"Quite strange," he said, as if pondering. "Why do they turn brown?
These twenty-fivers sometimes get terribly brown, while others, on the contrary, fade completely.
Take it."
The prince took the note from him.
Ferdyshchenko got up from the chair.
"I came to warn you: first of all, don't lend me any money, because I'm sure to ask."
"Very well."
"Do you intend to pay here?"
"I do."
"Well, I don't, thank you.
Mine's the first door to your right, did you see?
Try not to visit me too often; I'll come to you, don't worry about that.
Have you seen the general?"
"No."
"Heard him?"
"Of course not."
"Well, you will see and hear him. Besides, he even asks me to lend him money!
Avis au lecteur*Good-bye.
Is it possible to live with a name like Ferdyshchenko?
Eh?" *Warning to the reader.
"Why not?"
"Good-bye."
And he went to the door.
The prince learned later that this gentleman, as if out of duty, had taken upon himself the task of amazing everyone by his originality and merriment, but it somehow never came off.
He even made an unpleasant impression on some people, which caused him genuine grief, but all the same he would not abandon his task.
In the doorway he managed to set things right, as it were, by bumping into a gentleman coming in; after letting this new gentleman, who was unknown to the prince, enter the room, he obligingly winked several times behind his back by way of warning, and thus left not without a certain aplomb.
This new gentleman was tall, about fifty-five years old or even a little more, rather corpulent, with a purple-red, fleshy and flabby face framed by thick gray side-whiskers, with a moustache and large, rather protruding eyes.
His figure would have been rather imposing if there had not been something seedy, shabby, even soiled about it.
He was dressed in an old frock coat with nearly worn-through elbows; his shirt was also dirty—in a homey way.
There was a slight smell of vodka in his vicinity; but his manner was showy, somewhat studied, and with an obvious wish to impress by its dignity.
The gentleman approached the prince unhurriedly, with an affable smile, silently took his hand and, holding it in his own, peered into his face for some time, as if recognizing familiar features.
"Him!
Him!" he said softly but solemnly. "As if alive!
I heard them repeating the familiar and dear name and recalled the irretrievable past . . . Prince Myshkin?"
"That's right, sir."
"General Ivolgin, retired and unfortunate.
Your name and patronymic, if I dare ask?"
"Lev Nikolaevich."
"So, so!
The son of my friend, one might say my childhood friend, Nikolai Petrovich?"
"My father's name was Nikolai Lvovich."
"Lvovich," the general corrected himself, but unhurriedly and with perfect assurance, as if he had not forgotten in the least but had only made an accidental slip.
He sat down and, also taking the prince's hand, sat him down beside him.
"I used to carry you about in my arms, sir."
"Really?" asked the prince. "My father has been dead for twenty years now."
"Yes, twenty years, twenty years and three months.
We studied together. I went straight into the military ..."
"My father was also in the military, a second lieutenant in the Vasilkovsky regiment."
"The Belomirsky.
His transfer to the Belomirsky came almost on the eve of his death.