had of late made him more and more uneasy. Till then, that is a few days before, when she saw him she made every effort to cheer him up, and was dreadfully afraid of his looking sad. She even tried sinqinq to him; most frequently she would tell him everything amusing she could think of. Myshkin almost always pretended to laugh heartily. Sometimes he did really laugh at the brilliant wit and genuine feeling with which she sometimes told stories, when she was carried away by her subject, as she often was. Seeing Myshkin’s mirth, seeing the impression made on him, she was delighted, and began to feel proud of herself. But now her melancholy and brooding grew more marked every hour. His conviction of Nastasya Filippovna’s condition did not waver; but for that conviction all her behaviour now would have seemed to him enigmatic and unaccountable. But he genuinely believed that her recovery was possible. He had been quite truthful in telling Yevgeny Pavlovitch that he loved her truly and sincerely, and in his love for her there was an element of the tenderness for some sick, unhappy child who could not be left to shift for itself. He did not explain to anyone his feeling for her, and, in fact, disliked speaking of it, when he found it impossible to avoid the subject. When they were together, they never discussed their “feelings,” as though they had taken a vow not to do so. Anyone might have taken part in their everyday gay and lively conversation. Darya Alexeyevna used to say afterwards that she had done nothing all this time, but wonder and rejoice, as she looked at them.

But his view of Nastasya Filippovna’s spiritual and mental condition to some extent saved him from many perplexities. Now she was completely different from the woman he had known three months before. He no longer wondered, for instance, why she had run away from marrying him then with tears, with curses and reproaches, yet now she was herself insisting on the marriage. So she was no longer afraid that marriage with her would be misery for him, thought Myshkin. Such a rapid growth of self-confidence could not be natural in her, in his opinion. But, again, this self-confidence could not be due simply to her hatred for Aglaia. Nastasya Filippovna was capable of feeling too deeply for that. It could not come from dread of her fate with Rogozhin. All these causes as well as others might indeed enter into it. But what was clearest to his mind was what he had suspected long ago — that is, that the poor sick soul had broken down. Though all this saved him in one way from perplexity, it could not give him any peace or rest all that time. At times he tried, as it were, not to think of anything. He seemed really to look on his marriage as some insignificant formality, he held his own future so cheap. As for protests, conversations like the one with “Vfevgeny Pavlovitch, he was utterly unable to answer them, and felt himself absolutely incompetent, and so avoided all talk of the kind.

He noticed, however, that Nastasya Filippovna knew and understood quite well what Aglaia meant for him. She did not speak, but he saw her “face,” when she found him sometimes preparing to go to the Epanchins’. When the Epanchins left Pavlovsk, she was positively radiant. Unobservant and unsuspicious as he was, he had begun to be worried by the thought that Nastasya Filippovna might make up her mind to some public scandal to get Aglaia out of Pavlovsk. The talk and commotion about the wedding in all the villas was no doubt partly kept up by Nastasya Filippovna in order to irritate her rival. As it was difficult to meet the Epanchins, Nastasya Filippovna arranged to drive right in front of their windows with the prince in her carriage beside her. This was a horrible surprise for Myshkin. He realised it, as he usually did, when it was too late to set things right, when the carriage was actually passing the windows. He said nothing, but he was ill for two days afterwards. She did not repeat the experiment. During the last few days before the wedding she had frequent fits of brooding. She always ended by overcoming her melancholy, and became cheerful again, but more gently, not so noisily, not so happily cheerful as she had been of late. Myshkin redoubled his attention. It struck him as curious that she never spoke of Rogozhin. Only once, five days before the wedding, a message was suddenly brought him from Darya Alexeyevna to come at once, as Nastasya Filippovna was in a terrible state. He found her in a condition approaching complete madness. She kept screaming, shuddering, and crying out that Rogozhin was hidden in the garden, in their house, that she had seen him just now, that he would kill her in the night, that he would cut her throat! She could not be calmed all day. But that evening when Myshkin looked in on Ippolit for a moment, the captain’s widow, who had only just returned from the town where she had been on some little affair of her own, told him that Roqozhin had been to her lodqinq that day at Petersburg and had questioned her about Pavlovsk. In answer to her inquiry she said that Rogozhin had called on her at the very time when he was supposed to have been seen in the garden by Nastasya Filippovna. It was explained as pure imagination. Nastasya Filippovna went to the captain’s widow herself to question her more minutely, and was greatly relieved.

On the day before the wedding Myshkin left Nastasya Filippovna in a state of great excitement. Her wedding finery arrived from the dressmaker’s in Petersburg — her wedding dress, the bridal veil, and so on. Myshkin had not expected that she would be so much excited over her dress. He praised everything, and his praises made her happier than ever. But she let slip what was in her mind. She had heard that there was indignation in the town; that the madcaps of the place were getting up some sort of charivari with music, and possibly verses composed for the occasion; and that this was more or less with the approval of the rest of Pavlovsk society. And so she wanted to hold up her head higher than ever before them, to outshine them all with the taste and richness of her attire. “Let them shout, let them whistle if they dare!” Her eyes flashed at the very thought of it. She had another secret thought, but she did not utter that aloud. She hoped that Aglaia, or at any rate some one sent by her, would also be in the crowd incognito, in the church, would look and see, and she secretly prepared herself for it. She parted from Myshkin at eleven o’clock in the evening, absorbed in these ideas, but before it had struck midnight a messenger came running to Myshkin from Darya Alexeyevna begging him to “come at once, she’s very bad.”

Myshkin found his bride shut up in her bedroom, weeping, in despair, in hysterics. For a long time she would hear nothing that was said to her through the closed door. At last she opened it, letting no one in but Myshkin, shut the door, and fell on her knees before him. (So at least Darya Alexeyevna, who managed to get a peep, reported afterwards.)

“What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing to you?” she cried, embracing his feet convulsively.

Myshkin spent a whole hour with her; we do not know what they talked about. Darya Alexeyevna said that they parted peaceably and happily an hour later. Myshkin sent once more that night to inquire, but Nastasya Filippovna had dropped asleep.

In the morning before she waked, two more messengers were sent by Myshkin to Darya Alexeyevna, and it was a third messenger who was charged to report that “there was a perfect swarm of dressmakers and hairdressers from Petersburg round Nastasya Filippovna now; that there was no trace of yesterday’s upset; that she was busy, as such a beauty might well be, over dressing before her wedding; and that now, that very minute, there was an important consultation which of her diamonds to put on and how to put them on.”

Myshkin was completely reassured.

The account of what followed at the wedding was given me by people who saw it all, and I think it is correct.

The wedding was fixed for eight o’clock in the evening; Nastasya Filippovna was quite ready by seven. From six o’clock onwards a gaping crowd began gathering round Lebedyev’s villa, and a still larger one round Darya Alexeyevna’s. The church began filling up by seven o’clock. Vera Lebedyev and Kolya were in great alarm on Myshkin’s account. But they had a great deal to do in the house. They were arranging for a reception and refreshments in the prince’s rooms, though they hardly expected much of a gathering after the wedding. Besides the necessary persons who had to be present at the wedding, Lebedyev, the Ptitsyns, Ganya, the doctor with the Anna on his breast, and Darya Alexeyevna had been invited. When Myshkin asked Lebedyev why he had invited the doctor, “a man he hardly knew,” the latter replied complacently:

“An order on his breast, a man who is respected, for the style of the thing.”

And Myshkin laughed. Keller and Burdovsky, in evening suits, with gloves, looked quite correct, only Keller still troubled Myshkin and his supporters by a certain undisguised inclination for combat and cast very hostile looks at the sightseers who were gathering round the house. At last, at half-past seven, Myshkin set off for the church in a coach. We may observe, by the way, that he particularly wished not to omit any of the usual ceremonies. Everything was done openly, publicly, and “in due order.” Makinq his wav somehow or other throuqh the crowd in the church, escorted by Keller, who cast menacing looks to right and left of him, and followed by a continual fire of whispers and exclamations, Myshkin disappeared for a time into the altar end of the church, — and Keller went off to fetch the bride from Darya Alexeyevna’s, where he found at the entrance a crowd two or three times as large and fully three times as free and easy as at the prince’s. As he mounted the steps, he heard exclamations that were beyond endurance, and had already turned round to address an appropriate harangue to the crowd when he was luckily stopped by Burdovsky and by Darya Alexeyevna, who ran out at the door. They seized him and drew him indoors by force. Keller was irritated and hurried. Nastasya Filippovna got up, looked once more into the looking-glass, observed with a wry smile, as Keller reported afterwards, that she was “as pale as death,” bowed devoutly to the ikon, and went out on to the steps.