"It's right because they shoot from a great distance."
"And do you know how to shoot?"
"I've never done it."
"Do you at least know how to load a pistol?"
"No, I don't. That is, I understand how it's done, but I've never loaded one myself."
"Well, that means you don't know how, because it takes practice! Listen now and learn welclass="underline" first, buy good gunpowder, not damp (they say it mustn't be damp, but very dry), the fine sort, you can ask about it, but not the kind used for cannons. They say you have to mold the bullet yourself. Do you have pistols?"
"No, and I don't need any," the prince suddenly laughed.
"Ah, what nonsense! You must certainly buy one, a good one,
French or English, they say they're the best. Then take some powder, a thimbleful or maybe two thimblefuls, and pour it in. Better put in more. Ram it down with felt (they say it absolutely must be felt for some reason), you can get that somewhere, from some mattress, or doors are sometimes upholstered with felt. Then, when you've stuffed the felt in, you put in the bullet—do you hear, the bullet after, and the felt before, otherwise it won't fire. Why are you laughing? I want you to shoot several times a day and learn to hit the mark without fail. Will you do it?"
The prince laughed; Aglaya stamped her foot in vexation. Her serious air, in such a conversation, surprised the prince a little. He partly felt that he had to find out about something, to ask about something—in any case about something more serious than how to load a pistol. But everything flew out of his mind, except for the one fact that she was sitting before him, and he was looking at her, and what she talked about at that moment made scarcely any difference to him.
Finally Ivan Fyodorovich himself came down to the terrace from upstairs; he was headed somewhere with a frowning, preoccupied, and determined look.
"Ah, Lev Nikolaich, it's you . . . Where to now?" he asked, though Lev Nikolaevich had not thought of moving from his place. "Come along, I'll tell you a little something."
"Good-bye," said Aglaya, and she gave the prince her hand.
It was already rather dark on the terrace; the prince could not make out her face quite clearly at that moment. A minute later, as he and the general were leaving the dacha, he suddenly turned terribly red and clenched his right hand tightly.
It turned out that Ivan Fyodorovich was going the same way he was; despite the late hour, Ivan Fyodorovich was hurrying to speak with someone about something. But meanwhile he suddenly began talking with the prince, quickly, anxiously, rather incoherently, often mentioning Lizaveta Prokofyevna. If the prince could have been more attentive at that moment, he might have guessed that Ivan Fyodorovich wanted among other things to find out something from him as well, or, better, to ask him directly and openly about something, but never managed to touch on the chiefest point. To his shame, the prince was so distracted that at the very beginning he did not even hear anything, and when the general stopped in front of him with some burning question, he was forced to confess that he understood nothing.
The general shrugged his shoulders.
"You've all become some sort of strange people, in all respects," he started talking again. "I tell you, I utterly fail to understand Lizaveta Prokofyevna's ideas and anxieties. She's in hysterics, she weeps and says we've been covered with shame and disgrace. By whom? How? With whom? When and why? I confess I'm to blame (I admit it), greatly to blame, but the importunities of this . . . troublesome woman (and ill-behaved besides) can finally be restricted by the police, and even tonight I intend to see a certain person and give warning. Everything can be arranged quietly, meekly, affectionately even, through connections and without any scandal. I also agree that the future is fraught with events and much is unexplained; there's some intrigue involved; but if they don't know anything here, they can't explain anything there either; if I haven't heard, you haven't heard, this one hasn't heard, that one hasn't heard, then who, finally, has heard, I ask you? What can explain it, in your opinion, except that the affair is half a mirage, doesn't exist, like moonlight, for instance ... or other phantoms."
" Sheis a madwoman," the prince murmured, suddenly remembering, with pain, all that had happened earlier.
"That's the word, if you mean her. Somewhat the same idea used to visit me, and then I'd sleep peacefully. But now I see that others think more correctly, and I don't believe it's madness. She's a cantankerous woman, granted, but with that also a subtle one, anything but crazy. Today's escapade to do with Kapiton Alexeich proves it only too well. It's a crooked business on her part, Jesuitical at the very least, for her own purposes."
"What Kapiton Alexeich?"
"Ah, my God, Lev Nikolaich, you're not listening at all. I began by telling you about Kapiton Alexeich; I'm so struck that even now I'm trembling from head to foot. That's why I came late from the city today. Kapiton Alexeich Radomsky, Evgeny Pavlych's uncle . . ."
"What!" cried the prince.
"Shot himself this morning at dawn, at seven o'clock. A venerable man, seventy years old, an Epicurean—and it's just as she said about the government funds, a mighty sum!"
"How did she ..."
"Find out, you mean? Ha, ha! As soon as she appeared here, a whole staff formed around her. You know what sort of persons visit her now and seek the 'honor of her acquaintance.' Naturally, she
could have heard something earlier from her visitors, because the whole of Petersburg knows already and half, if not the whole, of Pavlovsk. But what a subtle observation she made about the uniform, as I've been told, that is, about Evgeny Pavlych managing to resign from the army in good time! What an infernal allusion! No, that doesn't suggest insanity. I, of course, refuse to believe that Evgeny Pavlych could have known about the catastrophe beforehand, that is, on such-and-such a day, at seven o'clock, and so on. But he might have anticipated it all. And here I am, here we all are, including Prince Shch., counting on the old man leaving him an inheritance! Terrible! Terrible! Understand, however, that I'm not accusing Evgeny Pavlych of anything, and I hasten to make that clear to you, but all the same it's suspicious. Prince Shch. is extremely struck. It's all fallen out so strangely."
"But what is suspicious in Evgeny Pavlych's behavior?"
"Nothing! He behaved in the noblest fashion. I wasn't hinting at anything. His own fortune, I think, is intact. Lizaveta Prokofyevna, naturally, won't hear anything . . . But the main thing is all these family catastrophes, or, better, all these squabbles, one doesn't even know what to call them . . . You, truly speaking, are a friend of the house, Lev Nikolaich, and imagine, it now turns out—though, by the way, not precisely—that Evgeny Pavlych supposedly proposed to Aglaya more than a month ago and supposedly received a formal rejection from her."
"That can't be!" the prince cried hotly.
"Perhaps you know something? You see, my dearest," the general roused himself in surprise, stopping as if rooted to the spot, "maybe I spilled it out to you needlessly and improperly, but it's because you're . . . you're . . . one might say, that sort of man. Maybe you know something particular?"
"I know nothing . . . about Evgeny Pavlych," the prince murmured.
"Neither do I! They . . . they decidedly want to dig a hole in the ground and bury me, brother, and they refuse to understand that it's hard on a man and that I won't survive it. There was such a terrible scene just now! I'm telling you like my own son. The main thing is that Aglaya seems to be laughing at her mother. That she apparently rejected Evgeny Pavlych about a month ago, and that they had a rather formal talk, her sisters told us, as a guess ... a firm guess, however. But she's such a willful and fantastic being, it's impossible to describe! All those magnanimities, all those