I spent all day yesterday writing it, then last night, and finished it this morning. Last night, towards morning, I had a dream ..."
"Wouldn't it be better tomorrow?" the prince interrupted timidly.
"Tomorrow 'there will be no more time!'"13 Ippolit chuckled hysterically.
"Don't worry, however, I can read it through in forty minutes . . . well, in an hour . . . And you can see how interested everyone is; everyone came over; everyone is looking at my seal; if I hadn't sealed the article in an envelope, there would have been no effect!
Ha, ha!
That's what mysteriousness means!
Shall I open it, gentlemen, or not?" he cried, laughing his strange laugh and flashing his eyes.
"A mystery!
A mystery!
And do you remember, Prince, who it was who announced that 'there will be no more time'?
A huge and powerful angel in the Apocalypse announces it."
"Better not read it!" Evgeny Pavlovich suddenly exclaimed, but with an air of uneasiness so unexpected in him that many found it strange.
"Don't read it!" the prince, too, cried, putting his hand on the envelope.
"What's this about reading? Right now we're eating," somebody observed.
"An article?
For a magazine, or what?" inquired another.
"Maybe it's boring?" added a third.
"What have you got?" inquired the rest.
But the prince's frightened gesture seemed to frighten Ippolit himself.
"So ... I shouldn't read it?" he whispered somehow fearfully to the prince, with a crooked smile on his blue lips. "I shouldn't read it?" he murmured, passing his gaze over all the public, all the eyes and faces, and as if again snatching at everything with his former, almost aggressive expansiveness. "Are you . . . afraid?" he turned to the prince again.
"Of what?" the latter asked, changing countenance more and more.
"Does anybody have a twenty-kopeck piece?" Ippolit suddenly jumped up from his chair as if he had been pulled from it. "A coin of any kind?"
"Here!" Lebedev offered at once; the thought flashed in him that the sick Ippolit had gone crazy.
"Vera Lukyanovna!" Ippolit hastily invited, "take it and toss it on the table: heads or tails?
Heads I read!"
Vera looked fearfully at the coin, at Ippolit, then at her father, and, somehow awkwardly, her head thrown back, as if convinced that she herself should not look at the coin, tossed it on the table.
It came up heads.
"I read!" whispered Ippolit, as if crushed by the decision of fate; he could not have turned more pale if a death sentence had been read to him.
"But anyhow," he suddenly gave a start after pausing half a minute, "what is it?
Have I just cast the die?" and with the same aggressive frankness he looked at everyone around him.
"But this is an astonishing psychological feature!" he suddenly cried, turning to the prince in genuine amazement. "This . . . this is an inconceivable feature, Prince!" he confirmed, growing animated and as if coming to his senses. "Write this down, Prince, remember it, I believe you collect materials about capital punishment ... so I was told, ha, ha!
Oh, God, what senseless absurdity!"
He sat down on the sofa, leaned both elbows on the table, and clutched his head with his hands.
"It's even shameful! . . .
The devil I care if it's shameful," he raised his head almost at once.
"Gentlemen!
Gentlemen, I am opening the envelope," he announced with a sort of unexpected resolve, "I . . . however, I'm not forcing you to listen! . . ."
His hands trembling with excitement, he opened the envelope, took out several sheets of paper covered with small writing, placed them in front of him, and began smoothing them out.
"But what is it?
What have you got there?
What are you going to read?" some muttered gloomily; others kept silent.
But they all sat down and watched curiously.
Perhaps they indeed expected something extraordinary.
Vera gripped her father's chair and all but wept from fear; Kolya was almost as frightened.
Lebedev, who had already settled down, suddenly got up, seized the candles, and moved them closer to Ippolit, so that there would be enough light to read by.
"Gentlemen, you . . . you'll presently see what it is," Ippolit added for some reason and suddenly began his reading: "
'A Necessary Explanation'!
Epigraph: Apres moi le deluge* . . . Pah, devil take it!" he cried as if burned. "Could I have seriously set down such a stupid epigraph? . . .
Listen, gentlemen! ... I assure you that in the final end this may all be the most terrible trifles!
It's just some of my thoughts ... If you think it's . . . something mysterious or . . . forbidden ... in short . . ."