moved quickly to the table; Rogozhin did the same, but with a sort of peevish vexation, as though he understood what was coming. Lebedyev, who happened to be close by, came up with inquisitive eyes and stared at the envelope, trying to guess what it meant.
“What have you there?” Myshkin asked, uneasily.
“At the first peep of sunshine I shall go to rest, prince. I’ve said so; on my honour, you shall see!” cried Ippolit. “But… but… Do you imagine that I’m not capable of breaking open that envelope?” he added, turning his eyes from one to another, with a sort of challenge, and apparently addressing all without distinction.
Myshkin noticed that he was trembling all over.
“None of us imagine such a thing,” Myshkin answered for all. “And why should you suppose that anyone thinks so? And what. . . what a strange idea to read to us? What have you there, Ippolit?”
“What is it?”
“What’s happened to him now?” they were asking on all hands.
All the party came up, some of them still eating.
The envelope with the red seal drew them all like a magnet.
“I wrote it yesterday, myself, directly after I’d promised I would come to live with you, prince. I was writing it all day yesterday, and all night, and finished it this morning; in the night, towards morning, I had a dream.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to-morrow?” Myshkin interposed timidly.
“To-morrow there will be ‘no more time,’” Ippolit laughed hysterically. “But don’t be uneasy. I’ll read it in forty minutes, or, well — an hour. . . . And see how interested they all are; they’ve all come up, they’re all staring at my seal, and if I hadn’t sealed the article up in an envelope, there’d have been no sensation! Ha-ha! You see what mystery does! Shall I break the seal or not, gentlemen?” he shouted, laughing his strange laugh, and staring at them with glittering eyes. “A secret! A secret! And do you remember, prince, who proclaimed that there will be ‘no more time’? It was proclaimed by the great and mighty angel in the Apocalypse.”
“Better not read it!”
“Vfevgeny Pavlovitch cried suddenly, but with a look of uneasiness so unexpected in him that it struck many persons as strange.
“Don’t read it,” cried Myshkin, too, laying his hand on the envelope.
“Why read? It’s time for supper now,” observed some one.
“An article? A magazine article?” inquired another.
“Dull, perhaps,” added a third.
“What’s it all about?” inquired the rest.
But Myshkin’s timid gesture seemed to have intimidated Ippolit himself.
“So … I’m not to read it?” he whispered to him, almost apprehensively, with a wry smile on his blue lips, “not to read it?” he muttered, scanning his whole audience, all their eyes and faces, and as it were catching at them all again, with the same aggressive effusiveness. “Are you … afraid?” he turned again to Myshkin.
“What of?” asked the latter, his face changing more and more.
“Has any one got a twenty-kopeck piece?” Ippolit leapt up from his chair as though he had been pulled up. “Oranvcoin?”
“Here you are,” Lebedyev gave it him at once.
The idea occurred to him that the invalid had gone out of his mind.
“Vera Lukyanovna!” Ippolit hurriedly begged her, “take it, throw it on the table — heads or tails? Heads — I read it!”
Vera looked in alarm at the coin, at Ippolit, and then at her father, and awkwardly throwing back her head, as though she felt she ought not to look at the coin, she tossed it. It came up heads.
“I read it!” whispered Ippolit, as though crushed by the decision of destiny. He could not have turned more pale, if he had heard his death sentence.
“But,” he started suddenly, after half a minute’s silence, “what? Can I really have tossed up?” With the same appealing frankness he scrutinised the whole circle. “But, you know, that’s an amazing psychological fact!” he cried suddenly, addressing Myshkin in genuine astonishment. “It’s . . . it’s an incredible fact, prince,” he repeated, reviving, and seeming to recover himself. “\bu must make a note of this, prince, remember it, for I believe you are collecting facts relating to capital punishment…. I’ve been told so, ha-ha! Oh, my God, what senseless absurdity!”
He sat down on the sofa, put his elbows on the table, and clutched at his head. “Why, it’s positively shameful! But what the devil do I care if it is shameful!” he raised his head almost at once. “Gentlemen, gentlemen! I will break the seal of my envelope!” he declared, with sudden determination. “I… I don’t compel you to listen though!”
With hands trembling with excitement he opened the envelope, took out several sheets of notepaper covered with small handwriting, put them before him, and began to arrange them.
“What is it? What’s the matter? What’s he going to read?” some people muttered gloomily; others were silent.
But they all sat down and stared inquisitively. Perhaps they really did expect something unusual. Vera caught hold of her father’s chair, and was almost crying with fright. Kolya was hardly less alarmed. Lebedyev, who had already sat down, rose and moved the candles nearer to Ippolit to give him more light.
“Gentlemen, this . . . you’ll see directly what it is,”
Ippolit added for some reason, and he suddenly began reading: ‘“An essential explanation! Motto: apres moi le deluge.’ Foo! damn it!” he cried out, as though he had been scalded. “Can I seriously have written such a stupid motto? . . . Listen, gentlemen! . . . I assure you that all this is perhaps after all the most fearful nonsense! It’s only some thoughts of mine. … If you think there’s anything mysterious about it… anything prohibited … in fact….”
“If you’d only read it without a preface!” interrupted Ganya.
“It’s affectation!” some one added.
“There’s too much talk,” put in Rogozhin, who had been silent till then.
Ippolit suddenly looked at him, and when their eyes met, Rogozhin gave a bitter and morose grin, and slowly pronounced a strange sentence.
“It’s not the way to set about this business, lad, it’s not the way….”
No one, of course, knew what Rogozhin meant, but his words made rather a strange impression on every one; every one seemed to catch a passing glimpse of a common idea. On Ippolit these words made a terrible impression; he trembled so much that Myshkin put out his arm to support him, and he would certainly have cried out but that his voice failed him. For a whole minute he could not speak, and stared at Rogozhin, breathing painfully. At last, gasping for breath, with an immense effort he articulated:
“So it was you … you … it was you?”
“What was I? What about me?” answered Rogozhin, amazed.
But Ippolit, firing up and suddenly seized almost with fury, shouted violently:
“You were in my room last week at night, past one o’clock, on the day I had been to you in the morning, you? Confess, it was you.”
“Last week, at night? Have you gone clean out of your senses, lad.”
The “lad” was silent again for a minute, putting his forefinger to his forehead, and seeming to reflect. But there was a gleam of something sly, almost triumphant, in his pale smile that was still distorted by fear.
“It was you!” he repeated, almost in a whisper, but with intense conviction. “You came to me and sat in my room without speaking, on the chair by the window, for a whole hour; more, between twelve and two o’clock at night. Then afterwards, between two and three, you got up and walked out. … It was you, it was you! Why did you frighten me. Why did you come to torment me? I don’t understand it, but it was you.”
And there was a sudden flash of intense hatred in his eyes, though he was still trembling with fear.
“You shall know all about it directly, gentlemen … I … I… listen….”
Once more, and with desperate haste, he clutched at the sheets of paper. They had slipped and fallen apart. He attempted to put them together. They shook in his shaking hands. It was a long time before he could get them right.
“He’s gone mad, or delirious,” muttered Rogozhin, almost inaudibly.
The reading began at last. At the beginning, for the first five minutes, the author of the unexpected article still gasped for breath, and read jerkily and incoherently; but as he went on his voice grew stronger and began to express the sense of what he was reading. But he was sometimes interrupted by a violent fit of coughing; before he was half way through the article, he was very hoarse. His feverish excitement, which grew greater and greater as he read, reached an intense pitch at last, and so did the painful impression on his audience. Here is the whole article:
“An Essential Explanation.”
“Apres moi le deluge!”
“The prince was here yesterday morning. Among other things he persuaded me to move to his villa. I knew that he would insist upon this, and felt sure that he would blurt straight out that it would be ‘easier to die among people and trees,’ as he expresses it. But to-day, he did not say ‘die,’ but said ‘it will be easier to live,’ which comes to much the same thing, however, in my position. I asked him what he meant by his everlasting ‘trees,’ and why he keeps pestering me with those ‘trees,’ and learnt to my surprise that I had myself said on that evening that I’d come to Pavlovsk to look at the trees for the last time. When I told him I should die just the same,
looking at trees, or looking out of my