for us and you are different. How could you not love anyone, when you cannot compare yourself with anyone, and when you are above every insult, every personal resentment. You alone can love without egoism, you alone can love, not for yourself, but for the sake of him whom vou love. Oh, how bitter it would be for me to find out that you feel shame or anger on account of me. That would be your ruin. You would sink to my level at once.
“Yesterday, after meeting you I went home and invented a picture. Artists always paint Christ as He appears in the Gospel stories. I would paint Him differently. I would imagine Him alone, His disciples must have sometimes left Him alone. I would leave only a little child beside Him. The child would be playing beside Him, perhaps be telling Him something in his childish words. Christ has been listening, but now He is thoughtful. His hand still resting unconsciously on the child’s fair little head. He is looking into the distance at the horizon; thought, great as the whole world, dwells in His eyes. His face is sorrowful. The child leans silent with his elbow on Christ’s knees, his cheek on his little hand and his head turned upwards, and looks intently at Him, pondering as little children sometimes ponder. The sun is setting. . . . That is my picture. You are innocent, and in your innocence lies all your perfection. Oh, only remember that! What have you to do with my passion for you? \bu are now altogether mine, I shall be all my life beside you. … I shall soon die.”
Finally, in the very last letter stood the words:
“For God’s sake, think nothing of me, and don’t think that I am abasing myself by writing to you like this, or that I belong to the class of people who enjoy abasing themselves, even if from pride. No, I have my consolation; but it is difficult for me to explain it to you. It would be difficult for me to explain it clearly even to myself, although it torments me that I cannot. But I know that I cannot abase myself, even from an access of pride; and of self-abasement from purity of heart I am incapable. And so I do not abase myself at all.
“Why do I so want to bring you together — for your sake, or for my own? For my own sake, of course; for myself, of course, it would solve all my difficulties, I have told myself so long ago. I have heard that your sister Adelaida said of my portrait then that with such beauty one might turn the world upside down. But I have renounced the world. Does it amuse you to hear that from me, meeting me decked in lace and diamonds, in the company of drunkards and profligates? Don’t mind that, I have almost ceased to exist and I know it. God knows what in my stead lives within me. I read that every day in two terrible eyes which are always gazing at me, even when they are not before me. Those eyes are silent now (they are always silent), but I know their secret. His house is gloomy, and there is a secret in it. I’m sure that he has, hidden in his box, a razor, wrapped in silk like that murderer in Moscow; he too lived in the same house with his mother, and kept a razor wrapped in silk to cut a throat with. All the time I was in their house, I kept fancying that somewhere under the floor there might be a corpse hidden there by his father perhaps, wrapped in American leather, like the corpse in the Moscow case, and surrounded in the same way with jars of Zhdanov’s fluid. I could show you the corner. He is always silent: but I know he loves me so much that he can’t help hating me. \bur marriage and ours are to take place together: we have fixed that. I have no secrets from him. I should kill him from terror. . . . But he will kill me first. He laughed just now and said I was raving: he knows I am writing to you.”
And there was much, much more of the same kind of ravinq in those letters. One of them, the second,
written in a small hand, covered two large sheets of note-paper.
At last Myshkin came out of the darkness of the park, where he had been wandering a long time, as he had the previous night. The clear limpid night seemed to him lighter than ever.
“Can it still be so early?” he thought. (He had forgotten to take his watch.) He fancied he heard music somewhere in the distance. “It must be at the station,” he thought, “they’ve certainly not gone there to-day.” As he made the reflection, he saw that he was standing close to the Epanchins’ villa. He knew quite well that he was bound to find himself there at last, and with a beating heart he went up to the steps of the verandah. No one met him. The verandah was empty. He waited, and opened the door into the room. “They never shut that door,” the thought flickered through his mind, but the room was empty too. It was almost dark in it.
He stood still in the middle of the room in perplexity. Suddenly the door opened and Alexandra came in, with a candle in her hand. On seeing Myshkin she was surprised and stopped short before him inquiringly. Obviously she was simply crossing the room from one door to the other, with no idea of finding anyone there.
“How do you come here?” she asked at last.
“I… came in….”
“Maman is not quite well, nor Aglaia either. Adelaida is going to bed, I’m going too. We’ve been at home by ourselves all the evening. Papa and the prince are in Petersburg.”
“I’ve come … I’ve come to you … now….”
“Do you know what the time is?”
“N-no.”
“Half-past twelve. We always go to bed by one.”
“Why, I thought it was half-past nine.”
“It doesn’t matter!” she laughed. “And, why didn’t you come in before? We may have been expecting you.”
“I… thought..,” he faltered, moving away.
“Good-bye. To-morrow I shall make them all laugh.”
He went homewards by the road that encircled the park. His heart was beating, his thoughts were in a maze, and everything round him became like a dream. And suddenly, just as yesterday he had twice waked up at the same dream, the same apparition rose again before him. The same woman came out of the park and stood before him, as though she had been waiting for him there. He started, and stood still. She snatched his hand and pressed it tight. “No, this was not an apparition!”
And at last she stood before him, face to face for the first time since their parting. She was saying something to him, but he looked at her in silence; his heart was too full, and ached with anguish. Oh, never could he forget that meeting with her and he always remembered it with the same anguish. She sank on her knees before him on the spot, in the street, like one demented. He stepped back in horror, and she tried to catch his hand to kiss it, and just as in his dream that night, the tears glistened on her long eyelashes.
“Stand up! Stand up!” he said in a frightened whisper, raising her. “Stand up, at once!”
“Are you happy? Happy?” she asked. “Only say one word to me, are you happy now? To-day, this minute? Have you been with her? What did she say?”
She did not qet up. She did not hear him. She questioned him hurriedly, and was in haste to speak, as though she were being pursued.
“I’m going to-morrow as you told me. I won’t. . . . It’s the last time I shall see you. The last time! Now it’s absolutely the last time!”
“Calm yourself, stand up!” he said in despair.
She looked greedily at him, clutching at his hands.
“Good-bye,” she said at last; she got up and went quickly away from him, almost running. Myshkin saw that Rogozhin had suddenly appeared beside her, that he had taken her arm, and was leading her away.
“Wait a minute, prince,” cried Rogozhin, “I’ll be back in five minutes.”
Five minutes later he did, in fact, return. Myshkin was waiting for him at the same place.
“I’ve put her in the carriage,” he said. “It’s been waiting there at the corner since ten o’clock. She knew you’d be at the young lady’s all the evening. I told her exactly what you wrote to me to-day. She won’t write to the young lady again, she’s promised; and she’ll go away from here to-morrow as you wish. She wanted to see you for the last time, though you refused her. We’ve been waiting for you here, on that seat there, to catch you as you came back.”
“Did she take you with her of her own accord?”
“Why not?” grinned Rogozhin. “I saw what I knew before. You’ve read the letters I suppose?”
“Have you really read them?” asked Myshkin, struck by that idea.
“Rather! She showed me each one of them herself. About the razor, too, do you remember, ha-ha!”
“She’s mad!” cried Myshkin, wringing his hands.
“Who knows about that? Perhaps not,” Rogozhin said softly, as though to himself. Myshkin did not answer.
“Well, good-bye,” said Rogozhin. “I’m going away to-morrow too: don’t remember evil against me! And I say, brother,” he added, turning quickly, “why didn’t you