the determined air with which Madame Epanchin twice scanned him from head to foot. Anyone who had known him before would certainly have thought that there was a great change in him. Aglaia was very much pleased at it.
“Was that Gavril Ardalionovitch who went out?” she asked suddenly, as she was fond of doing sometimes, interrupting the general conversation by her loud abrupt question, and addressing no one in particular.
“Yes,” answered Myshkin.
“I hardly knew him. He is very much changed and . .. greatly for the better.”
“I am very glad,” said Myshkin.
“He has been very ill,” added Varya, in a tone of glad commiseration.
“How has he changed for the better?” Lizaveta Prokofyevna asked with angry perplexity and almost in dismay. “What an idea! There’s nothing better. What improvement do you see?”
“There is nothing better than the ‘poor knight,’”
Kolya, who had been standing by Madame Epanchin’s chair, brought out suddenly.
“That’s exactly what I think,” said Prince S. and he laughed.
“I am precisely of the same opinion,” Adelaida declared solemnly.
“What poor knight?” asked Madame Epanchin, staring at all who had spoken, with perplexity and vexation, but seeing that Aglaia flushed hotly, she added angrily, “Some nonsense, of course! Who is this ‘poor knight’?”
“It’s not the first time that urchin, your favourite, has twisted other people’s words awry!” answered Aglaia, with haughty indignation.
In every outburst of anger from Aglaia (and she was very often angry) there was apparent, in spite of her evident seriousness and severity, something childish and impatiently schoolgirlish, so naively disguised that it was sometimes impossible not to laugh when one looked at her, though this was the cause of extreme indignation to Aglaia, who could not understand what people were laughing at, and “how they could, how they dared, laugh.” Her sisters and Prince S. lauqhed now, and even Mvshkin smiled, though he, too, flushed at something. Kolya roared with laughter, and was triumphant. Aglaia was angry in earnest, and looked twice as pretty. Her confusion was very becoming to her, and so was her vexation at her own confusion.
“He has twisted so many of your words awry, too!” she added.
“I based it on your own exclamation!” cried Kolya. “A month ago you were looking through ‘Don Quixote,’ and you cried out those very words, that there was nothing better than the ‘poor knight.’ I don’t know whom you were talking of, whether it was Don Quixote or Yevgeny Pavlovitch or some other person; but you were talking of some one and the conversation lasted a long while.”
“I see you allow yourself to go too far, young man, with your conjectures,” Lizaveta Prokofyevna checked him with vexation.
“But am I the only one?” Kolya persisted. “Everybody said so, and they are saying so still. Why, Prince S. and Adelaida Ivanovna and every one declared just now that they stood up for the ‘poor knight.’ So there must be a ‘poor knight,’ and he does exist, and I believe if it were not for Adelaida Ivanovna, we should have known long ago who the ‘poor knight’ was.”
“What have I done?” laughed Adelaida.
“You wouldn’t draw his portrait, that’s what you did! Aglaia Ivanovna begged you then to draw the portrait of the ‘poor knight,’ and described the whole subject of the picture. She made the subject up herself, you remember. You wouldn’t.”
“But how could I draw it? According to the poem, that ‘poor knight’
‘no more in sight of any Raised the visor from his face.’
How could I draw the face then? What was I to draw — the visor? — the anonymous hero?”
“I don’t understand what you mean by the visor,” said Madame Epanchin angrily, though she was beginning to have a very clear idea who was meant by the nickname (probably agreed upon long ago) of the “poor knight.” But what specially angered her was that Prince Lyov Nikolayevitch was also disconcerted, and at last quite abashed like a bovof ten.
“Well, will you put a stop to this foolishness or not? Will they explain to me this ‘poor knight’? Is it such an awful secret that one can’t approach it?”
But they only went on laughing.
“The fact is, there is a strange Russian poem about a poor knight,” Prince S. began at last, obviously anxious to suppress the subject and change the conversation, “a fragment without a beginning or an end. About a month ago we were all laughing after dinner and trying as usual to find a subject for Adelaida Ivanovna’s next picture. “Vbu know that the whole family is always trying to find subjects for Adelaida Ivanovna’s pictures. Then we hit on the ‘poor knight,’ which of us first I don’t remember.”
“Aglaia Ivanovna!” cried Kolya.
“Perhaps, I dare say, only I don’t remember,” Prince S. went on. “Some of us laughed at the subject, others declared that nothing could be better, but that to paint the ‘poor knight’ we must find a face for him. We began to go over the faces of all our friends. Not one was suitable, and there we left it,
that was all. I don’t know why Nikolay Ardalionovitch thought fit to recall it all and bring it up again. What was amusing and appropriate at the time is quite uninteresting now.”
“Because some fresh foolishness is meant, mischievous and offensive,” Lizaveta Prokofyevna snapped out.
“There’s no foolishness in it, nothing but the deepest respect,” Aglaia suddenly brought out, quite unexpectedly, in a grave and earnest voice.
She had mastered her confusion by now and completely recovered from it. What’s more, one might, looking at her, have supposed from certain signs that she was positively glad that the jest was going so far; and this revulsion of feeling took place in her at the very moment when Myshkin’s increasing and overwhelming embarrassment had become unmistakably evident to every one.
“At one time they are laughing like mad things, and then they talk of the deepest respect! Crazy creatures! Why respect? Tell me at once, what makes you drag in deepest respect when it’s neither here nor there? …”
“Deepest respect,” Aglaia went on as gravely and earnestly in response to her mother’s almost spiteful questions, “because that poem simply describes a man who is capable of an ideal, and what’s more, a man who having once set an ideal before him has faith in it, and having faith in it gives up his life blindly to it. This does not always happen in our day. We are not told in that poem exactly what the ‘poor knight’s’ ideal was, but one can see it was some vision, some image of ‘pure beauty,’ and the knight in his loving devotion has put a rosary round his neck instead of a scarf. It’s true that there is some obscure device of which we are not told in full, the letters A.N.B. inscribed on his shield …”
“A.M.D.” Kolya corrected her.
“But I say A.N.B. and that’s what I want to say,” Aglaia interrupted with vexation. “Anyway, it’s clear that that poor knight did not care what his lady was, or what she did. It was enough for him that he had chosen her and put faith in her ‘pure beauty and then did homage to her for ever. That’s just his merit, that if she became a thief afterwards, he would still be bound to believe in her and be ready to break a spear for her pure beauty. The poet seems to have meant to unite in one striking figure the grand conception of the piatonic love of mediaeval chivalry, as it was felt by a pure and lofty knight. Of course all that’s an ideal. In the ‘poor knight’ that feeling reaches its utmost limit in asceticism. It must be admitted that to be capable of such a feeling means a great deal, and that such feelings leave behind a profound impression, very, from one point of view, laudable, as with Don Quixote, for instance. The ‘poor knight’ is the same Don Quixote, only serious and not comic. I didn’t understand him at first, and laughed, but now I love the ‘poor knight,’ and what’s more, respect his exploits.”
This was how Aglaia concluded, and, looking at her, it was difficult to tell whether she was in earnest or laughing.
“Well, he must have been a fool anyway, he and his exploits,” was her mother’s comment. “And you are talking nonsense, my girl, a regular tirade. It’s not quite nice of you, to my thinking. In any case, it’s not good manners. What poem? Read it; no doubt you know it! I must hear it. I’ve always disliked poetry; I knew no good would come of it. For goodness’ sake, put up with it, prince! “Vbu and I have got to put up with thinqs toqether, it seems,” she added,
addressing Myshkin.
She was very much annoyed. Myshkin tried to say something, but was still too embarrassed to speak. But Aglaia, who had taken such liberties in her tirade, was not in the least confused, but seemed pleased indeed. She got up at once, still grave and earnest as before, looking as though she had prepared herself and was only waiting to be asked, stepped into the middle of the verandah, and stood facing Myshkin, who was still sitting in his armchair. Every one stared at her with some surprise, and almost all of them, Prince S. her sisters and her mother, looked with an uncomfortable feeling at this new prank, which had already gone too far. But it was evident that what delighted Aglaia was just the affectation with which she was beginning the ceremony of reading. Her mother was on the point of sending her back