How gloomily Rogozhin said today that he was "losing his faith"!
The man must be suffering greatly.
He says he "likes looking at that painting"; he doesn't like it, it means he feels a need.
Rogozhin is not only a passionate soul; he's a fighter after all: he wants to recover his lost faith by force.
He needs it now to the point of torment. . . Yes! to believe in something! to believe in somebody!
But still, how strange that Holbein painting is . . . Ah, this is the street!
And this should be the house, yes, it is, No. 16, "house of Mrs. Filissov, collegiate secretary's widow."
Here!
The prince rang and asked for Nastasya Filippovna.
The woman of the house herself told him that Nastasya Filippovna had left for Darya Alexeevna's place in Pavlovsk that morning "and it may even happen, sir, that the lady will stay there for several days."
Mrs. Filissov was a small, sharp-eyed, and sharp-faced woman of about forty, with a sly and intent gaze.
To her question as to his name—a question to which she seemed intentionally to give a tinge of mysteriousness—the prince at first did not want to reply; but he came back at once and insisted that his name be given to Nastasya Filippovna.
Mrs. Filissov received this insistence with increased attention and with an extraordinarily secretive air, which was evidently intended to indicate that "you needn't worry, I've understood, sir."
The prince's name obviously impressed her greatly.
The prince looked at her distractedly, turned, and went back to his hotel.
But he left looking not at all the same as when he had rung at Mrs. Filissov's door.
Again, and as if in one instant, an extraordinary change came over him: again he walked along pale, weak, suffering, agitated; his knees trembled, and a vague, lost smile wandered over his blue lips: his "sudden idea" had suddenly been confirmed and justified, and—again he believed in his demon!
But had it been confirmed?
Had it been justified?
Why this trembling again, this cold sweat, this gloom and inner cold?
Was it because he had just seen those eyes again?
But had he not left the Summer Garden with the sole purpose of seeing them?
That was what his "sudden idea" consisted in.
He insistently wanted to see "today's eyes," so as to be ultimately certain that he would meet them there without fail, near that house.
That had been his convulsive desire, and why, then, was he so crushed and astounded now, when he really saw them?
As if he had not expected it!
Yes, they were those same eyes (and there was no longer any doubt that they were the same!)that had flashed at him that morning, in the crowd, as he was getting off the train at the Nikolaevsk station; the same eyes (perfectly the same!) whose flashing gaze he had caught later that day behind his back, as he was sitting in a chair at Rogozhin's.
Rogozhin had denied it; he had asked with a twisted, icy smile: "Whose eyes were they?"
And a short time ago, at the Tsarskoe Selo station, when he was getting on the train to go to Aglaya and suddenly saw those eyes again, now for the third time that day—the prince had wanted terribly to go up to Rogozhin and tell him "whose eyes they were"!
But he had run out of the station and recovered himself only in front of the cutler's shop at the moment when he was standing and evaluating at sixty kopecks the cost of a certain object with a staghorn handle.
A strange and terrible demon had fastened on to him definitively, and would no longer let him go.
This demon had whispered to him in the Summer Garden, as he sat oblivious under a linden tree, that if Rogozhin had needed so much to keep watch on him ever since morning and catch him at every step, then, learning that he was not going to Pavlovsk (which, of course, was fatal news for Rogozhin), Rogozhin would unfailingly go there, to that house on the Petersburg side, and would unfailingly keep watch there for him, the prince, who had given him his word of honor that morning that he "would not see her" and that "he had not come to Petersburg for that."
And then the prince rushes convulsively to that house, and what if he actually does meet Rogozhin there?
He saw only an unhappy man whose inner state was dark but quite comprehensible.
This unhappy man was not even hiding now.
Yes, earlier for some reason Rogozhin had denied it and lied, but at the station he had stood almost without hiding.
It was even sooner he, the prince, who was hiding, than Rogozhin.
And now, at the house, he stood on the other side of the street, some fifty steps away, at an angle, on the opposite sidewalk, his arms crossed, and waited.
This time he was in full view and it seemed that he deliberately wanted to be in view.
He stood like an accuser and a judge, and not like . . . And not like who?
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 there with 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 todays whole 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.