The Karamazov Brothers

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  At this point, before he had finished speaking, Mitya leapt to his feet.

  ‘Rubbish!’ he yelled, beside himself. ‘It’s a filthy lie! He couldn’t have seen the door open, because it was shut at the time… He’s lying!…’

  ‘I repeat, it is my duty to tell you that his evidence is unshakeable. He’s absolutely convinced about it. He is adamant. We questioned him several times.’

  ‘That’s right, it was I who put the question to him several times!’ confirmed Nikolai Parfenovich passionately, in his turn.

  ‘It’s not true, that’s not true!’ Mitya kept shouting. ‘It’s either a fabrication or the ravings of a lunatic, he was simply raving, what with the blood and the wound, he just imagined things when he came to… Not surprising!’

  ‘Yes, but he noticed the open door not after he regained consciousness following the attack, but before, as he was entering the garden from the outhouse.’

  ‘But that’s not true, it isn’t, it can’t be! He’s lying to spite me… He couldn’t have seen it… I didn’t run out through the door,’ Mitya was gasping for breath.

  The prosecutor turned towards Nikolai Parfenovich and said gravely:

  ‘Show it to him.’

  ‘Are you familiar with this object?’ Nikolai Parfenovich placed on the table a large, stiff, business-size envelope, which still bore the remains of three seals. The envelope itself was empty and was torn open on one side. Mitya stared at it in wide-eyed amazement.

  ‘It’s… it’s father’s envelope, I’m sure,’ he mumbled, ‘the one that contained the three thousand… and where he’s written, if you look, “to my chicky-bird”… Here we are: three thousand!’ he exclaimed. ‘Three thousand, you see?’

  ‘Yes, of course we can see, but we didn’t find any money in it, it was empty and lying on the floor, by the bed, behind the screen.’

  For a few seconds Mitya stood thunderstruck.

  ‘Gentlemen, it was Smerdyakov!’ he yelled out suddenly, at the top of his voice, ‘he’s the one who killed him, he’s the one who robbed him! He was the only one who knew where the old man had hidden the envelope… It was him, now it’s clear!’

  ‘But surely you knew about the envelope, too, and that it was under the pillow.’

  ‘I never knew that! I never saw it before, this is the first time I’ve actually seen it; Smerdyakov mentioned it to me before, but that’s all… He was the only one who knew where the old man had hidden it, I didn’t…’, Mitya shouted breathlessly.

  ‘The fact remains, you told us yourself just now that the envelope was lying under your father’s pillow. Those were your very words, “under the pillow”, so you must have known where it was kept.’

  ‘That’s what we wrote down,’ Nikolai Parfenovich confirmed.

  ‘Rubbish, that’s absurd! I had no idea it was under the pillow. And who knows, perhaps it wasn’t under the pillow at all… I just said “under the pillow” without thinking… What did Smerdyakov tell you? Did you ask him where it was kept? What did he say? That’s what matters… As for me, I deliberately made it up against myself… I blurted it out without suspecting it might have been under the pillow, and now you… It was a silly lie, the sort of thing you sometimes say on the spur of the moment. But in fact it was only Smerdyakov who knew, just Smerdyakov and nobody else!… He didn’t reveal to me where it was kept either! But it was him, it was him; he killed him, it’s all perfectly clear to me now,’ Mitya kept shouting more and more frantically, repeating himself incoherently and becoming increasingly distraught and aggressive. ‘Don’t you understand, you’ve got to hurry up and arrest him, hurry… He killed him, after I had run away and while Grigory was lying senseless, that’s plain now… He gave the signal, and father opened the door for him… Because only he knew the signal, and without the signal father would never have opened the door to anyone…’

  ‘But again you’re forgetting,’ remarked the prosecutor as calmly as ever, but with a note of triumph in his voice now, ‘that there was no need to give any signal, since the door was already open while you were there, while you were still in the garden…’

  ‘The door, the door,’ mumbled Mitya, staring at the prosecutor, and slumped helplessly into his chair. No one said a word.

  ‘Yes, the door!… The damned door! God is against me!’ he exclaimed, staring blankly ahead.

  ‘You see,’ said the prosecutor pompously, ‘judge for yourself now, Dmitry Fyodorovich: on the one hand, we have the evidence of the open door through which you ran out into the garden—a highly incriminating piece of evidence, you have to agree—on the other hand, there’s your incomprehensible, stubborn, and almost pathological secretiveness regarding the origin of the money which you suddenly had in your hands, despite the fact that, just three hours previously, you had according to your own testimony pledged your pistols in order to obtain a paltry ten roubles! In view of all this, judge for yourself—what are we to believe and what are we to make of it? And don’t berate us for being “cold, derisive cynics”, incapable of being moved by the noble sentiments of your soul… Try, on the contrary, to see it from our point of view…’

  Mitya was in the most extreme state of agitation. He went pale.

  ‘All right!’ he exclaimed suddenly. ‘I’ll reveal my secret, I’ll tell you where I got the money from!… I’ll reveal my disgrace, so that I won’t blame either you or myself later…’

  ‘And rest assured, Dmitry Fyodorovich,’ intoned Nikolai Parfenovich in a soft, gleefully unctuous voice, ‘that any genuine and full admission on your part, especially if you make it at this juncture, may subsequently count inestimably in mitigation, and may even…’

  But the prosecutor nudged him lightly under the table, and he stopped himself just in time. Mitya, in fact, was not even listening.

  7

  MITYA’S GREAT SECRET. HE IS MADE A LAUGHING-STOCK

  ‘GENTLEMEN,’ he began in the same agitated tone of voice, ‘that money… I want to make a full confession… that money was mine.’

  Both the prosecutor and the magistrate stared at him open-mouthed; this was not at all what they had expected to hear.

  ‘What do you mean “yours”?’ mumbled Nikolai Parfenovich. ‘By your own admission, at five o’clock that same day…’

  ‘To hell with five o’clock that same day and my own admission—that’s beside the point! That money was mine, mine I say, that is, mine because I stole it… it wasn’t money I already had, I stole it, fifteen hundred roubles, and I had it on me all the time…’

  ‘But where did you get it?’

  ‘From my neck, gentlemen, from my neck, from this here neck of mine… I had it here, round my neck, sewn into a piece of cloth and hanging round my neck for ages, it’s been a month now that I’ve been carrying it round my neck in shame and ignominy.’

  ‘Yes, but from whom did you… appropriate it?’

  ‘You mean who did I steal it from? Stop beating about the bush. Yes, I suppose I might just as well have stolen it, appropriated it, if you wish. But the way I look at it, I stole it. And last night I really stole it.’

  ‘Last night? But didn’t you just say you got it… a month ago?’

  ‘Yes, but not from father—oh no, don’t worry, I didn’t steal it from father—but from her. Let me give you the full story, and don’t interrupt. It’s not going to be easy for me. You see, a month ago Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva, my former fiancée, asked me to go and see her… You know her, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I know you do. You couldn’t ask for a nobler person, she’s gold, pure gold, but she can’t stand the sight of me, hasn’t been able to do so for a long time now… and rightly, justifiably so!’

  ‘Katerina Ivanovna?’ the magistrate asked with surprise. The prosecutor, too, stared wide-eyed.

  ‘Don’t bandy her name about! I’m a scoundrel to have dragged her name into it. I could see she hated the sight of me… all along… right from the very beginn
ing, when she first came to my lodgings… But enough, that’s enough, you’re not fit even to know about it, so let’s not discuss the matter. All you need to know is that she saw me over a month ago, gave me three thousand roubles, some of which was to be sent to her sister and the remainder to a relative of hers in Moscow (as though she couldn’t have sent it herself!), and I… this coincided exactly with that fateful hour in my life when I… in short, just when I fell in love with the other one, with her, my current one, the one you’ve got downstairs now, Grushenka… I whisked her off to Mokroye then, and in two days blew half of that damned three thousand, fifteen hundred in other words, but I still kept the other half. Well, it was that fifteen hundred which I was carrying around my neck like an amulet, and yesterday I tore it open and blew the rest of the money. What you’ve got in your hands now, Nikolai Parfenovich, is the eight hundred roubles change, the change from the fifteen hundred I had yesterday.’

  ‘Just a moment, let’s get this straight; a month ago you spent three thousand here, not fifteen hundred, everybody knows that, don’t they?’

  ‘Who does? Who counted? Did I let anybody count?’

  ‘Look here, it was you yourself who went around telling everybody at the time that you had spent exactly three thousand.’

  ‘True, I did say that, I told the whole town about it, and the whole town buzzed, and everybody believed that it was three thousand, and here in Mokroye they believed it too. Nevertheless, the fact remains that I spent fifteen hundred and not three thousand then—I stitched the remaining fifteen hundred into a makeshift purse; that’s how it was, gentlemen, that’s where I got the fifteen hundred I had last night…’

  ‘That’s almost incredible…’, mumbled Nikolai Parfenovich.

  ‘May I ask you’, the prosecutor spoke at last, ‘if you have revealed this circumstance to anyone else… that is, that you kept that fifteen hundred to yourself?’

  ‘I haven’t told anyone.’

  ‘That’s strange. You really mean to say you haven’t told anyone?’

  ‘No one at all. I said no one, I meant no one.’

  ‘But why such secrecy? What compelled you to make such a mystery of it? Let me put it this way: you have finally forced yourself to reveal your secret to us, a very shameful one according to you, although in effect—that is, speaking purely relatively of course—that action—to be precise the appropriation, no doubt just as a short-term expedient, of someone else’s three thousand roubles—that action was—the way I look at it, anyway, and taking into account your character—at worst, one of absolute stupidity rather than of wickedness… Well, granted, it may have been reckless in the extreme, but reckless as distinct from perfidious… That is to say, what I’m getting at is that, quite apart from your admission, many people in the town over this past month already had a shrewd idea about those squandered three thousand roubles of Miss Verkhovtseva’s—I heard the story myself… Mikhail Makarovich, for example, heard it too. In the end it wasn’t just a story, it had become the talk of the town. Besides, there is the suggestion, if I’m not mistaken, that you yourself admitted to someone that you had got this money from Miss Verkhovtseva… And so I can’t help wondering why, until now, until this very last moment, you should have made such a mystery of this fifteen hundred roubles which, you say, you had retained, thus turning this secret of yours into a kind of phobia… It’s incredible that such a secret could have caused you so much heartache to reveal… you even shouted just now that you’d rather go to the salt-mines than reveal it…’

  The prosecutor stopped. He was agitated. He had not concealed his mortification, his anger almost, and had poured out all his frustrations disjointedly and almost incoherently, even at the expense of niceties of style.

  ‘The ignominy consisted not in the fifteen hundred, but in the fact that I had taken it from the three thousand,’ Mitya said firmly.

  ‘But what’, the prosecutor smirked with irritation, ‘what’s so ignominious about splitting the three thousand which you’d recklessly and, if you wish, ignominiously appropriated, into two parts as you saw fit? Surely, what’s more important is that you appropriated the three thousand, rather than how you chose to dispose of it. By the way, why in fact did you split it into two parts? What for, what was the purpose behind it, would you mind explaining that to us?’

  ‘Gentlemen, the purpose is the whole point!’ exclaimed Mitya. ‘I split it out of sheer depravity, deliberately, mind you, because in this case it’s the deliberation which is the essence of the depravity… And I kept it up for a whole month!’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You amaze me. Come to think of it, though, I will explain; perhaps it really is difficult to understand. You see—it’s like this—I pocket the three thousand entrusted to me on my honour; I then go on a spree with it, I blow every last kopeck, and next morning I go to her and say: “I’m sorry, Katya, I’ve spent your three thousand,” well, how about that? It won’t do, will it? It’s mean and dishonourable, I’m an animal, and, animal-like, I’ve been unable to subdue my baser instincts, isn’t that so? Yet I’m not a thief, am I? Not an out-and-out thief, not really, you must agree! I blew the money, but I didn’t steal it! Now a second, a more exciting version—listen carefully, I’ll get all muddled again if I’m not careful—I feel a bit dizzy—and so, version number two: I go through only fifteen hundred here out of the three thousand, half, in other words. Next day I go to her with the other half: “Katya, take this half of your money from me, villain and scoundrel that I am, because I’ve already blown half and I’m bound to blow the other half too—I won’t be able to resist the temptation!” Well, what’s the verdict in this case? Anything you like—an animal, a scoundrel, but not a thief, not yet anyway, because, had I been a thief, I’d surely not have returned the remaining half. I’d have pocketed that too. This way, however, she can see that if the fellow has returned half, he’ll come up with the rest too, in other words what he’s already spent; he’ll go on trying all his life, he’ll slave his guts out, but he’ll come up with it in the end and pay it back. This way, he’s a scoundrel but not a thief—oh no, say what you like, but he’s not a thief!’

  ‘Fair enough, let’s assume there is a distinction,’ the prosecutor smiled coldly. ‘What is puzzling, however, is that you should see it as such a fateful distinction.’

  ‘Yes, I see it as a fateful distinction! Anyone can be a scoundrel—and, come to think of it, everyone is—but not anyone can be a thief, it takes an arch-scoundrel to be a thief. All right, let’s not split hairs… It’s just that a thief is more scurrilous than a scoundrel. Listen: I carry the money about with me for a whole month, any day I can decide to give it back and I’ll no longer be a scoundrel, but the trouble is, I can’t bring myself to make that decision, no matter how hard I try every day and no matter how much I keep repeating to myself every day: “Do it, go on, do it, you scoundrel,” a whole month goes by and I still haven’t done it, that’s what! Well, is that a good thing in your view, is it?’

  ‘Granted, it’s not a good thing, that I can understand very well and I wouldn’t argue about it,’ the prosecutor replied with restraint. ‘However, let us not indulge in any debates about niceties and fine distinctions; if you don’t mind, can we please return to the matter in hand. And that is that, despite our requests, you still have not given us an explanation as to why you split the three thousand roubles in the first place, that is, why you frittered away one half and kept the other. Precisely why did you keep it, and exactly how did you intend to spend the fifteen hundred which you had kept? I insist you answer this question, Dmitry Fyodorovich.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course!’ exclaimed Mitya, slapping his forehead. ‘I do beg your pardon, I’ve been keeping you on tenterhooks, and I haven’t got around to explaining the main thing, otherwise you’d have understood in a flash, because it’s in the intent, the depravity lies in the intent of it all! You see, it was all the fault of that old devil, my late father, he kept tryin
g to lure Agrafena Aleksandrovna away, making me jealous and convincing me that she couldn’t make up her mind between me and him; so each day I thought, what if she suddenly came to a decision, what if she got tired of torturing me and suddenly said: “It’s you I love, not him, take me to the ends of the earth.” And all I had was two twenty-kopeck coins! How was I going to take her away? What was I to do? I’d have been lost. You see, at the time I didn’t know what she was like, I thought she was after money and wouldn’t put up with my being poor. So that’s why I was crafty, counted out half the three thousand and sewed it up in this makeshift purse with a needle, all in cold blood, I sewed it up quite premeditatedly, before I even went on the spree, and only after I’d done that did I set off to paint the town red with the other half! That’s a bit thick, isn’t it! Do you understand now?’

  The prosecutor simply burst out laughing, as did the magistrate.

  ‘In my opinion, it was even prudent and moral of you to restrain yourself and not squander it all,’ giggled Nikolai Parfenovich. ‘For the life of me, I can’t see what’s wrong in that.’