The Idiot

This time not only Rogozhin's door but even the one to the old lady's apartment did not open. The prince went for the caretaker and had great difficulty finding him in the courtyard; the caretaker was busy with something and barely answered, even barely looked at him, but all the same declared positively that Parfyon Semyonovich "left very early in the morning, went to Pavlovsk, and wouldn't be home today."

"I'll wait; maybe he'll come towards evening?"

"And he may not be home for a week, who knows about him."

"So he did spend the night here?"

"The night, yes, he spent the night . . ."

All this was suspicious and shady. The caretaker might very well have had time, during that interval, to receive new instructions: earlier he had even been talkative, while now he simply turned his back. But the prince decided to come by once more in about two

hours, and even to stand watch by the house, if need be, while now there was still hope for the German woman, and he drove to the Semyonovsky quarter.

But at the German woman's they did not even understand him. From certain fleeting remarks, he was even able to guess that the German beauty had quarreled with Nastasya Filippovna some two weeks ago, so that she had not even heard of her in all those days, and tried as hard as she could to make it clear that she was not interested in hearing anything now, "even if she's married all the princes in the world." The prince hastened to leave. It occurred to him, among other things, that she might have left for Moscow, as she did the other time, and Rogozhin, naturally, would have followed her, or perhaps had gone with her. "At least let me find some trace!" He remembered, however, that he had to stop at the i

Rogozhin had not come back; no one opened to his ringing; he rang at old Mrs. Rogozhin's; they opened the door and also a

He was expected there. The teacher's widow had already gone

to three or four places and had even stopped at Rogozhin's: not the slightest trace. The prince listened silently, went into the room, sat on the sofa, and began looking at them all as if not understanding what they were telling him. Strange: first he was extremely observant, then suddenly impossibly distracted. The whole family reported later that he had been an "astonishingly" strange man that day, so that "perhaps all the signs were already there." He finally stood up and asked to be shown Nastasya Filippovna's rooms. These were two large, bright, high-ceilinged rooms, quite well furnished, and not cheap. All these ladies reported afterwards that the prince studied every object in the rooms, saw an open book on the table, from a lending library, the French novel Madame Bovary,52 looked at it, earmarked the page on which the book lay open, asked permission to take it with him, and, not listening to the objection that it was a library book, put it into his pocket. He sat down by the open window and, seeing a card table covered with writing in chalk, asked who played. They told him that Nastasya Filippovna had played every night with Rogozhin—fools, preference, millers, whist, hearts—all sorts of games, and that the cards had appeared only very recently, when she moved from Pavlovsk to Petersburg, because Nastasya Filippovna kept complaining that she was bored, that Rogozhin sat silent for whole evenings and could not talk about anything, and she often wept; and suddenly the next evening Rogozhin took cards from his pocket; here Nastasya Filippovna laughed and they began to play. The prince asked where the cards they had played with were. But there were no cards; Rogozhin himself always brought the cards in his pocket, a new deck every day, and then took them away with him.

The ladies advised him to go once more to Rogozhin's and to knock harder once more, not now, but in the evening: "something might turn up." The teacher's widow herself volunteered meanwhile to go to Pavlovsk to see Darya Alexeevna before evening: they might know something there. The prince was invited to come by ten o'clock that evening, in any case, to make plans for the next day. Despite all consolations and reassurances, a perfect despair overwhelmed the prince's soul. In inexpressible anguish, he reached his i

been advised, sat down on the sofa, rested both elbows on the table, and fell to thinking.

God knows how long he thought and God knows what about. There was much that he feared, and he felt painfully and tormentingly that he was terribly afraid. Vera Lebedev came into his head; then it occurred to him that Lebedev might know something about this matter, and if he did not, he would be able to find out sooner and more easily than he would himself. Then he remembered Ippolit, and that Rogozhin had gone to see Ippolit. Then he remembered Rogozhin himself: recently at the burial, then in the park, then—suddenly here in the corridor, when he had hidden himself in the corner that time and waited for him with a knife. His eyes he now remembered, his eyes looking out of the darkness then. He gave a start: the earlier importunate thought now came to his head.

It was in part that if Rogozhin was in Petersburg, then even if he was hiding for a time, all the same he would end by coming to him, the prince, with good or bad intentions, perhaps, just as then. At least, if Rogozhin had to come for some reason or other, then he had nowhere else to come than here, to this same corridor again. He did not know his address; therefore he would very possibly think that the prince was staying at the same i

So he reflected, and for some reason this thought seemed perfectly possible to him. He would not have been able to account for it to himself, if he had begun to go deeper into this thought: "Why, for instance, should Rogozhin suddenly need him so much, and why was it even impossible that they should not finally come together?" But the thought was painful: "If things are well with him, he won't come," the prince went on thinking, "he'll sooner come if things are not well with him; and things are probably not well ..."