me, for I see you are still uneasy. Announce Prince Myshkin, and the name itself will be a sufficient reason for my visit. If I am received — well and good, if not, it’s perhaps just as well. But I don’t think they can refuse to see me. Madame Epanchin will surely want to see the last representative of the elder branch of her family. She thinks a great deal of her family, as I have heard on good authority!”
The prince’s conversation seemed simple enough, yet its very simplicity only made it more inappropriate in the present case, and the experienced attendant could not but feel that what was perfectly suitable from man to man was utterly unsuitable from a visitor to a manservant. And since servants are far more intelligent than their masters usually suppose, it struck the man that there were two explanations: either the prince was some sort of impostor who had come to beg of the general, or he was simply a little bit soft and had no sense of dignity, for a prince with his wits about him and a sense of his own dignity, would not sit in an anteroom and talk to a servant about his affairs. So in either case he might get into trouble over him.
“Anyway, it would be better if you’d walk into the waiting-room,” he observed, as impressively as possible.
“But if I had been there, I wouldn’t have explained it all to you,” said Myshkin, laughing goodhumouredly, “and you would still have been anxious, looking at my cloak and bundle. Now, perhaps, you needn’t wait for the secretary, but can go and announce me to the general.”
“I can’t announce a visitor like you without the secretary; besides, his excellency gave special orders just now that he was not to be disturbed for anyone while he is with the colonel. Gavril Ardalionovitch goes in without being announced.”
“An official?”
“Gavril Ardalionovitch? No. He is in the service of the company. You might put your bundle here.”
“I was meaning to, if I may. And I think I’ll take off my cloak too.”
“Of course, you couldn’t go in in your cloak.”
Myshkin stood up and hurriedly took off his cloak, remaining in a fairly decent, wellcut, though worn, short jacket. A steel chain was visible on his waistcoat, and on the chain was a silver Geneva watch.
Though the prince was a bit soft — the footman had made up his mind that he was so — yet he felt it unseemly to keep up a conversation with a visitor. Moreover, he could not help feeling a sort of liking for the prince, though from another point of view he aroused in him a feeling of strong and coarse indignation.
“And Madame Epanchin, when does she see visitors?” asked Myshkin, sitting down again in the same place.
“That’s not my business. She sees visitors at different times according to who they are. The dressmaker is admitted at eleven even, Gavril Ardalionovitch is admitted earlier than other people, even to early lunch.”
“Your rooms here are kept warmer than abroad,”
observed Myshkin, “but it’s warmer out of doors there than here. A Russian who is not used to it can hardly live in their houses in the winter.”
“Don’t they heat them?”
“No, and the houses are differently built, that is to say the stoves and windows are different.”
“Hm! Have you been away long?”
“Four years. But I was almost all the time at the same place in the country.”
“You’ve grown strange to our ways?”
“Yes, that’s true. Would you believe it, I am surprised to find I haven’t forgotten how to speak Russian. As I talk to you, I keep thinking ‘Why, I am speaking Russian nicely.’ Perhaps that’s why I talk so much. Ever since yesterday I keep longing to talk Russian.”
“Hm! Ha! Used you to live in Petersburg?” In spite of his efforts the lackey could not resist being drawn into such a polite and affable conversation.
“In Petersburg? I’ve scarcely been there at all, only on my way to other places. I knew nothing of the town before, and now I hear there’s so much new in it that anyone who knew it would have to get to know it afresh. People talk a great deal about the new Courts of Justice now.”
“Hm! … Courts of Justice… . It’s true there are Courts of Justice. And how is it abroad, are their courts better than ours?”
“I don’t know. I’ve heard a great deal that’s good about ours. We’ve no capital punishment, you know.”
“Why, do they execute people there then?”
“Yes. I saw it in France, at Lyons. Dr. Schneider took me with him.”
“Do they hang them?”
“No, in France they always cut off their heads.”
“Do they scream?”
“How could they? It’s done in an instant. They make the man lie down and then a great knife is brought down by a heavy, powerful machine, called the guillotine… . The head falls off before one has time to wink. The preparations are horrible. When they read the sentence, get the man ready, bind him, lead him to the scaffold — that’s what’s awful! Crowds assemble, even women, though they don’t like women to look on… .”
“It’s not a thing for them!”
“Of course not, of course not! Such a horrible thing! … The criminal was an intelligent, middle-
aged man, strong and courageous, called Legros. But I assure you, though you may not believe me, when he mounted the scaffold he was weeping and was as white as paper. Isn’t it incredible? Isn’t it awful? Who cries for fear? I’d no idea that a grown man, not a child, a man who never cried, a man of forty-five, could cry for fear! What must be passing in the soul at such a moment; to what anguish it must be brought! It’s an outrage on the soul, that’s what it is! It is written ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ so because he has killed, are we to kill him? No, that’s impossible. It’s a month since I saw that, but I seem to see it before my eyes still. I’ve dreamt of it half a dozen times.”
Myshkin was quite moved as he spoke, a faint colour came into his pale face, though his voice was still gentle. The footman followed him with sympathetic interest, so that he seemed sorry for him to stop. He, too, was perhaps a man of imagination and strainings after thought.
“It’s a good thing at least that there is not much pain,” he observed, “when the head falls off.”
“Do you know,” Myshkin answered warmly, “you’ve just made that observation and every one says the same, and the guillotine was invented with that object. But the idea occurred to me at the time that perhaps it made it worse. That will seem to you an absurd and wild idea, but if one has some imagination, one may suppose even that. Think! if there were torture, for instance, there would be suffering and wounds, bodily agony, and so all that would distract the mind from spiritual suffering, so that one would only be tortured by wounds till one died. But the chief and worst pain may not be in the bodily suffering but in one’s knowing for certain that in an hour, and then in ten minutes, and then in half a minute, and then now, at the very moment, the soul will leave the body and that one will cease to be a man and that that’s bound to happen; the worst part of it is that it’s certain. When you lay
