“I beg you again; calm yourself, my dear boy. We’ll talk about all this another time. I shall be delighted. .. ,” smiled the old “dignitary.”
Ivan Petrovitch cleared his throat and turned round in his chair; General Epanchin made a movement; the chief of the department began talking to the old “dignitary’s” wife, paying not the slightest attention to Myshkin; but the “dignitary’s” wife frequently listened and glanced at him.
“No, it’s better for me to speak, you know,” Myshkin began again, with another feverish outburst, addressing the old man with peculiar trustfulness, and as it were, confidentially. “Yesterday, Aglaia Ivanovna told me not to talk, and even told me what subjects not to talk about; she knows I’m absurd on those subjects. I’m twenty-seven, but I know that I’m like a child. I have no right to express an opinion, I’ve said that long ago. It’s only with Rogozhin in Moscow that I’ve talked openly. We read Pushkin together, the whole of him. He knew nothing of him, not even the name of Pushkin. … I’m always afraid that my absurd manner may discredit the thought or the leading idea. I have no elocution. My gestures are always inappropriate, and that makes people laugh, and degrades my ideas. I’ve no sense of proportion either, and that’s the great thing; that’s the chief thing in fact. … I know it’s better for me to sit still and keep quiet. When I persist in keepinq quiet, I seem very sensible, and what’s more I think things over. But now it’s better for me to talk. I’m talking because you look at me so nicely; you have such a nice face! I promised Aglaia Ivanovna yesterday that I’d be silent all the evening!”
“Vraiment!”smiled the old dignitary.
“But sometimes I think that I am not right in thinking that. Sincerity is more important than elocution, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
“Sometimes.”
“I want to explain everything, everything, everything! Oh, yes! “Vbu think I’m Utopian? A theorist? My ideas are really all so simple. . . . Don’t you believe it? “Vbu smile? “Vbu know I’m contemptible sometimes, for I lose my faith. As I came here just now, I wondered: ‘How shall I talk to him? With what words shall I begin, so that they may understand a little?’ How frightened I was, but I was more frightened for you. It was awful, awful! And yet, how could I be afraid? Wasn’t it shameful to be afraid? What does it matter that for one advanced man there is such a mass of retrograde and evil ones? That’s what I’m so happy about; that I’m convinced now that there is no such mass, and that it’s all living material! There’s no reason to be troubled because we’re absurd, is there? “Vbu know it really is true that we’re absurd, that we’re shallow, have bad habits, that we’re bored, that we don’t know how to look at things, that we can’t understand; we’re all like that, all of us, you, and I, and they! And you are not offended at my telling you to your faces that you’re absurd? Are you? And if that’s so, aren’t you good material? Do you know, to my thinking it’s a good thing sometimes to be absurd; it’s better in fact, it makes it easier to forgive one another, it’s easier to be humble. One can’t understand everything at once, we can’t begin with perfection all at once! In order to reach perfection one must begin by being ignorant of a great deal. And if we understand things too quickly, perhaps we shan’t understand them thoroughly. I say that to you who have been able to understand so much already and . . . have failed to understand so much. I am afraid for you now. “Vbu are not angry at a boy like me for saying things to you? Of course you’re not! Oh, you know how to forget and to forgive those who have offended you and those who have not offended you,
for it’s always more difficult to forgive those who have not offended one, and just because they’ve not injured one, and that therefore one’s complaint of them is groundless. That’s what I expected of the best people, that’s what I was in a hurry to tell you as I came here, and did not know how to tell you. . . . \bu are laughing, Ivan Petrovitch? You think that I was afraid for them, that I’m their champion, a democrat, an advocate of equality?” he laughed hysterically (he had been continually breaking into short laughs of delight). “I’m afraid for you, for all of you, for all of us together. I am a prince myself, of ancient family, and I am sitting with princes. I speak to save us all, that our class may not vanish in vain; in darkness, without realising anything, abusing everything, and losing everything. Why disappear and make way for others when we might remain in advance and be the leaders? If we are advanced we shall be the leaders. Let us be servants in order to be leaders.”
He began to try to get up from his chair, but the old man still held him, though he looked at him with growing uneasiness.
“Listen! I know it’s not right to talk. Better set an example, better to begin. … I have already begun . . . and — and — can one really be unhappy? Oh, what does my grief, what does my sorrow matter if I can be happy? Do you know I don’t know how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it? How can one talk to a man and not be happy in loving him! Oh, it’s only that I’m notable to express it. . . . And what beautiful things there are at every step, that even the most hopeless man must feel to be beautiful! Look at a child! Look at God’s sunrise! Look at the grass, how it grows! Look at the eyes that gaze at you and love you! …”
He had for some time been standing as he talked. The old man looked at him in alarm. Lizaveta Prokofyevna cried out, “Ah, my God!” and threw up her hands in dismay, the first to realise what was wrong.
Aglaia quickly ran up to him. She was in time to catch him in her arms, and with horror, with a face distorted with pain, she heard the wild scream of the “spirit tearing and casting down the unhappy man.”
The sick man lay on the carpet. Some one hastened to put a pillow under his head.
No one had expected this. A quarter of an hour later, Prince N. “Vfevgeny Pavlovitch, and the old dignitary were trying to restore the liveliness of the company, but within half an hour the party had broken up. Many words of sympathy and regret were uttered, a few comments were made. Ivan Petrovitch remarked that “the young man was a Slavophil or something of the sort, but that there was nothing very dangerous about that, however.” The old dignitary expressed no opinion. It’s true that later on, next day and the day after, every one who had been present seemed rather cross. Ivan Petrovitch was positively offended, but not seriously so. The chief of the department was for some time rather cold to General Epanchin. The old dignitary, who was their “patron,” mumbled something by way of admonition to the father of the family, though, in flattering terms he expressed the deepest interest in Aglaia’s future. He really was a rather good-hearted man; but one reason for the interest he had taken in Myshkin that evening was the part that the prince had played in the scandal connected with Nastasya Filippovna. He had heard something of the story and had been much interested by it, and would have liked indeed to ask questions about it.
Princess Byelokonsky said to Lizaveta Prokofyevna as she took leave that evening:
“Well, there’s good and bad in him. And if you care to know my opinion, there’s more bad than good. “Vbu can see for yourselves what he is, a sick man!”
Madame Epanchin made up her mind, once for all, that as a bride-groom he was “impossible,” and that night she vowed to herself that “as long as she was living, he should not be the husband of Aglaia.” She got up in the same mind next morning. But in the course of the morning, by lunch-time at one o’clock, she was drawn into contradicting herself in an extraordinary way.
In reply to her sisters’ carefully guarded question, Aglaia replied coldly, but haughtily, as it were, rapping it out:
“I’ve never given him a promise of any sort, I’ve never in my life looked on him or thought of him as my betrothed. He is no more to me than anyone else.”
Lizaveta Prokofyevna suddenly flared up.
“That I should never have expected of vou,” she said with chagrin. “As a suitor he’s out of the question, I know, and thank God that we’re agreed about it. But I didn’t expect such words from you. I looked
