Page:Dostoevsky - The Idiot, Collected Edition, 1916.djvu/26

"Well, how am I going to announce a fellow like you?" the attendant could not help muttering. "In the first place you have no business to be here, you ought to be sitting in the waiting-room, for you are a visitor, in other words a guest, and I shall be blamed for it.... You are not thinking of staying with the family?" he added, glancing once more at the bundle, which evidently disturbed him.

"No, I don't think so. Even if they invite me, I shan't stay. I've simply come to make their acquaintance, that's all."

"What? to make their acquaintance?" the attendant repeated with amazement and redoubled suspiciousness. "Why, you said at first you'd come on business?"

"Oh, it's hardly business. Though I have business, if you like, but only to ask advice; I've come chiefly to introduce myself, because I am Prince Myshkin and Madame Epanchin is a Princess Myshkin, the last one of them, and there are no Myshkins left but she and I."

"Then you are a relation?" the startled lackey was positively alarmed.

"Hardly that either. Still, to stretch a point, I am a relation, but so distant that it's not worth counting. I wrote to Madame Epanchin from abroad, but she didn't answer me. Yet I thought I must make her acquaintance on my return. I tell you all this that you may have no doubt about me, for I see you are still uneasy. Announce Prince Myshkin, and the name itself will be a sufficient reason for my visit. If I am received--well and good, if not, it's perhaps just as well. But I don't think they can refuse to see me. Madame Epanchin will surely want to see the last representative of the elder branch of her family. She thinks a great deal of her family, as I have heard on good authority!"

The prince's conversation seemed simple enough, yet its very simplicity only made it more inappropriate in the present case, and the experienced attendant could not but feel that what was perfectly suitable from man to man was utterly unsuitable from a visitor to a manservant. And since servants are far more intelligent than their masters usually suppose, it struck the man that there were two explanations: either the prince was some sort of impostor who had come to beg of the general, or he was simply a little bit soft and had no sense of dignity, for a prince with his wits about him and a sense of his own dignity, would not sit in an anteroom and talk to a servant about his affairs. So in either case he might get into trouble over him.