The Idiot (Vintage Classics)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Finally, at around half-past ten, the prince was left alone; he had a headache; the last to leave was Kolya, who helped him to change his wedding costume for house clothes. They parted warmly. Kolya did not talk about what had happened, but promised to come early the next day. He later testified that the prince had not warned him about anything at this last farewell, which meant that he had concealed his intentions even from him. Soon there was almost no one left in the whole house: Burdovsky went to Ippolit’s, Keller and Lebedev also took themselves off somewhere. Only Vera Lebedev remained in the rooms for some time, hastily turning everything from a festive to its ordinary look. As she was leaving, she peeked into the prince’s room. He was sitting at the table, both elbows resting on it and his head in his hands. She quietly went up to him and touched his shoulder; the prince looked at her in perplexity, and for almost a minute seemed as if he was trying to remember; but having remembered and realized everything, he suddenly became extremely excited. It all resolved itself, however, in a great and fervent request to Vera, that she knock at his door the next morning at seven o’clock, before the first train. Vera promised; the prince began asking her heatedly not to tell anyone about it; she promised that as well, and finally, when she had already opened the door to leave, the prince stopped her for a third time, took her hands, kissed them, then kissed her on the forehead, and with a certain “extraordinary” look, said: “Till tomorrow!” So at least Vera recounted afterwards. She left fearing greatly for him. In the morning she was heartened a little when she knocked at his door at seven o’clock, as arranged, and announced to him that the train for Petersburg would leave in a quarter of an hour; it seemed to her that he was quite cheerful and even smiling when he opened the door to her. He had almost not undressed for the night, but he had slept. In his opinion, he might come back that same day. It turned out, therefore, that at that moment she was the only one he had found it possible and necessary to inform that he was going to town.

  XI

  AN HOUR LATER he was in Petersburg, and after nine o’clock he was ringing at Rogozhin’s. He came in by the front entrance and had to wait a long time. At last, the door of old Mrs. Rogozhin’s apartment opened, and an elderly, decent-looking maid appeared.

  “Parfyon Semyonovich is not at home,” she announced from the doorway. “Whom do you want?”

  “Parfyon Semyonovich.”

  “He’s not at home, sir.”

  The maid looked the prince over with wild curiosity.

  “At least tell me, did he spend the night at home? And … did he come back alone yesterday?”

  The maid went on looking, but did not reply.

  “Didn’t he come here yesterday … in the evening … with Nastasya Filippovna?”

  “And may I ask who you are pleased to be yourself?”

  “Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, we’re very well acquainted.”

  “He’s not at home, sir.”

  The maid dropped her eyes.

  “And Nastasya Filippovna?”

  “I know nothing about that, sir.”

  “Wait, wait! When will he be back?”

  “We don’t know that either, sir.”

  The door closed.

  The prince decided to come back in an hour. Looking into the courtyard, he met the caretaker.

  “Is Parfyon Semyonovich at home?”

  “He is, sir.”

  “How is it I was just told he’s not at home?”

  “Did somebody at his place tell you?”

  “No, the maid at his mother’s, but when I rang at Parfyon Semyonovich’s nobody answered.”

  “Maybe he went out,” the caretaker decided. “He doesn’t always say. And sometimes he takes the key with him and the rooms stay locked for three days.”

  “Are you sure he was at home yesterday?”

  “He was. Sometimes he comes in the front entrance, so I don’t see him.”

  “And wasn’t Nastasya Filippovna with him yesterday?”

  “That I don’t know, sir. She doesn’t care to come often; seems we’d know if she did.”

  The prince went out and for some time walked up and down the sidewalk, pondering. The windows of the rooms occupied by Rogozhin were all shut; the windows of the half occupied by his mother were almost all open; it was a hot, clear day; the prince went across the street to the opposite sidewalk and stopped to look once more at the windows; not only were they shut, but in almost all of them the white blinds were drawn.

  He stood there for a minute and—strangely—it suddenly seemed to him that the edge of one blind was raised and Rogozhin’s face flashed, flashed and disappeared in the same instant. He waited a little longer and decided to go and ring again, but changed his mind and put it off for an hour: “Who knows, maybe I only imagined it …”

  Above all, he now hurried to the Izmailovsky quarter, where Nastasya Filippovna recently had an apartment. He knew that, having moved out of Pavlovsk three weeks earlier at his request, she had settled in the Izmailovsky quarter with one of her good acquaintances, a teacher’s widow, a respectable and family lady, who sublet a good furnished apartment in her house, which was almost her whole subsistence. It was very likely that Nastasya Filippovna had kept the apartment when she went back to Pavlovsk; at least it was quite possible that she had spent the night in this apartment, where Rogozhin would surely have brought her yesterday. The prince took a cab. On the way it occurred to him that he ought to have started there, because it was incredible that she would have gone at night straight to Rogozhin’s. Here he also recalled the caretaker’s words, that Nastasya Filippovna did not care to come often. If she had never come often anyway, then why on earth would she now be staying at Rogozhin’s? Encouraging himself with such consolations, the prince finally arrived at the Izmailovsky quarter more dead than alive.

  To his utter astonishment, not only had no one heard of Nastasya Filippovna at the teacher’s widow’s either yesterday or today, but they ran out to look at him as at some sort of wonder. The whole numerous family of the teacher’s widow—all girls with a year’s difference, from fifteen down to seven years old—poured out after their mother and surrounded him, their mouths gaping. After them came their skinny yellow aunt in a black kerchief, and, finally, the grandmother of the family appeared, a little old lady in spectacles. The teacher’s widow urged him to come in and sit down, which the prince did. He realized at once that they were well informed about who he was, and knew perfectly well that his wedding was to have taken place yesterday, and were dying to ask about both the wedding and the wonder that he was there asking them about the woman who should have been nowhere else but with him in Pavlovsk, but they were too delicate to ask. In a brief outline, he satisfied their curiosity about the wedding. There was amazement, gasps and cries, so that he was forced to tell almost all the rest, in broad outline, of course. Finally, the council of wise and worried ladies decided that they absolutely had to go first of all and knock at Rogozhin’s till he opened, and find out everything positively from him. And if he was not at home (which was to be ascertained) or did not want to tell, they would drive to the Semyonovsky quarter, to a certain German lady, Nastasya Filippovna’s acquaintance, who lived with her mother: perhaps Nastasya Filippovna, in her agitation and wishing to hide, had spent the night with them. The prince got up completely crushed; they reported afterwards that he “turned terribly pale”; indeed, his legs nearly gave way under him. Finally, through the terrible jabber of voices, he discerned that they were arranging to act in concert with him and were asking for his town address. He turned out to have no address; they advised him to put up somewhere in a hotel. The prince thought and gave the address of his former hotel, the one where he had had a fit some five weeks earlier. Then he went back to Rogozhin’s.

  This time not only Rogozhin’s door but even the one to the old lady’s apartment did not open. The prince went for the caretaker and had great difficulty finding him in the courtyard; the caretaker was busy with something and bar
ely answered, even barely looked at him, but all the same declared positively that Parfyon Semyonovich “left very early in the morning, went to Pavlovsk, and wouldn’t be home today.”

  “I’ll wait; maybe he’ll come towards evening?”

  “And he may not be home for a week, who knows about him.”

  “So he did spend the night here?”

  “The night, yes, he spent the night …”

  All this was suspicious and shady. The caretaker might very well have had time, during that interval, to receive new instructions: earlier he had even been talkative, while now he simply turned his back. But the prince decided to come by once more in about two hours, and even to stand watch by the house, if need be, while now there was still hope for the German woman, and he drove to the Semyonovsky quarter.

  But at the German woman’s they did not even understand him. From certain fleeting remarks, he was even able to guess that the German beauty had quarreled with Nastasya Filippovna some two weeks ago, so that she had not even heard of her in all those days, and tried as hard as she could to make it clear that she was not interested in hearing anything now, “even if she’s married all the princes in the world.” The prince hastened to leave. It occurred to him, among other things, that she might have left for Moscow, as she did the other time, and Rogozhin, naturally, would have followed her, or perhaps had gone with her. “At least let me find some trace!” He remembered, however, that he had to stop at the inn, and he hurried to Liteinaya; there he was given a room at once. The floorboy asked if he wanted a bite to eat; he answered absentmindedly that he did, and on second thought was furious with himself, because eating would take an extra half hour, and only later did he realize that nothing prevented him from leaving the food uneaten on the table. A strange sensation came over him in this dim and stifling corridor, a sensation that strove painfully to realize itself in some thought; but he was quite unable to tell what this new importunate thought was. He finally left the inn, no longer himself; his head was spinning, but—anyhow, where to go? He raced to Rogozhin’s again.

  Rogozhin had not come back; no one opened to his ringing; he rang at old Mrs. Rogozhin’s; they opened the door and also announced that Parfyon Semyonovich was not at home and might not be back for some three days. What disturbed the prince was that he was again studied with the same wild curiosity. The caretaker this time was nowhere to be found. He went, as earlier, to the opposite sidewalk, looked at the windows, and paced up and down in the torrid heat for about half an hour or maybe more; this time nothing stirred; the windows did not open, the white blinds were motionless. It finally occurred to him that he had probably only imagined it earlier, that the windows by all tokens were even so dim, so long in need of washing, that it would have been hard to make anything out, even if anyone in fact had looked through the glass. Gladdened by this thought, he again went to the Izmailovsky quarter, to the teacher’s widow.

  He was expected there. The teacher’s widow had already gone to three or four places and had even stopped at Rogozhin’s: not the slightest trace. The prince listened silently, went into the room, sat on the sofa, and began looking at them all as if not understanding what they were telling him. Strange: first he was extremely observant, then suddenly impossibly distracted. The whole family reported later that he had been an “astonishingly” strange man that day, so that “perhaps all the signs were already there.” He finally stood up and asked to be shown Nastasya Filippovna’s rooms. These were two large, bright, high-ceilinged rooms, quite well furnished, and not cheap. All these ladies reported afterwards that the prince studied every object in the rooms, saw an open book on the table, from a lending library, the French novel Madame Bovary,52 looked at it, earmarked the page on which the book lay open, asked permission to take it with him, and, not listening to the objection that it was a library book, put it into his pocket. He sat down by the open window and, seeing a card table covered with writing in chalk, asked who played. They told him that Nastasya Filippovna had played every night with Rogozhin—fools, preference, millers, whist, hearts—all sorts of games, and that the cards had appeared only very recently, when she moved from Pavlovsk to Petersburg, because Nastasya Filippovna kept complaining that she was bored, that Rogozhin sat silent for whole evenings and could not talk about anything, and she often wept; and suddenly the next evening Rogozhin took cards from his pocket; here Nastasya Filippovna laughed and they began to play. The prince asked where the cards they had played with were. But there were no cards; Rogozhin himself always brought the cards in his pocket, a new deck every day, and then took them away with him.

  The ladies advised him to go once more to Rogozhin’s and to knock harder once more, not now, but in the evening: “something might turn up.” The teacher’s widow herself volunteered meanwhile to go to Pavlovsk to see Darya Alexeevna before evening: they might know something there. The prince was invited to come by ten o’clock that evening, in any case, to make plans for the next day. Despite all consolations and reassurances, a perfect despair overwhelmed the prince’s soul. In inexpressible anguish, he reached his inn on foot. The dusty, stifling summer Petersburg squeezed him as in a vice; he jostled among stern or drunken people, aimlessly peered into faces, probably walked much more than he had to; it was nearly evening when he entered his hotel room. He decided to rest a little and then go again to Rogozhin’s, as he had been advised, sat down on the sofa, rested both elbows on the table, and fell to thinking.

  God knows how long he thought and God knows what about. There was much that he feared, and he felt painfully and tormentingly that he was terribly afraid. Vera Lebedev came into his head; then it occurred to him that Lebedev might know something about this matter, and if he did not, he would be able to find out sooner and more easily than he would himself. Then he remembered Ippolit, and that Rogozhin had gone to see Ippolit. Then he remembered Rogozhin himself: recently at the burial, then in the park, then—suddenly here in the corridor, when he had hidden himself in the corner that time and waited for him with a knife. His eyes he now remembered, his eyes looking out of the darkness then. He gave a start: the earlier importunate thought now came to his head.

  It was in part that if Rogozhin was in Petersburg, then even if he was hiding for a time, all the same he would end by coming to him, the prince, with good or bad intentions, perhaps, just as then. At least, if Rogozhin had to come for some reason or other, then he had nowhere else to come than here, to this same corridor again. He did not know his address; therefore he would very possibly think that the prince was staying at the same inn; at least he would try looking here … if he needed him very much. And, who knows, perhaps he would need him very much?

  So he reflected, and for some reason this thought seemed perfectly possible to him. He would not have been able to account for it to himself, if he had begun to go deeper into this thought: “Why, for instance, should Rogozhin suddenly need him so much, and why was it even impossible that they should not finally come together?” But the thought was painful: “If things are well with him, he won’t come,” the prince went on thinking, “he’ll sooner come if things are not well with him; and things are probably not well …”

  Of course, with such a conviction, he ought to have waited for Rogozhin at home, in his hotel room; but he was as if unable to bear his new thought, jumped up, seized his hat, and ran. It was now almost quite dark in the corridor: “What if he comes out of that corner now and stops me by the stairs?” flashed in him as he approached the familiar spot. But no one came out. He went down under the gateway, walked out to the sidewalk, marveled at the dense crowd of people who came pouring outside at sunset (as always in Petersburg at vacation time), and went in the direction of Gorokhovaya Street. Fifty paces from the inn, at the first intersection, in the crowd, someone suddenly touched his elbow and said in a low voice, just at his ear:

  “Lev Nikolaevich, come with me, brother, you’ve got to.”

  It was Rogozhin.

  Strange: the prince bega
n telling him, suddenly, with joy, babbling and almost not finishing the words, how he had been expecting him just now in the corridor, at the inn.

  “I was there,” Rogozhin answered unexpectedly, “let’s go.”

  The prince was surprised by the answer, but he was surprised at least two minutes later, when he understood. Having understood the answer, he became frightened and began studying Rogozhin. The man was walking almost half a step ahead, looking straight in front of him and not glancing at anyone he met, giving way to them all with mechanical care.