The Brothers Karamazov
time.
“I have drunk it, gentlemen, I have ... but ... come, gentlemen, crush
me, punish me, decide my fate!” cried Mitya, staring with terribly
fixed wide-open eyes at the investigating lawyer.
“So you positively declare that you are not guilty of the death of your
father, Fyodor Pavlovitch?” asked the investigating lawyer, softly but
insistently.
“I am not guilty. I am guilty of the blood of another old man but not
of my father’s. And I weep for it! I killed, I killed the old man and
knocked him down.... But it’s hard to have to answer for that murder
with another, a terrible murder of which I am not guilty.... It’s a
terrible accusation, gentlemen, a knock-down blow. But who has killed
my father, who has killed him? Who can have killed him if I didn’t?
It’s marvelous, extraordinary, impossible.”
“Yes, who can have killed him?” the investigating lawyer was beginning,
but Ippolit Kirillovitch, the prosecutor, glancing at him, addressed
Mitya.
“You need not worry yourself about the old servant, Grigory
Vassilyevitch. He is alive, he has recovered, and in spite of the
terrible blows inflicted, according to his own and your evidence, by
you, there seems no doubt that he will live, so the doctor says, at
least.”
“Alive? He’s alive?” cried Mitya, flinging up his hands. His face
beamed. “Lord, I thank Thee for the miracle Thou has wrought for me, a
sinner and evildoer. That’s an answer to my prayer. I’ve been praying
all night.” And he crossed himself three times. He was almost
breathless.
“So from this Grigory we have received such important evidence
concerning you, that—” The prosecutor would have continued, but Mitya
suddenly jumped up from his chair.
“One minute, gentlemen, for God’s sake, one minute; I will run to her—”
“Excuse me, at this moment it’s quite impossible,” Nikolay Parfenovitch
almost shrieked. He, too, leapt to his feet. Mitya was seized by the
men with the metal plates, but he sat down of his own accord....
“Gentlemen, what a pity! I wanted to see her for one minute only; I
wanted to tell her that it has been washed away, it has gone, that
blood that was weighing on my heart all night, and that I am not a
murderer now! Gentlemen, she is my betrothed!” he said ecstatically and
reverently, looking round at them all. “Oh, thank you, gentlemen! Oh,
in one minute you have given me new life, new heart!... That old man
used to carry me in his arms, gentlemen. He used to wash me in the tub
when I was a baby three years old, abandoned by every one, he was like
a father to me!...”
“And so you—” the investigating lawyer began.
“Allow me, gentlemen, allow me one minute more,” interposed Mitya,
putting his elbows on the table and covering his face with his hands.
“Let me have a moment to think, let me breathe, gentlemen. All this is
horribly upsetting, horribly. A man is not a drum, gentlemen!”
“Drink a little more water,” murmured Nikolay Parfenovitch.
Mitya took his hands from his face and laughed. His eyes were
confident. He seemed completely transformed in a moment. His whole
bearing was changed; he was once more the equal of these men, with all
of whom he was acquainted, as though they had all met the day before,
when nothing had happened, at some social gathering. We may note in
passing that, on his first arrival, Mitya had been made very welcome at
the police captain’s, but later, during the last month especially,
Mitya had hardly called at all, and when the police captain met him, in
the street, for instance, Mitya noticed that he frowned and only bowed
out of politeness. His acquaintance with the prosecutor was less
intimate, though he sometimes paid his wife, a nervous and fanciful
lady, visits of politeness, without quite knowing why, and she always
received him graciously and had, for some reason, taken an interest in
him up to the last. He had not had time to get to know the
investigating lawyer, though he had met him and talked to him twice,
each time about the fair sex.
“You’re a most skillful lawyer, I see, Nikolay Parfenovitch,” cried
Mitya, laughing gayly, “but I can help you now. Oh, gentlemen, I feel
like a new man, and don’t be offended at my addressing you so simply
and directly. I’m rather drunk, too, I’ll tell you that frankly. I
believe I’ve had the honor and pleasure of meeting you, Nikolay
Parfenovitch, at my kinsman Miüsov’s. Gentlemen, gentlemen, I don’t
pretend to be on equal terms with you. I understand, of course, in what
character I am sitting before you. Oh, of course, there’s a horrible
suspicion ... hanging over me ... if Grigory has given evidence.... A
horrible suspicion! It’s awful, awful, I understand that! But to
business, gentlemen, I am ready, and we will make an end of it in one
moment; for, listen, listen, gentlemen! Since I know I’m innocent, we
can put an end to it in a minute. Can’t we? Can’t we?”
Mitya spoke much and quickly, nervously and effusively, as though he
positively took his listeners to be his best friends.
“So, for the present, we will write that you absolutely deny the charge
brought against you,” said Nikolay Parfenovitch, impressively, and
bending down to the secretary he dictated to him in an undertone what
to write.
“Write it down? You want to write that down? Well, write it; I consent,
I give my full consent, gentlemen, only ... do you see?... Stay, stay,
write this. Of disorderly conduct I am guilty, of violence on a poor
old man I am guilty. And there is something else at the bottom of my
heart, of which I am guilty, too—but that you need not write down” (he
turned suddenly to the secretary); “that’s my personal life, gentlemen,
that doesn’t concern you, the bottom of my heart, that’s to say.... But
of the murder of my old father I’m not guilty. That’s a wild idea. It’s
quite a wild idea!... I will prove you that and you’ll be convinced
directly.... You will laugh, gentlemen. You’ll laugh yourselves at your
suspicion!...”
“Be calm, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” said the investigating lawyer evidently
trying to allay Mitya’s excitement by his own composure. “Before we go
on with our inquiry, I should like, if you will consent to answer, to
hear you confirm the statement that you disliked your father, Fyodor
Pavlovitch, that you were involved in continual disputes with him. Here
at least, a quarter of an hour ago, you exclaimed that you wanted to
kill him: ‘I didn’t kill him,’ you said, ‘but I wanted to kill him.’”
“Did I exclaim that? Ach, that may be so, gentlemen! Yes, unhappily, I
did want to kill him ... many times I wanted to ... unhappily,
unhappily!”
“You wanted to. Would you consent to explain what motives precisely led
you to such a sentiment of hatred for your parent?”
“What is there to explain, gentlemen?” Mitya shrugged his shoulders
sullenly, looking down. “I have never concealed my feelings. All the
town knows about it—every one knows in the tavern. Only lately I
declared them in Father Zossima’s cell.... And the very same day, in
the evening I beat my father. I nearly killed him, and I swore I’d come
again and kill him, before witnesses.... Oh, a thousand witnesses! I’ve
been shouting it aloud for the last month, any one can tell you
that!... The fact stares you in the face, it speaks for itself, it
cries aloud, but feelings, gentlemen, feelings are another matter. You
see, gentlemen”—Mitya frowned—“it seems to me that about feelings
you’ve no right to question me. I know that you are bound by your
office, I quite understand that, but that’s my affair, my private,
intimate affair, yet ... since I haven’t concealed my feelings in the
past ... in the tavern, for instance, I’ve talked to every one, so ...
so I won’t make a secret of it now. You see, I understand, gentlemen,
that there are terrible facts against me in this business. I told every
one that I’d kill him, and now, all of a sudden, he’s been killed. So
it must have been me! Ha ha! I can make allowances for you, gentlemen,
I can quite make allowances. I’m struck all of a heap myself, for who
can have murdered him, if not I? That’s what it comes to, isn’t it? If
not I, who can it be, who? Gentlemen, I want to know, I insist on
knowing!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Where was he murdered? How was he
murdered? How, and with what? Tell me,” he asked quickly, looking at
the two lawyers.
“We found him in his study, lying on his back on the floor, with his
head battered in,” said the prosecutor.
“That’s horrible!” Mitya shuddered and, putting his elbows on the
table, hid his face in his right hand.
“We will continue,” interposed Nikolay Parfenovitch. “So what was it
that impelled you to this sentiment of hatred? You have asserted in
public, I believe, that it was based upon jealousy?”
“Well, yes, jealousy. And not only jealousy.”
“Disputes about money?”
“Yes, about money, too.”
“There was a dispute about three thousand roubles, I think, which you
claimed as part of your inheritance?”
“Three thousand! More, more,” cried Mitya hotly; “more than six
thousand, more than ten, perhaps. I told every one so, shouted it at
them. But I made up my mind to let it go at three thousand. I was
desperately in need of that three thousand ... so the bundle of notes
for three thousand that I knew he kept under his pillow, ready for
Grushenka, I considered as simply stolen from me. Yes, gentlemen, I
looked upon it as mine, as my own property....”
The prosecutor looked significantly at the investigating lawyer, and
had time to wink at him on the sly.
“We will return to that subject later,” said the lawyer promptly. “You
will allow us to note that point and write it down; that you looked
upon that money as your own property?”
“Write it down, by all means. I know that’s another fact that tells
against me, but I’m not afraid of facts and I tell them against myself.
Do you hear? Do you know, gentlemen, you take me for a different sort
of man from what I am,” he added, suddenly gloomy and dejected. “You
have to deal with a man of honor, a man of the highest honor; above
all—don’t lose sight of it—a man who’s done a lot of nasty things, but
has always been, and still is, honorable at bottom, in his inner being.
I don’t know how to express it. That’s just what’s made me wretched all
my life, that I yearned to be honorable, that I was, so to say, a
martyr to a sense of honor, seeking for it with a lantern, with the
lantern of Diogenes, and yet all my life I’ve been doing filthy things
like all of us, gentlemen ... that is like me alone. That was a
mistake, like me alone, me alone!... Gentlemen, my head aches ...” His
brows contracted with pain. “You see, gentlemen, I couldn’t bear the
look of him, there was something in him ignoble, impudent, trampling on
everything sacred, something sneering and irreverent, loathsome,
loathsome. But now that he’s dead, I feel differently.”
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t feel differently, but I wish I hadn’t hated him so.”
“You feel penitent?”
“No, not penitent, don’t write that. I’m not much good myself, I’m not
very beautiful, so I had no right to consider him repulsive. That’s
what I mean. Write that down, if you like.”
Saying this Mitya became very mournful. He had grown more and more
gloomy as the inquiry continued.
At that moment another unexpected scene followed. Though Grushenka had
been removed, she had not been taken far away, only into the room next
but one from the blue room, in which the examination was proceeding. It
was a little room with one window, next beyond the large room in which
they had danced and feasted so lavishly. She was sitting there with no
one by her but Maximov, who was terribly depressed, terribly scared,
and clung to her side, as though for security. At their door stood one
of the peasants with a metal plate on his breast. Grushenka was crying,