Living Arrangements and Family Tensions — The Idiot

He will lie at the threshold, he says, and she shall trample him if she enters. The bell is already broken. It only shakes. The third-floor flat is a little too good for a clerk on two thousand roubles, taken so that lodgers can patch the income, and Gania thinks the whole arrangement beneath him. He poses still as a young man of brilliant prospects. The rooms change use by the hour. The general, nominal master, sleeps behind the kitchen and must use the back stairs. Colia shares a torn sofa and watches him more every day. The prince is given the middle of three lodger rooms. The third is empty. Anyone coming in can see who the tyrant is.

Colia fetches the bundle from the hall. That is all the luggage there is. Varia is only just polite. Gania warns the prince not to blab, today at least, about Aglaya or what he may see here. The prince says he was never asked to be silent about the portrait. Ferdishenko puts his head in first, inspects the twenty-five roubles against the light, and warns him not to lend, because he will certainly ask. He does not intend to pay. You will hear the general soon. General Ivolgin comes in smelling of vodka, names the wrong father, then the right one without haste, and says he carried the prince as a baby. He was at the deathbed. He nearly fought a duel across a handkerchief for the mother. The prince grows incredulous. There was a catastrophe, the general says, and no trial. There is a tragedy in the house: a questionable woman and a young fellow who might be a flunkey. She shall never enter these doors.

Nina Alexandrovna begins to speak in a hurry and falls silent the moment her husband follows. He insists the father died at Tver. The prince says Elizabethgrad. Then comes Kolpakoff, buried to the drum and found alive three months later; she says in French that her husband is mistaken. When he has gone to his soup she asks one practical thing. If he applies for board, tell him you have already paid me. Varia holds out the portrait, picked up from under the table. A present from herself. The question is to be decided this evening. Then it is all settled, Nina says, softly, and there is no hope left. She has anticipated her answer by the picture. Gania has said they need not stand on ceremony with the prince. Nina wants to know what that means. He and Ptitsin come in. She becomes silent again. He snatches the portrait and throws it to his writing-table.

She knits and says she has submitted. No more tears, not from her side. How can the woman give her consent and her picture when he does not love her? He calls that the start of questions after a promise of none. Varia will go out the moment she comes in. He shouts obstinacy. The prince rises, sees that one more word would overflow the cup, and leaves without it. The voices get worse. At the front door someone is shaking the broken bell. He takes down the chain. He knows her at once from the photograph. She shoulders past, throws the fur cloak, and calls him dummy when he misses it. He starts for the drawing-room with the cloak on his arm and has to come back. Announce me. He has never seen her before. They are quarrelling, he says, and opens the door on a room that has forgotten it submitted. He announces Nastasya Filippovna.