The prince finally left the somber park, in which he had wandered for a long time, as he had the day before. The bright, transparent night seemed brighter than usual to him. "Can it be so early?" he thought. (He had forgotten to take his watch.) Music reached him from somewhere far away. "In the vauxhall, it must be," he thought again, "of course, they didn't go there today." Realizing that, he saw that he was standing right by their dacha; he simply knew he would have to end up there, finally, and with a sinking heart he went onto the terrace. No one met him, the terrace was deserted. He waited a while and then opened the door to the drawing room. "They never close this door," flashed in him, but the drawing room, too, was deserted; it was almost totally dark. He stood perplexed in the middle of the room. Suddenly the door opened and Alexandra Ivanovna came in carrying a candle. Seeing the prince, she was surprised and stopped in front of him as if
questioningly. It was obvious that she was only passing through the room, from one door to the other, not thinking at all of finding anyone there.
"How did you end up here?" she said at last.
"I . . . came by . . ."
"Mamanisn't feeling well, and neither is Aglaya. Adelaida's going to bed, and so am I. We spent the whole evening sitting at home alone. Papa and the prince are in Petersburg."
"I've come . . . I've come to you . . . now . . ."
"Do you know what time it is?"
"N-no . . ."
"Half-past twelve. We always go to bed at one."
"Ah, I thought it was . . . half-past nine."
"Never mind!" she laughed. "But why didn't you come earlier? Maybe we were expecting you."
"I . . . thought. . ." he babbled, going out.
"Good-bye! Tomorrow I'll make everybody laugh."
He went down the road that skirted the park to his dacha. His heart was pounding, his thoughts were confused, and everything around him seemed like a dream. And suddenly, just as earlier, both times when he was awakened by the same vision, so the same vision again appeared before him. The same woman came out of the park and stood before him, as if she had been waiting for him there. He shuddered and stopped; she seized his hand and pressed it hard. "No, this is not a vision!"
And so she finally stood before him face to face, for the first time since their parting; she was saying something to him, but he looked at her silently; his heart overflowed and was wrung with pain. Oh, never afterwards could he forget this meeting with her, and he always remembered it with the same pain. She went down on her knees before him right there in the street, as if beside herself; he stepped back in fear, but she tried to catch his hand in order to kiss it, and, just as earlier in his dream, tears glistened now on her long lashes.
"Get up, get up!" he said in a frightened whisper, trying to raise her. "Get up quickly!"
"Are you happy? Are you?" she kept asking. "Tell me just one word, are you happy now? Today, right now? With her? What did she say?"
She would not get up, she did not listen to him; she asked hurriedly and was in a hurry to speak, as though she were being pursued.
"I'm leaving tomorrow, as you told me to. I won't. . . I'm seeing you for the last time, the last! Now it really is the last time!"
"Calm yourself, get up!" he said in despair.
She peered at him greedily, clutching his hands.
"Farewell!" she said at last, stood up, and quickly walked away from him, almost ran. The prince saw that Rogozhin was suddenly beside her, took her arm, and led her away.
"Wait, Prince," cried Rogozhin, "in five minutes I'll come back for a bit."
In five minutes he indeed came back; the prince was waiting for him in the same place.
"I put her in the carriage," he said. "It's been waiting there on the corner since ten o'clock. She just knew you'd spend the whole evening with the other one. I told her exactly what you wrote me today. She won't write to the other one anymore; she promised; and she'll leave here tomorrow, as you wished. She wanted to see you one last time, even though you refused; we waited here in this place for you to go back—over there, on that bench."
"She brought you along herself?"
"And what of it?" Rogozhin grinned. "I saw what I knew. You read her letters, eh?"
"But can you really have read them?" asked the prince, astounded by the thought.
"What else; she showed me each letter herself. Remember about the razor? Heh, heh!"
"She's insane!" cried the prince, wringing his hands.
"Who knows, maybe she's not," Rogozhin said softly, as if to himself.
The prince did not answer.
"Well, good-bye," said Rogozhin, "I'm leaving tomorrow, too; don't think ill of me! And how come, brother," he added, turning quickly, "how come you didn't say anything in answer to her? Are you happy or not?' "
"No, no, no!" the prince exclaimed with boundless sorrow.
"As if you'd say 'yes!'" Rogozhin laughed spitefully and walked off without looking back.
PART FOUR
I
About a week went by after the two persons of our story met on the green bench. One bright morning, around half-past ten, Varvara Ardalionovna Ptitsyn, having gone out to visit some of her acquaintances, returned home in great and rueful pensiveness. There are people of whom it is difficult to say anything that would present them at once and fully, in their most typical and characteristic aspect; these are those people who are usually called "ordinary" people, the "majority," and who indeed make up the vast majority in any society. Writers in their novels and stories for the most part try to take social types and present them graphically and artistically—types which in their full state are met with extremely rarely in reality and which are nonetheless almost more real than reality itself. Podkolesin 1in his typical aspect may well be an exaggeration, but he is by no means an impossibility. What a host of intelligent people, having learned about Podkolesin from Gogol, at once began to find that dozens and hundreds of their good acquaintances and friends were terribly like Podkolesin. They knew before Gogol that these friends were like Podkolesin, they simply did not know yet precisely what their name was. In reality it is terribly rare that bridegrooms jump out of windows before their weddings, because, to say nothing else, it is even inconvenient; nonetheless, how many bridegrooms, even worthy and intelligent people, in the depths of their conscience, have been ready before marriage to acknowledge themselves as Podkolesins. Nor does every husband cry at each step: " Tu l'as voulu, Georges Dandin!"* 2But, God, how many millions and billions of times have the husbands of the whole world repeated this heartfelt cry after their honeymoon, and, who knows, maybe even the day after the wedding.
And so, without going into more serious explanations, we shall say only that in reality the typicality of persons is watered down, as it were, and all these Georges Dandins and Podkolesins really
*You asked for it, Georges Dandin!
exist, scurry and run around in front of us daily, but as if in a somewhat diluted state. Having mentioned, finally, for the sake of the complete truth, that the full Georges Dandin, as Molière created him, may also be met with in reality, though rarely, we shall therewith end our discourse, which is beginning to resemble a critical article in some journal. Nonetheless, a question remains before us all the same: what is a novelist to do with ordinary, completely "usual" people, and how can he present them to the reader so as to make them at least somewhat interesting? To bypass them altogether in a story is quite impossible, because ordinary people are constantly and for the most part the necessary links in the chain of everyday events; in bypassing them we would thus violate plausibility. To fill novels with nothing but types or even simply, for the sake of interest, with strange and nonexistent people, would be implausible—and perhaps uninteresting as well. In our opinion, the writer should try to seek out interesting and instructive nuances even among ordinary people. And when, for instance, the very essence of certain ordinary people consists precisely in their permanent and unchanging ordinariness, or, better still, when, despite all the extreme efforts of these people to get out of the rut of the usual and the routine, they end up all the same by remaining unchangingly and eternally in one and the same routine, then such people even acquire a kind of typicality—as that ordinariness which refuses to remain what it is and wants at all costs to become original and independent, but has not the slightest means of achieving independence.