"Do you think I'm deceiving you?" asked the prince.
"No, I believe you, only I don't understand any of it. The surest thing of all is that your pity is maybe still worse than my love!"
Something spiteful lit up in his face, wanting to speak itself out at once.
"Well, your love is indistinguishable from spite," smiled the prince, "and when it passes, there may be still worse trouble. This I tell you, brother Parfyon ..."
"That I'll put a knife in her?"
The prince gave a start.
"You'll hate her very much for this present love, for all this torment that you're suffering now. For me the strangest thing is how she could again decide to marry you. When I heard it yesterday—I could scarcely believe it, and it pained me so. She has already renounced you twice and run away from the altar, which means she has a foreboding! . . . What does she want with you now? Can it be your money? That's nonsense. And you must have spent quite a bit of it by now. Can it be only to have a husband? She could find someone besides you. Anyone would be better than you, because you may put a knife in her, and maybe she knows that only too well now. Because you love her so much? True, that could be . . . I've heard there are women who seek precisely that kind of love . . . only ..."
The prince paused and pondered.
"Why did you smile again at my father's portrait?" asked Rogozhin, who was observing very closely every change, every fleeting expression of his face.
"Why did I smile? It occurred to me that, if it hadn't been for this calamity, if this love hadn't befallen you, you might have become exactly like your father, and in a very short time at that. Lodged silently alone in this house with your obedient and uncomplaining wife, speaking rarely and sternly, trusting no one, and having no need at all for that, but only making money silently and sullenly. At most you'd occasionally praise some old books or get interested in the two-fingered sign of the cross, 18and that probably only in old age ..."
"Go on, jeer. And she said exactly the same thing not long ago,
when she was looking at that portrait! Funny how the two of you agree in everything now . . ."
"So she's already been at your place?" the prince asked with curiosity.
"She has. She looked at the portrait for a long time, asked questions about the deceased. 'You'd be exactly like that,' she smiled at me in the end. 'You have strong passions, Parfyon Semyonovich, such passions as would have sent you flying to Siberia, to hard labor, if you weren't also intelligent, because you are very intelligent,' she said (that's what she said, can you believe it? First time I heard such a thing from her!). 'You'd soon drop all this mischief you do now. And since you're a completely uneducated man, you'd start saving money, and you'd sit like your father in this house with his castrates; perhaps you'd adopt their beliefs in the end, and you'd love your money so much that you'd save up not two but ten million, and you'd starve to death on your moneybags, because you're passionate in everything, you carry everything to the point of passion.' That's just how she talked, in almost exactly those words. She'd never spoken with me like that before! Because she always talks about trifles with me, or makes fun of me; and this time, too, she began laughingly, but then turned so grim; she went around looking the whole house over, and seemed to be frightened by something. 'I'll change it all,' I say, 'and do it up, or maybe I'll buy another house for the wedding.' 'No, no,' she says, 'don't change anything here, we'll live in it as it is. When I'm your wife,' she says, 'I want to live near your mother.' I took her to see my mother—she was respectful to her, like her own daughter. Even before, already two years ago, my mother didn't seem quite right in the head (she's sick), but since my father's death she's become like a total infant, doesn't talk, doesn't walk, just sits there and bows to whoever she sees; seems like if you didn't feed her, she wouldn't realize it for three days. I took my mother's right hand, put her fingers together: 'Bless us, mother,' I say, 'this woman is going to marry me.' Then she kissed my mother's hand with feeling: 'Your mother,' she says, 'must have borne a lot of grief.' She saw this book on the table: 'Ah, so you've started reading Russian History?'(And she herself told me once in Moscow: 'You ought to edify yourself at least somehow, at least read Solovyov's Russian History,you don't know anything at all.') 'That's good,' she said, 'that's what you ought to do, start reading. I'll make a little list for you of which books you should read first; want me
to, or not?' And never, never before did she talk to me like that, so that she even surprised me; for the first time I breathed like a living person."
"I'm very glad of it, Parfyon," the prince said with sincere feeling, "very glad. Who knows, maybe God will make things right for you together."
"That will never be!" Rogozhin cried hotly.
"Listen, Parfyon, if you love her so much, how can you not want to deserve her respect? And if you do want to, how can you have no hope? I just said it was a strange riddle for me why she's marrying you. But though I can't answer it, all the same I don't doubt that there's certainly a sufficient, rational reason for it. She's convinced of your love; but she's surely convinced that there are virtues in you as well. It cannot be otherwise! What you just said confirms it. You say yourself that she found it possible to speak to you in a language quite different from her former treatment and way of speaking. You're suspicious and jealous, and so you've exaggerated everything bad you've noticed. Of course, she doesn't think as badly of you as you say. Otherwise it would mean that she was consciously throwing herself into the water or onto the knife by marrying you. Is that possible? Who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?"
Parfyon heard out the prince's ardent words with a bitter smile. His conviction, it seems, was already firmly established.
"How heavily you're looking at me now, Parfyon!" escaped the prince with a heavy feeling.
"Into the water or onto the knife!" the other said at last. "Heh! But that's why she's marrying me, because she probably expects to get the knife from me! But can it be, Prince, that you still haven't grasped what the whole thing is about?"
"I don't understand you."
"Well, maybe he really doesn't understand, heh, heh! They do say you're a bit. . . like that!She loves somebody else—understand? Just the way I love her now, she now loves somebody else. And do you know who that somebody else is? It's you!What, didn't you know?"
"Me!"
"You. She fell in love with you then, ever since that time, that birthday party. Only she thinks it's impossible for her to marry you, because she'd supposedly disgrace you and ruin your whole life. 'I'm you-know-what,' she says. To this day she maintains it
herself. She says it all right in my face. She's afraid to ruin and disgrace you, but me she can marry, meaning it doesn't matter— that's how she considers me, note that as well!"
"But why, then, did she run away from you to me, and . . . from me . . .
"And from you to me! Heh! All sorts of things suddenly come into her head! She's all like in a fever now. One day she shouts to me: 'I'll marry you like drowning myself. Be quick with the wedding!' She hurries herself, fixes the date, and when the time is near—she gets frightened, or has other ideas—God knows, but you've seen her: she cries, laughs, thrashes around feverishly. What's so strange that she ran away from you, too? She ran away from you then, because she suddenly realized how much she loves you. It was beyond her to be with you. You just said I sought her out then in Moscow; that's not so—she came running to me herself: 'Fix the day,' she says, 'I'm ready! Pour the champagne! We'll go to the gypsies!' she shouts! ... If it wasn't for me, she'd have drowned herself long ago; it's right what I'm saying. The reason she doesn't do it is maybe because I'm even scarier than the water. So she wants to marry me out of spite ... If she does it, believe me, she'll be doing it out of spite."