The Brothers Karamazov

BOOK IX. THE PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION

Chapter 1: The Start of the Official Perkhotin’s Career

Pyotr Ilyich Perkhotin, whom we left knocking with all his might at the well-locked gates of the widow Morozov’s house, in the end, of course, was finally successful. Hearing such furious knocking at the gate, Fenya, who had been so frightened two hours before, and who was still too excited and “thinking” too much to dare go to bed, became frightened once more almost to the point of hysterics: she fancied that it was Dmitri Fyodorovich knocking again (though she herself had seen him drive off), because no one else but he would knock so ‘boldly.” She rushed to the awakened porter, who had heard the knocking and was already on his way to the gate, and began begging him not to open. But the porter made inquiries of the person who was knocking, and learning who he was, and that he wanted to see Fedosya Markovna on a very important matter, finally decided to open the gates for him. Going to the same kitchen with Fedosya Markovna—and she “on account of her doubts” prevailed upon Pyotr Ilyich to allow the porter to come with them—Pyotr Ilyich started questioning her and at once hit upon the most important fact: namely, that Dmitri Fyodorovich, as he ran off to look for Grushenka, had snatched the pestle from the mortar, and returned later without the pestle but with his hands covered with blood: “And the blood was still dripping, it kept dripping and dripping!” Fenya exclaimed, her distraught imagination apparently having invented this horrible detail. But Pyotr Ilyich had also seen those bloody hands himself, though the blood was not dripping, and had himself helped to wash them, and the question was not how soon the blood had dried, but where exactly Dmitri Fyodorovich had run with the pestle—that is, was it certain he had gone to Fyodor Pavlovich’s, and what might be the grounds for such a positive inference? Perkhotin thoroughly emphasized this point, and though he did not find out anything definite as a result, he still became almost convinced that Dmitri Fyodorovich could not have run anywhere else but to his parent’s house, and that, consequently, something must have happened there. “And when he came back,” Fenya added excitedly, “and I told him everything, I began asking him: ‘Dmitri Fyodorovich, my dear, why are your hands covered with blood?’ and he answered me that it was human blood, and that he had just killed a man—he simply admitted it, he simply confessed it all to me, and suddenly ran out like a madman. I sat down and started thinking: where has he run off to like a madman? He’ll go to Mokroye, I was thinking, and kill my mistress there. So I ran out to go to his place and beg him not to kill my mistress, but at Plotnikov’s shop I saw that he was already leaving and that his hands weren’t covered with blood anymore.” (Fenya had noticed this and remembered it.) The old woman, Fenya’s grandmother, confirmed all her granddaughter’s statements as far as she could. Having asked a few more questions, Pyotr Ilyich left the house even more troubled and worried than when he had entered it.

One would think that the most immediate and direct thing for him to do now would be to go to Fyodor Pavlovich’s house and find out if anything had happened, and, if so, what exactly, and being convinced beyond any doubt, only then to go to the police commissioner, as Pyotr Ilyich had firmly resolved to do. But the night was dark, the gates of Fyodor Pavlovich’s house were strong, he would have to knock again, and he was only distantly acquainted with Fyodor Pavlovich—and so he would have to keep knocking until he was heard and the gates were opened, and what if suddenly nothing had happened at all, and a jeering Fyodor Pavlovich were to go all over town tomorrow telling jokes about how a stranger, the official Perkhotin, had forced his way into his house at midnight in order to find out if anyone had murdered him. A scandal! And there was nothing in the world Pyotr Ilyich feared more than a scandal. Nevertheless he was moved by so strong a feeling that, having angrily stamped his foot on the ground and given himself another scolding, he at once rushed on his way again, not to Fyodor Pavlovich’s now, but to Madame Khokhlakov’s. If she, he thought, would answer just one question: whether or not she had given Dmitri Fyodorovich three thousand at such and such a time, then, in case the answer was negative, he would go straight to the police commissioner, without going to Fyodor Pavlovich; otherwise he would put everything off until tomorrow and go back home. Here, of course, it is immediately obvious that the young man’s decision to go at night, at almost eleven o’clock, to the house of a society lady who was a complete stranger to him, and perhaps get her out of bed, in order to ask her an—under the circumstances—astonishing question, was perhaps much more likely to cause a scandal than going to Fyodor Pavlovich. But it sometimes happens that way—especially in such cases—with the decisions of the most precise and phlegmatic people. And at the moment Pyotr Ilyich was far from phlegmatic. He remembered afterwards all his life how the irresistible anxiety that gradually took possession of him finally became so painful that it carried him along even against his will. Naturally, he kept scolding himself all the way, in any case, for going to this lady, but “I’ll go through with it, I’ll go through with it!” he repeated for the tenth time, clenching his teeth, and he did as he intended—he went through with it.

It was exactly eleven o’clock when he came to Madame Khokhlakov’s house. He was promptly let into the yard, but to his question: “Is the lady asleep, or has she not gone to bed yet?” the porter could give no precise answer, beyond saying that at that hour people usually go to bed. “Ask to be announced upstairs; if the lady wants to receive you, she will; if she won’t—she won’t.” Pyotr Ilyich went up to the door, but there things became more difficult. The lackey did not want to announce him, and finally called the maid. Pyotr Ilyich politely but insistently asked her to inform the lady that a town official, Perkhotin, had come on special business, and were the business not so important, he would not have ventured to come—”inform her precisely, precisely in those words,” he asked the maid. She left. He stood waiting in the front hall. Madame Khokhlakov, though not yet asleep, had already retired to her bedroom. She had been upset since Mitya’s visit and now anticipated that she would not get through the night without the migraine that was usual for her in such cases. On hearing the maid’s report, she was surprised, and yet she irritably told her to refuse, though the unexpected visit at such an hour of a “town official” quite unknown to her greatly piqued her woman’s curiosity. But this time Pyotr Ilyich was stubborn as a mule: hearing the refusal, he once again asked the maid very insistently to inform her mistress and tell her precisely “in these very words” that he had come “on extremely important business, and that the lady herself might regret it later if she did not receive him now.” “It was like throwing myself off a mountain,” as he afterwards recounted. The maid, having looked him over in surprise, went to announce him again. Madame Khokhlakov was amazed, thought for a moment, inquired about his appearance, and learned that “he was very properly dressed, young, and so polite.” Let us note parenthetically and in passing that Pyotr Ilyich was quite a handsome young man, and was aware of it himself. Madame Khokhlakov decided to come out. She was already in her dressing gown and slippers, but she threw a black shawl over her shoulders. “The official” was shown into the drawing room, the very room where she had just recently received Mitya. The hostess came to meet her visitor with a sternly inquiring look and, without inviting him to sit down, began straight off with a question: “What is it you want?”

“I have ventured to trouble you, madame, in connection with our mutual acquaintance Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov,” Perkhotin began, but as soon as he spoke this name, his hostess’s face suddenly showed the greatest irritation. She all but shrieked and furiously interrupted him: “How long, how long must I be tormented by that awful man?” she cried in frenzy. “How dare you, my dear sir, how could you venture to disturb a lady not of your acquaintance, in her own house, and at such an hour ... and come to her to speak of a man who, right here, in this very drawing room, just three hours ago, came to murder me, stamped his feet, and walked out as no one walks out of a decent house. Let me tell you, my dear sir, that I will lodge a complaint against you, I will not stand for it, now kindly leave my house at once ... I am a mother, I shall ... I ... I...”

“Murder! So he wanted to murder you, too?”

“Why, did he already murder someone else?” Madame Khokhlakov asked impetuously.

“Be so good, madame, as to listen for only half a minute, and I shall explain everything in two words,” Perkhotin answered firmly. “Today, at five o’clock in the afternoon, Mr. Karamazov borrowed ten roubles from me as a friend, and I know for certain that he had no money, yet this same day, at nine o’clock, he walked into my rooms holding out for all to see a wad of hundred-rouble bills, approximately two or even three thousand roubles. His hands and face were all covered with blood, and it appeared as if he were mad. To my question as to where he got so much money, he replied with precision that he had just received it from you, and that you had loaned him the sum of three thousand roubles to go, he said, to the gold mines...”

Madame Khokhlakov’s face suddenly acquired a look of extraordinary and morbid excitement.

“Oh, God! He’s murdered his old father!” she cried out, clasping her hands. “I gave him no money, none! Oh, run, run...! Not a word more! Save the old man, run to his father, run!”

“I beg your pardon, madame, so you did not give him any money? You firmly recall that you did not give him any?”

“I did not! I did not! I refused him because he was unable to appreciate it. He walked out furious and stamped his feet. He rushed at me, but I jumped aside ... And I shall also tell you, as a man from whom I now have no intention of concealing anything, that he even spat at me, can you imagine it? But why are you standing? Ah, do sit down ... Forgive me, I ... Or, no, run, run, you must run and save the unfortunate old man from a horrible death!”

“But if he has already killed him?”

“Ah, my God, of course! What are we going to do now? What do you think we should do now?”

Meanwhile she sat Pyotr Ilyich down, and sat down herself facing him. Pyotr Ilyich gave her a brief but rather clear account of the affair, at least that part of the affair he himself had witnessed earlier; he also told her of his visit to Fenya, and mentioned the news of the pestle. All these details struck the agitated lady no end, so that she kept crying out and covering her eyes with her hands . . .

“Imagine, I foresaw it all! I am endowed with this property: whatever I imagine always happens. How often, how often have I looked at that terrible man and thought: here is a man who will end up by murdering me. And now it’s happened ... That is, if he hasn’t killed me now, but only his father, it is most likely because the hand of God is obviously protecting me, and, besides, he was ashamed to murder me because I myself, here on this very spot, put an icon around his neck with a relic of the great martyr Varvara ... How close I was to death at that moment! I went up to him, quite close, and he stretched out his neck to me! You know, Pyotr Ilyich (forgive me, you did say your name was Pyotr Ilyich?) ... you know, I do not believe in miracles, but this icon and this obvious miracle with me now—it astounds me, and I’m beginning to believe in anything again. Have you heard about the elder Zosima ... ? Ah, anyway, I don’t know what I’m saying ... And imagine, even with the icon on his neck, he still spat at me ... Of course, he only spat, he didn’t murder me, and ... and ... so that’s where he galloped off to! But what of us, where shall we go now, what do you think?”

Pyotr Ilyich stood up and announced that he would now go directly to the police commissioner and tell him everything, and let him do as he thinks best.

“Ah, he is a wonderful, wonderful man, I know Mikhail Makarovich. Of course, go precisely to him. How resourceful you are, Pyotr Ilyich, and what a good idea you’ve come up with; you know, in your place I’d never have been able to come up with that!”

“All the more so in that I, too, am well acquainted with the commissioner,” observed Pyotr Ilyich, still standing and evidently wishing somehow to tear himself away from the impetuous lady, who would not let him say good-bye to her and leave.

“And you know, you know,” she went on prattling, “you must come back and tell me what you see and learn ... and what they find out ... and what they will decide about him, and where they will condemn him to. Tell me, we don’t have capital punishment, do we? But you must come, even if it’s three o’clock in the morning, even if it’s four, even half past four ... Tell them to wake me up, to shake me if I don’t get up ... Oh, God, but I’ll never be able to fall asleep. You know, why don’t I go with you myself?”

“N-no, madame, but if you would now write three lines with your own hand, just in case, saying that you did not give Dmitri Fyodorovich any money, it might not be amiss ... just in case...”

“Certainly!” the delighted Madame Khokhlakov leaped to her bureau. “And you know, you amaze me, you simply astound me with your resourcefulness and your skill in these matters ... Are you in service here? I’m so pleased to know you’re in service here...”

And while she spoke, she quickly inscribed the following three lines in a large hand on a half sheet of writing paper:

Never in my life did I lend the unfortunate Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov (for he is unfortunate now, in any case) the sum of three thousand roubles today, or any other money, never, never! I swear to it by all that is holy in our world.

Khokhlakov

“Here is the note!” she turned quickly to Pyotr Ilyich. “Go now and save. It is a great deed on your part.”

And she crossed him three times. She even ran out to see him to the front hall.

“How grateful I am to you! You wouldn’t believe how grateful I am to you now, for having come to me first. How is it we’ve never met? I shall be flattered to receive you in my house in the future. And how pleased I am to know that you’re in service here ... and with your precision, your resourcefulness ... They must appreciate you, they must finally understand you, and whatever I can do for you, believe me ... Oh, I love young people so! I am in love with young people. Young people—they are the foundation for all of today’s suffering Russia, her only hope ... Oh, go, go...!”

But Pyotr Ilyich had already run out, otherwise she would not have let him go so soon. All the same, Madame Khokhlakov made quite a pleasant impression on him, which even somewhat softened his alarm at getting involved in such a bad affair. Tastes are extremely divergent, that is a known fact. “She’s not as old as all that,” he thought with pleasure. “On the contrary, I might have taken her for her own daughter.”

As for Madame Khokhlakov, she was simply enchanted with the young man. “Such skill, such exactitude, and in so young a man, in our time, and all that with such manners and appearance! And yet they say our modern young men cannot do anything, but here’s an example for you,” and so on and so forth. So that she simply forgot all about the “terrible incident,” and only on the point of going to bed did she suddenly recall again “how close she had been to death.” “Ah,” she said, “it’s terrible, terrible!” and at once fell into a sound and sweet sleep. By the way, I would not go into such petty and incidental details if the eccentric encounter I have just described, between a young official and a widow not all that old, had not afterwards served as the foundation for the whole life’s career of that precise and accurate young man, which is still recalled with astonishment in our town, and of which we, too, shall perhaps have a special word to say, once we have concluded our long story of the Karamazov brothers.

Chapter 2: The Alarm

Our district commissioner of police, Mikhail Makarovich Makarov, a retired lieutenant colonel, redesignated a state councillor,^[270] was a widower and a good man. He had come to us only three years earlier, but had already won general sympathy, mainly because he “knew how to bring society together.” His house was never without guests, and it seemed he would have been unable to live without them. He had to have guests to dinner every day, even if only two, even if only one, but without guests he would not sit down to eat. He gave formal dinners, too, under all sorts of pretexts, sometimes even the most unexpected. The food he served, though not refined, was abundant, the cabbage pies were excellent, and the wines made up in quantity for what they lacked in quality. In the front room stood a billiard table, surrounded by quite decent furnishings; that is, there were even paintings of English racehorses in black frames on the walls, which, as everyone knows, constitute a necessary adornment of any billiard room in a bachelor’s house. Every evening there was a card game, even if only at one table. But quite often all the best society of our town, including mamas and young girls, would get together there for a dance. Mikhail Makarovich, though a widower, lived as a family man. with his already long-widowed daughter, who in turn was the mother of two girls, Mikhail Makarovich’s granddaughters. The girls were grown up by then and had finished their education; they were of not-unattractive appearance, of cheerful character, and though everyone knew that they would bring no dowries, they still drew our young men of society to their grandfather’s house. In his official capacity, Mikhail Makarovich was none too bright, but he did his job no worse than many others. To tell the truth, he was rather an uneducated man, and even a bit carefree with respect to a clear understanding of the limits of his administrative power. Not that he did not fully comprehend some of the reforms of the present reign, but he understood them with certain, sometimes quite conspicuous, mistakes, and not at all because he was somehow especially incapable, but simply because of his carefree nature, because he never got around to looking into them. “I have the soul of a military man, not a civilian,” he said of himself. He still did not seem to have acquired a firm and definite idea even of the exact principles of the peasant reform, and learned of them, so to speak, from year to year, increasing his knowledge practically and unwittingly, though, by the way, he himself was a landowner. Pyotr Ilyich knew with certainty that he was sure to meet some guests at Mikhail Makarovich’s that evening, only he did not know exactly whom. Meanwhile, at that very moment, the prosecutor and our district doctor Varvinsky, a young man who had just come to us from Petersburg, after brilliantly completing his studies at the Petersburg Medical Academy, were sitting there playing whist. The prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich—the deputy prosecutor, that is, but we all called him the prosecutor—was a special man among us, not old, still only about thirty-five, but much inclined to consumption, and married, besides, to a rather fat and childless lady; he was proud and irritable, and yet of quite considerable intelligence, and even a kind soul. It appeared the whole trouble with his character was that he had a somewhat higher opinion of himself than his real virtues warranted. And that was why he constantly seemed restless. Besides, there were in him certain lofty and even artistic pretensions—for example, to psychologism, to a special knowledge of the human soul, to a special gift of comprehending the criminal and his crime. In this sense he considered himself somewhat ill treated and passed over in his service, and was forever persuaded that they were unable to appreciate him in higher spheres and that he had enemies. In his gloomier moments he even threatened to desert to the defense side of criminal law. The unexpected case of the Karamazov parricide thoroughly shook him, as it were: “A case like this could become known all over Russia.” But I am getting ahead of myself.

In the next room, with the girls, there also sat our young district attorney, Nikolai Parfenovich Nelyudov, who had come to our town from Petersburg only two months earlier. Afterwards everyone talked of it and even marveled that all these persons should have come together as if on purpose, on the evening of the “crime,” in the house of the executive authority. Yet it was a perfectly simple thing and happened quite naturally: it was the second day that Ippolit Kirillovich’s wife had had a toothache, and he absolutely had to flee somewhere from her groaning; as for the doctor, by his very nature he could do nothing of an evening but play cards. And Nikolai Parfenovich Nelyudov had already been planning for three days to visit Mikhail Makarovich that evening, inadvertently, so to speak, in order suddenly and perfidiously to startle the older girl, Olga Mikhailovna, with the fact that he knew her secret, that he knew it was her birthday and that she had decided purposely to conceal it from our society, so as not to have to invite people for dancing. Much laughter was in store, much hinting at her age, that she was supposedly afraid to reveal it, that he, now being in possession of her secret, would tell everyone tomorrow, and so on and so forth. The dear young man was very naughty in this respect; our ladies in fact called him a naughty boy, and he seemed to like it very much. However, he was of quite good society, good family, good upbringing, and good feelings, a bon vivant but quite an innocent one, and always proper. Physically, he was short and of weak, delicate constitution. Several extremely large rings always flashed on his thin and pale fingers. When performing his duties, he became remarkably solemn, as though he conceived of his significance and responsibility as sacred. He was especially good at throwing murderers and other low-class criminals off guard in interrogations, and actually aroused in them, if not respect for himself, at least a certain astonishment.

When Pyotr Ilyich entered the commissioner’s house, he was simply astounded: he suddenly saw that they knew everything already. Indeed, they had abandoned their cards, they all stood arguing, and even Nikolai Parfenovich came running from the young ladies with a most pugnacious and impetuous look on his face. Pyotr Ilyich was met with the astounding news that old Fyodor Pavlovich had really and truly been murdered in his house that evening, murdered and robbed. It had been learned just a moment before, in the following way.

Marfa Ignatievna—the wife of Grigory, who had been struck down at the fence—though she was fast asleep in her bed and might have gone on sleeping like that until morning, nevertheless suddenly woke up. Conducive to that end was a terrible epileptic scream from Smerdyakov, who lay unconscious in the next room—that scream with which his fits of falling sickness always began, and that always, all her life, frightened Marfa Ignatievna terribly and had a morbid effect on her. She simply never could get used to it. Half awake, she jumped up and, almost beside herself, rushed to Smerdyakov in his little room. It was dark there; she could only hear that the sick man had begun struggling and gasping horribly. Marfa Ignatievna screamed herself and began calling her husband, but suddenly realized that when she had gotten up Grigory seemed not to be in the bed. She ran back and felt in the bed again, but it was indeed empty. So he had gone out, but where? She ran to the porch and timidly called him. She got no answer, of course, but instead she heard, in the night’s silence, some groans, which seemed to be coming from somewhere far away in the garden. She listened; the groans were repeated, and it became clear that they were indeed coming from the garden. “Lord, just like with Stinking Lizaveta!” flashed through her distraught head. She went timidly down the steps and saw that the garden gate was open. “He must be there, the poor dear,” she thought, going up to the gate, and suddenly she clearly heard Grigory calling her, crying out: “Marfa, Marfa!” in a weak, wailing, woeful voice. “Lord, keep us from disaster,” Marfa Ignatievna whispered and rushed towards the voice, and in that way she found Grigory. But she found him not by the fence, not on the spot where he had been struck down, but about twenty paces away. Later it turned out that, having come to his senses, he had begun crawling, and probably crawled for a long while, losing consciousness and passing out several times more. She noticed at once that he was all covered with blood, and at that began screaming to high heaven. Grigory kept muttering softly and incoherently: “He killed ... father ... killed ... stop shouting, fool ... run, tell . . “But Marfa Ignatievna would not quiet down and went on screaming, and suddenly, seeing that the master’s window was open and there was light inside, she ran to it and began calling Fyodor Pavlovich. But, looking through the window, she saw a terrible sight: the master was lying on his back on the floor, not moving. The front of his light-colored dressing gown and his white shirt were soaked with blood. A candle on the table shed a bright light on the blood and on the motionless, dead face of Fyodor Pavlovich. Now horrified to the last degree, Marfa Ignatievna rushed away from the window, ran out of the garden, unlocked the gates, and ran like mad through the back lane to her neighbor, Maria Kondratievna. Both neighbors, mother and daughter, were asleep by then, but at Marfa Ignatievna’s urgent and frenzied shouting and knocking on the shutters, they woke up and jumped to the window. Marfa Ignatievna, shrieking and shouting, conveyed the essentials, however incoherently, and called for help. As it happened, that night the wandering Foma was staying with them. They roused him at once, and all three ran to the scene of the crime. On the way, Maria Kondratievna managed to recall that earlier, before nine o’clock, she had heard a terrible and piercing cry from their garden, which could be heard all over the neighborhood—and this certainly was precisely the cry of Grigory as he caught hold of the leg of Dmitri Fyodorovich, who was already sitting astride the fence, and cried out: “Parricide!” “Some one person shouted and suddenly stopped,” Maria Kondratievna testified as she ran. Having come to the place where Grigory lay, the two women, with the help of Foma, carried him to the cottage. They lighted a candle and saw that Smerdyakov had still not calmed down but was struggling in his little room, his eyes crossed and foam running from his lips. Grigory’s head was washed with water and vinegar; the water brought him back to his full senses, and he asked at once: “Has the master been killed?” The two women and Foma then went to the master’s and this time saw, as they entered the garden, that not only the window but the door to the garden was wide open, whereas for the whole past week the master had been locking himself up securely in the evening, every night, and would not allow even Grigory to knock for him under any circumstances. Seeing the door open, all of them, the two women and Foma, were afraid to go to the master’s room, “for fear something might come of it afterwards.” Grigory, when they came back, told them to run at once to the police commissioner himself. It was at this point that Maria Kondratievna ran and gave the alarm to everyone at the commissioner’s house. She preceded Pyotr Ilyich’s arrival by only five minutes, so that he came not just with his own guesses and conclusions, but as an obvious witness, whose story even further confirmed the general surmise as to the identity of the criminal (which he, by the way, in the bottom of his heart, till this last moment, still refused to believe).

It was decided to act energetically. The assistant police chief was immediately ordered to round up as many as four witnesses, and, following all the rules, which I am not going to describe here, they penetrated Fyodor Pavlovich’s house and carried out an investigation on the spot. The district doctor, a hot and new man, all but invited himself to accompany the commissioner, the prosecutor, and the district attorney. I will give only a brief outline: Fyodor Pavlovich turned out to be thoroughly murdered, his head having been smashed in, but with what?—most likely with the same weapon with which Grigory had also been struck later. And just then they found the weapon, having heard from Grigory, to whom all possible medical help was administered, a quite coherent, though weakly and falteringly uttered, account of how he had been struck down. They began searching near the fence with a lantern and found the brass pestle, thrown right on the garden path for all to see. No unusual disorder was noted in the room where Fyodor Pavlovich was lying, but behind the screen near his bed they picked up a big envelope from the floor, made of heavy paper, of official size, inscribed: “A little treat of three thousand roubles for my angel Grushenka, if she wants to come,” and below that was added, most likely later, by Fyodor Pavlovich himself: “And to my chicky.” There were three big seals of red wax on the envelope, but it had already been torn open and was empty: the money was gone. They also found on the floor a narrow pink ribbon with which the envelope had been tied. One circumstance among others in Pyotr Ilyich’s evidence made an extraordinary impression on the prosecutor and the district attorney: namely, his guess that Dmitri Fyodorovich would certainly shoot himself towards dawn, that he had resolved to do it, spoken of it to Pyotr Ilyich, loaded his pistol, and so on and so forth. And that when he, Pyotr Ilyich, still unwilling to believe him, had threatened to go and tell someone to prevent the suicide, Mitya had answered him, grinning: “You won’t have time.” It followed that they had to hurry there, to Mokroye, in order to catch the criminal before he perhaps really decided to shoot himself. “That’s clear, that’s clear!” the prosecutor kept repeating in great excitement, “that’s just how it is with such hotheads: tomorrow I’ll kill myself, but before I die—a spree!” The story of his taking a lot of wine and provisions from the shop aroused the prosecutor even more. “Do you remember, gentlemen, that fellow who killed the merchant Olsufyev, robbed him of fifteen hundred, and went at once to have his hair curled, and then, without even hiding the money very well, almost holding it in his hand in the same way, went to the girls?” They were detained, however, by the investigation, the search of Fyodor Pavlovich’s house, the paperwork, and so on. All this needed time, and therefore they sent to Mokroye, two hours ahead of them, the deputy commissioner, Mavriky Mavrikievich Shmertsov, who had come to town just the previous morning to collect his salary. Mavriky Mavrikievich was instructed to go to Mokroye and, without raising any alarm, to keep watch on the “criminal” tirelessly until the arrival of the proper authorities, as well as to procure witnesses, deputies, and so on and so forth. And all this Mavriky Mavrikievich did, preserving his incognito, and initiating only Trifon Borisovich, his old acquaintance, and then only partially, into the secret of the affair. This coincided precisely with the time when Mitya met the innkeeper in the darkness on the porch looking for him and at once noticed a sudden change in Trifon Borisovich’s face and tone. Thus neither Mitya nor anyone else knew that he was being watched; his case with the pistols had long since been spirited away by Trifon Borisovich and hidden in some safe place. And only after four o’clock in the morning, almost at dawn, did all the authorities arrive, the police commissioner, the prosecutor, and the district attorney, in two carriages drawn by two troikas. The doctor stayed behind in Fyodor Pavlovich’s house with the object of performing a postmortem in the morning on the body of the murdered man, but above all he had become particularly interested in the condition of the sick servant Smerdyakov: “Such severe and protracted fits of the falling sickness, recurring uninterruptedly over two days, are rarely met with: this case belongs to science,” he said excitedly to his departing companions, and they laughingly congratulated him on his find. At the same time the prosecutor and the district attorney remembered very clearly the doctor adding in a most definite tone that Smerdyakov would not live till morning.

Now, after a long but, I believe, necessary explanation, we have returned precisely to that moment of our story at which we stopped in the previous book.

Chapter 3: The Soul’s Journey through Torments. The First Torment

And so Mitya was sitting and staring around with wild eyes at those present, without understanding what was being said to him.^[271] Suddenly he rose, threw up his hands, and cried loudly:

“Not guilty! Of that blood I am not guilty! Of my father’s blood I am not guilty ... I wanted to kill him, but I’m not guilty. Not me!”

But no sooner had he cried it than Grushenka jumped out from behind the curtains and simply collapsed at the feet of the police commissioner.

“It’s me, me, the cursed one, I am guilty!” she cried in a heartrending howl, all in tears, stretching her arms out to everyone, “it’s because of me that he killed him...! I tormented him and drove him to it! I tormented that poor old dead man, too, out of spite, and drove things to this! I am the guilty one, first and most of all, I am the guilty one!”

“Yes, you are the guilty one! You are the chief criminal! You are violent, you are depraved, you are the guilty one, you most of all,” screamed the commissioner, shaking his finger at her, but this time he was quickly and resolutely suppressed. The prosecutor even seized him with both arms.

“This is entirely out of order, Mikhail Makarovich,” he cried, “you are positively hindering the investigation ... ruining the whole thing ... ,”he was all but choking.

“Measures, measures, we must take measures!” Nikolai Parfenovich, too, began seething terribly, “otherwise it’s positively impossible...!”

“Judge us together!” Grushenka went on exclaiming frenziedly, still on her knees. “Punish us together, I’ll go with him now even to execution!”

“Grusha, my life, my blood, my holy one!” Mitya threw himself on his knees beside her and caught her tightly in his arms. “Don’t believe her,” he shouted, “she’s not guilty of anything, of any blood, or anything!”

He remembered afterwards that several men pulled him away from her by force, that she was suddenly taken out, and that when he came to his senses he was already sitting at the table. Beside him and behind him stood people with badges. On the sofa across the table from him, Nikolai Parfenovich, the district attorney, sat trying to persuade him to sip some water from a glass that stood on the table: “It will refresh you, it will calm you down, you needn’t be afraid, you needn’t worry,” he kept adding with extreme politeness. And Mitya, as he remembered, suddenly became terribly interested in his big rings, one with an amethyst, and another with a bright yellow stone, transparent and of a most wonderful brilliance. And for a long time afterwards he recalled with surprise how these rings irresistibly drew his eye even through all those terrible hours of interrogation, so that for some reason he was unable to tear himself away and forget them as something quite unsuitable in his position. On the left, at Mitya’s side, where Maximov had been sitting at the start of the evening, the prosecutor now sat down, and to Mitya’s right, where Grushenka had been, a pink-cheeked young man settled himself, dressed in a rather threadbare sort of hunting jacket, and in front of him appeared an inkstand and some paper. He turned out to be the district attorney’s clerk, who had come with him. The police commissioner now stood near the window, at the other end of the room, next to Kalganov, who was sitting in a chair by the same window.

“Drink some water!” the district attorney gently repeated for the tenth time.

“I drank some, gentlemen, I drank some ... but ... come, gentlemen, crush me, punish me, decide my fate!” Mitya exclaimed, staring with horribly fixed, bulging eyes at the district attorney.

“So you positively assert that you are not guilty of the death of your father, Fyodor Pavlovich?” the district attorney asked gently but insistently.

“Not guilty! I’m guilty of other blood, of another old man’s blood, but not of my father’s. And I weep for it! I killed, I killed the old man, killed him and struck him down ... But it’s hard to have to answer for that blood with this other blood, this terrible blood, which I’m not guilty of ... A terrible accusation, gentlemen, as if you’d stunned me on the head! But who killed my father, who killed him? Who could have killed him if not me? It’s a wonder, an absurdity, an impossibility . . .!”

“Yes, who could have killed him ... ,” the district attorney began, but the prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich (the deputy prosecutor, but for the sake of brevity we, too, shall call him the prosecutor), exchanging glances with the district attorney, said, turning to Mitya:

“You needn’t worry about the old servant, Grigory Vasiliev. I can tell you that he is alive, he has recovered, and despite the severe beating inflicted by you, according to his and now to your own evidence, it seems he will undoubtedly live, at least in the doctor’s opinion.”

“Alive? So he’s alive!” Mitya suddenly shouted, clasping his hands. His whole face lit up. “Lord, I thank you for this greatest miracle, which you have done for me, a sinner and evildoer, according to my prayer! Yes, yes, it’s according to my prayer, I was praying all night!” And he crossed himself three times. He was nearly breathless.

“And it is from this same Grigory that we have received such significant evidence regarding you, that ... ,” the prosecutor went on, but Mitya suddenly jumped up from his chair.

“One moment, gentlemen, for God’s sake, just one moment; I’ll run to her...”

“Sorry! Right now it’s quite impossible!” Nikolai Parfenovich almost shrieked, and he, too, jumped to his feet. The men with badges laid hold of Mitya; however, he sat down on the chair himself . . .

“What a pity, gentlemen! I wanted to see her for just one moment ... I wanted to announce to her that this blood that was gnawing at my heart all night has been washed away, has disappeared, and I am no longer a murderer! She is my fiancée, gentlemen!” he suddenly spoke ecstatically and reverently, looking around at them all. “Oh, thank you, gentlemen! Oh, how you’ve restored, how you’ve resurrected me in a moment ... ‘.That old man—he carried me in his arms, gentlemen, he washed me in a tub when I was a three-year-old child and abandoned by everyone, he was my own father . . .!”

“And so you ... ,” the district attorney began.

“Sorry, gentlemen, sorry, just one more minute,” Mitya interrupted, putting both elbows on the table and covering his face with his hands, “let me collect myself a little, let me catch my breath, gentlemen. It’s all terribly shocking, terribly—a man is not a drumskin, gentlemen!”

“Have some more water,” muttered Nikolai Parfenovich.

Mitya took his hands away from his face and laughed. His look was cheerful; he had quite changed, as it were, in a moment. And his whole tone was changed: here now sat a man once again the equal of all these men, of all these previous acquaintances of his, exactly as if they had all come together the day before, when nothing had happened yet, somewhere at a social gathering. Let us note, incidentally, that when he first came to our town, Mitya was warmly received at the commissioner’s house, but later, especially during the last month, Mitya hardly ever visited him, and the commissioner, meeting him in the street, for example, frowned deeply and bowed to him only out of politeness, which circumstance Mitya noted very well. His acquaintance with the prosecutor was even more distant, but to the prosecutor’s wife, a nervous and fantastic lady, he sometimes paid visits, most respectful visits, by the way, himself not even quite knowing why he was calling on her, and she always received him kindly, taking an interest in him for some reason, until quite recently. He had not yet had time to make the acquaintance of the district attorney, though he had met him and even spoken with him once or twice, both times about the female sex.

“You, Nikolai Parfenovich, are, I can see, a most skillful investigator,” Mitya suddenly laughed gaily, “but now I will help you myself. Oh, gentlemen, I am resurrected ... and do not take it amiss that I address you so casually and directly. Besides, I’m a little drunk, that I will frankly admit. I believe I had the honor ... the honor and the pleasure of meeting you, Nikolai Parfenovich, at the home of my relation, Miusov ... Gentlemen, gentlemen, I do not claim to be equal, I quite understand who I am now, as I sit here before you. A horrible suspicion hangs over me ... if Grigory has given evidence regardingme ... then of course, oh, of course it hangs over me! Horrible, horrible—I quite understand! But—to business, gentlemen, I’m ready, and now we’ll make short work of it, because, listen, listen, gentlemen. You see, if I know I am not guilty, then of course we can make short work of it! Can’t we? Can’t we?”

Mitya spoke much and quickly, nervously and expansively, and as if he decidedly took his listeners for his best friends.

“So, for the present we shall write down that you radically deny the accusation brought against you,” Nikolai Parfenovich pronounced imposingly, and, turning to the clerk, he dictated in a low voice what he was to write down.

“Write down? You want to write it down? Well, write it down then, I consent, I give my full consent, gentlemen ... Only, you see ... Wait, wait, write it down like this: ‘Of violence—guilty; of inflicting a savage beating on a poor old man—guilty.’ And then, within himself, too, inside, in the bottom of his heart, he is guilty—but there’s no need to write that down,” he turned suddenly to the clerk, “that is my private life, gentlemen, that doesn’t concern you now, the bottom of my heart, I mean ... But of the murder of his old father—not guilty! It’s a wild idea! It’s an utterly wild idea...! I’ll prove it to you and you’ll be convinced immediately. You’ll laugh, gentlemen, you’ll roar with laughter at your own suspicion...!”

“Calm yourself, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” the district attorney reminded him, apparently as if he wished to subdue the frenzied man with his own calmness. “Before continuing the interrogation, I should like, if only you will agree to answer, to hear from you a confirmation of the fact that you seem to have disliked the late Fyodor Pavlovich, and were in some sort of permanent dispute with him ... Here, in any case, a quarter of an hour ago, I believe you were pleased to say that you even wanted to kill him: ‘I did not kill him,’ you exclaimed, ‘but I wanted to kill him! ‘“

“I exclaimed that? Ah, maybe I did, gentlemen! Yes, unfortunately I wanted to kill him, wanted to many times ... unfortunately, unfortunately!”

“You wanted to. Would you be willing to explain what principles in fact guided you in this hatred for the person of your parent?”

“What’s there to explain, gentlemen!” Mitya shrugged gloomily, looking down. “I’ve never hidden my feelings, the whole town knows of it—everyone in the tavern knows. Recently, in the monastery, I announced it in the elder Zosima’s cell ... That same day, in the evening, I beat my father and nearly killed him, and swore in front of witnesses that I would come back and kill him ... Oh, there’s a thousand witnesses! I’ve been shouting for the whole month, everyone is a witness...! The fact is right there, the fact speaks, it cries out, but—feelings, gentlemen, feelings are something else. You see, gentlemen,” Mitya frowned, “it seems to me that you have no right to question me about my feelings. You are empowered, I understand that, but this is my business, my inner business, an intimate thing, but ... since I haven’t hidden my feelings before ... in the tavern, for instance, but have talked of it to all and sundry, so I won’t ... I won’t make a secret of it now, either. You see, gentlemen, I quite understand that in that case there is horrible evidence against me: I told everyone I would kill him, and suddenly he is killed: who else but me in that case? Ha, ha! I don’t blame you, gentlemen, I don’t blame you at all. I’m struck to the epidermis myself, because who, finally, did kill him in that case, if not me? Isn’t that so? If not me, then who, who? Gentlemen,” he suddenly exclaimed, “I want to know, I even demand it of you, gentlemen: where was he killed? How was he killed, with what and how? Tell me,” he asked quickly, looking around at the prosecutor and the district attorney.

“We found him lying on his back, on the floor of his study, with his head smashed in,” the prosecutor said.

“How horrible, gentlemen!” Mitya suddenly shuddered, and leaning his elbow on the table, he covered his face with his right hand.

“Let us continue,” Nikolai Parfenovich interrupted. “What, then, guided you in your feeling of hatred? I believe you have announced publicly that it was a feeling of jealousy?”

“Yes, jealousy, and not only jealousy.”

“Disputes about money?” ‘ “Yes, about money, too.”

“The dispute seems to have been over three thousand roubles, allegedly due you as part of your inheritance?”

“Three thousand, hah! It was more, more,” Mitya heaved himself up, “more than six, more than ten, maybe. I told everyone, I shouted it to everyone! But I decided to let it go, to settle for three thousand. I desperately needed that three thousand ... so the envelope with three thousand which I knew was under his pillow, waiting for Grushenka, I considered definitely as stolen from me, that’s what, gentlemen, I considered it mine, just as if it was my own property ...”

The prosecutor exchanged meaningful glances with the district attorney and managed to wink at him unobserved.

“We shall come back to that subject later,” the district attorney said at once. “For now, allow me to take note of precisely this little point and write it down: that you considered the money in that envelope as your own property.”

“Write it down, gentlemen, I quite understand that it is one more piece of evidence against me, but I’m not afraid of evidence and even testify against myself. Do you hear, against myself! You see, gentlemen, you seem to be taking me for quite a different man from what I am,” he suddenly added, glumly and sadly. “It is a noble man you are speaking with, a most noble person; above all—do not lose sight of this—a man who has done a world of mean things, but who always was and remained a most noble person, as a person, inside, in his depths, well, in short, I don’t know how to say it ... This is precisely what has tormented me all my life, that I thirsted for nobility, that I was, so to speak, a sufferer for nobility, seeking it with a lantern, Diogenes’ lantern,^[272] and meanwhile all my life I’ve been doing only dirty things, as we all do, gentlemen ... I mean, me alone, gentlemen, not all but me alone, I made a mistake, me alone, alone . . .! Gentlemen, my head aches,” he winced with pain. “You see, gentlemen, I did not like his appearance, it was somehow dishonorable, boastful, trampling on all that’s holy, mockery and unbelief, loathsome, loathsome! But now that he’s dead, I think differently.”

“How differently?”

“Not differently, but I’m sorry I hated him so much.”

“You feel repentant?”

“No, not really repentant, don’t write that down. I’m not good myself, gentlemen, that’s the thing, I’m not so beautiful myself, and therefore I had no right to consider him repulsive, that’s the thing. Perhaps you can write that down.”

Having said this, Mitya suddenly became extremely sad. Gradually, for some time now, as he answered the district attorney’s questions, he had been growing more and more gloomy. And suddenly, just at that moment, another unexpected scene broke out. It so happened that, though Grushenka had been removed, she had not been taken very far, only to the third room down from the blue room in which the interrogation was now going on. It was a small room with one window, just beyond the big room where they had been dancing and feasting during the night. There she sat, and so far the only one with her was Maximov, who was terribly shocked, terribly frightened, and clung to her as if seeking salvation at her side. Some peasant with a badge on his chest stood at their door. Grushenka was weeping, and then suddenly, when the grief came too near her soul, she jumped up, clasped her hands, and, crying “Woe, woe is me!” in a loud wail, rushed out of the room to him, to her Mitya, so unexpectedly that no one had time to stop her. Mitya, hearing her wail, shuddered all over, jumped up, gave a shout, and, as if forgetting himself, rushed headlong to meet her. But again they were not allowed to come together, though they had already caught sight of each other. He was seized firmly by the arms: he struggled, tried to break loose, it took three or four men to hold him. She, too, was seized, and he saw her shouting and stretching out her arms to him as they drew her away. When the scene was over, he came to himself again in the same place, across the table from the district attorney, and was shouting at them:

“What do you want with her? Why do you torment her? She’s innocent, innocent...!”

The prosecutor and the district attorney were trying to talk sense into him. This took some time, about ten minutes; at last Mikhail Makarovich, who had stepped out, came hurriedly into the room, and in a loud, excited voice said to the prosecutor:

“She has been removed, she is downstairs; but will you permit me, gentlemen, to say just one word to this unfortunate man? In your presence, gentlemen, in your presence!”

“As you wish, Mikhail Makarovich,” the district attorney answered, “in the present case we have nothing to say against it.”

“Listen, Dmitri Fyodorovich, my dear fellow,” Mikhail Makarovich began, turning to Mitya, his whole troubled face expressing warm, almost fatherly compassion for the unfortunate man, “I myself took your Agrafena Alexandrovna downstairs and handed her over to the innkeeper’s daughters, and that old man, Maximov, is there and never leaves her now, and I talked with her, do you hear? I talked with her and calmed her down, I impressed upon her that you need to clear yourself and so she mustn’t interfere, mustn’t drive you to despair, otherwise you may get confused and give wrong evidence against yourself, you see? Well, in short, I talked with her and she saw. She’s a smart woman, brother, she’s kind, she wanted to kiss these old hands of mine, she asked me to help you. She sent me here herself to tell you that you mustn’t worry about her, and it would be a good thing, my dear, it would be a good thing if I went and told her that you’re not worried and are comforted about her. So you see, you mustn’t worry. I’m guilty before her, she’s a Christian soul, yes, gentlemen, she’s a meek soul and not guilty of anything. Well, what shall I tell her, Dmitri Fyodorovich, are you going to be quiet or not?”

The kindly man said much more than was necessary, but Grushenka’s grief, such human grief, had penetrated his kind soul, and tears even brimmed in his eyes. Mitya jumped up and rushed to him.

“Forgive me, gentlemen, allow me, oh, allow me!” he cried out. “You are an angelic soul, an angelic soul, Mikhail Makarovich, I thank you for her! I will, I will be quiet, I will be cheerful, tell her in the infinite kindness of your soul that I am cheerful, cheerful, I’ll even start laughing now, knowing that she has such a guardian angel as you. I’ll finish with all of this now, and the moment I’m free, I’ll go to her at once, she’ll see, she must wait! Gentlemen,” he suddenly turned to the prosecutor and the district attorney, “I will now open and pour out my whole soul to you, we will finish with this in a moment, finish it cheerfully—in the end we’ll have a good laugh, won’t we? But, gentlemen, this woman is the queen of my soul! Oh, allow me to say it, this is something I’m going to reveal to you ... I can see I’m with the noblest men: she is my light, my holy one, and if only you knew! Did you hear her cry: ‘I’ll go with you—even to execution’? And what have I, a naked beggar, given her, why such love for me, am I—a clumsy and shameful creature with a shameful face—worthy of such love, that she should go to hard labor with me? She just laid herself at your feet for me, she, a proud woman and not guilty of anything! How can I not adore her, not cry out, not long for her, as I do now? Oh, gentlemen, forgive me! But now, now I’m comforted!”

And he sank down and, covering his face with both hands, burst into sobs. But they were happy tears. He collected himself at once. The old commissioner was very pleased, and so the jurists seemed to be, too: they felt that the interrogation was now entering a new phase. Having sent the commissioner off, Mitya became quite cheerful.

“Well, gentlemen, now I am yours, yours completely. And ... if only it weren’t for all these small details, we would come to an understanding at once. Again I’m talking about small details. I’m yours, gentlemen, but, I swear, we must have mutual trust—you in me, and I in you—otherwise we’ll never finish. I’m saying it for your sake. To business, gentlemen, to business, and above all don’t go digging around in my soul so much, don’t torment it with trifles, but keep to the point, to the facts, and I’ll satisfy you at once. Devil take the small details!”

So Mitya exclaimed. The interrogation began again.

Chapter 4: The Second Torment

“You would not believe how encouraged we are, Dmitri Fyodorovich, by this readiness of yours ... ,” Nikolai Parfenovich started saying, with an animated look and with visible pleasure shining in his big, protruding, pale gray, and, by the way, extremely myopic eyes, from which he had just removed his spectacles a moment before. “And you have made a very just observation concerning our mutual confidentiality, without which it is sometimes even impossible to proceed in matters of such importance, in the case and sense that the suspected person indeed wishes, hopes, and is able to vindicate himself. For our part, we shall do everything possible, and you have already been able to see how we are conducting this case ... Do you approve, Ippolit Kirillovich?” he suddenly turned to the prosecutor.

“Oh, indubitably,” the prosecutor approved, though somewhat drily compared with Nikolai Parfenovich’s outburst.

I will note once and for all that the newly arrived Nikolai Parfenovich, from the very beginning of his career among us, felt a marked respect for our Ippolit Kirillovich, the prosecutor, and became almost heart-to-heart friends with him. He was almost the only man who believed without reservation in the remarkable psychological and oratorical talents of our “passed-over” Ippolit Kirillovich, and also fully believed that he had indeed been passed over. He had heard of him while still in Petersburg. And in turn the young Nikolai Parfenovich happened to be the only man in the whole world whom our “passed-over” prosecutor came sincerely to love. On the way there they had had time to set up a few things and make arrangements for the impending case, and now, at the table, the sharp little mind of Nikolai Parfenovich caught on the wing and understood every indication, every movement in the face of his older colleague, from half a word, a look, a wink of the eye.

“Gentlemen, give me leave to tell my own story and do not interrupt me with trifles, and I will lay it all out for you in no time,” Mitya was seething.

“Excellent, sir. Thank you. But before we go on to hear your account, allow me simply to mention one more little fact, of great interest for us, namely, the ten roubles you borrowed yesterday, at around five o’clock, by pawning your pistols to your friend Pyotr Ilyich Perkhotin.”

“I pawned them, gentlemen, I pawned them for ten roubles, that’s all. What of it? As soon as I got back to town from my trip, I pawned them at once.”

“Got back? So you left town?”

“I did, gentlemen, I went thirty miles out of town, didn’t you know that?”

The prosecutor and Nikolai Parfenovich exchanged glances.

“Suppose you begin your story with a systematic description of your whole day yesterday, starting from the morning? Let us know, for example, why you left town, and precisely when you went and came back ... and all these facts ...”

“But you should have asked me that from the very beginning,” Mitya laughed loudly, “and, if you please, I should start not from yesterday but from the day before yesterday, from that morning; then you’ll understand where, how, and why I went or drove. The day before yesterday, gentlemen, I went to a local merchant, Samsonov, to borrow three thousand roubles from him on the best security—a sudden itch, gentlemen, a sudden itch...”

“Allow me to interrupt you,” the prosecutor interjected politely, “why did you so suddenly need precisely that amount, that is, three thousand roubles? “

“Eh, gentlemen, why pick on such little things: how, when, and why, and precisely this much money and not that much, and all that claptrap ... if you keep on, it’ll take you three volumes and an epilogue to cram it all in.”

All this Mitya said with the good-natured but impatient familiarity of a man who wishes to tell the whole truth and is full of the best intentions.

“Gentlemen,” he caught himself, as it were, “don’t murmur against me for my bristliness. I ask you again: believe once more that I feel the utmost respect and fully understand the situation. And don’t think that I’m drunk. I’ve sobered up now. And it would be no hindrance if I were drunk, because:

Sober and wise, he’s stupid, Drunk and stupid, he’s wise.

That’s how I am. Ha, ha! I see, by the way, that it’s not proper for me to be cracking jokes with you yet—that is, before we’ve explained everything. Allow me to keep my dignity. I quite understand the present difference: I’m still sitting before you as a criminal, and, therefore, unequal to you in the highest degree, and your duty is to watch me: you really can’t pat me on the back for Grigory, one certainly can’t go breaking old men’s heads with impunity, you’ll probably try me and lock me up for, what, six months or a year in the penitentiary for that, or, I don’t know, whatever the sentence would be—but without loss of rights, it will be without loss of rights, won’t it, prosecutor? And so, gentlemen, I quite understand this difference ... But you must also agree that you could confuse even God himself with such questions: where I stepped, how I stepped, when I stepped, what I stepped in? I’ll get confused that way, and you’ll pick up every dropped stitch and write it down at once, and what will come of it? Nothing will come of it! And finally, since I’ve already begun telling my tale, I’ll finish it now, and you, gentlemen, being most noble and highly educated, will forgive me. I’ll end precisely with a request: you, gentlemen, must unlearn this official method of interrogation, I mean, first you begin, say, with something measly and insignificant: how did you get up, what did you eat, how did you spit, and ‘having lulled the criminal’s attention,’ you suddenly catch him with a stunning question: ‘Whom did you kill, whom did you rob?’ Ha, ha! That’s your official method, that’s your rule, that’s what all your cleverness is based on! You can lull peasants with your cleverness, but not me. I understand the system, I was in the service myself, ha, ha, ha! You’re not angry, are you, gentlemen? You’ll forgive my boldness?” he cried, looking at them with almost surprising good-naturedness. “Mitka Karamazov said it, so it’s excusable, because what would be inexcusable in an intelligent man is excusable in Mitka! Ha, ha!”

Nikolai Parfenovich listened and laughed, too. The prosecutor, though he did not laugh, was studying Mitya intently, without taking his eyes off him, as if not wishing to miss the least word, the least movement, the least twitch of the least little line on his face.

“Incidentally, that is how we began with you from the beginning,” Nikolai Parfenovich replied, still laughing, “not confusing you with questions about how you got up in the morning and what you ate, but beginning even from what is all too essential.”

“I understand, I understood and appreciated it, and I appreciate still more your present kindness to me, which is unprecedented, worthy of the noblest souls. We are three noble men come together here, and let everything with us be on the footing of mutual trust between educated and worldly men, bound by nobility and honor. In any case, allow me to look upon you as my best friends in this moment of my life, in this moment when my honor is humiliated! That’s no offense to you, is it, gentlemen?”

“On the contrary, you’ve expressed it all quite beautifully, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” Nikolai Parfenovich gravely and approvingly agreed.

“And away with little details, gentlemen, with all these pettifogging details,” Mitya delightedly exclaimed, “otherwise the devil knows what will come of it, isn’t that so?”

“I will follow your sensible advice completely,” the prosecutor suddenly mixed in, addressing Mitya. “However, I still do not withdraw my question. It is all too essentially necessary for us to know why precisely you needed such an amount—that is, precisely three thousand.” “Why I needed it? Well, for this and that ... well, to repay a debt.”

“To whom, precisely?”

“That I positively refuse to tell you, gentlemen! You see, it’s not that I cannot tell you, or don’t dare, or am afraid, because it’s all a paltry matter and perfectly trifling, no, but I won’t tell you on principle: it’s my private life, and I will not allow you to invade my private life. That is my principle. Your question is irrelevant to the case, and whatever is irrelevant to the case is my private life! I wanted to repay a debt, a debt of honor, but to whom I won’t say.”

“Allow us to write that down,” said the prosecutor.

“As you wish. Write down this: that I just won’t say. Write, gentlemen, that I would even consider it dishonorable to say. You’ve got lots of time for writing, haven’t you?”

“Allow me, dear sir, to caution you and remind you once more, in case you are still unaware of it,” the prosecutor said with particular and rather stern impressiveness, “that you have every right not to answer the questions that are put to you now, and we, on the contrary, have no right to extort answers from you, if you decline to answer for one reason or another. That is a matter of your personal consideration. On the other hand, in such a situation, it is our business to point out to you and explain the full extent of the harm you will be doing yourself by refusing to give this or that evidence. At which point I ask you to continue.”

“Gentlemen, I’m not angry ... I ... ,” Mitya started mumbling, somewhat taken aback by this reprimand, “you see, gentlemen, this Samsonov to whom I went then ...”

We shall not, of course, reproduce his detailed account of what is already known to the reader. The narrator was impatient to tell everything in the smallest particulars, and at the same time to get through it quickly. But his evidence was being written down as he gave it, and he therefore had necessarily to be stopped. Dmitri Fyodorovich objected but submitted, was angry, but so far good-naturedly. True, from time to time he cried out, “Gentlemen, this would exasperate the Lord God himself!” or “Gentlemen, do you know you’re irritating me for nothing?” but despite his exclamations, he still preserved his friendly and expansive mood. Thus he told them how Samsonov had “hoodwinked” him two days before. (He now realized fully that he had been hoodwinked then.) The sale of the watch for six roubles in order to get money for the road, which was still completely unknown to the district attorney and the prosecutor, at once aroused their greatest interest, and, to Mitya’s boundless indignation, they found it necessary to record this fact in detail, seeing in it a second confirmation of the circumstance that even a day before he had been almost without a kopeck. Little by little Mitya was becoming gloomy. Then, having described his trip to Lyagavy, the night spent in the fume-poisoned hut, and so on, he brought his story as far as his return to town, where he began on his own, without being specially asked, to describe in detail his jealous torments over Grushenka. He was listened to silently and attentively; they particularly went into the circumstance of his having long ago set up his lookout for Grushenka going to Fyodor Pavlovich in Maria Kondratievna’s backyard, and of Smerdyakov’s bringing him information: this was much noticed and written down. Of his jealousy he spoke ardently and extensively, and though inwardly ashamed at displaying his most intimate feelings, so to speak, “for general disgrace,” he obviously tried to overcome his shame for the sake of being truthful. The indifferent sternness of the district attorney’s and, especially, the prosecutor’s eyes, which they kept fixed on him during his account, disconcerted him in the end rather strongly: “This boy, Nikolai Parfenovich, with whom I exchanged some silly remarks about women only a few days ago, and this sickly prosecutor are not worthy of my telling them this,” flashed sadly through his mind. “Oh, shame! Be patient, humble, hold thy peace,’”^[273] he concluded his thoughts with this line of verse, but still collected himself again in order to go on. Having come to the part about Madame Khokhlakov, he even brightened up again, and was even about to tell a certain recent anecdote, unrelated to the case, concerning the good lady, but the district attorney stopped him and politely suggested that they pass on “to more essential things.” Finally, having described his despair and told them of that moment when, as he walked out of Madame Khokhlakov’s, he had even had the thought of “quickly putting a knife into someone, just to get the three thousand,” he was stopped again, and it was recorded that “he wanted to put a knife into someone.” Mitya let them write it down without protest. Finally he came to the point in the story when he suddenly found out that Grushenka had deceived him and left Samsonov’s just after he brought her there, though she had told him she would stay until midnight. “If I didn’t kill this Fenya right then, gentlemen, it was only because I had no time,” suddenly escaped him at this place in the story. And this, too, was carefully written down. Mitya waited gloomily and was beginning to tell how he ran to his; father’s garden, when the district attorney suddenly stopped him, and, opening his large briefcase, which lay beside him on the sofa, took out of it a brass pestle.

“Are you familiar with this object?” he showed it to Mitya.

“Ah, yes!” Mitya grinned gloomily, “indeed I am! Let me see it ... Or don’t, devil take it!” “You forgot to mention it,” the district attorney observed.

“Ah, the devil! I wouldn’t hide it from you, we certainly couldn’t get along without it, don’t you agree? It just escaped my memory.”

“Be so good, then, as to tell us in detail how you came to arm yourself with it.”

“I’ll be so good, if you wish, gentlemen.”

And Mitya told how he took the pestle and ran.

“But what purpose did you have in mind in arming yourself with such an implement?”

“What purpose? No purpose! I just grabbed it and ran.”

“But why, if there was no purpose?”

Mitya was seething with vexation. He looked fixedly at the “boy” and grinned gloomily and maliciously. The thing was that he felt more and more ashamed at having just told “such people” the story of his jealousy, so sincerely and with such effusion.

“I spit on the pestle,” suddenly escaped him.

“Even so, sir.”

“So I grabbed it to keep off the dogs. Or because it was dark ... Or just in case.”

“And have you always been in the habit of taking some weapon with you when going out at night, since you are so afraid of the dark?”

“Agh, the devil, pah! Gentlemen, it’s literally impossible to talk to you!” Mitya cried out in the utmost annoyance, and turning to the clerk, all red with anger, with a sort of frenzied note in his voice, quickly said to him:

“Take this down right now ... right now ... ‘that I grabbed the pestle in order to run and kill my father, Fyodor Pavlovich ... by hitting him on the head’! Well, are you content now, gentlemen? Does that ease your hearts?” he said, staring defiantly at the prosecutor and the district attorney.

“We realize only too well that you have given such evidence just now because you are annoyed with us and vexed by the questions we put to you, which you regard as petty, and which in essence are quite essential,” the prosecutor answered him drily.

“But for pity’s sake, gentlemen! So I took the pestle ... So, what does one pick things up for in such cases? I don’t know. I snatched it and ran. That’s all. Shame on you, gentlemen—passons, or I swear I won’t say anything more!”

He leaned his elbow on the table and propped his head in his hand. He was sitting sideways to them, looking at the wall, and trying to overcome the bad feeling inside him. In fact, he really had a terrible urge to stand up and declare that he was not going to say another word, “even if you should take me out and hang me.” “You see, gentlemen,” he suddenly spoke, overcoming himself with difficulty, “you see. I’m listening to you and imagining ... You see, sometimes I dream a dream in my sleep ... one particular dream, and I often dream it, it keeps repeating itself, that someone is chasing me, someone I’m terribly afraid of is chasing me in the darkness, at night, looking for me, and I’m hiding from him somewhere behind a door or a wardrobe, hiding in a humiliating way, and moreover he knows perfectly well where I’m hiding, but he seems to pretend not to know where I am on purpose, in order to torment me longer, in order to revel in my fear ... That’s what you are doing now! It’s just the same!”

“Is that the sort of dreams you have?” the prosecutor inquired.

“Yes, I have such dreams ... Why, do you want to write it down?” Mitya grinned crookedly.

“No, sir, I do not want to write it down, but still you do have curious dreams.”

“This time it’s not a dream! Realism, gentlemen, the realism of actual life! I’m the wolf, you’re the hunters—so hunt the wolf down.”

“You shouldn’t make such comparisons ... ,” Nikolai Parfenovich began very gently.

“Why shouldn’t I, gentlemen, why shouldn’t I!” Mitya boiled up again, though he had apparently unburdened his soul with this outburst of sudden anger and was growing kinder again with every word. “You may disbelieve a criminal or a prisoner in the dock whom you’re tormenting with your questions, but to disbelieve the noblest man, gentlemen, the noblest impulses of the soul (I cry it boldly!)—no! that you cannot do ... you even have no right to ... but—

. . . heart, hold thy peace, Be patient, humble, hold thy peace!

Well, shall I go on?” he broke off gloomily.

“Of course, if you’d be so good,” replied Nikolai Parfenovich.

Chapter 5: The Third Torment

Though Mitya began speaking sternly, he apparently was trying all the more not to forget or skip over the least detail in his account. He told how he had jumped over the fence into his father’s garden, how he went up to the window, and, finally, everything that took place under the window. Clearly, precisely, as though hammering it out, he spoke of the feelings that had troubled him during those moments in the garden, when he had wanted so terribly to know whether Grushenka was with his father or not. But, strangely, this time both the prosecutor and the district attorney somehow listened with terrible reserve, looked at him drily, asked far fewer questions. Mitya could gather nothing from their faces. “They’re angry and offended,” he thought, “well, devil take them!” When he told how he finally made up his mind to give his father the signal that Grushenka had come, so that he would open the window, the prosecutor and the district attorney paid no attention to the word “signal,” as if they had no idea at all of the word’s significance here; Mitya even noticed it. When he finally came to the moment when, seeing his father leaning out of the window, hatred boiled up in him and he snatched the pestle from his pocket, he suddenly stopped as if on purpose. He sat and looked at the wall, knowing they both had their eyes glued to him.

“Well, sir,” said the district attorney, “so you snatched out the weapon and ... and what then?”

“Then? Oh, then I killed him ... smashed him on the head and split his skull. That’s your version, is it!” he suddenly flashed his eyes. All the wrath that had almost died out in him suddenly rose up in his soul with extraordinary force.

“Ours,” Nikolai Parfenovich repeated, “well, and what is yours?”

Mitya lowered his eyes and was silent for a long time.

“My version, gentlemen, my version is this,” he began softly. “Whether it was someone’s tears, or God heard my mother’s prayers, or a bright spirit kissed me at that moment, I don’t know—but the devil was overcome. I dashed away from the window and ran to the fence. . . Father got frightened. He caught sight of me then for the first time, cried out, and jumped back from the window—I remember that very well. And I ran through the garden to the fence ... it was here that Grigory caught up with me, when I was already sitting on the fence ...”

At this point he finally raised his eyes to his listeners. They seemed to be looking at him with completely untroubled attention. A sort of twinge of indignation went through Mitya’s soul.

“But I see right now you’re laughing at me, gentlemen!” he suddenly interrupted.

“Why would you draw such a conclusion?” Nikolai Parfenovich remarked.

“You don’t believe a word of it, that’s why! I quite understand that I’ve come to the main point: the old man is now lying there with his head smashed in, and I—having tragically described how I wanted to kill him and how I already snatched out the pestle—I suddenly run away from the window ... A poem! In verse! Take the good man’s word for it! Ha, ha! You are scoffers, gentlemen!”

And he swung his whole body around on the chair so hard that the chair creaked.

“And did you notice,” the prosecutor began suddenly, as if paying no attention to Mitya’s excitement, “did you notice, when you ran away from the window, whether the door to the garden, at the other end of the house, was open or not?”

“No, it was not open.”

“It was not?”

“On the contrary, it was shut. Who could have opened it? Bah, the door— wait!” he suddenly seemed to collect himself and all but jumped up. “Did you find the door open?”

“Open.”

“But who could have opened it, if you didn’t open it yourselves?” Mitya was suddenly terribly surprised.

“The door was open, and your father’s murderer undoubtedly went in through that door and, having committed the murder, went out through the same door,” the prosecutor spoke slowly and distinctly, as though hammering out each word. “It is perfectly clear to us. The murder obviously took place , in the room, and not through the window, which is positively clear from the investigation carried out, from the position of the body, and everything else. There can be no doubt of that circumstance.”

Mitya was terribly astounded.

“But that’s impossible, gentlemen!” he cried out, completely at a loss. “I ... I didn’t go in . . .I tell you positively, with exactness, that the door was shut all the while I was in the garden and when I ran out of the garden. I just stood outside the window and saw him in the window, and that’s all, that’s all ... I remember it down to the last moment. And even if I didn’t remember, I know it anyway, because the signals were known only to me and Smerdyakov, and to him, the dead man, and without the signals he wouldn’t have opened the door to anyone in the world.”

“Signals? What kind of signals?” the prosecutor said with greedy, almost hysterical curiosity, and instantly lost all his reserved demeanor. He asked as if creeping up timidly. He scented an important fact, still unknown to him, and at once felt great fear that Mitya might not be willing to reveal it fully.

“So you didn’t even know?” Mitya winked at him, smiling mockingly and spitefully. “And what if I won’t tell you? Who will you find out from then? Only the dead man knew about the signals, and me, and Smerdyakov, that’s all, and heaven knew, too, but it won’t tell you. And it’s a curious little fact, one could build devil knows what on it, ha, ha! Take comfort, gentlemen, I’ll reveal it to you. You’ve got foolishness in your minds. You don’t know with whom you’re dealing! You’re dealing with a suspect who gives evidence against himself, who gives evidence that does him harm! Yes, sirs, for I am a knight of honor and you are not!”

The prosecutor swallowed all these pills; he was simply trembling with impatience to know about the new fact. Mitya gave them a precise and extensive account of everything to do with the signals invented by Fyodor Pavlovich for Smerdyakov, told them precisely what each knock on the window meant, even knocked out the signals on the table, and when asked by Nikolai Parfenovich whether it meant that he, Mitya, when he knocked on the old man’s window, had used precisely the signal meaning “Grushenka has come,” answered exactly that, yes, he had used precisely the signal meaning “Grushenka has come.”

“There you are, now build your tower!” Mitya broke off, and again turned away from them in contempt.

“And only your deceased parent, you, and the servant Smerdyakov knew about these signals? And no one else?” Nikolai Parfenovich inquired once again.

“Yes, the servant Smerdyakov, and heaven, too. Write that down about heaven, too; it’s worth writing down. And you’ll have need of God yourselves.”

Of course, they began writing it down, but while they were writing, the prosecutor, as if stumbling quite unexpectedly onto a new thought, suddenly said:

“But if Smerdyakov also knew about these signals, and you radically deny all accusations of your father’s death, then was it not he who, having given the agreed signal, got your father to unlock the door for him, and then ... committed the crime?”

Mitya gave him a deeply mocking and at the same time terribly hateful look. He stared at him long and silently, until the prosecutor began blinking his eyes.

“Caught the fox again!” Mitya spoke finally. “Pinched the rascal by the tail, heh, heh! I see right through you, prosecutor! You thought I’d jump up at once, snatch your prompting, and shout at the top of my lungs: ‘Aie, it’s Smerdyakov, he’s the murderer! ‘ Admit that’s what you thought, admit it, and then I’ll go on.”

But the prosecutor admitted nothing. He was silent and waited.

“You’re mistaken, I will not shout against Smerdyakov!” said Mitya.

“And you do not even suspect him at all?”

“Do you suspect him? “

“He is one of our suspects.”

Mitya planted his eyes on the floor.

“Joking aside,” he said gloomily, “listen: from the very beginning, almost from the moment when I ran out to you from behind the curtains tonight, this thought already flashed through me: ‘Smerdyakov! ‘ All the while I was sitting here at the table, shouting that I was not guilty of blood, I kept thinking: ‘Smerdyakov!’ And Smerdyakov would not let go of my soul. Finally, just now I suddenly had the same thought: ‘Smerdyakov,’ but only for a second; immediately, right next to it, came the thought: ‘No, not Smerdyakov! ‘ It’s not his doing, gentlemen.”

“In that case, do you suspect yet another person?” Nikolai Parfenovich asked guardedly.

“I don’t know who or what person, the hand of heaven or Satan, but. . not Smerdyakov!” Mitya snapped out resolutely.

“But why do you maintain so firmly and with such insistence that he is not the one?”

“From conviction. From impression. Because Smerdyakov is a man of the most abject nature and a coward. Not just a coward, but a conjunction of all cowardice in the world taken together, walking on two legs. He was born of a chicken. Every time he talked with me, he trembled for fear I might kill him, though I never even raised my hand. He fell at my feet and wept, he kissed these very boots of mine, literally, begging me not to ‘scare’ him. ‘Scare,’ do you hear?—what sort of word is that? And I even gave him presents. He’s a sickly, epileptic, feebleminded chicken, who could be thrashed by an eight-year-old boy. What sort of a character is that? No, not Smerdyakov, gentlemen—and he doesn’t care about money either, he never would take my presents ... Anyway,why would he kill the old man? You see he may be his son, his natural son, do you know that?”

“We have heard that legend. But after all, you, too, are your father’s son, and yet you told everyone you wanted to kill him.”

“A rock through my own window! And a low one, a nasty one! I’m not afraid. Oh, gentlemen, how mean of you to say that to my face! Mean, because I myself said it to you. I not only wanted to kill him, but I could well have killed him, and I voluntarily heaped it upon myself that I almost killed him! But I didn’t kill him, my guardian angel saved me—that’s what you haven’t taken into consideration ... And that is what makes it mean, mean! Because I didn’t kill him, I didn’t, I didn’t! Do you hear, prosecutor: I didn’t!”

He almost choked. Not once during the whole investigation had he been so agitated.

“And what has he told you, gentlemen—Smerdyakov, I mean?” he suddenly concluded, after a silence. “May I ask you that?”

“You may ask us anything,” the prosecutor replied with a cold and stern look, “anything concerning the factual side of the case, and it is our duty, I repeat, to satisfy your every question. We found the servant Smerdyakov, about whom you inquire, lying unconscious in his bed with a very severe attack of the falling sickness, which had recurred perhaps ten times in succession. The doctor who was with us examined the sick man and told us he might not even live till morning.”

“Well, in that case the devil killed my father!” suddenly escaped from Mitya, as if even up to that minute he had been asking himself: “Smerdyakov, or not Smerdyakov?”

“We shall return to this fact again,” Nikolai Parfenovich resolved, “and now wouldn’t you like to go on with your evidence?”

Mitya asked for a rest. It was politely granted. Having rested, he began to go on. But it was obviously difficult for him. He was worn out, insulted, and morally shaken. Besides, the prosecutor, now quite intentionally, began irritating him every moment by pestering him with “details.” As soon as Mitya described how, sitting astride the fence, he had hit Grigory, who was clutching his left leg, on the head with the pestle, and then jumped down at once to the stricken man, the prosecutor stopped him and asked him to describe in greater detail how he was sitting on the fence. Mitya was surprised.

“Well, like this, astride it, one leg here, the other there...”

“And the pestle?”

“The pestle was in my hand.” “Not in your pocket? You remember such a detail? So, then you must have swung hard?”

“I must have swung hard—but what do you need that for?”

“Why don’t you sit on the chair exactly as you were sitting on the fence then, and act out for us visually, for the sake of clarification, how and where you swung, in what direction?”

“You’re not mocking me, are you?” Mitya asked, glancing haughtily at his interrogator, but the latter did not even bat an eye. Mitya turned convulsively, sat astride the chair, and swung his arm:

“That’s how I hit him! That’s how I killed him! Anything else?”

“Thank you. Now may I trouble you to explain why, in fact, you jumped down, with what purpose, and what, in fact, you had in mind?”

“Ah, the devil ... I jumped down to the stricken man ... I don’t know why!”

“Even though you were so agitated? And running away?”

“Yes, agitated and running away.”

“Did you want to help him?”

“Help him, hah...! Well, maybe also to help him, I forget.”

“You forgot yourself? That is, you were even somehow unconscious?”

“Oh, no, not unconscious at all, I remember everything. To the last shred. I jumped down to look at him and wiped the blood off with my handkerchief. “

“We have seen your handkerchief. Did you hope to bring the man you struck back to life?”

“I don’t know if I hoped anything. I simply wanted to make sure if he was alive or not.”

“Ah, you wanted to make sure? Well, and so?”

“I’m not a doctor, I couldn’t tell. I ran away thinking I’d killed him, but he recovered.”

“Wonderful, sir,” the prosecutor concluded. “Thank you. That is just what I wanted. Be so good as to continue.”

Alas, it did not even occur to Mitya to tell them, though he remembered it, that he had jumped down out of pity, and that standing over the murdered man he had even uttered a few pathetic words: “You came a cropper, old man—there’s no help for it—now lie there.” But the prosecutor drew just one conclusion, that the man would only have jumped down “at such a moment and in such agitation,” with the purpose of making completely sure whether the sole witness to his crime was alive or not. And what strength, consequently, what resolution, cold-bloodedness, and calculation the man possessed even at such a moment ... and so on and so forth. The prosecutor was pleased: “I irritated the morbid fellow with ‘details’ and he gave himself away.”

Painfully, Mitya went on. But again he was stopped at once, this time by Nikolai Parfenovich:

“How could you have run to the servant, Fedosya Markov, with your hands and, as it turned out later, your face so covered with blood?”

“But I didn’t notice at the time that there was any blood on me!” Mitya answered.

“That’s plausible, it does happen that way,” the prosecutor exchanged looks with Nikolai Parfenovich.

“I precisely didn’t notice—beautiful, prosecutor,” Mitya, too, suddenly approved. But next came the story of Mitya’s sudden decision “to remove himself” and “ make way for the happy ones. “ And now it was quite impossible for him to bring himself to lay bare his heart, as before, and tell them about “the queen of his soul.” It sickened him in the face of these cold people, who “bit at him like bedbugs.” Therefore, to their repeated questions, he declared briefly and sharply:

“So I decided to kill myself. Why should I go on living? Naturally that jumped into the picture. Her offender arrived, the former, indisputable one, and he came riding to her with love, after five years, to end the offense with legal marriage. So I realized that it was all over for me ... And behind me was disgrace, and that blood, Grigory’s blood ... Why live? So I went to redeem the pawned pistols, to load them, and to put a bullet into my sconce at dawn ...”

“And feast the night before?”

“And feast the night before. Eh, the devil, let’s get it over with quicker, gentlemen. I was certainly going to shoot myself, not far from here, just outside town, and I would have disposed of myself at about five o’clock in the morning—I had a note all prepared in my pocket, I wrote it at Perkhotin’s when I loaded the pistol. Here it is, read it. I’m not telling it for you!” he suddenly added contemptuously. He threw the piece of paper from his waistcoat pocket onto the table in front of them; the investigators read it with curiosity, and, as is customary, filed it away,

“And you still did not think of washing your hands even as you entered Mr. Perkhotin’s? In other words, you were not afraid of arousing suspicion?”

“What suspicion? Suspicion or not, all the same I’d have driven here and shot myself at five o’clock, and there would have been no time to do anything about it. If it weren’t for what happened to my father, you wouldn’t have found anything out and come here. Oh, the devil did it, the devil killed my father, and the devil let you find out so soon! How on earth did you get here so soon? It’s a wonder, fantastic!”

“Mr. Perkhotin told us that when you came to him, you were holding your money ... a lot of money ... a wad of hundred-rouble bills ... in your hands ... your blood-stained hands, and that the servant boy also saw it!”

“Yes, gentlemen, that’s true, I remember.”

“Now one little question arises. Would you mind informing us,” Nikolai Parfenovich began with extreme gentleness, “as to where you suddenly got so much money, when it appears from the evidence, even from the simple reckoning of time, that you did not stop at your own lodgings?”

The prosecutor winced slightly at the bluntness with which the question had been put, but he did not interrupt Nikolai Parfenovich.

“No, I didn’t stop at my lodgings,” Mitya replied, apparently very calmly, but dropping his eyes.

“Allow me, in that case, to repeat the question,” Nikolai Parfenovich continued, somehow creeping up. “Where could you have gotten such a sum all at once, when, by your own admission, at five o’clock that same afternoon you...”

“Needed ten roubles, and pawned my pistols to Perkhotin, then went to Khokhlakov for three thousand, which she didn’t give me, and so on, and all the rest of it,” Mitya interrupted sharply. “So, yes, gentlemen, I needed money, and then suddenly thousands appeared, eh? You know, gentlemen, you’re both afraid now: what if he won’t tell us where he got it? And so it is: I won’t tell you, gentlemen, you’ve guessed right, you’ll never know,” Mitya suddenly hammered out with great determination. The investigators fell silent for a moment.

“Understand, Mr. Karamazov, that it is an essential necessity that we know this,” Nikolai Parfenovich said softly and humbly.

“I understand, but I still won’t tell you.”

The prosecutor intervened and again reminded him that a man under interrogation was of course at liberty not to answer questions if he thought it more beneficial, and so on, but in view of the harm the suspect might do himself by keeping silent, and especially in view of questions of such importance as . . .

“And so on, gentlemen, and so on! Enough, I’ve heard the whole harangue before!” Mitya again interrupted. “I myself understand the importance of the matter and what the most essential point is, and I still won’t tell you.”

“What is it to us, sir? It’s not our business, but yours. You will only be harming yourself,” Nikolai Parfenovich remarked nervously. “You see, gentlemen, joking aside,” Mitya raised his eyes and looked at them both steadily, “from the very beginning I had a feeling we would be at loggerheads on this point. But when I first started giving evidence today, that was all in a fog of things to come, it was all floating out there, and I was even so naive as to make a suggestion of ‘mutual trust between us.’ Now I see for myself that there could be no such trust, because we were bound to come to this cursed fence! Well, so we’ve come to it! It’s impossible, that’s all! I don’t blame you, by the way, it’s also impossible for you to take my word for it, I quite understand that.”

He fell gloomily silent.

“But could you not, without in the least violating your determination to keep silent on this main point, could you not at the same time give us at least some slight hint as to precisely what sort of compelling motives might force you to keep silent at a moment so dangerous for you in your evidence?”

Mitya smiled sadly and somehow pensively.

“I am much kinder than you think, gentlemen, and I will tell you my reasons, and give you that hint, though you’re not worthy of it. I keep silent, gentlemen, because it involves a disgrace for me. The answer to the question of where I got this money contains such a disgrace for me as could not be compared even with killing and robbing my father, if I had killed and robbed him. That is why I cannot speak. Because of the disgrace. What, gentlemen, are you going to write that down?”

“Yes, we shall write it down,” Nikolai Parfenovich muttered.

“You shouldn’t be writing it down—about the ‘disgrace,’ I mean. I only gave you that evidence out of the goodness of my soul, but I didn’t have to do it, I gave it to you as a gift, so to speak, but you pick up every stitch. Well, write, write whatever you want,” he concluded contemptuously and with distaste. “I’m not afraid of you, and ... I’m proud before you.”

“And would you tell us what sort of disgrace it might be? “ muttered Nikolai Parfenovich.

The prosecutor winced terribly.

“No, no, c’est fini, don’t bother. There’s no need dirtying myself. I’ve already dirtied myself enough on you. You’re not worthy, you or anyone else ... Enough, gentlemen, drop it.”

This was said all too resolutely. Nikolai Parfenovich stopped insisting, but he saw at once from the glance of Ippolit Kirillovich that he had not yet lost hope.

“Could you not at least state how much money was in your hands when you came with it to Mr. Perkhotin’s—that is, exactly how many roubles?”

“I cannot state that either.” “I believe you made some statement to Mr. Perkhotin about three thousand that you supposedly got from Madame Khokhlakov?”

“Maybe I did. Enough, gentlemen, I won’t tell you how much.”

“In that case, will you kindly describe how you came here and all that you did when you came?”

“Oh, ask the local people about that. Or, no, maybe I will tell you.”

He told them, but we shall not give his story here. It was dry, brief. He did not speak at all about the raptures of his love. He did tell, however, how the resolve to shoot himself abandoned him “in the face of new facts.” He told it without giving motives, without going into details. And this time the investigators did not bother him much: it was clear that for them the main point now lay elsewhere.

“We shall check all that, we shall come back to everything when we question the witnesses, which will be done, of course, in your presence,” Nikolai Parfenovich concluded the interrogation. “And now allow me to make a request of you, that you lay out here on the table all the things you have in your possession, especially all the money you now have.”

“Money, gentlemen? By all means, I understand the need for it. I’m even surprised you didn’t ask sooner. True, I wasn’t going anywhere, I’m sitting in plain sight of everyone. Well, here it is, my money, here, count it, take it, that’s all, I think.”

He took everything out of his pockets, even the change; he pulled two twenty-kopeck pieces from the side pocket of his waistcoat. They counted the money, which came to eight hundred and thirty-six roubles and forty kopecks.

“And that’s all?” asked the district attorney.

“All.”

“You were so good as to tell us, giving your evidence just now, that you spent three hundred roubles at Plotnikov’s shop, gave ten to Perkhotin, twenty to the coachman, lost two hundred in a card game here, so then ...”

Nikolai Parfenovich totaled it all up. Mitya willingly helped. They remembered every kopeck and added it to the reckoning. Nikolai Parfenovich made a quick calculation.

“It follows that you originally had about fifteen hundred roubles, if we include this eight hundred.”

“It follows,” Mitya snapped.

“Why, then, does everyone claim there was much more?”

“Let them claim it.”

“But you also claimed it yourself.”

“I also claimed it.” “We shall still check it against the evidence of other persons who have not yet been questioned; don’t worry about your money, it will be kept in a proper place and will be at your disposal at the end of ... of what is now beginning ... if it proves, or rather if we prove, so to speak, that you have an undisputed right to it. Well, sir, and now...”

Nikolai Parfenovich suddenly got up and firmly announced to Mitya that he was “obliged and duty-bound” to conduct a most thorough and minute examination “of your clothes and everything else...”

“As you wish, gentlemen, I’ll turn all my pockets out, if you like.”

And indeed he began turning his pockets out.

“It will even be necessary for you to take off your clothes.”

“What? Undress? Pah, the devil! You can search me like this, isn’t that possible?”

“Utterly impossible, Dmitri Fyodorovich. You must take your clothes off.”

“As you will,” Mitya gloomily submitted, “only, please, not here—behind the curtains. Who will do the examining?”

“Behind the curtains, of course,” Nikolai Parfenovich inclined his head in a token of consent. His little face even wore an expression of unusual importance.

Chapter 6: The Prosecutor Catches Mitya

There began something quite unexpected and astonishing for Mitya. He could not at all have supposed, even a moment before, that anyone could treat him, Mitya Karamazov, like that! Above all there was something humiliating in it, and something “haughty and contemptuous towards him” on their part. To take off his coat would be nothing, but they asked him to undress further. And they did not merely ask, but, in fact, they ordered; he understood it perfectly. Out of pride and contempt he submitted completely, without a word. Along with Nikolai Parfenovich, the prosecutor also went behind the curtains, and there were several peasants as well, “for strength, of course,” thought Mitya, “and maybe for something else.”

“What, must I take my shirt off, too?” he asked sharply, but Nikolai Parfenovich did not answer: together with the prosecutor, he was absorbed in examining the coat, the trousers, the waistcoat, and the cap, and one could see that they were both very interested in examining them. “They don’t stand on any ceremony,” flashed through Mitya’s mind, “they don’t even observe the necessary politeness.”

“I’m asking you for the second time: must I take my shirt off or not?” he said even more sharply and irritably.

“Don’t worry, we’ll let you know,” Nikolai Parfenovich replied somehow even overbearingly. At least it seemed so to Mitya.

Meanwhile between the district attorney and the prosecutor a solicitous debate was going on in half whispers. Huge spots of blood, dry, stiff, and not softened very much yet, were found on the coat, especially on the left flap at the back. Also on the trousers. Furthermore, Nikolai Parfenovich, with his own hands, in the presence of witnesses, felt along the collar, cuffs, and all the seams of the coat and trousers with his fingers, evidently looking for something—money, of course. Above all, they did not conceal from Mitya the suspicion that he could and would have sewn money into his clothes. “As if they really were dealing with a thief, not an officer,” Mitya growled to himself. And they were telling each other their thoughts in his presence, with a frankness that verged on strangeness. For example, the clerk, who also ended up behind the curtains, fussing about and assisting, drew Nikolai Parfenovich’s attention to the cap, which was also felt over: “Do you remember Gridenko the scrivener, sir,” he remarked, “who came in the summer to pick up the wages for the whole office, and announced when he got back that he had lost the money while drunk—and where did they find it? In this same piping, in his cap, sir—the hundred-rouble bills were rolled up and sewn into the piping.” The fact about Gridenko was remembered very well by both the district attorney and the prosecutor, and therefore Mitya’s cap, too, was set aside, and it was decided that all of that would have to be seriously reexamined later, and all the clothes as well.

“I beg your pardon,” Nikolai Parfenovich suddenly cried, noticing the tucked-under right cuff of Mitya’s right shirt sleeve, all stained with blood, “I beg your pardon, sir—is that blood?”

“Blood,” snapped Mitya.

“That is, whose blood, sir ... and why is it tucked under?”

Mitya told him how he had stained the cuff fussing over Grigory, and how he had tucked it under when he washed his hands at Perkhotin’s.

“We shall have to take your shirt, too, it’s very important ... as material evidence.” Mitya flushed and became furious.

“What, am I to stay naked?” he cried.

“Don’t worry ... We’ll do something about it ... and meanwhile may I also trouble you to take off your socks?” “You must be joking! Is it really so necessary?” Mitya flashed his eyes.

“This is no time for joking,” Nikolai Parfenovich parried sternly.

“Well, if you need it ... I ... ,” Mitya muttered, and having sat down on the bed, he began taking his socks off. He felt unbearably awkward: everyone else was dressed, and he was undressed, and—strangely—undressed, he himself seemed to feel guilty before them, and, above all, he was almost ready to agree that he had indeed suddenly become lower than all of them, and that they now had every right to despise him. “If everyone is undressed, it’s not shameful, but when only one is undressed and the others are all looking—it’s a disgrace!” flashed again and again through his mind. “It’s like a dream, I’ve dreamed of being disgraced like this.” But to take his socks off was even painful for him: they were not very clean, nor were his underclothes, and now everyone could see it. And above all he did not like his own feet; all his life for some reason he had found both his big toes ugly, especially the right one with its crude, flat toenail, somehow curved under, and now they would all see it. This unbearable shame suddenly made him, deliberately now, even more rude. He tore his shirt off.

“Would you like to look anywhere else, if you’re not ashamed to?”

“No, sir, not just now.”

“So, what, am I to stay naked like this?” he added fiercely.

“Yes, it is necessary just now ... May I trouble you to sit down here for now, you can take a blanket from the bed and wrap yourself, and I ... I’ll see to everything.”

All the articles were shown to the witnesses, the report of the examination was drawn up, and Nikolai Parfenovich finally went out, and the clothes were taken out after him. Ippolit Kirillovich also went out. Only the peasants remained with Mitya, and stood silently, not taking their eyes off him. Mitya wrapped himself in a blanket; he was cold. His bare feet stuck out, and he kept trying unsuccessfully to pull the blanket over them so as to cover them. Nikolai Parfenovich did not come back for a long time, “painfully long.” “He treats me like a pup,” Mitya ground his teeth. “That rotten prosecutor left, too, must be from contempt, he got disgusted looking at a naked man.” Mitya still supposed that his clothes would be examined elsewhere and then brought back. How great was his indignation when Nikolai Parfenovich suddenly returned with quite different clothes, brought in after him by a peasant.

“Well, here are some clothes for you,” he said casually, apparently quite pleased with the success of his expedition. “Mr. Kalganov has donated them for this curious occasion, as well as a clean shirt for you. Fortunately, he happened to have it all in his suitcase. You may keep your own underwear and socks.” Mitya boiled over.

“I don’t want other people’s clothes!” he thundered. “Give me mine!”

“Impossible.”

“Give me mine! Devil take Kalganov, him and his clothes!”

They reasoned with him for a long time. Anyway, they somehow calmed him down. They convinced him that his own clothes, being stained with blood, must “join the collection of material evidence,” and to leave them on him “no longer even fell within their rights ... in view of how the case might end.” Mitya somehow finally understood this. He lapsed into a gloomy silence and began hurriedly getting dressed. He merely observed, as he was putting the clothes on, that they were more costly than his old ones, and that he did not want “to gain by it.” And besides, “they’re embarrassingly tight. Shall I play the buffoon in them ... for your pleasure?”

Again he was convinced that here, too, he was exaggerating, that Mr. Kalganov, though taller than he, was only slightly taller, so that only the trousers might be a trifle long. But the coat did turn out to be narrow in the shoulders.

“Devil take it, I can hardly even button it,” Mitya growled again. “Do me a favor, please tell Mr. Kalganov right now that I did not ask him for his clothes, and that I’ve been gotten up like a buffoon.”

“He understands that very well, and he is sorry ... not sorry about his clothes, that is, but, as a matter of fact, about this whole case ... ,” Nikolai Parfenovich mumbled.

“I spit on his ‘sorry’! Well, where to now? Or do I go on sitting here?”

He was asked to go back to “that room.” He went back, sullen with anger, trying not to look at anyone. He felt himself utterly disgraced in another man’s clothes, even before those peasants and Trifon Borisovich, whose face lor some reason flashed in the doorway and disappeared. “He came to have a look at the mummer,” thought Mitya. He sat down on his former chair. He had the illusion of something nightmarish and absurd; it seemed to him he was not in his right mind.

“Well, what now, do you start flogging me with a birch, or what? There’s nothing else left,” he gnashed out, addressing the prosecutor. He no longer wanted even to turn towards Nikolai Parfenovich, as though he did not deign to speak with him. “He examined my socks too closely, and had them turned inside out, the scoundrel—he did it on purpose, to show everyone how dirty my underwear is!”

“Well, now we’ll have to proceed to the interrogation of the witnesses,” said Nikolai Parfenovich, as if in answer to Dmitri Fyodorovich’s question.

“Yes,” the prosecutor said thoughtfully, as if he, too, was pondering something. “We have done all we could in your interest, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” Nikolai Parfenovich continued, “but having received such a radical refusal on your part to give us any explanation concerning the sources of the sum found in your possession, we, at this point...”

“What’s the stone in that ring?” Mitya suddenly interrupted, as if coming out of some sort of reverie, pointing to one of the three large rings that adorned Nikolai Parfenovich’s right hand.

“Ring?” Nikolai Parfenovich repeated in surprise.

“Yes, that one ... with the little veins in it, on your middle finger—what stone is that?” Mitya insisted somehow irritably, like a stubborn child.

“It’s a smoky topaz,” Nikolai Parfenovich smiled, “would you like to look at it? I’ll take it off...”

“No, no, don’t take it off,” Mitya cried fiercely, suddenly coming to his senses, and angry with himself. “Don’t take it off, there’s no need ... Ah, the devil ... Gentlemen, you’ve befouled my soul! Can you possibly think I’d conceal it from you if I really killed my father? That I’d hedge, and lie, and hide? No, Dmitri Karamazov is not like that, he couldn’t bear it, and if I were guilty, I swear, I wouldn’t have waited for you to come here, or for the sun to rise, as I originally intended, I’d have destroyed myself even before, without waiting for dawn! I feel that in myself now. I’ve found out more in this one cursed night than I’d have learned in twenty years of living . . .! And would I have been this way, would I have been this way on this night, and at this moment, sitting with you now, would I be talking like this, would I be moving like this, would I look at you and at the world like this, if I really were a parricide, when even the inadvertent killing of Grigory gave me no rest all night—not from fear, oh! not just from fear of your punishment! The disgrace of it! And you want me to reveal and tell about yet another new meanness of mine, yet another new disgrace, to such scoffers as you, who do not see anything and do not believe anything, blind moles and scoffers, even if it would save me from your accusation? Better penal servitude! The one who opened the door to my father’s room and went in through that door is the one who killed him, he is the one who robbed him. Who he is, I am at a loss and at pains to say, but he is not Dmitri Karamazov, know that—and that is all I can tell you, and enough, stop badgering me ... Exile me, hang me, but don’t irritate me any more. I am silent. Call your witnesses!”

Mitya spoke his sudden monologue as if he were fully and finally determined to keep silent from then on. The prosecutor was watching him the whole time, and, as soon as he fell silent, suddenly said with the coldest and calmest air, as if it were the most ordinary thing:

“Incidentally, it is precisely with regard to that open door you have just mentioned that we can inform you, precisely now, of a highly curious piece of evidence, of the greatest importance for you and for us, supplied by Grigory Vasiliev, the old man you injured. On regaining consciousness, he clearly and emphatically told us, in answer to our inquiries, that when, coming out on the porch and hearing some noise in the garden, he decided to go into the garden through the gate, which was standing open; having gone into the garden, but before he noticed you running in the darkness, as you have told us already, away from the open window in which you saw your father, he, Grigory, glancing to the left and indeed noticing the open window, noticed at the same time that the door, much closer to him, was also wide open, that door of which you have stated that it remained shut all the while you were in the garden. I shall not conceal from you that Vasiliev himself firmly concludes and testifies that you must have run out of that door, though of course he did not see you run out with his own eyes, but noticed you for the first time when you were some distance away, in the middle of the garden, running in the direction of the fence...”

Mitya had already leaped from his chair halfway through the speech.

“Nonsense!”he suddenly yelled in frenzy, “a bold-faced lie! He could not have seen the door open then, because it was shut ... He’s lying . . .!”

“I consider it my duty to repeat to you that his testimony is firm. He has no hesitation. He stands upon it. We asked him several more times.”

“Precisely, I asked him several more times!” Nikolai Parfenovich hotly confirmed.

“Not true, not true! It’s either a slander against me or a madman’s hallucination,” Mitya went on shouting. “He simply imagined it in his delirium, all bloody, wounded, on regaining consciousness ... So he’s raving.”

“Yes, sir, but he noticed the open door not when he regained consciousness from his wound, but already before then, when he was just going into the garden from the cottage.”

“But it’s not true, not true, it cannot be! He’s slandering me out of malice

. He couldn’t have seen it ... I didn’t run out the door,” Mitya was gasping lor breath.

The prosecutor turned to Nikolai Parfenovich and said imposingly:

“Show him.”

“Is this object familiar to you?” Nikolai Parfenovich suddenly placed on the table a large, official-sized envelope of thick paper, on which three intact seals could still be seen. The envelope itself was empty and torn open at one end. Mitya stared wide-eyed at it.

“That ... that should be father’s envelope,” he muttered, “the one with the three thousand roubles ... and it should have ‘for my chicky’ written on it ... allow me ... yes, look: three thousand,” he cried out, “three thousand, you see?”

“Of course we see, sir, but we did not find the money in it, it was empty and lying on the floor, near the bed, behind the screen.”

For a few seconds Mitya stood as if stunned.

“Gentlemen, it’s Smerdyakov!” he suddenly shouted with all his might. “He killed him, he robbed him! He’s the only one who knew where the old man hid the envelope ... It’s him, it’s clear now!”

“But you also knew about the envelope and that it was under the pillow.”

“I never knew: I’ve never seen it before, I’m seeing it now for the first time, I just heard about it from Smerdyakov ... He’s the only one who knew where the old man kept it hidden, I didn’t know ... ,” Mitya was completely breathless.

“And yet you yourself told us just now that the envelope was under your deceased father’s pillow. You precisely said under the pillow, which means you did know where it was.”

“We have it written down!” Nikolai Parfenovich confirmed.

“Nonsense, absurdity! I had no idea it was under the pillow. And maybe it wasn’t under the pillow at all ... It was a random guess that it was under the pillow ... What does Smerdyakov say? Did you ask him where it was? What does Smerdyakov say? That’s the most important thing ... And I deliberately told lies against myself... I lied to you that it was under the pillow, without thinking, and now you ... Ah, you know, something just comes out of your mouth, and you tell a lie. But only Smerdyakov knew, just Smerdyakov alone, and no one else . . .! He didn’t even reveal to me where it was! So it’s him, it’s him; there’s no question he killed him, it’s clear as day to me now,” Mitya kept exclaiming more and more frenziedly, repeating himself incoherently, growing impassioned and bitter. “You must understand that and arrest him quickly, quickly ... Precisely he killed him, after I ran away and while Grigory was lying unconscious, it’s clear now ... He gave the signals, and father opened the door for him ... Because he alone knew the signals, and without the signals father wouldn’t have opened the door for anyone...”

“But again you are forgetting one circumstance,” the prosecutor observed, still with the same restraint, but now, as it were, triumphantly, “that there was no need to give the signals if the door was already open, when you were still there, while you were still in the garden...”

“The door, the door,” Mitya muttered, staring speechlessly at the prosecutor, and he sank down weakly on his chair again. Everyone fell silent.

“Yes, the door . . .! It’s a phantom! God is against me!” he exclaimed, staring before him with an altogether vacant look. “So you see,” the prosecutor spoke imposingly, “and judge for yourself now, Dmitri Fyodorovich: on one side there is this evidence of the open door from which you ran out, which overwhelms both you and us. And, on the other side, your inexplicable, persistent, and almost obdurate silence with regard to the source of the money that suddenly appeared in your hands, when only three hours prior to that sum, according to your own testimony, you pawned your pistols to get a mere ten roubles! In view of all this, decide for yourself: what should we believe, and where does it leave us? And do not hold a grudge against us for being ‘cold cynics and scoffers’ who are incapable of believing in the noble impulses of your soul ... Try, on the contrary, to understand our position as well ...”

Mitya was inconceivably agitated; he turned pale.

“All right!” he suddenly exclaimed, “I will reveal my secret to you, reveal where I got the money . . .! I will reveal my disgrace, so as not to blame either you or myself later on ...”

“And you may believe, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” Nikolai Parfenovich added, in a sort of tenderly joyful little voice, “that any sincere and full confession you make precisely at this moment, may afterwards contribute towards an immeasurable alleviation of your fate, and, moreover, may even ...”

But the prosecutor nudged him slightly under the table, and he managed to stop himself in time. Mitya, to tell the truth, was not listening to him.

Chapter 7: Mitya’s Great Secret. Met with Hisses

“Gentlemen,” he began in the same agitation, “the money ... I want to confess completely ... the money was mine.”

The prosecutor and the district attorney even pulled long faces: this was not at all what they expected.

“How can that be,” murmured Nikolai Parfenovich, “when at five o’clock in the afternoon, by your own admission ...”

“Eh, devil take five o’clock in the afternoon and my own admission, that’s not the point now! The money was mine, mine, that is, my stolen money . . not mine, that is, but stolen, stolen by me, and it was fifteen hundred, and I had it with me, I had it with me all the while ...”

“But where did you get it?”

“From around my neck, gentlemen, I got it from around my neck, from this very neck of mine ... It was here on my neck, sewn up in a rag and hanging on my neck; for a long time, a month already, I was carrying it on my neck with shame and disgrace!”

“But who did you ... appropriate it from?”

“Were you about to say ‘steal’? Let’s not mince words now. Yes, I consider it the same as if I’d stolen it—’appropriated,’ indeed, if you wish, but in my view I stole it. And last evening I stole it altogether.”

“Last evening? But you just said it was a month ago that you ... obtained it!”

“Yes, but not from my father, not from my father, don’t worry, I stole it not from my father, but from her. Let me speak and don’t interrupt. It’s hard. You see: a month ago, Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtsev, my former fiancée, sent for me ... Do you know her?”

“Of course, sir, good heavens!”

“I know you know her. The noblest soul, the noblest of the noble, but who has hated me for a long time, oh, a long, long time ... and rightly so, rightly so!”

“Katerina Ivanovna?” the district attorney asked in surprise. The prosecutor also stared terribly.

“Oh, do not utter her name in vain! I’m a scoundrel to bring her into it. Yes, I saw that she hated me ... long ago ... from the very first, from that time in my rooms, already then ... But enough, enough, you’re even unworthy to know of that, there’s no need at all ... All you need to know is that she sent for me a month ago, handed me three thousand to send to her sister and some other relative in Moscow (as if she couldn’t have sent it herself! ), and I ... it was precisely at that fatal moment of my life when I ... well, in a word, when I had just fallen in love with the other one, her, the present one, she’s sitting downstairs now, Grushenka ... I carried her off here, to Mokroye, and in two days here I squandered half of that cursed three thousand, that is, fifteen hundred, and the other half I kept on me. Well, so the fifteen hundred that I kept, I wore here on my neck, in place of an amulet, and yesterday I got it out and squandered it. The eight hundred roubles left are now in your hands, Nikolai Parfenovich, that’s what’s left of yesterday’s fifteen hundred.”

“I beg your pardon, but how can that be, when you squandered three thousand here a month ago, not fifteen hundred, and everyone knows it?”

“Who knows it? Who counted? Did I let anyone count it?”

“Good heavens, but you yourself told everyone that you squandered exactly three thousand then.”

“True, I said it. I said it to the whole town, and the whole town said it, and everyone thought so, and here in Mokroye everyone thought the same, that it was three thousand. Yet I only squandered fifteen hundred, not three thousand, and the other fifteen hundred I sewed into an amulet; that’s how it was, gentlemen, and that’s where yesterday’s money came from...”

“It’s almost miraculous ... ,” murmured Nikolai Parfenovich.

“Allow me to ask,” the prosecutor spoke finally, “if there is someone at least whom you informed of this circumstance ... that is, that you kept this fifteen hundred with you then, a month ago?”

“I told no one.”

“That’s strange. No one at all, can it really be?”

“No one at all. Nobody and no one.”

“But why such reticence? What moved you to make such a secret of it? Let me explain myself more precisely: you have finally told us your secret, so ‘disgraceful,’ as you say, though as a matter of fact—I mean, of course, only relatively speaking— this action—namely, that is, the appropriation of another person’s three thousand roubles, and, no doubt, only temporarily—this action, in my opinion at least, is simply a highly thoughtless action, but not so disgraceful, considering, moreover, your character ... Well, let us say it is even a highly discreditable action, I agree, but still discreditable is not disgraceful ... What I’m driving at, in fact, is that during this month many people have already guessed about Miss Verkhovtsev’s three thousand, which you have spent, even without your confession—I have heard this legend myself ... Mikhail Makarovich, for instance, has also heard it. So that, ultimately, it is almost not a legend anymore, but the gossip of the whole town. Moreover, there are signs that you yourself, if I am not mistaken, confessed it to someone or other—namely, that is, that this money came from Miss Verkhovtsev ... And therefore I am all the more surprised that until now, that is, until this very present moment, you have attached such extraordinary secrecy to this fifteen hundred, which, as you say, you set aside, even connecting this secret of yours with some kind of horror ... It is incredible that such a secret should cost you such torment in confessing it ... for you were just shouting that penal servitude would be better than confessing it...”

The prosecutor fell silent. He was flushed. He did not conceal his vexation, almost spite, and poured out all he had stored up, not even caring about the beauty of his style, that is, confusedly and almost incoherently.

“The disgrace lay not in the fifteen hundred, but in my separating that fifteen hundred from the three thousand,” Mitya spoke firmly.

“But what,” the prosecutor smiled irritably, “what precisely is disgraceful about your having chosen to set aside half of the three thousand that you had already discreditably, or, if you wish, disgracefully taken? That you appropriated the three thousand is the main thing, not how you disposed of it. Incidentally, why exactly did you dispose of it that way, I mean, set aside that half? What for, with what purpose in mind—can you explain that to us?”

“Oh, but gentlemen, it is in that purpose that the whole force lies!” Mitya exclaimed. “I set it aside out of baseness—that is, out of calculation, because calculation in this case is baseness ... And this baseness went on for a whole month!”

“Incomprehensible.”

“You surprise me. But, anyway, let me explain further; perhaps it really is incomprehensible. Try to follow me. You see, I appropriate three thousand, entrusted to my honor, I go on a spree with it, I squander it all, the next morning I go to her and say: ‘Katya, I’m sorry, I squandered your three thousand’— well, is that nice? No, it’s not nice, it’s dishonest, cowardly, I’m a beast, a man with no more self-restraint than a beast, right, am I right? But still not a thief! Not an outright thief, not outright, you’ll agree! I squandered it, but I did not steal it! Now a second, even more favorable case—follow me, or I may get confused again—I’m somehow giddy—so, the second case: I go on a spree and spend only fifteen hundred out of the three thousand—half, in other words. The next day I go to her and bring her the other half: ‘Katya, take this half back from me, a villain and a thoughtless scoundrel, because I’ve already squandered one half, therefore I’ll also squander the other, so put me out of harm’s way! ‘ Well, what am I in that case? Whatever you like, a beast, a scoundrel, but not a thief, not finally a thief, because if I were a thief, I’d have appropriated the other half as well and certainly not have brought it back. She would see at once that if he’s brought her the one half, he’ll also bring her the rest, the part he squandered, he’ll spend his life looking for it, he’ll work, but he will find it and give it back. Thus, a scoundrel, but not a thief, not a thief, anything you like, but not a thief!”

“There is some difference, I grant you,” the prosecutor smiled coldly. “But still it’s strange that you see it as such a fatal difference.”

“Yes, I see it as a fatal difference! Any man can be, and perhaps is, a scoundrel, but not any man can be a thief, only an arch-scoundrel can be that. Well, I’m not very good at these subtleties ... But still, a thief is more of a scoundrel than a scoundrel, that is my conviction. Listen: I carry the money on me for a whole month, even tomorrow I can decide to give it back, and then I’m not a scoundrel, but I can’t decide, that’s the thing, though I keep deciding every day, though I push myself every day: ‘Decide, you scoundrel, decide,’ and yet I can’t decide for a whole month, that’s the thing! Is that nice? What do you think, is it nice?”

“I grant you it is not very nice, I can understand that perfectly, and I do not dispute it,” the prosecutor answered with reserve. “And generally let us set aside any altercation concerning these subtleties and distinctions, and, if you please, come back to the point. And the point is that you have not yet explained to us, though we did ask, why you originally made such a division of the three thousand—that is, squandered one half and set aside the other half? Precisely what, properly speaking, did you set it aside for; and how, properly speaking, did you intend to use this separate fifteen hundred? I insist upon this question, Dmitri Fyodorovich.”

“Ah, yes, indeed!” cried Mitya, slapping himself on the forehead. “Forgive me, I’m tormenting you and not explaining the main thing, otherwise you’d understand it at once, because it is in this purpose, in this purpose, that the whole disgrace lies! You see, it was the old man, the dead man, he kept troubling Agrafena Alexandrovna, and I was jealous, I thought then that she was hesitating between me and him; and so I kept thinking each day: what if there suddenly comes a decision from her, what if she gets tired of tormenting me and suddenly says to me, ‘I love you and not him, take me away to the end of the earth.’ And all I have is some small change; how will I take her, what will I do then—it’s all over for me. I didn’t know her then, I didn’t understand, I thought she wanted money and that she’d never forgive me my poverty. And so I slyly counted out half of the three thousand and sewed it up with needle and thread, in cold blood, I sewed it up calculatingly, I sewed it up even before I went drinking, and then, when I had sewn it up, I went and got drunk on the other half! It took a scoundrel to do that, sir! Do you understand now?”

The prosecutor burst into loud laughter, as did the district attorney.

“In my opinion it is even sensible and moral that you restrained yourself and did not squander it all,” Nikolai Parfenovich tittered, “because what’s wrong with that, sir?”

“That I stole, that’s what! Oh, God, you horrify me with your lack of understanding! All the while I carried that fifteen hundred sewn up on my chest, I kept saying to myself every day and every hour: ‘You are a thief, you are a thief!’ And that’s why I raged all month, that’s why I fought in the tavern, that’s why I beat my father, because I felt I was a thief! I could not bring myself, I did not dare to reveal anything about the fifteen hundred even to Alyosha, my brother: so much did I feel myself a scoundrel and a pickpocket. But know that all the while I carried it, every day and every hour, I kept saying to myself at the same time: ‘No, Dmitri Fyodorovich, perhaps you’re not yet a thief.’ Why? Precisely because you can go tomorrow and give the fifteen hundred back to Katya. And only yesterday did I decide to tear the amulet off my neck, on my way from Fenya to Perkhotin, for until that moment I couldn’t decide, and as soon as I tore it off, at that moment I became a final and indisputable thief, a thief and a dishonest man for the rest of my life. Why? Because along with the amulet, my dream of going to Katya and saying: ‘I am a scoundrel, but not a thief,’ was also torn up! Do you understand now, do you understand!”

“Why did you decide to do it precisely last evening?” Nikolai Parfenovich interrupted.

“Why? A funny question! Because I had condemned myself to death, at five o’clock in the morning, here, at dawn: ‘It’s all the same how I die,’ I thought, ‘as a scoundrel or as a noble man! ‘ But not so, it turned out not to be all the same! Believe me, gentlemen, what tormented me most this night was not that I had killed the old servant, and that I was threatened with Siberia, and all of that when?—when my love had been crowned and heaven was open to me again! Oh, that was a torment, but not so great, still not so great as the cursed awareness that I had finally torn that cursed money off my chest and spent it, and therefore was now a final thief! Oh, gentlemen, I repeat to you in my heart’s blood: I learned a lot this night! I learned that it is impossible not only to live a scoundrel, but also to die a scoundrel ... No, gentlemen, one must die honestly . . .!”

Mitya was pale. His face had a wasted and worn-out look, despite his intense excitement.

“I am beginning to understand you, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” the prosecutor drawled softly and even somehow compassionately, “but, be it as you say, still, in my opinion it is just nerves ... your overwrought nerves, that’s all, sir. And why, for instance, to spare yourself so much torment over almost a whole month, would you not go and return the fifteen hundred to the person who entrusted it to you, and then, having talked things over with her, why, in view of your situation at the time, which you describe as being so terrible, would you not try the solution that so naturally comes to mind—I mean, after nobly confessing your errors to her, why not ask her for the sum needed for your expenses, which she, with her generous heart, seeing how upset you were, of course would not refuse you, especially with some written agreement, or, finally, at least with the same security you offered to the merchant Samsonov and Madame Khokhlakov? I suppose you still consider that security to be of value?”

Mitya suddenly blushed.

“Do you really consider me such a downright scoundrel? You can’t possibly be serious . . .!” he said indignantly, looking the prosecutor in the eye, as if he could not believe what he had heard.

“I assure you I am serious ... Why do you think I am not?” The prosecutor, in turn, was also surprised. “Oh, how base that would be! Gentlemen, you’re tormenting me, do you know that? As you wish, I’ll tell you everything, so be it, I will now confess all my infernality to you, just to put you to shame, and you yourselves will be surprised at what baseness a combination of human feelings can sink to. Know, then, that I already had that solution in mind, the very one you were just talking about, prosecutor! Yes, gentlemen, I, too, had that thought during this cursed month, so that I almost resolved to go to Katya, so base I was! But to go to her, to announce my betrayal to her, and for that betrayal, to carry through that betrayal, for the future expenses of that betrayal, to ask money (to ask, do you hear, to ask! ) from her, from Katya, and immediately run off with another woman, with her rival, with her hater and offender—my God, you’re out of your mind, prosecutor!”

“Out of my mind or not, of course, in the heat of the moment, I did fail to consider ... this matter of female jealousy ... if indeed there is a question of jealousy here, as you affirm ... yes, perhaps there is something of the sort,” the prosecutor grinned.

“But it would be such an abomination!” Mitya pounded the table fiercely with his fist, “it would stink so much, I can’t tell you! And do you know that she might have given me the money, and she would have given it, she certainly would have given it, she would have given it out of vengeance, for the pleasure of revenge, she would have given it out of contempt for me, because she, too, is an infernal soul, and a woman of great wrath! And I’d have taken the money, oh, I’d have taken it, I would, and then all my life ... oh, God! Forgive me, gentlemen, I’m shouting so because I had this idea only recently, only two days ago, that night when I was worrying over Lyagavy, and then yesterday, yes, also yesterday, all day yesterday, I remember it, till this very accident...”

“Till what accident?” Nikolai Parfenovich put in with curiosity, but Mitya did not hear him.

“I’ve made a terrible confession to you,” he concluded gloomily. “Do appreciate it, gentlemen. And it’s not enough, not enough to appreciate it, you must not just appreciate it, it should also be precious to you, and if not, if this, too, goes past your souls, then it means you really do not respect me, gentlemen, I tell you that, and I will die of shame at having confessed to such men as you! Oh, I will shoot myself! And I can see, I can see already that you don’t believe me! What, are you going to write this down, too?”he cried, frightened now.

“But what you have just said,” Nikolai Parfenovich was looking at him in surprise, “that is, that until the very last hour you still thought of going to Miss Verkhovtsev to ask for this sum ... I assure you that this evidence is very important for us, Dmitri Fyodorovich, this whole story, that is ... and especially important for you, especially for you.”

“Have mercy, gentlemen,” Mitya clasped his hands, “at least leave that out, for shame! I have, so to speak, torn my soul asunder before you, and you take advantage of it and go rummaging with your fingers in both halves of the torn spot ... Oh, God!”

He covered his face with his hands in despair.

“Do not upset yourself, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” the prosecutor concluded, “everything that has been written down here will be read over to you afterwards, and whatever you disagree with will be changed as you say, but now I shall repeat one little question for the third time: is it possible that indeed no one, really no one at all, heard from you about this money you sewed into the amulet? I must say I find that almost impossible to imagine.”

“No one, no one, I told you, or else you’ve understood nothing! Leave me alone!”

“As you wish, sir, the matter will have to be clarified, but there is still time enough for that, yet meanwhile consider: we have perhaps dozens of testimonies that precisely you yourself were spreading and even shouted everywhere about the three thousand you had spent, three thousand and not fifteen hundred, and now, too, with the appearance of yesterday’s money, you also let many people understand that once again you had brought three thousand with you...”

“Not dozens, you’ve got hundreds of testimonies, two hundred testimonies, two hundred people heard it, a thousand heard it!” Mitya exclaimed.

“Well, so you see, sir, everyone says it. Does the word everyone mean anything?”

“It means nothing, I lied, and everyone started lying after me.”

“And what need did you have to ‘lie,’ as you put it?”

“Devil knows. Maybe in order to boast ... well ... about squandering so much money ... Or maybe in order to forget about the money I had sewn up ... yes, that’s exactly why ... ah, the devil ... how many times must you ask me? So I lied, and that’s it, I lied once and then I didn’t want to correct it. Why does a man lie sometimes?”

“That is very difficult to say, Dmitri Fyodorovich, why a man lies,” the prosecutor said imposingly. “Tell me, however: this amulet, as you call it, that you wore on your neck—was it big?”

“No, not big.”

“What size was it, for instance?” “Fold a hundred-rouble bill in half—that’s the size for you.”

“Hadn’t you better show us the scraps of it? You must have them somewhere.”

“Ah, the devil ... what foolishness ... I don’t know where they are.”

“I beg your pardon, but where and when did you take it off your neck? According to your own testimony, you did not stop at home.”

“When I left Fenya and was going to Perkhotin’s, on the way I tore the money off my neck and took it out.”

“In the dark?”

“Should I have had a candle? I did it with my fingers in a second.”

“Without scissors, in the street?”

“In the square, I think. And why scissors? It was a wom-out rag, it tore at once.”

“What did you do with it then?”

“I dropped it right there.”

“Where, exactly?”

“In the square, in the square somewhere. Devil knows where in the square! What do you need that for?”

“It is extremely important, Dmitri Fyodorovich: material evidence in your favor, why can’t you understand that? And who helped you to sew it up a month ago?”

“No one did. I sewed it myself.”

“You know how to sew?”

“A soldier has to know how to sew. It didn’t take any special skill.”

“And where did you get the material, the rag, that is, into which you sewed it?”

“Are you joking?”

“By no means, Dmitri Fyodorovich. This is no time for joking.”

“I don’t remember where I got the rag, I got it somewhere.”

“I should think one would remember that.”

“By God, I don’t remember, maybe I tore some piece of my linen.”

“That is very interesting: the piece might be found tomorrow in your lodgings, perhaps a shirt with a bit torn off of it. What sort of rag was it, cotton or linen?”

“Devil knows what it was. Wait... I think I didn’t tear it off anything. It was calico ... I think I sewed it up in my landlady’s bonnet.”

“Your landlady’s bonnet?”

“Yes, I filched it from her.”

“What’s that? Filched?” “You see, I remember I did once filch a bonnet for a rag, or maybe to wipe a pen. I took it without asking, because it wasn’t good for anything, I had the scraps lying about, and then this fifteen hundred, so I went and sewed it ... I think I sewed it precisely in those rags. Worthless old calico, washed a thousand times.”

“And you remember that firmly now?” “I don’t know how firmly. I think it was a bonnet. But to hell with it!”

“In that case your landlady might at least remember finding it missing? “

“Not at all, she never missed it. It was an old rag, I tell you, an old rag, not worth a kopeck.”

“And the needle, where did you get the needle and thread?”

“I quit, I won’t go on! Enough!” Mitya finally got angry.

“Then, too, it’s strange that you should forget so completely just where you dropped this ... amulet in the square.”

“So, order them to sweep the square tomorrow, maybe you’ll find it,” Mitya smirked. “Enough, gentlemen, enough,” he finished in a weary voice. “I see very well that you don’t believe me! Not a word, not a bit! It’s my fault, not yours, I shouldn’t have stuck my neck out. Why, why did I defile myself by confessing my secret! And you think it’s funny, I can see by your eyes. You drove me to it, prosecutor! Sing your hymn, if you can ... Damn you, tormentors!”

He bent his head and covered his face with his hands. The prosecutor and the district attorney were silent. After a moment, he raised his head and looked at them somehow vacantly. His face expressed an already complete, already irreversible despair, and he, somehow gently, fell silent, sat, and seemed hardly aware of himself. Meanwhile they had to finish their business: it was urgent that they move on to the interrogation of the witnesses. It was already eight o’clock in the morning. The candles had long been extinguished. Mikhail Makarovich and Kalganov, who kept coming in and out of the room during the interrogation, now both went out. The prosecutor and the district attorney also looked extremely tired. The morning brought bad weather, the sky was all overcast and it was pouring rain. Mitya gazed vacantly at the windows.

“May I look out?” he suddenly asked Nikolai Parfenovich.

“Oh, as much as you like,” the latter replied.

Mitya rose and went over to the window. Rain was lashing the small greenish windowpanes. Just under the window a muddy road could be seen, and further off, in the rainy dimness, rows of black, poor, unsightly cottages, which seemed to have turned even blacker and poorer in the rain. Mitya remembered “golden-haired Phoebus” and how he had wanted to shoot himself at his first ray. “It might be better on a morning like this,” he grinned, and, suddenly, with a downward wave of his hand, turned to his “tormentors.”

“Gentlemen!” he exclaimed, “I’m lost, I can see that. But she? Tell me about her, I beg you, can it be that she, too, will be lost with me? She’s innocent, she was out of her mind when she shouted last night about being ‘guilty of everything.’ She is guilty of nothing, nothing! All this night, sitting with you, I’ve been grieving ... Won’t you, can’t you tell me what you’re going to do with her now?”

“You can be decidedly reassured in that regard, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” the prosecutor replied at once, and with obvious haste. “So far we have no significant motives for troubling in any way the person in whom you are so interested. It will turn out the same, I hope, as the case develops further ... On the contrary, for our part we shall do everything possible in that sense. Be completely reassured.”

“I thank you, gentlemen. I knew you were still honest and just men, in spite of everything. You’ve taken a burden from my soul ... Well, what do we do now? I’m ready.”

“Now, sir, we’ll have to speed things up. It’s urgent that we move on to the interrogation of the witnesses. This must all take place in your presence, to be sure, and therefore ...”

“Why don’t we have some tea first?” Nikolai Parfenovich interrupted. “I think by now we deserve it. “

It was decided that if there was tea ready downstairs (for Mikhail Makarovich had certainly gone “for a cup of tea”), they would have some tea and then “carry on, carry on.” And they would put off real tea and “a little something” until they had a free moment. Tea was indeed found downstairs, and was quickly brought upstairs. Mitya at first refused the cup Nikolai Parfenovich kindly offered him, but then asked for it himself and greedily drank it. Generally he looked even somehow surprisingly worn out. What, one might have thought, would one night of carousing mean for a man of such strength, even coupled with the strongest sensations? Yet he himself felt that he could hardly hold himself upright, and at times everything seemed to start swimming and turning before his eyes. “A little more and I’ll probably start raving,” he thought to himself.

Chapter 8: The Evidence of the Witnesses. The Wee One

The interrogation of the witnesses began. But we shall not continue our story in the same detail as we have maintained up to now. And therefore we shall omit how Nikolai Parfenovich impressed upon each witness called that he should give evidence truthfully and conscientiously, and that later he would have to repeat his evidence under oath; and how, finally, each witness was required to sign the transcript of his evidence, and so on and so forth. We shall note only one thing, that the main point to which the interrogators directed all their attention was predominantly the same question of the three thousand roubles—that is, whether it had been three thousand or fifteen hundred the first time, when Dmitri Fyodorovich gave his first party there, at Mokroye, a month ago, and three thousand or fifteen hundred yesterday, when Dmitri Fyodorovich gave his second party. Alas, all the evidence from first to last turned out to be against Mitya, and none in his favor, and some of the evidence even introduced new, almost astounding facts in refutation of his evidence. The first to be interrogated was Trifon Borisich. He came before the interrogators without a trace of fear; on the contrary, with a look of stern and severe indignation at the accused, thereby undoubtedly imparting to himself an air of extreme truthfulness and self-respect. He spoke little and with reserve, waiting for each question, answering precisely and deliberately. He testified firmly and without hesitation that the amount spent a month ago could not possibly have been less than three thousand, that all the peasants there would testify to having heard about the three thousand from “Mitri Fyodorovich” himself: “Look how much he threw away on the gypsy girls alone. It must have been over a thousand just on them.”

“Probably not even five hundred,” Mitya observed gloomily in response, “only I wasn’t counting at the time, I was drunk, more’s the pity ...”

Mitya was now sitting to one side, his back to the curtains, listening gloomily, with a sad and tired look, as if to say: “Eh, tell them whatever you like, it makes no difference now!”

“Over a thousand went to them, Mitri Fyodorovich,” Trifon Borisovich countered firmly. “You were throwing it away for nothing, and they were picking it up. They’re pilfering folk, cheats, horse thieves, they were driven away from here, otherwise they’d testify themselves to how much they profited from you. I saw the amount you had in your hands myself—I didn’t count it, you didn’t let me, that’s true, but I could tell by eye, and I remember it was much more than fifteen hundred ... Fifteen hundred, hah! I’ve seen money enough, I can tell ...”

As for the amount yesterday, Trifon Borisich testified outright that Dmitri Fyodorovich himself had announced to him, as soon as he dismounted, that he had brought three thousand.

“Come now, did I say that, Trifon Borisich,” Mitya objected, “did I really announce so positively that I had brought three thousand?”

“You did, Mitri Fyodorovich. You said it in front of Andrei. Andrei’s still here, he hasn’t gone yet, call him in. And in the main room there, when you were giving treats to the chorus, you shouted right out that you were leaving your sixth thousand here—including the ones before, that’s what it means. Stepan and Semyon heard it, and Pyotr Fomich Kalganov was standing next to you then, maybe the gentleman also remembers...”

The evidence concerning the sixth thousand was received with remarkable impression by the interrogators. They liked the new version: three and three makes six, meaning that three thousand then and three thousand now would take care of all six, the result was clear.

All the peasants pointed out by Trifon Borisovich were interrogated, Stepan and Semyon, the coachman Andrei, and Pyotr Fomich Kalganov. The peasants and the coachman confirmed without hesitation the evidence of Trifon Borisich. Besides that, special note was taken, in his own words, of Andrei’s conversation with Mitya on the way there, about “where do you think I, Dmitri Fyodorovich, will go: to heaven or hell? And will I be forgiven in that world or not?” The “psychologist” Ippolit Kirillovich listened to it all with a subtle smile, and in the end recommended that this evidence about where Dmitri Fyodorovich would go should be “filed with the case.”

The summoned Kalganov came in reluctantly, sullen and peevish, and spoke with the prosecutor and Nikolai Parfenovich as if he were seeing them for the first time in his life, whereas they were long-standing and everyday acquaintances. He began by saying that he “knows nothing of it and does not want to know.” But it turned out that he, too, had heard about the sixth thousand, and admitted that he had been standing nearby at that moment. In his view, Mitya had “I don’t know how much money” in his hands. With regard to the Poles cheating at cards, he testified in the affirmative. He also explained in reply to repeated questions, that once the Poles were banished, Mitya’s affairs with Agrafena Alexandrovna changed for the better, and that she herself had said she loved him. About Agrafena Alexandrovna he expressed himself with reserve and respect, as if she were a lady of the best society, and did not once allow himself to call her “Grushenka.” Despite the repugnance the young man obviously felt at giving evidence, Ippolit Kirillovich interrogated him for a long time, and from him alone learned all the details of what constituted Mitya’s “romance,” so to speak, that night. Mitya did not once stop Kalganov. At last the young man was dismissed, and he withdrew with unconcealed indignation.

The Poles were interrogated as well. Though they had tried to go to sleep in their little room, they had not slept all night, and, with the arrival of the authorities, had hastened to get dressed and put themselves in order, realizing that they would certainly be sent for. They made their appearance with dignity, though not without a certain fear. The chief one—that is, the little pan— turned out to be a retired official of the twelfth grade,^[274] had served in Siberia as a veterinarian, and his last name was Pan Mussyalovich. And Pan Vrublevsky turned out to be a free-lance dentist—in Russian, a tooth doctor. Both of them, upon entering the room, despite the questions put to them by Nikolai Parfenovich, at once began addressing their answers to Mikhail Makarovich, who was standing to one side, through ignorance taking him to be the person of highest rank and authority there, and addressing him at every word as “Panie Colonel.” And only after several times, and on instructions from Mikhail Makarovich himself, did they realize that they ought to address their answers only to Nikolai Parfenovich. It turned out that they could speak Russian quite correctly, except perhaps for the pronunciation of some words. About his relations with Grushenka, past and present, Pan Mussyalovich began declaiming hotly and proudly, so that Mitya lost his temper at once and shouted that he would not allow “the scoundrel” to talk like that in his presence. Pan Mussyalovich instantly called attention to the word “scoundrel” and asked that it be put in the record. Mitya flew into a rage.

“And a scoundrel he is! A scoundrel! Put it down, and put down that in spite of the record I’m still shouting that he’s a scoundrel!” he shouted.

Nikolai Parfenovich, though he did put it in the record, also displayed, on this unpleasant occasion, a most praiseworthy efficiency and administrative skill: after severely reprimanding Mitya, he at once put an end to all further inquiry into the romantic side of the case and quickly moved on to the essential. And there emerged as essential a particular piece of evidence from the pans, which aroused unusual curiosity in the investigators: namely, how Mitya, in that little room, had been trying to bribe Pan Mussyalovich and had offered to buy him out for three thousand, with the understanding that he would give him seven hundred roubles on the spot and the remaining twenty-three hundred “tomorrow morning, in town,” swearing on his word of honor, and declaring that he did not have so much money with him there, in Mokroye, but that the money was in town. Mitya remarked, in the heat of the moment, that he had not said he would certainly pay it in town tomorrow morning, but Pan Vrublevsky confirmed the evidence, and Mitya himself, after thinking for a minute, glumly agreed that it must have been as the pans said, that he was excited then and might well have said it. The prosecutor simply fastened on this evidence: it was becoming clear to the investigation (as was indeed concluded afterwards) that half or a part of the three thousand that had come into Mitya’s hands might indeed have been hidden somewhere in town, or perhaps even somewhere there, in Mokroye, thus clarifying the circumstance, so ticklish for the investigation, that only eight hundred roubles had been found in Mitya’s possession—the one circumstance, though the only one and rather negligible at that, that so far had been some sort of evidence in Mitya’s favor. But now this only evidence in his favor was breaking down. To the prosecutor’s question as to where he would have found the remaining twenty-three hundred to give to the pan the next day, if he himself asserted that he had only fifteen hundred, though he had assured the pan on his word of honor, Mitya firmly replied that he intended to offer the “little Polack” not the money, but a formal deed for his rights to the Chermashnya estate, the very same rights he had offered to Samsonov and Madame Khokhlakov. The prosecutor even smiled at the “innocence of the ruse.”

“And you think he would have agreed to take these ‘rights’ instead of twenty-three hundred roubles in cash?”

“Certainly he would have agreed,” Mitya snapped hotly. “My God, he might have got not just two, but four, even six thousand out of it! He’d immediately gather his little lawyers together, little Polacks and Yids, and they’d take the old man not just for three thousand but for the whole of Chermashnya.”

Naturally, the evidence of Pan Mussyalovich was entered into the record in the fullest detail. With that, the pans were dismissed. As for the fact of their cheating at cards, it was barely mentioned; Nikolai Parfenovich was grateful enough to them as it was, and did not want to bother them with trifles, especially since it was all just an idle, drunken quarrel over cards, and nothing more. All sorts of carousing and scandalousness had gone on that night ... So the money, two hundred roubles, simply stayed in the Poles’ pockets.

Then the little old man, Maximov, was called. He came in timidly, approached with small steps, looked disheveled and very sad. He had been downstairs all the while, huddled next to Grushenka, sitting silently with her, and “every now and then he’d start whimpering over her, wiping his eyes with a blue-checkered handkerchief,” as Mikhail Makarovich reported afterwards. So that she herself had to quiet and comfort him. The old man confessed at once, and with tears, that he was sorry but he had borrowed “ten roubles, sirs, on account of my poverty, sirs,” from Dmitri Fyodorovich, and that he was ready to return it ... To the direct question of Nikolai Parfenovich, whether he had noticed exactly how much money Dmitri Fyodorovich had in his hands, since he had had a close view of the money in his hands when he was borrowing from him, Maximov answered in the most decisive manner that it was “twenty thousand, sir.”

“Have you ever seen twenty thousand anywhere before?” Nikolai Parfenovich asked, smiling.

“Of course I have, sir, when my wife mortgaged my little village, only it wasn’t twenty thousand, it was seven, sir. And she only let me see it from far off, she was boasting to me. It was a very big bundle, sir, all hundred-rouble bills. And Dmitri Fyodorovich, too, had all hundred-rouble bills...”

He was soon dismissed. Finally it came to be Grushenka’s turn. The investigators were obviously apprehensive of the impression her appearance would make on Dmitri Fyodorovich, and Nikolai Parfenovich even muttered a few words of admonition to him, but Mitya silently bent his head in reply, letting him know that “there would be no disturbance. “ Grushenka was led in by Mikhail Makarovich himself. She entered with a stern and sullen face, looking almost calm, and quietly sat down on the chair offered her facing Nikolai Parfenovich. She was very pale, she seemed to be cold, and kept wrapping herself tightly in her beautiful black shawl. In fact, she was then beginning to have a slight feverish chill—the start of a long illness that first came over her that night. Her stem look, her direct and serious eyes and calm manner produced quite a favorable impression on everyone. Nikolai Parfenovich even got somewhat “carried away” at once. He himself admitted, talking about it afterwards in one place or another, that he had only then perceived how “good-looking” this woman was, and that before, the few times he had seen her, he had always regarded her as something of a “provincial hetaera.” “She has the manners of the highest society,” he once blurted out rapturously in some ladies’ circle. But this was received with the utmost indignation, and he was at once dubbed “a naughty boy” for it, which pleased him no end. As she entered the room, Grushenka seemed to give only a passing glance to Mitya, who in turn looked at her anxiously, but her appearance immediately reassured him. After the first obligatory questions and admonitions, Nikolai Parfenovich, hesitating a little, but nonetheless maintaining a most courteous air, asked her: “What had been her relations with the retired lieutenant Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov?” To which Grushenka quietly and firmly replied: “He was my acquaintance, I received him during the past month as an acquaintance.”

To further inquisitive questions she declared directly and with complete frankness, that though she had liked him “at times,” she had not been in love with him, but had been enticing him “in my vile wickedness,” as well as the “old man,” that she had seen how jealous Mitya was of Fyodor Pavlovich and of everyone, but it only amused her. And she had never meant to go to Fyodor Pavlovich, but was just laughing at him. “All that month I couldn’t be bothered with either of them; I was expecting another man, one who was guilty before me ... But I think,” she concluded, “that there is no need for you to ask about that, or for me to answer you, because that is my particular business.”

And Nikolai Parfenovich immediately did just that: once again he stopped insisting on “romantic” points, and moved directly on to the serious one— that is, to the same and chief question concerning the three thousand. Grushenka confirmed that three thousand roubles had indeed been spent in Mokroye a month before, and that though she had not counted the money herself, she had heard from Dmitri Fyodorovich that it was three thousand roubles.

“Did he say it to you privately, or in someone else’s presence, or did you only hear him say it to others around you?” the prosecutor inquired at once.

To which Grushenka replied that she had heard it in other people’s presence, had heard him say it to others, and had also heard it privately from Mitya himself.

“Did he say it to you once or many times in private?” the prosecutor inquired again, and learned that Grushenka had heard it many times.

Ippolit Kirillovich was very pleased with this evidence. Further questioning revealed that Grushenka knew where the money had come from and that Dmitri Fyodorovich had taken it from Katerina Ivanovna.

“And did you ever once hear that the money squandered a month ago was not three thousand but less, and that Dmitri Fyodorovich had kept fully half of it for himself?”

“No, I never heard that,” Grushenka testified.

It was further discovered that Mitya, on the contrary, had often told her during that month that he did not have a kopeck. “He kept waiting for what he would get from his father,” Grushenka concluded.

“And did he ever say before you ... somehow in passing, or in irritation,” Nikolai Parfenovich suddenly struck, “that he intended to make an attempt on his father’s life?” “Ah, yes, he did!” sighed Grushenka.

“Once or several times?”

“He mentioned it several times, always in a fit of anger.”

“And did you believe he would go through with it?”

“No, I never believed it!” she replied firmly. “I trusted in his nobility.”

“Gentlemen, allow me,” Mitya suddenly cried, “allow me to say just one word to Agrafena Alexandrovna in your presence.”

“Say it,” Nikolai Parfenovich consented.

“Agrafena Alexandrovna,” Mitya rose a little from his chair, “believe God and me: I am not guilty of the blood of my father who was killed last night!”

Having said this, Mitya again sat down on his chair. Grushenka rose a little, looked towards the icon, and piously crossed herself.

“Glory be to God!” she said in an ardent, emotional voice, and turning to Nikolai Parfenovich before sitting down, she added: “What he has just said, you must believe! I know him: when he babbles, he babbles, whether it’s for fun or out of stubbornness, but if it’s something against his conscience, he will never deceive you. He will speak the truth directly, you must believe that!”

“Thank you, Agrafena Alexandrovna, you have given my soul new courage!” Mitya responded in a trembling voice.

To the questions about yesterday’s money she replied that she did not know how much there was, but had heard him say to many people yesterday that he had brought three thousand with him. And with regard to where he had got the money, he had told her privately that he had “stolen” it from Katerina Ivanovna, to which she had replied that he had not stolen it and that the money must be given back tomorrow. To the prosecutor’s insistent question as to which money he said he had stolen from Katerina Ivanovna—yesterday’s, or the three thousand spent there a month ago—she stated that he was speaking of the money from a month ago, that that was how she had understood him.

Grushenka was finally dismissed, Nikolai Parfenovich impetuously announcing to her that she could even return to town at once, and that if he, for his part, could be of any assistance to her, for example, in connection with the horses, or if, for example, she wished to be accompanied, then he ... for his part . . .

“I humbly thank you,” Grushenka bowed to him, “I’ll go with that little old man, the landowner, I’ll take him back with me, but meanwhile I’ll wait downstairs, with your permission, until you decide here about Dmitri Fyodorovich.”

She went out. Mitya was calm and even looked quite encouraged, but only for a moment. Some strange physical powerlessness was gradually overwhelming him. His eyes kept closing with fatigue. The interrogation of the witnesses finally came to an end. They moved on to the final editing of the transcript. Mitya got up, went from his chair to the corner, near the curtain, lay down on a large chest covered with a rug, and was asleep in a second. He had a strange sort of dream, somehow entirely out of place and out of time. It seemed he was driving somewhere in the steppe, in a place where he had served once long ago; he is being driven through the slush by a peasant, in a cart with a pair of horses. And it seems to Mitya that he is cold, it is the beginning of November, and snow is pouring down in big, wet flakes that melt as soon as they touch the ground. And the peasant is driving briskly, waving his whip nicely, he has a long, fair beard, and he is not an old man, maybe around fifty, dressed in a gray peasant coat. And there is a village nearby— black, black huts, and half of the huts are burnt, just charred beams sticking up. And at the edge of the village there are peasant women standing along the road, many women, a long line of them, all of them thin, wasted, their faces a sort of brown color. Especially that one at the end—such a bony one, tall, looking as if she were forty, but she may be only twenty, with a long, thin face, and in her arms a baby is crying, and her breasts must be all dried up, not a drop of milk in them. And the baby is crying, crying, reaching out its bare little arms, its little fists somehow all blue from the cold.

“Why are they crying? Why are they crying?” Mitya asks, flying past them at a great clip.

“The wee one,” the driver answers, “it’s the wee one crying.” And Mitya is struck that he has said it in his own peasant way: “the wee one,” and not “the baby.” And he likes it that the peasant has said “wee one”: there seems to be more pity in it.

“But why is it crying?” Mitya insists, as if he were foolish, “why are its little arms bare, why don’t they wrap it up?”

“The wee one’s cold, its clothes are frozen, they don’t keep it warm.”

“But why is it so? Why?” foolish Mitya will not leave off.

“They’re poor, burnt out, they’ve got no bread, they’re begging for their burnt-down place.”

“No, no,” Mitya still seems not to understand, “tell me: why are these burnt-out mothers standing here, why are the people poor, why is the wee one poor, why is the steppe bare, why don’t they embrace and kiss, why don’t they sing joyful songs, why are they blackened with such black misery, why don’t they feed the wee one?”

And he feels within himself that, though his questions have no reason or sense, he still certainly wants to ask in just that way, and he should ask in just that way. And he also feels a tenderness such as he has never known before surging up in his heart, he wants to weep, he wants to do something for them all, so that the wee one will no longer cry, so that the blackened, dried-up mother of the wee one will not cry either, so that there will be no more tears in anyone from that moment on, and it must be done at once, at once, without delay and despite everything, with all his Karamazov unrestraint.

“And I am with you, too, I won’t leave you now, I will go with you for the rest of my life,” the dear, deeply felt words of Grushenka came from somewhere near him. And his whole heart blazed up and turned towards some sort of light, and he wanted to live and live, to go on and on along some path, towards the new, beckoning light, and to hurry, hurry, right now, at once!

“What? Where?” he exclaims, opening his eyes and sitting up on the chest, as if he were just coming out of a faint, and smiling brightly. Over him stands Nikolai Parfenovich, inviting him to listen to the transcript and sign it. Mitya guessed that he had slept for an hour or more, but he did not listen to Nikolai Parfenovich. It suddenly struck him that there was a pillow under his head, which, however, had not been there when he had sunk down powerlessly on the chest.

“Who put that pillow under my head? What good person did it?” he exclaimed with a sort of rapturous gratitude, in a sort of tear-filled voice, as though God knows what kindness had been shown him. The good man remained unidentified even later—perhaps one of the witnesses, or even Nikolai Parfenovich’s clerk, had arranged that a pillow be put under his head, out of compassion—but his whole soul was as if shaken with tears. He went up to the table and declared that he would sign whatever they wanted.

“I had a good dream, gentlemen,” he said somehow strangely, with a sort of new face, as if lit up with joy.

Chapter 9: Mitya Is Taken Away

When the transcript had been signed, Nikolai Parfenovich solemnly addressed the accused and read to him a “Resolution,” setting forth that on such and such a day, of such and such a year, in such and such a place, having interrogated so and so (that is, Mitya), accused of such and such (all the charges were carefully enumerated), and insofar as the accused, while declaring himself not guilty of any of the crimes imputed to him, has brought forth nothing to vindicate himself, whereas the witnesses (so and so) and the circumstances (such and such) show him to be guilty in the highest degree, the district attorney of such and such district court, in accordance with such and such paragraphs of the Criminal Code, etc., hereby resolves: to commit so and so (Mitya) to such and such prison, in order to deprive him of all means of evading investigation and trial; to inform the accused of this fact; to forward a copy of this resolution to the deputy prosecutor, etc., etc. In short, Mitya was informed that from that moment on he was a prisoner, and that he would now be driven to town, where he would be locked up in a very unpleasant place. Mitya, having listened attentively, merely shrugged.

“Well, gentlemen, I don’t blame you, I’m ready ... I understand that you have no other choice.”

Nikolai Parfenovich gently explained to him that he would be taken away at once by the deputy commissioner, Mavriky Mavrikievich, who happened to be there at the moment . . .

“Wait,” Mitya interrupted suddenly, and with some irrepressible feeling he spoke, addressing everyone in the room. “Gentlemen, we are all cruel, we are all monsters, we all make people weep, mothers and nursing babies, but of all—let it be settled here and now—of all, I am the lowest vermin! So be it! Every day of my life I’ve been beating my breast and promising to reform, and every day I’ve done the same vile things. I understand now that for men such as I a blow is needed, a blow of fate, to catch them as with a noose and bind them by an external force. Never, never would I have risen by myself! But the thunder has struck.^[275]I accept the torment of accusation and of my disgrace before all, I want to suffer and be purified by suffering! And perhaps I will be purified, eh, gentlemen? But hear me, all the same, for the last time: I am not guilty of my father’s blood! I accept punishment not because I killed him, but because I wanted to kill him, and might well have killed him ... But even so I intend to fight you, and I am letting you know it. I will fight you to the very end, and then let God decide! Farewell, gentlemen, do not be angry that I shouted at you during the interrogation—oh, I was still so foolish then ... Another moment and I’ll be a prisoner, but now, for the last time, while he is still a free man, Dmitri Karamazov offers you his hand. Saying farewell to you, I say it to all men...!”

His voice trembled and he did, indeed, offer his hand, but Nikolai Parfenovich, who was nearest to him, somehow suddenly, with an almost convulsive sort of movement, hid his hands behind him. Mitya noticed it at once and was startled. He immediately let fall his proffered hand.

“The investigation is not over yet,” Nikolai Parfenovich muttered, somewhat embarrassed. “We shall continue it in town, and I, of course, for my part, am prepared to wish you all luck ... in your acquittal ... And you personally, Dmitri Fyodorovich, I have always been inclined to regard as a man, so to speak, more unfortunate than guilty ... All of us here, if I may be so bold as to express myself on behalf of all, all of us are prepared to recognize you as a young man who is noble in principle, though one, alas, carried away by certain passions to a somewhat inordinate degree ...”

Nikolai Parfenovich’s little figure became, towards the end of his speech, a most perfect embodiment of stateliness. It flashed through Mitya’s mind that this “boy” was now going to take him by the arm, lead him to the other corner, and start up their recent conversation about “girls” again. But all sorts of extraneous and unrelated thoughts sometimes flash even through the mind of a criminal who is being led out to execution.

“Gentlemen, you are kind, you are humane—may I see her, to say farewell for the last time?” asked Mitya.

“Certainly, but in view ... in short, it is impossible now except in the presence ...”

“Please do be present!”

Grushenka was brought in, but the farewell was brief, just a few words, hardly satisfying to Nikolai Parfenovich. Grushenka made a low bow to Mitya.

“I’ve told you that I am yours, and I will be yours, I will go with you forever, wherever they doom you to go. Farewell, guiltless man, who have been your own ruin.”

Her lips trembled, tears flowed from her eyes.

“Forgive me, Grusha, for my love, that I’ve ruined you, too, with my love!”

Mitya wanted to say something more, but suddenly stopped himself short and walked out. He was immediately surrounded by people who kept a close eye on him. At the foot of the porch, where he had driven up with such a clatter in Andrei’s troika the day before, two carts already stood waiting. Mavriky Mavrikievich, a squat, thickset man with a flabby face, was annoyed with something, some sudden new disorder, and was shouting angrily. He invited Mitya somehow too sternly to get into the cart. “He had quite a different face before, when I used to stand him drinks in the tavern,” Mitya thought as he was getting in. Trifon Borisovich also came down from the porch. People, peasants, women, coachmen crowded at the gates; everyone stared at Mitya.

“Farewell and forgive, God’s people!” Mitya suddenly cried to them from the cart.

“And you forgive us,” two or three voices were heard.

“You, too, Trifon Borisich, farewell and forgive!” But Trifon Borisich did not even turn his head, perhaps he was too busy. He, too, was bustling about and shouting for some reason. It turned out that things were not quite in order yet with the second cart, in which two deputies were to accompany Mavriky Mavrikievich. The little peasant who had been hired to drive the second troika was pulling on his coat and stoutly protesting that it was not him but Akim who had to drive. But Akim was not there; they ran to get him; the little peasant insisted and begged them to wait.

“Look what kind of people we’ve got, Mavriky Mavrikievich, no shame at all!” Trifon Borisich exclaimed. “Akim gave you twenty-five kopecks the day before yesterday, you spent it on drink, and now you’re shouting. I’m really surprised you’re so good-natured with our base peasants, Mavriky Mavrikievich, I can tell you that!”

“But what do we need a second troika for?” Mitya intervened. “Let’s go in one, Mavriky Mavrikievich, I assure you I won’t make trouble, I won’t run away from you, old fellow—why the escort?”

“Kindly learn how to address me, sir, if you don’t know already; I’m not your ‘old fellow,’ kindly do not be so familiar, and save your advice for some other time . . .,” Mavriky Mavrikievich snapped fiercely at Mitya all of a sudden, as if glad to vent his heart.

Mitya said no more. He blushed all over. A moment later he suddenly felt very cold. It had stopped raining, but the dull sky was still overcast, and a sharp wind was blowing straight in his face. “Have I caught a chill or something? “ Mitya thought, twitching his shoulders. At last Mavriky Mavrikievich also got into the cart, sat down heavily, broadly, and, as if without noticing it, gave Mitya a strong shove with his body. True, he was out of sorts and intensely disliked the task entrusted to him.

“Farewell, Trifon Borisich!” Mitya called out again, and felt himself that this time he had called out not from good-naturedness but from spite, against his will. But Trifon Borisich stood proudly, both hands behind his back, staring straight at Mitya with a stern and angry look, and made no reply.

“Farewell, Dmitri Fyodorovich, farewell!” the voice of Kalganov, who popped up from somewhere, was suddenly heard. Running over to the cart, he offered his hand to Mitya. He had no cap on. Mitya just managed to seize and shake his hand.

“Farewell, you dear man, I won’t forget this magnanimity!” he exclaimed ardently. But the cart started, and their hands were parted. The bell jingled— Mitya was taken away.

Kalganov ran back into the front hall, sat down in a corner, bent his head, covered his face with his hands, and began to cry. He sat like that and cried for a long time—cried as though he were still a little boy and not a man of twenty. Oh, he believed almost completely in Mitya’s guilt!”What are these people, what sort of people can there be after this!” he kept exclaiming incoherently, in bitter dejection, almost in despair. At that moment he did not even want to live in the world. “Is it worth it, is it worth it!” the grieved young man kept exclaiming.