“There were crowds of people, there was noise and shouting; ten thousand faces, ten thousand eyes — all that he has had to bear, and, worst of all, the thought, They are ten thousand, but not one of them is being executed, and I am to be executed.’ Well, all that is preparatory. There is a ladder to the scaffold. Suddenly at the foot of the ladder he began to cry, and he was a strong manly fellow; he had been a great criminal, I was told. The priest never left him for a moment; he drove with him in the cart and talked with him all the while. I doubt whether he heard; he might begin listening and would not understand more than two words. So it must have been. At last he began going up the ladder; his legs were tied together so that he could only move with tiny steps. The priest, who must have been an intelligent man, left off speaking and only gave him the cross to kiss. At the foot of the ladder he was very pale, and when he was at the top and standing on the scaffold, he became as white as paper, as white as writing paper. His legs must have grown weak and wooden,
and I expect he felt sick — as though something were choking him and that made a sort of tickling in his throat. Have you ever felt that when you were frightened, or in awful moments when all your reason is left, but it has no power? I think that if one is faced by inevitable destruction — if a house is falling upon you, for instance — one must feel a great longing to sit down, close one’s eyes and wait, come what may. . . . When that weakness was beginning, the priest with a rapid movement hastily put the cross to his lips — a little plain silver cross — he kept putting it to his lips every minute. And every time the cross touched his lips, he opened his eyes and seemed for a few seconds to come to life again, and his legs moved. He kissed the cross greedily; he made haste to kiss, as though in haste not to forget to provide himself with something in case of need; but I doubt whether he had any religious feeling at the time. And so it was till he was laid on the plank. … It’s strange that people rarely faint at these last moments. On the contrary, the brain is extraordinarily lively and must be working at a tremendous rate — at a tremendous rate, like a machine at full speed. I fancy that there is a continual throbbing of ideas of all sorts, always unfinished and perhaps absurd too, quite irrelevant ideas: That man is looking at me. He has a wart on his forehead. One of the executioner’s buttons is rusty.’ . . . and yet all the while one knows and remembers everything. There is one point which can never be forgotten, and one can’t faint, and everything moves and turns about it, about that point. And only think that it must be like that up to the last quarter of a second, when his head lies on the block and he waits and . . . knows, and suddenly hears above him the clang of the iron! He must hear that! If I were lying there, I should listen on purpose and hear. It may last only the tenth part of a second, but one would be sure to hear it. And only fancy, it’s still disputed whether, when the head is cut off, it knows for a second after that it has been cut off! What an idea! And what if it knows it for five seconds!
“Paint the scaffold so that only the last step can be distinctly seen in the foreground and the criminal having just stepped on it; his head, his face as white as paper; the priest holding up the cross, the man greedily putting forward his blue lips and looking — and aware of everything. The cross and the head —
that’s the picture. The priest’s face and the executioner’s, his two attendants and a few heads and eyes below might be painted in the background, in half light, as the setting…. That’s the picture!”
Myshkin ceased speaking and looked at them all.
“That’s nothing like quietism, certainly,” said Alexandra to herself.
“And now tell us how you were in love,” said Adelaida.
Myshkin looked at her with astonishment.
“Listen,” Adelaida said, seeming rather hurried. “You promised to tell us about the Bale picture, but now I should like to hear how you have been in love. Don’t deny it, you must have been. Besides, as soon as you begin describing anything, you cease to be a philosopher.”
“As soon as you have finished telling us anything, you seem to be ashamed of what you’ve said,” Aglaia observed suddenly. “Why is that?”
“How stupid that is!” snapped her mother, looking indignantly at Aglaia.
“It’s not clever,” Alexandra assented.
“Don’t believe her, prince,” said Madame Epanchin, turning to him. “She does it on purpose from a sort of malice; she has really not been so badly brought up. Don’t think the worse of them for teasing you like this; they must be up to some mischief. But they like you already, I know. I know their faces.”
“I know their faces too,” said Myshkin with peculiar emphasis.
“What do you mean?” asked Adelaida curiously.
“What do you know about our faces?” the two others inquired too.
But Myshkin did not speak and was grave. They all waited for his answer.
“I’ll tell you afterwards,” he said gently and gravely.
“You are trying to rouse our curiosity,” cried Aglaia. “And what solemnity!”
“Very well,” Adelaida interposed hurriedly again, “but if you are such a connoisseur in faces, you certainly must have been in love, so I guessed right. Tell us about it.”
“I haven’t been in love,” answered Myshkin as gently and gravely as before. “I. . . have been happy in a different way.”
“How? In what?”
“Very well, I’ll tell you,” said Myshkin, as though meditating profoundly.
Chapter 6
YOU ARE all looking at me with such interest,” began Myshkin, “that if I didn’t satisfy it you might be angry with me. No, I am joking,” he added quickly, with a smile. “There were lots of children there, and I was always with the children, only with the children. They were the children of the village, a whole crowd of schoolchildren. It was not that I taught them. Oh, no, there was a schoolmaster for that — Jules Thibaut. I did teach them too, perhaps, but for the most part I was simply with them, and all those four years were spent in their company. I wanted nothing else. I used to tell them everything; I concealed nothing from them. Their fathers and relations were all cross with me, for the children couldn’t get on without me at last, and were always flocking round me, and the schoolmaster at last became my chief enemy. I made many enemies there, and all on account of the children. Even Schneider reproved me. And what were they afraid of? Children can be told anything — anything. I’ve always been struck by seeing how little grown-up people understand children, how little parents even understand their own children. Nothing should be concealed from children on the pretext that they are little and that it is too early for them to understand. What a miserable and unfortunate idea! And how readily the children detect that their fathers consider them too little to understand anything, though they understand everything. Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case. Oh, dear! when that pretty little bird looks at you, happy and confiding, it’s a shame for you to deceive it. I call them birds because there’s nothing better than a bird in the world. What really set all the village against me was something that happened … but Thibaut was simply envious of me. At first he used to shake his head and wonder how it was the children understood everything from me and scarcely anything from him; and then he began laughing at me when I told him that neither of us could teach them anything, but that they can teach us. And how could he be envious of me and say things against me, when he spent his life with children himself! The soul is healed by being with children. . . . There was one patient in Schneider’s institution, a very unhappy man. I doubt whether there could be any unhappiness equal to his. He was there to be treated for insanity. In my opinion he was not mad, it was simply that he was frightfully miserable; that was all that was the matter with him. And if only you knew what our children were to him in the end. .. . But I’d better tell you about that patient another time. I’ll tell you now how it all began. At first the children didn’t take to me. I was so big, I am always so clumsy; I
