The Brothers Karamazov
Here Ippolit Kirillovitch drew a minute picture of Mitya’s
preparations, the scene at Perhotin’s, at the shop, with the drivers.
He quoted numerous words and actions, confirmed by witnesses, and the
picture made a terrible impression on the audience. The guilt of this
harassed and desperate man stood out clear and convincing, when the
facts were brought together.
“What need had he of precaution? Two or three times he almost
confessed, hinted at it, all but spoke out.” (Then followed the
evidence given by witnesses.) “He even cried out to the peasant who
drove him, ‘Do you know, you are driving a murderer!’ But it was
impossible for him to speak out, he had to get to Mokroe and there to
finish his romance. But what was awaiting the luckless man? Almost from
the first minute at Mokroe he saw that his invincible rival was perhaps
by no means so invincible, that the toast to their new-found happiness
was not desired and would not be acceptable. But you know the facts,
gentlemen of the jury, from the preliminary inquiry. Karamazov’s
triumph over his rival was complete and his soul passed into quite a
new phase, perhaps the most terrible phase through which his soul has
passed or will pass.
“One may say with certainty, gentlemen of the jury,” the prosecutor
continued, “that outraged nature and the criminal heart bring their own
vengeance more completely than any earthly justice. What’s more,
justice and punishment on earth positively alleviate the punishment of
nature and are, indeed, essential to the soul of the criminal at such
moments, as its salvation from despair. For I cannot imagine the horror
and moral suffering of Karamazov when he learnt that she loved him,
that for his sake she had rejected her first lover, that she was
summoning him, Mitya, to a new life, that she was promising him
happiness—and when? When everything was over for him and nothing was
possible!
“By the way, I will note in parenthesis a point of importance for the
light it throws on the prisoner’s position at the moment. This woman,
this love of his, had been till the last moment, till the very instant
of his arrest, a being unattainable, passionately desired by him but
unattainable. Yet why did he not shoot himself then, why did he
relinquish his design and even forget where his pistol was? It was just
that passionate desire for love and the hope of satisfying it that
restrained him. Throughout their revels he kept close to his adored
mistress, who was at the banquet with him and was more charming and
fascinating to him than ever—he did not leave her side, abasing himself
in his homage before her.
“His passion might well, for a moment, stifle not only the fear of
arrest, but even the torments of conscience. For a moment, oh, only for
a moment! I can picture the state of mind of the criminal hopelessly
enslaved by these influences—first, the influence of drink, of noise
and excitement, of the thud of the dance and the scream of the song,
and of her, flushed with wine, singing and dancing and laughing to him!
Secondly, the hope in the background that the fatal end might still be
far off, that not till next morning, at least, they would come and take
him. So he had a few hours and that’s much, very much! In a few hours
one can think of many things. I imagine that he felt something like
what criminals feel when they are being taken to the scaffold. They
have another long, long street to pass down and at walking pace, past
thousands of people. Then there will be a turning into another street
and only at the end of that street the dread place of execution! I
fancy that at the beginning of the journey the condemned man, sitting
on his shameful cart, must feel that he has infinite life still before
him. The houses recede, the cart moves on—oh, that’s nothing, it’s
still far to the turning into the second street and he still looks
boldly to right and to left at those thousands of callously curious
people with their eyes fixed on him, and he still fancies that he is
just such a man as they. But now the turning comes to the next street.
Oh, that’s nothing, nothing, there’s still a whole street before him,
and however many houses have been passed, he will still think there are
many left. And so to the very end, to the very scaffold.
“This I imagine is how it was with Karamazov then. ‘They’ve not had
time yet,’ he must have thought, ‘I may still find some way out, oh,
there’s still time to make some plan of defense, and now, now—she is so
fascinating!’
“His soul was full of confusion and dread, but he managed, however, to
put aside half his money and hide it somewhere—I cannot otherwise
explain the disappearance of quite half of the three thousand he had
just taken from his father’s pillow. He had been in Mokroe more than
once before, he had caroused there for two days together already, he
knew the old big house with all its passages and outbuildings. I
imagine that part of the money was hidden in that house, not long
before the arrest, in some crevice, under some floor, in some corner,
under the roof. With what object? I shall be asked. Why, the
catastrophe may take place at once, of course; he hadn’t yet considered
how to meet it, he hadn’t the time, his head was throbbing and his
heart was with _her_, but money—money was indispensable in any case!
With money a man is always a man. Perhaps such foresight at such a
moment may strike you as unnatural? But he assures us himself that a
month before, at a critical and exciting moment, he had halved his
money and sewn it up in a little bag. And though that was not true, as
we shall prove directly, it shows the idea was a familiar one to
Karamazov, he had contemplated it. What’s more, when he declared at the
inquiry that he had put fifteen hundred roubles in a bag (which never
existed) he may have invented that little bag on the inspiration of the
moment, because he had two hours before divided his money and hidden
half of it at Mokroe till morning, in case of emergency, simply not to
have it on himself. Two extremes, gentlemen of the jury, remember that
Karamazov can contemplate two extremes and both at once.
“We have looked in the house, but we haven’t found the money. It may
still be there or it may have disappeared next day and be in the
prisoner’s hands now. In any case he was at her side, on his knees
before her, she was lying on the bed, he had his hands stretched out to
her and he had so entirely forgotten everything that he did not even
hear the men coming to arrest him. He hadn’t time to prepare any line
of defense in his mind. He was caught unawares and confronted with his
judges, the arbiters of his destiny.
“Gentlemen of the jury, there are moments in the execution of our
duties when it is terrible for us to face a man, terrible on his
account, too! The moments of contemplating that animal fear, when the
criminal sees that all is lost, but still struggles, still means to
struggle, the moments when every instinct of self-preservation rises up
in him at once and he looks at you with questioning and suffering eyes,
studies you, your face, your thoughts, uncertain on which side you will
strike, and his distracted mind frames thousands of plans in an
instant, but he is still afraid to speak, afraid of giving himself
away! This purgatory of the spirit, this animal thirst for
self-preservation, these humiliating moments of the human soul, are
awful, and sometimes arouse horror and compassion for the criminal even
in the lawyer. And this was what we all witnessed then.
“At first he was thunderstruck and in his terror dropped some very
compromising phrases. ‘Blood! I’ve deserved it!’ But he quickly
restrained himself. He had not prepared what he was to say, what answer
he was to make, he had nothing but a bare denial ready. ‘I am not
guilty of my father’s death.’ That was his fence for the moment and
behind it he hoped to throw up a barricade of some sort. His first
compromising exclamations he hastened to explain by declaring that he
was responsible for the death of the servant Grigory only. ‘Of that
bloodshed I am guilty, but who has killed my father, gentlemen, who has
killed him? Who can have killed him, _if not I_?’ Do you hear, he asked
us that, us, who had come to ask him that question! Do you hear that
phrase uttered with such premature haste—‘if not I’—the animal cunning,
the naïveté, the Karamazov impatience of it? ‘I didn’t kill him and you
mustn’t think I did! I wanted to kill him, gentlemen, I wanted to kill
him,’ he hastens to admit (he was in a hurry, in a terrible hurry),
‘but still I am not guilty, it is not I murdered him.’ He concedes to
us that he wanted to murder him, as though to say, you can see for
yourselves how truthful I am, so you’ll believe all the sooner that I
didn’t murder him. Oh, in such cases the criminal is often amazingly
shallow and credulous.
“At that point one of the lawyers asked him, as it were incidentally,
the most simple question, ‘Wasn’t it Smerdyakov killed him?’ Then, as
we expected, he was horribly angry at our having anticipated him and
caught him unawares, before he had time to pave the way to choose and
snatch the moment when it would be most natural to bring in
Smerdyakov’s name. He rushed at once to the other extreme, as he always
does, and began to assure us that Smerdyakov could not have killed him,
was not capable of it. But don’t believe him, that was only his
cunning; he didn’t really give up the idea of Smerdyakov; on the
contrary, he meant to bring him forward again; for, indeed, he had no
one else to bring forward, but he would do that later, because for the
moment that line was spoiled for him. He would bring him forward
perhaps next day, or even a few days later, choosing an opportunity to
cry out to us, ‘You know I was more skeptical about Smerdyakov than
you, you remember that yourselves, but now I am convinced. He killed
him, he must have done!’ And for the present he falls back upon a
gloomy and irritable denial. Impatience and anger prompted him,
however, to the most inept and incredible explanation of how he looked
into his father’s window and how he respectfully withdrew. The worst of
it was that he was unaware of the position of affairs, of the evidence
given by Grigory.
“We proceeded to search him. The search angered, but encouraged him,
the whole three thousand had not been found on him, only half of it.
And no doubt only at that moment of angry silence, the fiction of the
little bag first occurred to him. No doubt he was conscious himself of
the improbability of the story and strove painfully to make it sound
more likely, to weave it into a romance that would sound plausible. In
such cases the first duty, the chief task of the investigating lawyers,
is to prevent the criminal being prepared, to pounce upon him
unexpectedly so that he may blurt out his cherished ideas in all their
simplicity, improbability and inconsistency. The criminal can only be
made to speak by the sudden and apparently incidental communication of
some new fact, of some circumstance of great importance in the case, of
which he had no previous idea and could not have foreseen. We had such
a fact in readiness—that was Grigory’s evidence about the open door
through which the prisoner had run out. He had completely forgotten
about that door and had not even suspected that Grigory could have seen
it.
“The effect of it was amazing. He leapt up and shouted to us, ‘Then
Smerdyakov murdered him, it was Smerdyakov!’ and so betrayed the basis
of the defense he was keeping back, and betrayed it in its most
improbable shape, for Smerdyakov could only have committed the murder
after he had knocked Grigory down and run away. When we told him that
Grigory saw the door was open before he fell down, and had heard