“Kolya told me it just now, and he was told it this morning by his father whom he met at six o’clock — between six and seven — in the passage, when he came out for something.”
And Myshkin told the story in detail.
“Ah, well, that’s what’s called a clue.” Lebedyev laughed noiselessly, rubbing his hands. “Just as I thought! That means that his excellency waked from his sleep of innocence at six o’clock, expressly to go and wake his darling son and warn him of the great danger of associating with Mr. Ferdyshtchenko. What a dangerous man Mr. Ferdyshtchenko must be! And what parental solicitude on the part of his excellency!”
“Listen, Lebedyev,” Myshkin was utterly confused, “listen, keep quiet about it! Don’t make an uproar! I beg you, Lebedyev, I entreat you. In that case I swear I’ll help you, but on condition that nobody, nobody knows!”
“Rest assured, most noble-hearted, most sincere and generous prince,” cried Lebedyev in perfect exaltation— “rest assured that all this will be buried in my loyal heart. I’d give every drop of my blood. . . . Illustrious prince, I’m a poor creature in soul and spirit, but ask any poor creature, any scoundrel even, which he’d rather have to do with, a scoundrel like himself, or a noble-hearted man like you, most true-hearted prince, he’ll answer that he prefers the noble-hearted man, and that’s the triumph of virtue! Good-bye honoured prince! Treading softly . . . treading softly, and … hand in hand.”
Chapter 10
Myshkin understood at last why he turned cold every time he touched those three letters, and why he had put off reading them until the evening. When, in the morning, he had sunk into a heavy sleep on the lounge in the verandah without having brought himself to open those three envelopes, he had another painful dream, and again the same “sinful woman” came to him. Again she looked at him with tears sparkling on her long eyelashes, again beckoned him to follow her, and again he waked up, as he had done before, with anguish recalling her face. He wanted to go to her at once, but could not. At last, almost in despair he opened the letters and began reading them.
These letters too were like a dream. Sometimes one dreams strange, impossible and incredible dreams; on awakening you remember them and are amazed at a strange fact. You remember first of all that your reason did not desert you throughout the dream; you remember even that you acted very cunningly and logically through all that long, long time, while you were surrounded by murderers who deceived you, hid their intentions, behaved amicably to you while they had a weapon in readiness, and were only waiting for some signal; you remember how cleverly you deceived them at last, hiding from them; then you guessed that they’d seen through your deception and were only pretending not to know where you were hidden; but you were sly then and deceived them again; all this you remember clearly. But how was it that you could at the same time reconcile your reason to the obvious absurdities and impossibilities with which your dream was overflowing? One of your murderers turned into a woman before your eyes, and the woman into a little, sly, loathsome dwarf — and you accepted it all at once as an accomplished fact, almost without the slightest surprise, at the very time when, on another side, your reason was at its highest tension and showed extraordinary power, cunning, sagacity, and logic? And why, too, on waking up and fully returning to reality, do you feel almost every time, and sometimes with extraordinary intensity, that you have left something unexplained behind with the dream? “Vbu laugh at the absurdities of your dream, and at the same time you feel that interwoven with those absurdities some thought lies hidden, and a thought that is real, something belonging to your actual life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart. It’s as though something new, prophetic, that you were awaiting, has been told you in your dream. \bur impression is vivid, it may be joyful or agonising, but what it is, and what was said to you, you cannot understand or recall.
It was almost like this, after reading these letters. But even before he had unfolded them, Myshkin felt that the very fact of the existence and the possibility of them was like a nightmare. How could she have brought herself to write to her, he asked himself as he wandered about alone that evening (at times not knowing where he was going). How could she write of that, how could such a mad fantasy have arisen in her mind? But that fantasy had by now taken shape, and the most amazing thing of all for him was that, as he read those letters, he himself almost believed in the possibility and the justification of that fantasy. “Vfet, of course, it was a dream, a nightmare, a madness; but there was something in it tormentingly real, and agonisingly true, which justified the dream and the nightmare and the madness. For several hours together he seemed to be haunted by what he had read, every minute recalling fragments of it; brooding over them, pondering them. Sometimes he was even inclined to tell himself that he had foreseen all this and known it beforehand. It even seemed to him as though he had read it all before, some time very long ago, and that everything that he had grieved over since, everything that had been a pain or a dread to him had all lain hidden in those letters he had read long ago.
“When you open this letter” — so the first epistle began— “you will look first of all at the signature. The signature will tell you all, and explain all, so there’s no need to make any defence or explanation. If I were in any way on a level with you, you might be offended at such impertinence. But, who am I, and who are you?
We are two such opposite extremes and I am so infinitely below you that I cannot insult you, even if I wanted to.”
In another place she wrote:
“Don’t consider my words the sick ecstasy of a sick mind, but you are for me perfection! I have seen you, I see you everyday. I don’t judge you; I have not come by reason to believe that you are perfection; I simply have faith in it. But one wrong I do you: I love you. Perfection should not be loved; one can only look on perfection as perfection. Is that not so? “Vfet I am in love with you. Though love makes equal, yet don’t be uneasy; I have not put myself on an equality with you even in my most secret thought. I have written, ‘don’t be uneasy.’ Can you possibly be uneasy? I would kiss your footprints if I could. Oh, I don’t put myself on a level with you. . . . Look at my signature, you need only look at my signature!”
“I notice, however,” she wrote in another letter, “that I join your name with his, and I have never once asked myself whether you love him. He loved you, though he had seen you only once. He thought of you as of ‘light.’ Those are his own words, I heard them from him. But without words I knew that you were ‘light’ for him. I’ve lived a whole month beside him, and understood then that you love him too. To me you and he are one.”
“What does this mean?” she wrote again. “Yesterday I passed by you and you seemed to blush. It can’t be so. It was my fancy. If you were brought to the filthiest den and shown vice in its nakedness, you should not blush; you are too lofty to resent an insult. “Vbu can hate every one base and low, not for your own sake, but for the sake of others, those whom they wrong. You no one can wrong. Do you know I think you even ought to love me? You are for me the same as for him — a ray of light. An angel cannot hate, cannot help loving. Can one love every one, all men, all one’s neighbours? I have often asked myself that question. Of course not. It’s unnatural indeed. In abstract love for humanity one almost always loves no one but oneself. But that’s impossible
