The Brothers Karamazov (94 page)

“All right then, gentlemen, I’m sure I cannot blame you for it . . . I’m ready to leave any time; I don’t suppose there’s anything else you want with me.”

Nelyudov told Mitya that he would be taken to prison by the rural police officer, Shmertsov, who happened to be there.

“Just a moment,” Mitya suddenly interrupted him. “Gentlemen, we are all cruel. We are monsters. We force people to shed tears, mothers and infants,” he said with uncontrollable fervor. “But let it be known once and for all that, of all the people in the world, I am the most despicable, the lowest creature. So be it! Every day of my life I have beaten my breast and promised myself to change, but then every day I have done the same vile things again. I understand now that men like me must be struck down by life; they must be caught as in a lasso and bound by an outside force. Without that, I would never have risen by myself! But lightning has struck and I accept the ordeal of the accusation and my public disgrace; I want to suffer and to cleanse myself by suffering! For I may be cleansed some day, may I not, gentlemen? But I want to tell you for the last time: I am not guilty of my father’s murder! I accept punishment, not because I killed him, but because I wanted to kill him, and because perhaps I might have killed him if . . . I intend, however, to fight you—I warn you of that—and I shall fight you to the bitter end; after that it will be up to God. Good-by, gentlemen, and please forgive me for having shouted at you during the interrogation; I was still so stupid then . . . In one minute I will be a prison inmate, but now, for that one more minute, I am still Dmitry Karamazov, and it is as a free man that I hold out my hand to you, as I take leave of you and of everyone!”

Mitya’s voice quivered and he really made as if to hold out his hand. But Nelyudov, who stood nearest to him, quickly and nervously hid his hands behind his back. Mitya noticed this and shuddered. He dropped his outstretched hand at once.

“The investigation isn’t really over yet,” Nelyudov muttered, somewhat embarrassed. “We’ll continue with it in town and, as far as I am concerned, I’m prepared to wish you the best of luck . . . I mean in obtaining your acquittal . . . I personally feel, Mr. Karamazov, that you are more the victim of unhappy circumstances than a really bad man . . . All of us here, if I may take the liberty of speaking for the others too, are prepared to recognize that you are a basically honorable man, who, however, has unfortunately been swayed by rather excessive passions . . .”

By the time he had finished speaking, the little figure of the examining magistrate had become the personification of majestic dignity. But Mitya had the feeling that this “boy” could still now, at any moment, catch him by the arm, walk off into a corner with him, and resume a conversation they had once had about women. But then, all kinds of incongruous notions may pass through the head even of a criminal who is being led off to execution.

“Gentlemen,” Mitya said, “you have been so kind and humane to me that I wonder whether you’d allow me to see 
her
 for the last time, to say good-by?”

“Of course, but it must be in our presence . . . otherwise it would be impossible . . .”

“By all means, please.”

They brought Grushenka in. But the farewells were short. Only very few words were said, and Nelyudov seemed somehow disappointed. Grushenka bowed low to Mitya.

“I’ve already told you I’ll be yours, and I’ll be yours forever, wherever they may send you. Good-by, Mitya, you who have been ruined through no fault of your own.”

Her lips quivered and tears poured from her eyes.

“Forgive me, Grusha, for my love, for ruining you with my love . . .”

Mitya was about to say something else but suddenly changed his mind and went out. He was at once surrounded by people, who never took their eyes off him. Outside, by the front steps, to which Andrei had driven up so dashingly and with such a clatter in his three-horse cart the night before, two carts were already waiting. Mavriky Shmertsov, the rural police officer, a short, thick-set man with a bloated face, seemed to be irritated at some unexpected difficulty and was shouting angrily. With uncalled for brusqueness, he told Mitya to get into one of the carts. “When I used to pay for his drinks in the tavern, he had a quite different look,” Mitya thought, as he climbed into the cart. The innkeeper Trifon appeared at the top of the steps. Coachmen, villagers, men, and women gathered by the gate, staring at Mitya.

“Forgive me, good people!” Mitya suddenly shouted to them from the cart.

“You forgive us too!” two or three voices called back.

“You, too, Trifon, forgive me!”

But Trifon did not even look at Mitya. He had his back turned to him. Possibly he was too busy. He was fussing about, shouting something . . .

Apparently everything was not in order in the second cart, in which two men with brass badges were to accompany the rural police officer. The little peasant who had been hired to drive the second cart and was putting on his coat was still arguing that Akim should be the one to drive the cart and not him. Everyone was looking for Akim, but he was nowhere to be found. The little peasant argued, begging them to wait for Akim.

“These people nowadays have no shame, Mr. Shmertsov, no shame at all!” Trifon complained. “Akim gave you twenty-five kopeks two days ago, remember? And what did you do with it? You drank it all, didn’t you, and now you’re shouting! I’m really surprised at your patience with these people—one can never trust them!”

“But what do we need the second cart for, Mavriky?” Mitya tried to interfere. “Can’t we go without them? I assure you I’m not planning to attack you or try to escape. You don’t have to have an escort, believe me . . .”

“First learn to address me properly!” Shmertsov cut him off fiercely. “I’m not Mavriky to you, remember! And keep your damned advice to yourself!” He seemed to be glad of the opportunity to vent his irritation on Mitya.

Silenced, Mitya flushed all over. The next second he felt very cold. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still murky and overcast, and a sharp wind was blowing straight into his face. “I must have caught a chill,” Mitya thought, his shoulders twitching.

Finally the rural police officer climbed into the cart next to Mitya. He sat down heavily and spread out his legs, pushing against Mitya as he installed himself, without appearing to notice it. It is true that Shmertsov was in a foul mood, for he did not like this assignment at all.

“Good-by, Trifon!” Mitya called out again, feeling that this time he was doing so not out of the warmth of his heart, but out of spite, almost against his own will. But this time, again, Trifon did not answer: he stood proudly, his hands behind his back, staring straight at Mitya with a stern and disapproving expression.

“Good-by, Mr. Karamazov, dear fellow, good-by!” Mitya suddenly heard the voice of Kalganov, who had appeared from nowhere. Hatless, he hurried over to the cart to shake hands.

“Good-by, my dear fellow, I’ll never forget your generous gesture!” Mitya cried warmly. But the cart moved off, and their hands were separated. The bells jingled—they took Mitya away.

And Kalganov went back into the house, sat down in a corner of the entrance hall, covered his face with his hands, and wept. He sat there, weeping and weeping as if he were still a little boy and not a young man of twenty. Oh, he was almost convinced that Mitya was guilty. “But what kind of people are they, what kind of people!” he repeated incoherently again and again in bitter desolation, verging on despair. “What can I think of these people after this?” At that moment, he didn’t even want to go on living: “What’s the point?” the young man kept asking himself in distress.

PART FOUR

Book X: The Boys

Chapter 1: Kolya Krasotkin

IT WAS early November. The temperature was eleven degrees below zero (centigrade) and the ground was crusted with ice. It had snowed lightly during the night and a sharp, dry wind was raising a snowy powder and sweeping it along the town’s bleak streets and all across Market Square. Although it was no longer snowing, the morning was gray.

Mrs. Krasotkin’s house, which, though not large, was very neat inside as well as out, stood a few doors from Plotnikov’s grocery store, quite near the square. Krasotkin, a local government official, had been dead for almost fourteen years and his widow, a good-looking woman in her thirties, lived in the snug little house on an independent income. A prim but cheerful lady, she led a quiet, respectable life. She had lost her husband when she was only eighteen, after only a year or so of marriage and soon after bearing him a son. Since her husband’s death, she had devoted herself entirely to bringing up her little Kolya and, although she loved him dearly, she had certainly had far more trouble than joy from him during those fourteen years, trembling with fear almost every day lest he catch cold, fall ill, do something naughty, climb a chair and fall off, and so on. When Kolya went first to elementary school and later to high school, his mother began to study all the subjects along with him in order to help him with his homework and go over his lessons with him; she arranged to meet all his teachers and their wives, and was nice to the boys in Kolya’s class in an attempt to gain their favor so they would not tease her Kolya, be rough with him, or push him around. Indeed, she went so far that the boys ended up by teasing Kolya precisely because of her, taunting him with being a “sissy” and a “mummy’s boy.” But it soon turned out that Kolya could take care of himself very well. He was not easily frightened and quickly acquired a reputation in his class for being “terribly strong.” And in fact he was very agile, persevering, daring, and enterprising. He was also a good student and some of the boys went so far as to say that, in arithmetic and world history, he could show up even their teacher, Dardanelov. But, although he seemed to look down on those around him, Kolya was a good friend and never tried to bully the others; he accepted the respect of his comrades as his due, but he was friendly with them. Above all, he had a sound idea of how much he could get away with and when it was time to stop; in his relations with the school authorities, he never went beyond a certain limit, after which an infraction of discipline would be considered disorder, rebellion, and lawlessness, and no longer tolerated. And yet he certainly was always ready to play a mischievous prank like any wild street urchin, and not just a prank but something unbelievably clever, something that would leave everybody gaping open-mouthed, something extra-special, for which he would be particularly admired. In fact, he was extremely vain. He had even succeeded in getting the upper hand over his mother and at times treated her almost despotically. She obeyed him and had done so for quite a while already; there was only one thing that worried her greatly, and that was the idea that the boy did not really love her. The idea kept coming back to her that Kolya was an “unfeeling” boy, and on occasion she would cry hysterically and bitterly reproach him for his coldness. The boy disliked these scenes very much and the shriller her demands for a show of affection became, the less responsive he was. But this was not deliberate on his part; he could not help it—that was just the way he was. And she was wrong about his feelings: he did love his mother and disliked only what he called in his schoolboy lingo “that sickening slobbery stuff.”

There was a bookcase in the house containing a number of books left by Kolya’s father, and the boy, who was fond of reading, had read a few of these. This did not worry his mother, although she was a little puzzled to see Kolya spending hours and hours at the bookcase, reading some book or other, instead of playing with the other boys. So Kolya had read a few books that, at his age, he should not have been allowed to read.

Lately, it had happened that this boy, who before had always known where to stop, had begun to do things that really worried his mother. It is true there was nothing particularly morally reprehensible about the things Kolya did, but there was something surprisingly wild and reckless in his behavior. During the past summer holidays, for instance, mother and son had spent a week in July with a distant relative who lived in a neighboring district, about fifty miles away. The relative’s husband worked at the railway station there. It was the nearest railway station to our town and, incidentally. the one where, a month later, Ivan Karamazov was to catch his train for Moscow. Well, when the Krasotkins arrived there, Kolya began by making a thorough study of the workings of the railway: he visited the station and the tracks, examined the train schedules, etc., expecting that this new knowledge of his would impress the boys tremendously when he went back to school. It so happened that some other boys were also staying in the neighborhood of the railway station and soon they all became acquainted. They ranged in age between twelve and fifteen, six or seven boys altogether, two of them from our town. So the boys played together, showing off to each other, and on the fourth or fifth day of Kolya’s visit he—almost the youngest of them and for that reason somewhat looked down upon by the others—made a stupid and incredible two-ruble bet with them. Either out of vanity or because of his complete fearlessness, he bet them that he would lie down at night on the track in the space between the rails and stay there while the 11 p.m. train thundered over him at full speed. First of all, though, they made a thorough investigation and found that it really was possible to flatten oneself out between the rails so that the train would pass over you without touching you; but to actually lie still while the thing rattled deafeningly over your head—that was something else again! Kolya boasted that he could do it. At first they just laughed at him and called him a little liar and a silly braggart, but that only made him all the more determined to go through with it. It had all started, probably, because the fifteen-year-olds looked down on him because he was just “a kid” and would hardly accept him as one of the gang, and this stung his pride quite unbearably.

So they agreed that they would meet in the evening about a mile from the station, to give the train a chance to gather speed. All the boys went. It was a moonless, almost completely black night. As the hour drew close, Kolya lay down between the rails. The other five boys, who were betting with him, waited in the bushes around the embankment, their hearts pounding with apprehension and remorse. At last, in the distance, they heard the rumble of the train leaving the station. Two red lights shone in the darkness and the rattle of the approaching monster increased. “Run! Get off the rails! Hurry!” the boys yelled in terror from under the bushes. But it was too late. The train was already there. And then it was gone. The boys rushed over to Kolya. He lay there motionless. They started pulling him and shaking him, but he suddenly got up by himself and silently walked down from the embankment. He told the boys he had pretended to have fainted just to scare them, although the truth was that he had really fainted, as he admitted to his mother much later. After that exploit, he acquired a reputation as a “desperado” once and for all. He went back to the station and returned home, his face white as a sheet. The next day he was a bit feverish, but otherwise he was very cheerful and pleased with himself.

Eventually the story reached our town and the school principal’s office. But Mrs. Krasotkin pleaded with the school authorities not to take any disciplinary action against her son and, in the end, thanks to the teacher Dardanelov, who was highly regarded and respected by his colleagues and the principal, succeeded in having the matter dropped. Dardanelov was a middle-aged bachelor who, by a strange coincidence, had been in love with Mrs. Krasotkin for many years and who, about a year before, had most delicately and with a sinking heart offered her his hand in marriage. She had unhesitatingly turned him down, declaring that it would be a betrayal of her darling son, although from certain mysterious signs Dardanelov might have observed that he was not altogether unattractive to this charming widow, who was such an overdutiful and tender mother. Now Kolya’s crazy act seemed to have improved Dardanelov’s standing, and, because of his efforts on the boy’s behalf, he was made to understand that there might be some hope for him after all, although as yet a very remote hope. But then Dardanelov himself was a paragon of chastity and delicacy in these matters, so this was quite sufficient for the time being to make him a perfectly happy man. He was also very fond of the boy, although he would have considered it undignified, in view of the circumstances, to try and gain his affection and he was always strict and demanding with him in class. But Kolya himself was anxious to keep his distance from the teacher; he always did his homework well, was second in his class, and treated Dardanelov coldly; many boys were still convinced that he was good enough in world history to show up Dardanelov himself. And, indeed, when Kolya once asked the teacher who was the founder of Troy, Dardanelov replied in general terms about the migration of peoples, about the difficulty of discerning facts in such ancient times, about the creation of legends, without giving Kolya a precise answer, i.e., without naming the person or group of persons who had founded Troy. Indeed, for some reason he considered Kolya’s question idle and irrelevant. The boys, however, remained convinced that Dardanelov simply did not know who the founder of Troy was. Kolya, on the other hand, had read about the founding of Troy in Smaragdov’s book, which he had found in his father’s bookshelf. In the end, every boy in the class became terribly anxious to know who had founded Troy, but Kolya would not reveal his secret, and his scholarly reputation was well established.

After the incident on the railroad track, there was a change in Kolya’s relations with his mother. When Anna Krasotkin learned about Kolya’s exploit, she almost went insane. She had recurring fits of hysterics for days on end. Kolya was very frightened and swore to his mother that he would never do such a thing again. He swore it, as his mother demanded, by the memory of his father, kneeling before an icon, and on that occasion the fearless, “manly” Kolya burst into tears out of “slobbery sentimentality,” after which mother and son had several joint sobbing fits, crying in each other’s arms. The following day, however, Kolya awoke as “unfeeling” as before, although he was somewhat quieter, graver, less brazen, and rather dreamy. True, six weeks or so later, he again got into trouble and this time his name became known to our justice of the peace. The new prank was, however, of a very different nature; it was quite innocent, indeed, foolish, and besides, as it turned out later, it was not even of Kolya’s direct doing; he was only involved in it. But more of this later.

In the meantime Mrs. Krasotkin kept worrying and suffering, and the more she worried, the stronger Dardanelov’s hopes grew. It must be noted that Kolya saw and guessed how Dardanelov felt and it goes without saying that he despised him no end for “that sentimental stuff.” Once he was even tactless enough to express his scorn to his mother, hinting to her that he, Kolya, was very well aware of what Dardanelov was after. However, after the railroad track adventure, his attitude toward this matter also changed and he no longer made hints of that sort. This his sensitive mother noticed, and she was tremendously grateful. But now, if Dardanelov’s name happened to come up in conversation with visitors in Kolya’s presence, the poor woman would blush like a rose while Kolya would pointedly look out of the window, or examine his boots to see if they needed repairing, or impatiently call Perezvon, a large, shaggy, mangy dog which he had found somewhere a month before and had kept secretly at home, for some reason not wanting any of his schoolmates to see it. He bullied the animal terribly, teaching it all kinds of tricks, and reducing it to such a state that the poor beast howled for hours on end when Kolya was away at school and, when he came back, squealed crazily with delight, stood on its hind legs, lay down and pretended to be dead, and so on, repeating all the tricks it had been taught without being ordered to, just out of overwhelming gratitude and love for its master.

I believe I have forgotten to mention that Kolya Krasotkin was the one whom Ilyusha Snegirev, the boy we have already met, had stabbed in the side with a penknife when the boys were teasing him by calling his father “back-scrubber.”

Chapter 2: The Children

ND SO, on that frosty, windAy November morning, Kolya Krasotkin was at home. It was a Sunday and there was no school. It was already past eleven and he had to go out on some “most important business.” But it so happened that he was all alone in the house, its only guardian, as it were, since all the grown-ups had been forced, owing to a peculiar combination of circumstances, to leave the house. At the other end of the house were rooms that Mrs. Krasotkin rented to an old friend of hers, a doctor’s wife, who lived there with her two small children. The doctor himself had left a year or so before for Orenburg, then he had moved to Tashkent, and now, for more than six months, he had not been heard from at all. Had it not been for her friendship with Kolya’s mother, the abandoned woman would have cried herself dry in her misery. And then, to top off everything, Katerina, the only servant of the doctor’s wife, had just the night before taken her poor mistress completely by surprise by announcing to her that she was going to have a baby before morning. How it happened that no one had noticed anything before was something of a wonder. The doctor’s wife decided to take Katerina, while there was still time, to a certain establishment that was run by a midwife in our town and that dealt with such emergencies. Since she was very attached to her servant, she immediately hired a carriage, drove the girl there, and, moreover, stayed with her to look after her. In the morning, somehow or other, she also had to have the friendly help of Mrs. Krasotkin, who apparently had influence with someone or other who could be of assistance. So the two ladies were out. Mrs. Krasotkin’s own maid, Agafia, was shopping at the market, so Kolya had been left alone in the house to look after the two little children, a boy and a girl. Kolya did not mind at all. He ordered Perezvon to lie down in the hall and pretend he was dead; for just that reason he would give two loud, ingratiating taps on the floor with his tail every time Kolya came by while making his rounds, but, alas, there was no releasing whistle. Instead, Kolya glared sternly at the wretched beast, who relapsed obediently into his self-induced paralysis. But what worried Kolya was the “kids.” He had, of course, nothing but the utmost scorn for Katerina’s unexpected adventure, but he was very fond of the abandoned children and had already taken them a children’s book. Nastya, the eight-year-old girl, could read very well, and her seven-year-old brother, Kostya, liked to listen when she read to him. There were many ways, of course, in which Kolya could have amused them more, such as standing them up side by side and making them do soldiers’ drill, or hiding from them and making them look for him all over the house. He had often played with them like that before and did not mind doing it at all. In fact, rumors about it had reached his classmates and there was even gossip going around that Krasotkin played “horsey” with his little lodgers, that he galloped around and even held his head sideways as if he were the side-horse of a troika. But Kolya proudly parried this talk by saying that it would have been, indeed, pretty childish of him if he had insisted on playing “horsey” with other thirteen-year-olds like himself—“particularly at our age”—but he obviously did it to amuse the little kids, because he was fond of them, and he did not have to account to anyone for his feelings. For their part, the kids worshipped him.