“Better not read it!” Evgeny Pavlovich suddenly exclaimed, but with an air of uneasiness so unexpected in him that many found it strange.
“Don’t read it!” the prince, too, cried, putting his hand on the envelope.
“What’s this about reading? Right now we’re eating,” somebody observed.
“An article? For a magazine, or what?” inquired another.
“Maybe it’s boring?” added a third.
“What have you got?” inquired the rest. But the prince’s frightened gesture seemed to frighten Ippolit himself.
“So … I shouldn’t read it?” he whispered somehow fearfully to the prince, with a crooked smile on his blue lips. “I shouldn’t read it?” he murmured, passing his gaze over all the public, all the eyes and faces, and as if again snatching at everything with his former, almost aggressive expansiveness. “Are you … afraid?” he turned to the prince again.
“Of what?” the latter asked, changing countenance more and more.
“Does anybody have a twenty-kopeck piece?” Ippolit suddenly jumped up from his chair as if he had been pulled from it. “A coin of any kind?”
“Here!” Lebedev offered at once; the thought flashed in him that the sick Ippolit had gone crazy.
“Vera Lukyanovna!” Ippolit hastily invited, “take it and toss it on the table: heads or tails? Heads I read!”
Vera looked fearfully at the coin, at Ippolit, then at her father, and, somehow awkwardly, her head thrown back, as if convinced that she herself should not look at the coin, tossed it on the table. It came up heads.
“I read!” whispered Ippolit, as if crushed by the decision of fate; he could not have turned more pale if a death sentence had been read to him. “But anyhow,” he suddenly gave a start after pausing half a minute, “what is it? Have I just cast the die?” and with the same aggressive frankness he looked at everyone around him. “But this is an astonishing psychological feature!” he suddenly cried, turning to the prince in genuine amazement. “This … this is an inconceivable feature, Prince!” he confirmed, growing animated and as if coming to his senses. “Write this down, Prince, remember it, I believe you collect materials about capital punishment … so I was told, ha, ha! Oh, God, what senseless absurdity!” He sat down on the sofa, leaned both elbows on the table, and clutched his head with his hands. “It’s even shameful!… The devil I care if it’s shameful,” he raised his head almost at once. “Gentlemen! Gentlemen, I am opening the envelope,” he announced with a sort of unexpected resolve, “I … however, I’m not forcing you to listen!…”
His hands trembling with excitement, he opened the envelope, took out several sheets of paper covered with small writing, placed them in front of him, and began smoothing them out.
“But what is it? What have you got there? What are you going to read?” some muttered gloomily; others kept silent. But they all sat down and watched curiously. Perhaps they indeed expected something extraordinary. Vera gripped her father’s chair and all but wept from fear; Kolya was almost as frightened. Lebedev, who had already settled down, suddenly got up, seized the candles, and moved them closer to Ippolit, so that there would be enough light to read by.
“Gentlemen, you … you’ll presently see what it is,” Ippolit added for some reason and suddenly began his reading: “ ‘A Necessary Explanation’! Epigraph: Après moi le déluge‡ … Pah, devil take it!” he cried as if burned. “Could I have seriously set down such a stupid epigraph?… Listen, gentlemen!… I assure you that in the final end this may all be the most terrible trifles! It’s just some of my thoughts … If you think it’s … something mysterious or … forbidden … in short …”
“Read without any prefaces,” Ganya interrupted.
“He’s dodging!” somebody added.
“Too much talk,” put in Rogozhin, who had been silent the whole time.
Ippolit suddenly looked at him, and when their eyes met, Rogozhin grinned bitterly and sarcastically, and slowly pronounced some strange words:
“That’s not how the thing should be handled, man, that’s not …”
What Rogozhin meant to say, no one, of course, understood, but his words made a rather strange impression on them all; it was as if they had all brushed up against a common thought. But the impression these words made on Ippolit was terrible; he trembled so much that the prince reached out to support him, and he would probably have cried out, if his voice had not suddenly failed him. For a whole minute he was unable to utter a word and, breathing heavily, stared at Rogozhin. At last, breathlessly and with great effort he spoke:
“So that … that was you … you?”
“What? What about me?” Rogozhin answered in perplexity, but Ippolit, flushed, and suddenly seized almost by rage, cried sharply and loudly:
“You were in my room last week, at night, past one o’clock, the same day I went to see you in the morning! You! Admit it was you!”
“Last week, at night? You must have gone clean out of your mind, man.”
The “man” was silent again for a minute, putting his forefinger to his forehead and as if thinking hard; but in his pale smile, still twisted with fear, there suddenly flashed something cunning, as it were, and even triumphant.
“It was you!” he repeated at last, almost in a whisper, but with extraordinary conviction. “You came to my room and sat silently on my chair, by the window, for a whole hour; more; from one till past two in the morning; then you got up and left after two … It was you, you! Why you frightened me, why you came to torment me—I don’t understand, but it was you!”
And in his eyes there suddenly flashed a boundless hatred, in spite of his frightened trembling, which had still not subsided.
“You’ll find out all about it presently, gentlemen, I … I … listen …”
Again, and in terrible haste, he seized his pages; they had spilled and scattered, he tried to gather them up; they trembled in his trembling hands; for a long time he could not settle down.
The reading finally began. At first, for about five minutes, the author of the unexpected article was still breathless and read disjointedly and unevenly; but then his voice grew firm and began to express fully the meaning of what he read. Only occasionally a very strong cough interrupted him; by the middle of the article his voice became very hoarse; the extraordinary animation that came over him more and more as he read, in the end reached the highest pitch, as did its painful impression on his listeners. Here is the whole of this “article.”
MY NECESSARY EXPLANATION
Après moi le déluge!
Yesterday morning the prince came to see me; incidentally, he talked me into moving to his dacha. I knew he would certainly insist on that, and I was sure he would blurt right out to me that it would be “easier for me to die among people and trees,” as he puts it. But this time he did not say to die, but said “it would be easier to live,” which, however, makes almost no difference for me in my situation. I asked him what he meant by his incessant “trees,” and why he was foisting these “trees” on me—and was surprised to learn from him that I myself supposedly said the other evening that I had come to Pavlovsk to look at the trees for the last time. When I observed to him that it made no difference whether I died under the trees or looking out the window at my bricks, and that there was no point in making a fuss over two weeks, he agreed at once; but greenery and clean air, in his opinion, are bound to produce some physical change in me, and my agitation and my dreams will change and perhaps become lighter. I again observed to him laughingly that he spoke like a materialist. He replied with his smile that he had always been a materialist. Since he never lies, these words must mean something. His smile is nice; I’ve looked at him more attentively now. I do not know whether I love him or not now; I have no time to bother with that now. My five-month hatred of him, it should be noted, has begun to abate in this last month. Who knows, maybe I went to Pavlovsk mainly to see him. But … why did I leave my room then? A man condemned to death should not
leave his corner; and if I had not taken a final decision now, but had decided, on the contrary, to wait till the last hour, then, of course, I would not have left my room for anything and would not have accepted the suggestion of moving out “to die” in his place in Pavlovsk.
I must hurry and finish all this “explanation” by tomorrow without fail. Which means I will not have time to reread and correct it; I will reread it tomorrow when I read it to the prince and the two or three witnesses I intend to find there. Since there will not be a single lying word in it, but only the whole truth, ultimate and solemn, I am curious beforehand what sort of impression it will make on me at that hour and that moment when I start to reread it. However, I need not have written the words “ultimate and solemn truth”; there is no need to lie for the sake of two weeks anyway, because it is not worth living for two weeks; that is the best proof that I will write nothing but the truth. (NB. Do not forget the thought: am I not mad at this moment, that is, at moments? I have been told positively that people in the last stages of consumption sometimes lose their minds temporarily. Check this tomorrow during the reading by the impression made on the listeners. This question must be resolved with the utmost precision; otherwise it is impossible to set about anything.)
It seems to me that I have just written something terribly stupid, but I have no time to correct it, as I said; besides, I give myself my word purposely not to correct a single line in this manuscript, even if I notice that I am contradicting myself every five lines. I precisely want to determine tomorrow during the reading whether the logical course of my thought is correct; whether I notice my own mistakes, and thus whether everything I have thought through during these six months in this room is true or mere raving.
If, just two months ago, I had had to leave my room, as I am doing now, and say good-bye to Meyer’s wall, I’m sure I would have felt sad. But now I do not feel anything, and yet tomorrow I am leaving both my room and the wall forever! Thus my conviction that for the sake of two weeks it is not worth regretting anything or giving oneself up to any sort of emotions, has overcome my nature and can now command all my feelings. But is that true? Is it true that my nature is now utterly defeated? If I were to be tortured now, I would surely start shouting, and would not say that it is not worth shouting and feeling pain because I have only two weeks left to live.
But is it true that I have only two weeks left to live, and no more? I lied that time in Pavlovsk: B—n never told me anything and never saw me; but about a week ago the student Oxigenov was brought to me; in his convictions he is a materialist, an atheist, and a nihilist, which is precisely why I invited him; I needed somebody who would finally tell me the naked truth, without mawkishness or ceremony. That is what he did, and not only readily and without ceremony, but even with obvious pleasure (which, in my opinion, was unnecessary). He blurted right out to me that I had about a month left; maybe a little more, if the conditions are good; but I may even die much sooner. In his opinion, I may die unexpectedly, even, for instance, tomorrow: such facts have occurred, and only two days ago a young lady, a consumptive and in a state resembling mine, in Kolomna, was about to go to the market for provisions, but suddenly felt ill, lay down on the sofa, sighed, and died. Oxigenov told me all this, even flaunting his unfeelingness and carelessness somewhat, as if thereby doing me honor, that is, showing that he took me to be just such an all-denying higher being as himself, for whom dying, naturally, amounts to nothing. In the end, all the same, the fact is determined: a month and no more! I am perfectly convinced that he is not mistaken about it.
It surprised me very much how the prince guessed the other day that I have “bad dreams”; he said literally that in Pavlovsk “my agitation and dreams” would change. And why dreams? He is either a doctor or indeed of an extraordinary intelligence and able to guess a great many things. (But that he is ultimately an “idiot” there can be no doubt at all.) As if on purpose, just before he came I had a nice little dream (of a kind, however, that I now have by the hundred). I fell asleep—an hour before he came, I think—and saw myself in a room (but not mine). The room was bigger and higher than mine, better furnished, bright; a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a sofa, and my bed, big and wide and covered with a green silk quilt. But in this room I noticed a terrible animal, a sort of monster. It resembled a scorpion, but it was not a scorpion, it was more vile and much more terrible, and precisely, it seemed, in that there are no such creatures in nature and that it had come to me on purpose, and that very fact presumably contained some sort of mystery. I made it out very well: it was brown and had a shell, a creeping reptile, about seven inches long, about two fingers thick at the head, gradually tapering towards the tail, so that the very tip of the tail was no more than one-fifth of an inch thick. About two inches from the head, a pair of legs came out of the body, at a forty-five-degree angle, one on each side, about three and a half inches long, so that the whole animal, if seen from above, looked like a trident. I could not make out the head very well, but I saw two feelers, not long, like two strong needles, also brown. Two identical feelers at the tip of the tail and at the tip of each foot, making eight feelers in all. The animal ran about the room very quickly, supported on its legs and tail, and when it ran, its body and legs wriggled like little snakes, with extraordinary rapidity, despite its shell, and this was very repulsive to look at. I was terribly afraid it would sting me; I had been told it was venomous, but I was most tormented by who could have sent it to my room, what did they want to do to me, and what was the secret of it? It hid under the chest of drawers, under the wardrobe, crawled into the corners. I sat on a chair with my legs tucked under me. It quickly ran diagonally across the room and disappeared somewhere near my chair. I looked around in fear, but as I was sitting with my legs tucked under me, I hoped it would not crawl up the chair. Suddenly I heard a sort of crackling rustle behind me, almost by my head. I turned and saw that the reptile was crawling up the wall and was already level with my head and even touching my hair with its tail, which was turning and twisting with extreme rapidity. I jumped up, and the animal disappeared. I was afraid to lie down in bed, lest it crawl under the pillow. My mother and an acquaintance of hers came into the room. They tried to catch the reptile, but were calmer than I, and not even afraid. But they understood nothing. Suddenly the reptile crawled out again; this time it crawled very quietly, and as if with some particular intention, twisting slowly, which was still more repulsive, again diagonally across the room, towards the door. Here my mother opened the door and called Norma, our dog—an enormous Newfoundland, black and shaggy; she died some five years ago. She rushed into the room and stopped over the reptile as if rooted to the spot. The reptile also stopped, but was still twisting and flicking the tips of its legs and tail against the floor. Animals cannot feel mystical fear, if I am not mistaken; but at that moment it seemed to me that in Norma’s fear there was something as if very extraordinary, as if almost mystical, which meant that she also sensed, as I did, that there was something fatal and some sort of mystery in the beast. She slowly backed away from the reptile, which was quietly and cautiously crawling towards her; it seemed that it wanted to rush at her suddenly and sting her. But, despite all her fear, Norma’s gaze was terribly angry, though she was trembling all over. Suddenly she slowly bared her terrible teeth, opened her entire red maw, took aim, readied herself, resolved, and suddenly seized the reptile with her teeth. The reptile must have made a strong movement to escape, because Norma caught it once more, this time in the air, and twice got her whole mouth around it, still in the air, as if gulping it down. The shell cracked in her teeth; the animal’s tail and legs stuck out of her mouth, moving with terrible rapidity. Suddenly Norma squealed pitifully: the reptile had managed after all to sting her on the tongue. Squealing and howling with pain, she opened her mouth, and I saw that the bitten reptile was still stirring as it lay across her mouth, its half-crushed body oozing a large quantity of white juice onto her tongue, resembling the juice of a crushed blac
k cockroach … Here I woke up, and the prince came in.
“Gentlemen,” said Ippolit, suddenly tearing himself away from his reading and even almost shamefacedly, “I didn’t reread it, but it seems I indeed wrote a lot that’s superfluous. This dream …”
“Is that,” Ganya hastened to put in.
“There’s too much of the personal, I agree, that is, about me myself …”
As he said this, Ippolit looked weary and faint and wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.
“Yes, sir, you’re much too interested in yourself,” hissed Lebedev.
“Again, gentlemen, I’m not forcing anyone: whoever doesn’t want to listen can leave.”
“Throws us … out of somebody else’s house,” Rogozhin growled barely audibly.
“And what if we all suddenly get up and leave?” Ferdyshchenko, who until then, incidentally, had not dared to speak aloud, said unexpectedly.
Ippolit suddenly dropped his eyes and clutched his manuscript; but in that same second he raised his head again and, his eyes flashing, with two red spots on his cheeks, said, looking pointblank at Ferdyshchenko:
“You don’t love me at all!”
There was laughter; however, the majority did not laugh. Ippolit blushed terribly.
“Ippolit,” said the prince, “close your manuscript and give it to me, and go to bed here in my room. We can talk before we sleep and tomorrow; but on condition that you never open these pages again. Do you want that?”
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