"A tenant," Ferdyshchenko spoke again, peering in the same way.
"You want to become acquainted?"
"Ehh!" said the visitor, ruffling up his hair and sighing, and he started looking into the opposite corner. "Do you have any money?" he asked suddenly, turning to the prince.
"A little."
"How much, precisely?"
"Twenty-five roubles."
"Show me."
The prince took a twenty-five-rouble note from his waistcoat pocket and handed it to Ferdyshchenko. The man unfolded it, looked at it, turned it over, then held it up to the light.
"Quite strange," he said, as if pondering. "Why do they turn brown? These twenty-fivers sometimes get terribly brown, while others, on the contrary, fade completely. Take it."
The prince took the note from him. Ferdyshchenko got up from the chair.
"I came to warn you: first of all, don't lend me any money, because I'm sure to ask."
"Very well."
"Do you intend to pay here?"
"I do."
"Well, I don't, thank you. Mine's the first door to your right, did you see? Try not to visit me too often; I'll come to you, don't worry about that. Have you seen the general?"
"No."
"Heard him?"
"Of course not."
"Well, you will see and hear him. Besides, he even asks me to lend him money! Avis au lecteur*Good-bye. Is it possible to live with a name like Ferdyshchenko? Eh?"
*Warning to the reader.
"Why not?"
"Good-bye."
And he went to the door. The prince learned later that this gentleman, as if out of duty, had taken upon himself the task of amazing everyone by his originality and merriment, but it somehow never came off. He even made an unpleasant impression on some people, which caused him genuine grief, but all the same he would not abandon his task. In the doorway he managed to set things right, as it were, by bumping into a gentleman coming in; after letting this new gentleman, who was unknown to the prince, enter the room, he obligingly winked several times behind his back by way of warning, and thus left not without a certain aplomb.
This new gentleman was tall, about fifty-five years old or even a little more, rather corpulent, with a purple-red, fleshy and flabby face framed by thick gray side-whiskers, with a moustache and large, rather protruding eyes. His figure would have been rather imposing if there had not been something seedy, shabby, even soiled about it. He was dressed in an old frock coat with nearly worn-through elbows; his shirt was also dirty—in a homey way. There was a slight smell of vodka in his vicinity; but his manner was showy, somewhat studied, and with an obvious wish to impress by its dignity. The gentleman approached the prince unhurriedly, with an affable smile, silently took his hand and, holding it in his own, peered into his face for some time, as if recognizing familiar features.
"Him! Him!" he said softly but solemnly. "As if alive! I heard them repeating the familiar and dear name and recalled the irretrievable past . . . Prince Myshkin?"
"That's right, sir."
"General Ivolgin, retired and unfortunate. Your name and patronymic, if I dare ask?"
"Lev Nikolaevich."
"So, so! The son of my friend, one might say my childhood friend, Nikolai Petrovich?"
"My father's name was Nikolai Lvovich."
"Lvovich," the general corrected himself, but unhurriedly and with perfect assurance, as if he had not forgotten in the least but had only made an accidental slip. He sat down and, also taking the prince's hand, sat him down beside him. "I used to carry you about in my arms, sir."
"Really?" asked the prince. "My father has been dead for twenty years now."
"Yes, twenty years, twenty years and three months. We studied together. I went straight into the military ..."
"My father was also in the military, a second lieutenant in the Vasilkovsky regiment."
"The Belomirsky. His transfer to the Belomirsky came almost on the eve of his death. I stood there and blessed him into eternity. Your mother ..."
The general paused as if in sad remembrance.
"Yes, she also died six months later, of a chill," said the prince.
"Not of a chill, not of a chill, believe an old man. I was there, I buried her, too. Of grief over the prince, and not of a chill. Yes, sir, I have memories of the princess, too! Youth! Because of her, the prince and I, childhood friends, nearly killed each other."
The prince began listening with a certain mistrust.
"I was passionately in love with your mother while she was still a fiancée—my friend's fiancée. The prince noticed it and was shocked. He comes to me in the morning, before seven o'clock, wakes me up. I get dressed in amazement; there is silence on both sides; I understand everything. He takes two pistols from his pocket. Across a handkerchief.28 Without witnesses. Why witnesses, if we'll be sending each other into eternity in five minutes? We loaded the pistols, stretched out the handkerchief, put the pistols to each other's hearts, and looked into each other's faces. Suddenly tears burst from our eyes, our hands trembled. Both of us, both of us, at once! Well, naturally, then came embraces and a contest in mutual magnanimity. The prince cries: 'She's yours!' I cry: 'She's yours!' In short... in short . . . you've come ... to live with us?"
"Yes, for a while, perhaps," said the prince, as if stammering slightly.
"Prince, mama wants to see you," cried Kolya, looking in at the door. The prince got up to leave, but the general placed his right hand on his shoulder and amiably forced him back down on the couch.
"As a true friend of your father's I wish to warn you," said the general, "I have suffered, as you can see yourself, owing to a tragic catastrophe—but without a trial! Without a trial! Nina Alexandrovna is a rare woman. Varvara Ardalionovna, my daughter, is a rare daughter! Owing to certain circumstances, we let rooms—an unheard-of degradation! I, for whom it only remained to become a governor-general! . . . But we're always glad to have you. And meanwhile there's a tragedy in my house!"
The prince looked at him questioningly and with great curiosity.
"A marriage is being prepared, a rare marriage. A marriage between an ambiguous woman and a young man who could be a kammerjunker.29 This woman will be introduced into the house in which my daughter and wife live! But as long as there is breath in me, she will not enter it! I'll lie down on the threshold, and just let her step over me! ... I almost don't speak with Ganya now, I even avoid meeting him. I'm warning you on purpose, though if you live with us you'll witness it anyway without that. But you are my friend's son, and I have the right to hope . . ."
"Prince, be so kind as to come to me in the drawing room," Nina Alexandrovna called, appearing in the doorway herself.
"Imagine, my friend;" cried the general, "it appears I dandled the prince in my arms!"
Nina Alexandrovna looked reproachfully at the general and searchingly at the prince, but did not say a word. The prince followed her; but they had only just come to the drawing room and sat down, and Nina Alexandrovna had only just begun telling the prince something hastily and in a half-whisper, when the general himself suddenly arrived in the drawing room. Nina Alexandrovna fell silent at once and bent over her knitting with obvious vexation. The general may have noticed her vexation, but he continued to be in the most excellent spirits.
"My friend's son!" he cried, addressing Nina Alexandrovna. "And so unexpectedly! I'd long ceased imagining. But, my dear, don't you remember the late Nikolai Lvovich? Wasn't he still in Tver . . . when you ... ?"
"I don't remember Nikolai Lvovich. Is that your father?" she asked the prince.
"Yes. But I believe he died in Elisavetgrad, not in Tver," the prince observed timidly to the general. "I heard it from Pavlishchev . . ."
"In Tver," the general confirmed. "Just before his death he was transferred to Tver, and even before the illness developed. You were still too little and wouldn't remember either the transfer or the trip. And Pavlishchev could have made a mistake, though he was a most excellent man."