The Idiot (65 page)

‘I’ve been following you, Prince,’ said the gentleman.

‘Is it you, Keller?’ exclaimed the prince in surprise.

‘I’m looking for you, Prince. I waited for you outside the Yepanchins’ dacha - I couldn’t go in, of course. I followed you when you went off with the general. At your service, Prince - Keller is at your disposal. Ready to make any sacrifice and even to die, should it be necessary.’

‘But ... why?’

‘Well, there will certainly be a challenge. That Lieutenant Molovtsov, I know him, not personally, of course ... he won’t tolerate an insult. Of course, he’s inclined to view people like us, Rogozhin and myself, I mean, as riff-raff, and, perhaps, rightly so, so you’re the only one who needs to respond. You’ll have to pay for the bottles,
²
Prince. He’s been making inquiries about you, I heard, and tomorrow his friend will certainly call on you, and is perhaps waiting there now. If you’ll do me the honour of choosing me as your second, I’m ready to take the red cap;
³
that’s why I’ve been looking for you.’

‘So you’re talking about a duel, too!’ the prince suddenly began to laugh, to Keller’s extreme surprise. He laughed mightily. Keller, who had really almost been on tenterhooks until he had obtained satisfaction, offering himself as a second, almost took offence as he beheld the prince’s merry laughter.

‘But Prince, you seized him by the arms earlier on. That’s hard for a well-bred man to tolerate, and in public, too.’

‘Well, he pushed me in the chest!’ the prince exclaimed, laughing. ‘There’s no reason for us to fight! I shall apologize to him, and that will be the end of it. But if we’re to fight, then we shall fight!
Let him take a shot at me; why, I even want him to. Ha-ha! I know how to load a pistol now. Do you know that I’ve just been taught how to load a pistol? Do you know how to load a pistol, Keller? You have to buy the powder first, the pistol sort of powder, not the damp sort and not the large-grained sort that’s used for firing cannons; and then you have to put the powder in first, get felt from a door somewhere, and only then insert the bullet, and you mustn’t put the bullet in before the powder, because if you do it won’t fire. Ha-ha! Isn’t that a splendid reason, friend Keller? Ah, Keller, you know, I’m going to hug and kiss you in a moment. Ha-ha-ha! How did you manage to suddenly pop up in front of him like that earlier? Come and see me as soon as you can, and we’ll drink champagne. We’ll all get drunk! Do you know that I have twelve bottles of champagne, in Lebedev’s cellar? Lebedev sold them to me the other day “on the occasion”, the first day after I moved in, and

I bought them all! I’ll get the whole gang together! I say, you’re

not going to get any sleep tonight, are you?’

‘I’ll sleep like I do every other night, Prince.’

‘Well, pleasant dreams! Ha-ha!’

The prince walked across the road and vanished into the park, leaving the somewhat puzzled Keller in reflection. He had never seen the prince in such a strange mood before, and could not even have imagined it before now.

‘Perhaps it’s a fever, for he’s a nervous sort of fellow, and all this has had its effect, but of course he won’t get cold feet. Fellows like him never get cold feet, my God they don’t!’ Keller thought to himself. ‘Hmm, champagne! Interesting news, I’ll be bound. Twelve bottles, sir, a round dozen; not bad, a decent garrison. And I’ll bet that Lebedev won the champagne in a wager from someone else. Hmm ... he’s a rather agreeable fellow, this prince; yes, I like men like him; but there’s no time to be lost and ... if there’s champagne, now is the time ...’

That the prince was almost in a fever was, of course, true.

For a long time he roamed around the dusky park, and eventually ‘found himself’ walking along an avenue. In his consciousness there remained a memory of having already passed along this avenue before, from the bench to an old tree, tall and conspicuous, about a hundred paces away, some thirty or forty times, to and fro. He could not have remembered what he had thought in that hour, at least, that he had spent in the park, even if he had wanted to. However, he caught himself in a certain thought that made him shake with sudden laughter; though there was nothing to laugh about, he kept wanting to laugh. He imagined that the proposal for a duel might not have come into being in Keller’s head alone, and that, consequently, the episode about the loading of a pistol might not have been an accident ... ‘Bah!’ He stopped suddenly, illuminated by another idea. ‘She came down to the veranda, when I was sitting in the corner, and was terribly surprised when she found me there, and - laughed so much ... she began to talk about tea; and yet, I mean, she had this piece of paper in her hands then, s
o she must have known that I was sitting on the veranda, so why was she surprised? Ha-ha-ha!’

He grabbed the note out of his pocket and kissed it, but then stopped at once, and reflected.

‘How strange! How strange!’ he said a moment later, even with a kind of sadness: at moments of intense joy he always felt sad, he did not know why. He looked intently about him and was surprised that he had come here. He felt a great tiredness, approached the bench, and sat down on it. All around there was deep silence. The band had finished its concert in the park. There was probably no one there, now; of course, it was at least half-past eleven. The night was quiet, warm, light - a St Petersburg night in early June, but in the dense, shadowy park, in the avenue where he sat, it was almost completely dark.

If anyone had told him at that moment that he had fallen in love, was passionately in love, he would have rejected the idea with astonishment and, perhaps, even with indignation. And if anyone had added to this that Aglaya’s note was a love letter, the assignation of a lovers’ tryst, he would have burned with shame for that man, and might possibly have challenged him to a duel. All of this was completely sincere, and he never once doubted or had the slightest ‘ambiguous’ thought about the possibility of this girl loving him, or even of the possibility of him loving this girl. He would have considered monstrous the possibility that anyone might love him, ‘a man like him’. He fancied that it was simply mischief on her part, if there really was anything in it; but he was really quite indifferent to the mischief, and found it only natural; he was preoccupied and troubled by something else entirely. He fully believed what the agitated general had let slip earlier to the effect that she was laughing at everyone, and particularly at him, the prince. He felt not the slightest sense of injury at this; in his opinion, that was how it was bound to be. The main thing for him was that tomorrow he would see her again, early in the morning, would sit beside her on the green bench, listen to her tell him how to load a pistol, and gaze at her. He did not want any more than that. The question of what she intended to tell him and what this important matter was that affected him personally also flickered through his mind once or twice. What was more, in the real existence of this ‘important matter’, on account of which he was being summoned, he did not doubt for a single moment, but almost gave no thought to the important matter now, to the point where he did not even feel the slightest prompting to think about it.

The crunch of quiet footsteps on the gravel of the avenue made him lift his head. A man whose face it was hard to make out in the darkness approached the bench and sat down beside him. The prince quickly moved closer to him, almost touching him, and discerned the pale face of Rogozhin.

‘I knew you were wandering around here somewhere, it didn’t take me long to track you down,’ Rogozhin muttered through his teeth.

It was the first time they had met since their encounter in the corridor at the inn. Shaken by Rogozhin’s sudden appearance, the prince was for a long time unable to gather his thoughts, and an agonizing sensation rose up again in his heart. Rogozhin was evidently aware of the effect he was producing; but although he too was disconcerted at first, he spoke as though with an air of studied familiarity. However, the prince soon had the impression that there was nothing studied about it, and not even any particular embarrassment; if there was a certain awkwardness in his gestures and conversation, it was merely external; in his soul this man could never change.

‘How did you ... know where I was?’ the prince inquired, in order to say something.

‘I heard from Keller (I dropped in at your place) that you’d

gone to the park; well, I thought, so that’s the way it is.’

‘What do you mean, “that’s the way it is”?’ the prince anxiously picked up on the phrase that had slipped out.

Rogozhin smiled wryly, but gave no explanation.

‘I got your letter, Lev Nikolaich; there’s no point in all this ... you’re wasting your time ... But I come to you now from her: she wants to see you without fail; there is something she absolutely must tell you. She asks you to go there this evening.’

‘I’ll come tomorrow. I’m going home now; will you ... come to my place?’

‘Why? I’ve told you everything; good night.’

‘Are you sure you won’t come?’ the prince asked him quietly.

‘You’re an amazing fellow, Lev Nikolaich, one can’t help marvelling at you.’

Rogozhin smiled a caustic smile.

‘Why? Why do you have such hatred for me now?’ the prince interjected sadly and with feeling. ‘I mean, you yourself know that all the things you thought are not true. And actually, I had a pretty good idea that the hatred you had for me hadn’t passed yet, and do you know why? Because you made an attempt on my life, that’s why your hatred doesn’t pass. I tell you, the only Rogozhin I remember is the one with whom I exchanged crosses as a brother that day; I wrote that to you in my letter yesterday, so that you’d stop thinking about all that delirium and not begin to talk to me about it. Why are you avoiding me? Why are you hiding your hands from me? I tell you, I view all the things that happened that day as sheer delirium: I know exactly what you went through that day, as though it had been myself. The thing you imagined did not exist and could not exist. Why should there be any hatred between us?’

‘What hatred could you ever feel?’ Rogozhin laughed again in response to the prince’s sudden, heated address. He really was standing in a way that suggested he was avoiding him, having taken a couple of steps back and hiding his hands.

‘It’s not right for me to visit you at all now, Lev Nikolaich,’ he added, slowly and sententiously, in conclusion.

‘Do you hate me that much, then?’

‘I don’t like you, Lev Nikolaich, so why should I come and

see you? Ach, Prince, you’re like a child, when you want a toy, you take it out and play with it, but you don’t understand the real world. You’re saying exactly what you said in your letter, and do you think I don’t believe you? I believe your every word and know that you have never deceived me and will never deceive me in the future; but I still don’t like you. Look, you write that you’ve forgotten it all and that you only remember your brother Rogozhin, with whom you exchanged crosses, and not the Rogozhin who raised the knife against you that day. But how do you know what my feelings are? (Rogozhin smiled wryly again.) Why, I may have never once felt remorse since that day, and yet you’ve already sent me your brotherly forgiveness. I might have been thinking of something quite different that evening, while about that...’

‘You forgot even to think!’ the prince interjected. ‘And no wonder! And I’ll bet you got straight on the train that day and came down here to Pavlovsk to hear the band, and followed her and spied on her exactly as you did today. Not much of a surprise there! Why, if you hadn’t been in such a state that day that you were only capable of thinking about one thing, then you might not have raised the knife against me. I had a premonition right from the morning of that day, when I looked at you; do you know what you looked like then? Perhaps it was when we were exchanging crosses that this thought began to stir in me. Why did you take me to see the old woman that day? Did you think that would stay your hand? But you can’t possibly have thought that, you merely felt it, as I did ... We felt the same thing. Had you not raised your hand against me (which God turned away), how would I appear to you now? I mean, I did suspect you of it, the same sin, we felt the same! (And don’t frown! Oh, what are you laughing at?) “I felt no remorse!” Why, you wouldn’t have been able to feel remorse even if you’d wanted to, for you don’t like me. And even if I were as innocent as an angel before you, you would still not be able to endure me as long as you thought that it wasn’t you but me whom she loved. That must be what jealousy is. Except that - this is what I’ve been thinking about all week, Parfyon, and I’ll tell you: do you know that it’s possible she loves you now more than anyone, so that the more she torments you, the more she loves you. She won’t tell you that, and you have to be able to see it. After all, why is she marrying you? Some day she’ll tell you that. Some women even want to be loved like that, and that’s precisely her character! For your love and your character must overwhelm her! Do you know that a woman is capable of tormenting a man with cruelty and mockery without feeling a pang of conscience, because every time she looks at you she thinks: “Now I’ll torment him to death, but later I’ll make it up to him with love” ...’

Having listened to the prince, Rogozhin began to laugh.

‘But I say, Prince, haven’t you ended up in something of that sort yourself? If what I’ve heard about you is true?’

‘Why, what could you have heard?’ the prince quivered suddenly, and stopped in extreme embarrassment.

Rogozhin went on laughing. He had listened to the prince not without interest and, perhaps, not without enjoyment, either; the prince’s joyful and ardent enthusiasm struck him and cheered him greatly.

‘Well, even if I didn’t hear it, I can see for myself now that it’s true,’ he added. ‘I mean, when have you ever spoken as you did just now? Why, it was if it was someone else talking, not you. Had I not heard something of the sort about you, I wouldn’t have come here to the park, at midnight.’