And why had he, the prince, not gone up to him now, but turned away from him as if noticing nothing, though their eyes had met? (Yes, their eyes had met! and they had looked at each other.) Hadn't he wanted to take him by the hand and go therewith him? Hadn't he wanted to go to him tomorrow and tell him that he had called on her? Hadn't he renounced his demon as he went there, halfway there, when joy had suddenly filled his soul? Or was there in fact something in Rogozhin, that is, in todayswhole image of the man, in the totality of his words, movements, actions, glances, something that might justify the prince's terrible foreboding and the disturbing whisperings of his demon? Something visible in itself,
but difficult to analyze and speak about, impossible to justify by sufficient reasons, but which nevertheless produced, despite all this difficulty and impossibility, a perfectly whole and irrefutable impression, which involuntarily turned into the fullest conviction? . . .
Conviction—of what? (Oh, how tormented the prince was by the monstrosity, the "humiliation" of this conviction, of "this base foreboding," and how he blamed himself!) "Say then, if you dare, of what?" he said ceaselessly to himself, in reproach and defiance. "Formulate, dare to express your whole thought, clearly, precisely, without hesitation! Oh, I am dishonorable!" he repeated with indignation and with a red face. "With what eyes am I to look at this man now all my life! Oh, what a day! Oh, God, what a nightmare!"
There was a moment, at the end of this long and tormenting way from the Petersburg side, when an irrepressible desire suddenly took hold of the prince—to go right then to Rogozhin's, to wait for him, to embrace him with shame, with tears, to tell him everything and be done with it all at once. But he was already standing by his hotel . . . How he had disliked this hotel earlier—the corridors, the whole building, his room—disliked them at first sight; several times that day he had remembered with a sort of special revulsion that he would have to go back there . . . "How is it that, like an ailing woman, I believe in every foreboding today!" he thought with irritable mockery, stopping at the gate. A new, unbearable surge of shame, almost despair, riveted him to the spot, at the very entrance to the gateway. He stopped for a moment. This sometimes happens with people: unbearable, unexpected memories, especially in connection with shame, ordinarily stop one on the spot for a moment. "Yes, I'm a man without heart and a coward!" he repeated gloomily, and impulsively started walking, but . . . stopped again . . .
In this gateway, which was dark to begin with, it was at that moment very dark: the storm cloud came over, swallowing up the evening light, and just as the prince was nearing the house, the cloud suddenly opened and poured down rain. And at the moment when he set off impulsively, after a momentary pause, he was right at the opening of the gateway, right at the entrance to it from the street. And suddenly, in the depths of the gateway, in the semidarkness, just by the door to the stairs, he saw a man. This man seemed to be waiting for something, but flashed quickly and vanished. The prince could not make the man out clearly and, of
course, could not tell for certain who he was. Besides, so many people might pass through there. It was a hotel, and there was a constant walking and running up and down the corridors. But he suddenly felt the fullest and most irrefutable conviction that he had recognized the man and that the man was most certainly Rogozhin. A moment later the prince rushed after him into the stairway. His heart stood still. "Now everything will be resolved!" he said to himself with great conviction.
The stairs which the prince ran up from under the gateway led to the corridors of the first and second floors, on which the hotel rooms were located. This stairway, as in all houses built long ago, was of stone, dark, narrow, and winding around a thick stone pillar. On the first landing, this pillar turned out to have a depression in it, like a niche, no more than one pace wide and a half-pace deep. There was, however, room enough for a man. Having run up to the landing, the prince, despite the darkness, made out at once that a man was for some reason hiding there, in that niche. The prince suddenly wanted to walk past and not look to the right. He had already gone one step, but could not help himself and turned.
Today's two eyes, the same ones,suddenly met his gaze. The man hiding in the niche also had time to take one step out of it. For a second the two stood face to face, almost touching. Suddenly the prince seized him by the shoulders and turned back to the stairs, closer to the light: he wanted to see the face more clearly.
Rogozhin's eyes flashed and a furious smile distorted his face. His right hand rose, and something gleamed in it; the prince did not even think of stopping him. He remembered only that he seemed to have cried out:
"Parfyon, I don't believe it! . . ."
Then suddenly it was as if something opened up before him: an extraordinary innerlight illumined his soul. This moment lasted perhaps half a second; but he nevertheless remembered clearly and consciously the beginning, the very first sound of his terrible scream, which burst from his breast of itself and which no force would have enabled him to stop. Then his consciousness instantly went out, and there was total darkness.
He had had a fit of epilepsy, which had left him very long ago. It is known that these fits, falling fitsproperly speaking, come instantaneously. In these moments the face, especially the eyes, suddenly become extremely distorted. Convulsions and spasms seize the whole body and all the features of the face. A dreadful,
unimaginable scream, unlike anything, bursts from the breast; everything human suddenly disappears, as it were, in this scream, and it is quite impossible, or at least very difficult, for the observer to imagine and allow that this is the man himself screaming. It may even seem as if someone else were screaming from inside the man. At least many people have explained their impression that way, and there are many whom the sight of a man in a falling fit fills with a decided and unbearable terror, which even has something mystical in it. It must be supposed that this impression of unexpected terror, in conjunction with all the other dreadful impressions of that moment, suddenly made Rogozhin freeze on the spot and thereby saved the prince from the inevitable blow of the knife that was already coming down on him. Then, before he had time to realize that this was a fit, and seeing the prince recoil from him and suddenly fall backwards, right down the stairs, striking the back of his head hard against the stone step, Rogozhin rushed headlong down the stairs, skirted the fallen man, and, nearly beside himself, ran out of the hotel.