He grabbed him by the elbow and stood him in front of the mirror. Mitya saw his bloodstained face, shuddered, and frowned angrily.
‘Oh, hell! That’s all I need,’ he mumbled furiously, switched the banknotes from his right hand to his left hand, and abruptly pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket. But the handkerchief too was all soaked in blood (he had used it to wipe Grigory’s head and face), and there was hardly anywhere clean on it; it was not that it was beginning to dry out, rather it had become stiff and sticky. Mitya threw it down angrily.
‘Oh, hell! You wouldn’t have a piece of cloth… to wipe myself on…’
‘So it’s not your blood, you’re not hurt? You’d better have a wash,’ replied Pyotr Ilyich. ‘There’s a washstand over there, let me help you.’
‘Washstand? Fine… but what am I going to do with this?’ he said to Pyotr Ilyich in a very odd tone of voice, pointing to the wad of hundred-rouble notes with a questioning look, as though it were up to the latter to decide what he should do with the money.
‘Put it in your pocket or on the table here, no one’s going to steal it.’
‘In my pocket? Yes, in my pocket. Of course… No, you see, all this is crazy!’ he exclaimed, as though suddenly snapping out of his absent-mindedness. ‘Look, let’s do one thing at a time, you give me the pistols and here’s your money… because I need them, I have to have them… I’ve no time to lose, none at all…’
And, peeling off a hundred-rouble note, he proffered it to the clerk.
‘I haven’t got any change,’ said Perkhotin, ‘you wouldn’t have something smaller?’
‘No,’ said Mitya, taking another look at the wad, and, as if lacking confidence in his own words, he checked the top two or three notes with his fingers, ‘no, I’ve only got hundreds,’ he added, and again looked quizzically at Pyotr Ilyich.
‘How on earth did you get so much money?’ he asked. ‘Wait, I’ll ask my boy to run over to Plotnikov’s. They’re open quite late—perhaps they can change your money. Hey, Misha!’ he called to the boy in the entrance hall.
‘Plotnikov’s—that’s splendid!’ concurred Mitya enthusiastically, as though an idea had suddenly struck him. ‘Misha,’ he turned to the boy who had just entered, ‘look, run over to Plotnikov’s and tell them Dmitry Fyodorovich sends his regards and will be over himself shortly… But listen: ask them to get some champagne ready before I get there, say about three dozen bottles, and to pack it so I can take it with me, like that time when I went to Mokroye…’ He suddenly turned to Pyotr Ilyich, ‘I took four dozen that time. Don’t worry, Misha,’ he turned to the boy again, ‘they know already. And one more thing, ask them to include some cheese, some Strasburg pies, smoked salmon, ham, caviar, well, some of everything, all they’ve got, about a hundred or a hundred and twenty roubles’ worth, like last time… Oh, and one more thing: they mustn’t forget the dessert—some sweets, pears, two or three melons, four perhaps—well, no, one melon will do, but some chocolate, some boiled sweets, fruit drops, caramels—well, all the stuff they packed for me last time when I went to Mokroye… all together, including the champagne, it came to about three hundred roubles… Well, I want the same again this time. And don’t forget anything, Misha… by the way, you are Misha, aren’t you?… Is his name Misha?’ he turned to Pyotr Ilyich again.
‘Wait,’ interjected Pyotr Ilyich, gazing anxiously at him as he listened, ‘hadn’t you better tell them yourself when you’re in the shop, he’ll only get everything wrong.’
‘Yes he will, you’re quite right! Oh, Misha, and I was going to give you a hug as your commission… Look here, if you don’t get it all muddled up there’ll be ten roubles for you at the end, quick, hurry… Champagne, that’s the main thing, they’ve got to get the champagne ready, and brandy too, as well as red and white wine and all the rest of it, just like last time… They’ll know, like last time.’
‘Why don’t you listen!’ Pyotr Ilyich interrupted, growing impatient. ‘What I’m saying is: why doesn’t he just run over to change the money and tell them not to close yet, and then you go and place your order yourself… Let’s have that note of yours. Off you go, Misha, left right, left right!’ Clearly, Pyotr Ilyich deliberately ushered Misha away because he was rooted to the spot in front of the visitor, staring open-mouthed at the bloodstained face and shaking hands holding the wad of money, just standing there goggle-eyed with astonishment and horror, and probably understanding very little of Mitya’s instructions.
‘Well now, let’s give you a wash,’ Pyotr Ilyich said brusquely. ‘Put the money on the table or in your pocket. That’s right. Come on, take your coat off.’
He began to help him off with his coat, and suddenly exclaimed again:
‘Look, there’s blood on your coat too!’
‘No… not on the coat. Only a little round the sleeve here… It’s only here, where the handkerchief was. Must have seeped out of the pocket. At Fenya’s I sat on the handkerchief, and the blood must have seeped through,’ Mitya immediately explained with extraordinary candour. Pyotr Ilyich listened, frowning.
‘What on earth have you been up to? You must have been in a fight,’ he muttered.
They set about washing the blood off. Pyotr Ilyich held the jug and poured the water. Mitya was in a tearing hurry and was not soaping his hands properly. (They were shaking, Pyotr Ilyich recalled later.) Pyotr Ilyich immediately told him to use more soap and to scrub harder. It was as though he began to exert more and more authority over Mitya at that stage. It should be noted in passing that he was quite a bossy young man.
‘Look, you haven’t cleaned under your nails; go on, wash your face now, at the side here, by your ear… Aren’t you going to change your shirt before you go? Where are you going, anyway? Look, the cuff of your right sleeve is all covered in blood.’
‘Yes, blood,’ observed Mitya, scrutinizing the cuff of his shirt.
‘Change it.’
‘Haven’t got time. Look, I know what I’ll do…’, Mitya continued with the same trusting candour, as he put on his coat, having first wiped his face and hands on the towel, ‘I’ll roll back the cuff here, no one will see it under the coat… See!’
‘Now tell me what you’ve been doing. Did you have a fight with somebody, or what? Not in the tavern again, like the other time? You haven’t been dragging that Captain about and beating him up like you did before, have you?’ Pyotr Ilyich recalled with a note of reproach. ‘So who did you beat up this time… or kill, perhaps?’
‘Rubbish!’ said Mitya.
‘What do you mean, “rubbish”?’
‘Don’t go on about it,’ said Mitya, and smiled suddenly. ‘I knocked down an old woman in the town square.’
‘You knocked down an old woman?’
‘An old man, actually!’ said Mitya loudly, looking Pyotr Ilyich straight in the eye, laughing and shouting as if the latter were deaf.
‘An old man, an old woman, what’s the difference… Have you killed someone, or what?’
‘We’ve made up. We fell out—and made up. Somewhere or other. We parted friends. An idiot… but he’s forgiven me… he has now, that’s for sure… If he’d managed to get up, he wouldn’t have forgiven me,’ Mitya winked suddenly. ‘Only, you know, Pyotr Ilyich, he can go to hell, you hear me, he can go to hell, I’ve had enough! Right now—I’ve had enough!’ Mitya declared categorically.
‘What I meant was, you should be more careful who you associate with… like that stupid business that time with the Staff Captain… Now you get into a fight and then you rush off to paint the town red—typical! Three dozen bottles of champagne—why so much?’
‘Bravo! Now let’s have the pistols. Honestly, I haven’t got time. I really wish I could stay behind and talk to you, my dear fellow, but there isn’t any time to lose. And anyway, what’s the use, it’s too late for talking. Hey! Where’s the money, where did I put it?’ he shrieked, and began to go through his pockets.
‘On the table… you put it
there yourself. There it is. Have you forgotten? You really do treat money as though it grew on trees. Here are your pistols. It’s amazing, you pawned them just after five o’clock for ten roubles, and now look, you’ve got thousands. Two or three thousand, I wouldn’t mind betting.’
‘I’d say, three,’ Mitya said with a smile, thrusting the money into his left trouser-pocket.
‘You’ll lose it if you keep it there. Have you acquired a goldmine or something?’
‘A mine? A gold-mine!’ Mitya exclaimed at the top of his voice, and rocked with laughter. ‘Perkhotin, do you want to go prospecting for gold? There’s a lady here who’ll pay you three thousand on the nail to go there. She paid me all right, that’s how fond she is of gold-mines! Do you know Khokhlakova?’
‘Only by sight and what I’ve heard. Did she really give you three thousand? Just like that?’ Pyotr Ilyich looked highly incredulous.
‘Tomorrow, when the sun, the eternally youthful Phoebus, praising and glorifying God,* leaps into the sky, go to Khokhlakova and ask her whether or not she gave me three thousand. Do that.’
‘I wouldn’t know how things stand between you two… but if you say so, then she must have given it to you… And you, of course, having got your hands on the money, instead of going to Siberia you’re going on the rampage… But where are you really off to now, eh?’
‘To Mokroye.’
‘Mokroye? At this time of night?’
‘Mastryuk* had aplenty, now his hands are empty!’ Mitya said suddenly.
‘ “Empty”? All those thousands, and you say empty?’
‘I don’t mean the thousands. To hell with the thousands! I mean women’s moods:
Woman’s love is fickle—
Unreliable, deceitful.*
I agree with Ulysses, he said it.’
‘I don’t understand you!’
‘Am I drunk?’
‘You’re worse than drunk.’
‘My soul is, Pyotr Ilyich, my soul is drunk, but enough of that, enough…’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Loading a pistol.’
Mitya had indeed opened the case containing the pistols, undone the powder-horn, carefully poured in the charge and rammed it down. Then, taking a bullet between finger and thumb, he held it up to the candle-flame.
‘Why are you looking at the bullet?’ Pyotr Ilyich asked anxiously.
‘No reason. Just thinking. Listen, if you were planning to blow your brain out with this bullet, wouldn’t you like to have a good look at it before inserting it into the barrel?’
‘Why look at it?’
‘It’s going to go through my brains, so I was just curious to see what it looks like… On second thoughts, it’s all a lot of nonsense, utter nonsense. There, that’s done it,’ he added, having inserted the bullet and rammed it tight with hemp. ‘My dear Pyotr Ilyich, nothing, but nothing makes sense, if only you knew how desperately true that is! Give me a piece of paper.’
‘Here you are.’
‘No, a clean piece, not a crumpled one, a piece of writing-paper. Yes, that’ll do.’ And, grabbing a pen that was lying on the table, Mitya quickly wrote a couple of lines, folded the piece of paper in four, and thrust it into his waistcoat-pocket. He put the pistols in the case, locked it, and picked it up. Then he looked at Pyotr Ilyich and gave him a long, thoughtful smile.
‘Now let’s go,’ he said.
‘Go where? No, wait… so you want to blow your brains out with that bullet, do you?…’ Pyotr Ilyich asked in alarm.
‘Never mind the bullet! I want to live, I love life! Don’t ever forget that. I love the golden-haired Phoebus and his warming rays… My dear Pyotr Ilyich, do you know how one makes oneself scarce, do you?’
‘What do you mean, “makes oneself scarce”?’
‘To clear off. To make way for the beloved one and for the hated one. So that the hated also becomes the beloved. That’s what I mean by making oneself scarce! To say to them: God speed, carry on, go right ahead, while I…’
‘While you…?’
‘Enough, let’s go.’
‘My God,’ Pyotr Ilyich said, looking at him, ‘I really will have to tell them to stop you from going there. Why on earth would you want to go to Mokroye now, anyway?’
‘There’s a woman there, a woman, and that’s the end of the matter, Pyotr Ilyich, just forget about it!’
‘Listen, you may be a bit of a wild one, but I’ve always had a soft spot for you somehow… that’s why I’m worried.’
‘Thank you, my friend. I’m a wild one, you say. The wild ones, the wild ones! That’s what I keep saying to myself: the wild ones! Ah, look, here’s Misha, I’d forgotten all about him.’
Misha entered breathless, clutching a wad of banknotes, and announced that the Plotnikovs were ‘all in a tizzy’ and were sorting out the bottles, the cured fish, the tea—it would all be ready soon. Mitya took a ten-rouble note and gave it to Pyotr Ilyich, and threw another ten-rouble note to Misha.
‘Don’t!’ shouted Pyotr Ilyich. ‘Not in my house, you shouldn’t spoil him so. Put your money away, here, that’s right, why squander it? Come the morrow you’ll need it, and you’ll be back asking for another ten roubles. Why are you putting it in your side pocket? You’ll lose it, you know!’
‘Listen, my friend, why don’t we go to Mokroye together?’
‘Why should I go there?’
‘Listen, if you want I’ll open a bottle now and we’ll drink to life! I want to have a drink, especially with you. We’ve never had a drink before, have we?’
‘We can have one at the tavern, I suppose; let’s go, I was on my way there myself.’
‘No time to go to the tavern, let’s go to the back room at Plotnikov’s instead. I say, do you want me to set you a riddle?’
‘Go on then.’
Mitya produced the piece of paper from his waistcoat-pocket, unfolded it, and showed it to him. On it, in large, bold letters, was written:
‘To punish myself for what I have done with my life, with my whole life.’
‘I’m really going to go and tell someone, I’m going to go and tell someone straight away,’ said Pyotr Ilyich, after he had read the piece of paper.
‘You won’t have time, my dear fellow, let’s go and have a drink, come on!’
Plotnikov’s was situated only about a block away, on the corner of the street. It was the principal grocer’s in our town, and a very good one it has to be said, owned by a family of rich merchants. It had everything, all kinds of groceries: wines ‘bottled by Yeliseyev Bros’, fruit, cigars, tea, sugar, coffee, and much else besides. There were always three shop assistants in attendance, and the two delivery boys were kept constantly busy. Although our district had become impoverished, many landowners having left and trade generally having become slack, grocery sales were booming with every passing year, as never before, and there was no lack of customers. Mitya was eagerly awaited at the shop. Everyone remembered only too well that three or four weeks previously he had also bought a few hundred roubles’ worth of all kinds of groceries and wines in one go, cash down (no one of course would have advanced him credit), and they also remembered that on that occasion too he had been clutching a whole wad of hundred-rouble notes which he had spent freely, with gay abandon, and without stopping to explain why he needed to buy so much food and wine, and so on. It was the talk of the town afterwards, that having gone to Mokroye with Grushenka he had in the course of just twenty-four hours squandered some three thousand roubles and had returned from his revels utterly cleaned out, without a kopeck to his name. He had invited a whole crowd of gypsies (recently encamped in the neighbourhood), and in just two days they had relieved him, drunk as he was, of a huge sum of money and had consumed vast quantities of expensive wine. People recounted with laughter how Mitya had got the local bumpkins drunk on champagne and had plied the village girls and women with sweets and Strasburg pies. They also laughed, especially in the tavern, at Mitya’s own candid and un
solicited admission (no one laughed in his face of course, for that would have been too dangerous) that, in return for the entire escapade, all that Grushenka had granted him was permission to kiss her foot, and that she had not allowed him to go any further.
When Mitya and Pyotr Ilyich approached the shop they found an already harnessed troika outside, caparisoned with bells, a carpet-rug flung across the seat, and the driver Andrei waiting for Mitya. In the shop they had almost finished packing a box with provisions, and were only waiting for Mitya to appear before nailing down the lid and loading it on to the carriage. Pyotr Ilyich was astounded.
‘How did you manage to get hold of a troika?’ he asked Mitya.
‘On my way here I met Andrei and told him to bring it straight to the shop. Why waste time! Last time I came with Timofei, but he’s already left, he’s gone on ahead with a certain enchantress. Andrei, are we going to be very late?’
‘They might only be about an hour ahead of us, perhaps not even that, perhaps not as much as an hour!’ Andrei responded enthusiastically. ‘It was I who got Timofei ready for the journey, so I know how fast he’ll be going. Nowhere near as fast as us, Dmitry Fyodorovich, we’ll leave them standing. They won’t even get there an hour ahead of us!’ Andrei concluded cheerfully; he was a gaunt, red-haired, middle-aged man in a poddyovka,* an armyak* slung over his left arm.
‘There’s fifty roubles’ drinking-money for you if you get there not more than an hour after him!’
‘I can guarantee it won’t be more than an hour, Dmitry Fyodorovich, not even half an hour, come to that.’
Though Mitya busied himself with giving orders, he spoke and issued instructions in a somewhat strange manner, disjointedly rather than logically. He would start a conversation and forget to finish it. Pyotr Ilyich thought it necessary to intervene and help him.
‘Four hundred roubles’ worth,’ commanded Mitya, ‘not less than four hundred roubles’ worth, just like last time. Four dozen bottles of champagne, not a bottle less.’
The Karamazov Brothers Page 62