“Allow me, Nastasya Filippovna,” cried the general in a rush of chivalrous feeling. “To whom are you saying this? Only from devotion to you I will remain at vour side now, and if there is any danqer. .
. . Besides, I must confess I am extremely interested. I only meant to say that they will spoil your carpets and perhaps break something…. And you ought not to see them at all, to my thinking, Nastasya Filippovna.”
“Rogozhin himself,” Ferdyshtchenko announced.
“What do you think, Afanasy Ivanovitch,” the general managed to whisper to him in haste, “hasn’t she taken leave of her senses? I mean not allegorically, but in the literal, medical sense. Eh?”
“I’ve told you that she’s always been disposed that way,” Totsky whispered slyly.
“And she is in a fever too….”
Rogozhin was accompanied by almost the same followers as in the afternoon. There were only two additions to the company: one a worthless old man, once the editor of a disreputable, libellous paper, of whom the story went that for drink he had once pawned his false teeth; and a retired sub-lieutenant, the rival by trade and calling of the gentleman with the fists. He was utterly unknown to all Rogozhin’s party, but had been picked up in the street on the sunny side of the Nevsky Prospect, where he used to stop the passersby, begging assistance in the language of Marlinsky, slyly alleging that he used to give away as much as fifteen roubles at once in his time. The two rivals at once took up a hostile attitude to one another. The gentleman with the fists considered himself affronted by this addition to the party. Being silent by nature, he merely growled at times like a bear and with profound contempt looked at the tricks by which his rival, who turned out to be a man of the world and a diplomatist, tried to ingratiate himself and win favour. The sub-lieutenant promised, to judge by appearances, more skill and dexterity “at work” than strength, and he was shorter than the fisted gentleman. Delicately and without entering into open competition, though he boasted shockingly he hinted several times at the superiority of English boxing. He seemed, in fact, a thoroughgoing champion of Western culture. The fisted gentleman only smiled contemptuously and huffily, not deigning to contradict his rival openly, though at times he showed him silently, as though by chance, or rather moved into the foreground, a thoroughly national argument — a huge, sinewy, gnarled fist covered with a sort of reddish down. It was made perfectly clear to every one that, if this truly national argument were accurately brought to bear on any subject, it would reduce it to pulp.
Thanks to the efforts of Rogozhin, who had all day long been looking forward to his visit to Nastasya Filippovna, none of the party was completely drunk. He himself was by now nearly sober, but almost stupefied with the number of sensations he had passed through in that chaotic day, that was unlike anything he had experienced in his life before. One thing only had remained constantly in his mind and his heart at every minute, every instant. For the sake of that one thing he had spent the whole time between five o’clock in the afternoon and eleven o’clock at night in continual misery and anxiety, worrying, with Kinders and Biskups, Jews and moneylenders, who were driven almost distracted too, rushing about like mad on his errands. They had, anyway, succeeded in raising the hundred thousand roubles, of which Nastasya Filippovna had mockingly dropped a passing and quite vague hint. But the money had been lent at a rate of interest of which even Biskup himself did not venture to speak to Kinder above a bashful whisper.
As in the afternoon, Rogozhin stepped forward first; the rest followed him, somewhat uneasy, though fully conscious of their advantages. What they were most frightened of — goodness knows why — was Nastasya Filippovna. Some of them almost expected that they would all be promptly “kicked downstairs”; and among these was the dandy and lady-killer Zalyozhev. But others — and the fisted gentleman was conspicuous among them — cherished at heart profound though unspoken contempt, and even hatred, for Nastasya Filippovna, and had come to her house as though to take it by storm. But the magnificence of the first two rooms, the articles they had never seen or heard of before, the choice furniture and pictures, and the life-size statue of Venus, roused in them an overwhelming sentiment of respect and almost of fear. This did not, however, prevent them all from gradually crowding with insolent curiosity into the drawing-room after Rogozhin. But when the fisted gentleman, his rival, and some of the others noticed General Epanchin among the guests, they were for the first moment so crestfallen that they positively beat a retreat to the other room. Lebedvev, however, was amonq the more fearless and resolute, and he stepped forward almost beside Rogozhin, having grasped the true significance of a fortune of a million four hundred thousand, a hundred thousand of it in hard cash. It must be observed, however, that all of them, even the knowing Lebedyev, were a little uncertain of the precise limits of their powers and did not know whether they were really able to do just as they liked or not. Lebedyev was ready to swear at certain moments that they were, but at other moments he felt uneasily impelled to remind himself of several preeminently cheering and reassuring articles of the legal code.
On Rogozhin himself Nastasya Filippovna made a very different impression from that produced on his companions. As soon as the curtain over the door was raised and he saw her, everything else ceased to exist for him, as it had that morning, and even more completely than it had that morning. He turned pale, and for an instant stopped short. It might be conjectured that his heart was beating violently. He gazed for some seconds timidly and desperately at Nastasya Filippovna without taking his eyes off her.
Suddenly, as though lost to all reason, almost staggering as he moved, he went up to the table. On the way he stumbled against Ptitsyn’s chair and trod with his huge dirty boots on the lace trimming of the dumb German beauty’s magnificent light blue dress. He did not apologise, and indeed he did not notice it. He laid on the table a strange object, which he was holding before him in both hands when he entered the drawing-room. It was a thick roll of paper, six inches thick and eight inches long, stoutly and tightly wrapped up in a copy of the Financial News, tied round and round and twice across with string, as loaves of sugar are tied up. Then he stood still without uttering a word and let his hands fall, as though awaiting his sentence. He was dressed exactly as before, except for a new bright red and green silk scarf round his neck, a huge diamond pin in the form of a beetle stuck in it, and a massive diamond ring on a finger of his grubby right hand.
Lebedyev stopped short three paces from the table; the others, as I have said, were gradually making their way into the drawing-room. Katya and Pasha, Nastasya Filippovna’s maids, had run up too to look under the lifted curtain in qreat amazement and alarm.
“What’s this?” asked Nastasya Filippovna, scanning Rogozhin intently and curiously and glancing towards “the object.”
“A hundred thousand!” answered Rogozhin almost in a whisper.
“Ah, so he’s kept his word! What a man! Sit down, please, here on this chair; I shall have something to say to you later. Who is with you? All the same party? Well, let them come in and sit down; they can sit on that sofa and this other sofa here. Here are two armchairs…. What’s the matter with them, don’t they want to?”
Some of them were in fact completely overcome with confusion; they beat a retreat and settled down to wait in the other room. But others remained and sat down as they were invited, only rather further from the table, and for the most part in out-of-the-way corners. Some of them still wished to efface themselves, but others regained their effrontery with incredible rapidity, as time went on. Rogozhin too sat down on the chair assigned him, but he did not sit there long; he stood up and did not sit down again. By degrees he began to scrutinise and distinguish the visitors. Seeing Ganya, he smiled malignantly and whispered to himself “Hullo!” He gazed at the general and Totsky without shyness or special interest. But when he noticed Myshkin beside Nastasya Filippovna, he was extremely amazed and could not take his eyes off him for a long time; he seemed at a loss to explain his presence. It may well have been that he was at moments in actual delirium. Besides the violent emotions he had gone through that day, he had spent all the previous night in the train and had been almost forty-eight hours without sleep.
“This, friends, is a hundred thousand roubles,” said Nastasya Filippovna, addressing the company with a sort of feverish, impatient defiance, “in this dirty bundle. This afternoon he shouted like a madman that he would bring me a hundred thousand this evening, and I’ve been expecting him all the time. He was bidding for me: he began at eighteen, then
