Текст книги "The Brothers Karamazov"
Автор книги: Федор Достоевский
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There was one fleeting detail in Katerina Ivanovna’s errand that also interested him greatly: when Katerina Ivanovna mentioned that a little boy, a schoolboy, the captain’s son, had run beside his father, crying loudly, the thought flashed through Alyosha’s mind even then that this boy must be the same schoolboy who had bitten his finger when he, Alyosha, asked him how he had offended him. Now Alyosha was almost sure of it, though he did not know why. Thus, drawn to other thoughts, he became distracted and decided not to “think” about the “disaster” he had just caused, not to torment himself with remorse, but to go about his business, and let be what came. With that thought, he finally cheered up. Incidentally, as he turned into the lane where his brother Dmitri lived, he felt hungry, pulled from his pocket the loaf he had taken from his father, and ate it as he walked. This fortified him.
Dmitri was not at home. The owners of the little house—an old cabinetmaker, his son, and an old woman, his wife—even looked at Alyosha with suspicion. “It’s three days now since he’s slept here, maybe he’s vacated somewhere,” the old man replied to Alyosha’s urgent inquiries. Alyosha realized that he was answering on instructions. When he asked whether he might be at Grushenka’s, or hiding at Foma’s again (Alyosha used these confidences deliberately), the owners all even looked at him with alarm. “So they love him, they’re on his side,” thought Alyosha, “that’s good.”
At last he found Mrs. Kalmykov’s house on Lake Street, a decrepit, lopsided little house, with only three windows looking out onto the street, and a dirty courtyard, in the middle of which a cow stood solitarily. The entry to the front hall was through the courtyard; on the left side of the hall lived the old landlady with her elderly daughter, both apparently deaf. In reply to his question about the captain, repeated several times, one of them finally understood that he was asking for the tenants and jabbed with her finger across the hall, pointing at the door to the front room. Indeed, the captain’s lodgings turned out to be just a peasant cottage. Alyosha already had his hand on the iron door-pull when he was suddenly struck by the unusual silence behind the door. Yet he knew from what Katerina Ivanovna had told him that the retired captain was a family man: “Either they’re all asleep, or perhaps they heard me come and are waiting for me to open the door. I’d better knock first,” and he knocked. An answer came, though not at once but perhaps even ten seconds later.
“Who are you?” someone shouted in a loud and forcedly angry voice.
Alyosha then opened the door and stepped across the threshold. He found himself in a room that was rather spacious but extremely cluttered both with people and with all kinds of domestic chattels. To the left was a big Russian stove. From the stove to the window on the left, across the entire room, a line was strung, on which all sorts of rags were hanging. Along the two walls to left and right stood beds covered with knitted blankets. On one of them, the left one, was erected a pile of four cotton-covered pillows, each one smaller than the next. On the other bed, to the right, only one very small pillow could be seen. Further, in the front corner, there was a small space closed off by a curtain or a sheet, also thrown over a line stretched across the corner. Behind this curtain could be glimpsed another bed, made up against the wall on a bench with a chair placed beside it. A simple, rectangular wooden peasant table had been moved from the front corner to the middle window. The three windows, each with four small, green, mildewed panes, were very dim and tightly shut, so that the room was rather stuffy and none too bright. On the table sat a frying pan with the remains of some fried eggs in it, a bitten piece of bread, and, in addition, a half-pint bottle with the faint remnants of earthly blessings at the bottom. On a chair by the left bed sat a woman who looked like a lady, wearing a cotton dress. Her face was very thin and yellow; her extremely sunken cheeks betrayed at first glance her sickly condition. But most of all Alyosha was struck by the look in the poor lady’s eyes—an intensely questioning, and at the same time terribly haughty, look. And until the moment when the lady herself began to speak, all the while Alyosha was talking with the husband, she kept looking in the same haughty and questioning way, with her large brown eyes, from one speaker to the other. Next to this lady, at the left window, stood a young girl with a rather homely face and thin, reddish hair, poorly, though quite neatly, dressed. She eyed Alyosha with disgust as he came in. To the right, also near the bed, sat yet another female person. This was a very pitiful creature, also a young girl, about twenty years old, but hunchbacked and crippled, with withered legs, as Alyosha was told later. Her crutches stood nearby, in the corner, between the bed and the wall. The remarkably beautiful and kind eyes of the poor girl looked at Alyosha with a sort of quiet meekness. At the table, finishing the fried eggs, sat a gentleman of about forty-five, small, lean, weakly built, with reddish hair, and a thin red beard rather like an old whiskbroom (this comparison, and particularly the word whiskbroom,for some reason flashed through Alyosha’s mind at first glance, as he later recalled). Obviously it was this same gentleman who had shouted, “Who are you?” from behind the door, since there was no other man in the room. But when Alyosha entered, he all but flew from the bench on which he was sitting at the table, and, hastily wiping his mouth with a tattered napkin, rushed up to Alyosha.
“A monk begging for the monastery—he’s come to the right place!” the girl standing in the left corner meanwhile said loudly. But the gentleman who had run up to Alyosha immediately turned on his heel to her, and in an excited, somehow faltering voice, answered her:
“No, ma’am, Varvara Nikolaevna, that’s not it, you’ve got it wrong! Allow me to ask in my turn, sir,” he suddenly wheeled around to Alyosha again, “what has urged you, sir, to visit ... these depths?”
Alyosha looked at him attentively; it was the first time in his life he had seen the man. There was something angular, hurried, and irritable in him. Although he had obviously just been drinking, he was not drunk. His face expressed a sort of extreme insolence, and at the same time—which was strange—an obvious cowardice. He looked like a man who had been submissive for a long time and suffered much, but had suddenly jumped up and tried to assert himself. Or, better still, like a man who wants terribly to hit you, but is terribly afraid that you are going to hit him. In his speech and the intonations of his rather shrill voice could be heard a sort of crack-brained humor, now spiteful, now timid, faltering, and unable to sustain its tone. The question about “depths” he had asked all atremble, as it were, rolling his eyes, and jumping up to Alyosha, so close that Alyosha mechanically took a step back. The gentleman was wearing a coat of some sort of dark, rather shabby nankeen, stained and mended. His trousers were of a sort of extremely light color, such as no one had even been wearing for a long time, checkered, and made of some thin fabric, crumpled at the cuffs and therefore bunched upwards, as if he had outgrown them like a little boy.
“I am ... Alexei Karamazov ... ,” Alyosha said in reply.
“That I am quite able to understand, sir,” the gentleman immediately snapped, letting it be known that he was aware, even without that, of who Alyosha was. “And I am Captain, sir, for my part, Snegiryov, sir; but still it would be desirable to know precisely what has urged you to...”
“Oh, I just stopped by. As a matter of fact, I’d like very much to have a word with you ... if I may...”
“In that case, here is a chair, sir, pray be seated, sir. As they used to say in the old comedies: ‘Pray be seated ...,’” and with a quick gesture the captain seized an empty chair (a simple peasant one, all wood, not upholstered with anything) and placed it almost in the middle of the room; then, seizing another chair, just like the first, for himself, he sat facing Alyosha, as close up to him as before, so that their knees almost touched.
“Nikolai Ilyich Snegiryov, sir, former captain in the Russian infantry, sir, disgraced by his vices, but still a captain. I should have said Captain Yessirov instead of Snegiryov, because it’s only in the second half of my life that I’ve started saying ‘Yessir.’ ‘Yessir’ is acquired in humiliation.”
“That’s very true,” Alyosha smiled, “but is it acquired unwillingly or deliberately?”
“Unwillingly, God knows. I never used to say it, all my life I never used to say ‘sir.’ Suddenly I fell down and got up full of ‘sirs.’ It’s the work of a higher power. I see that you’re interested in contemporary problems. Yet how can I have aroused such curiosity, living as I do in conditions that render the exercise of hospitality impossible?”
“I’ve come ... about that matter...”
“About what matter?” the captain interrupted impatiently.
“Concerning that encounter of yours with my brother, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” Alyosha blurted out awkwardly.
“Which encounter, sir? You mean that one, sir? The one concerning the whiskbroom, the old whiskbroom?” he suddenly moved so close that this time he positively hit Alyosha with his knees. His lips somehow peculiarly compressed themselves into a thread.
“What whiskbroom?” Alyosha mumbled.
“He came to complain to you about me, papa!” a boy’s voice, already familiar to Alyosha, cried from behind the curtain in the corner. “It was his finger I bit today!”
The curtain was pulled aside, and Alyosha saw his recent enemy, in the corner, under the icons, on the little bed made up on a bench and a chair. The boy was lying under his own coat and an old quilted cotton blanket. He was obviously not well, and, judging by his burning eyes, was in a fever. He looked fearlessly at Alyosha now, unlike the first time: “See, I’m at home now, you can’t get me.”
“Bit what finger?” the captain jumped up a little from his chair. “Was it your finger he bit, sir?”
“Yes, mine. Today he was throwing stones with some boys in the street; the six of them were throwing at him, and he was alone. I came up to him, and he threw a stone at me, too, then another one, at my head. I asked him what I had done to him. He suddenly rushed at me and bit my finger badly, I don’t know why.”
“A whipping, right now, sir! A whipping this very minute, sir,” the captain now jumped all the way out of his chair.
“But I’m not complaining at all, I was simply telling you ... I don’t want you to whip him at all. Besides, he seems to be ill now ...”
“And did you think I’d whip him, sir? That I’d take Ilyushechka and whip him right now, in front of you, for your full satisfaction? How soon would you like it done, sir?” said the captain, suddenly turning to Alyosha with such a gesture that he seemed as if he were going to leap at him. “I am sorry, my dear sir, about your poor little finger, but before I go whipping Ilyushechka maybe you’d like me to chop off these four fingers, right here, in front of your eyes, for your righteous satisfaction, with this very knife? Four fingers, I think, should be enough for you, sir, to satisfy your thirst for revenge, you won’t demand the fifth one, sir ... ?” he suddenly stopped as if he were suffocating. Every feature of his face was moving and twitching, and he looked extremely defiant. He was as if in a frenzy.
“I think I understand it all now,” Alyosha replied softly and sadly, without getting up. “So your boy is a good boy, he loves his father, and he attacked me as your offender’s brother ... I understand it now,” he repeated, pondering. “But my brother, Dmitri Fyodorovich, repents of his act, I know, and if it were only possible for him to come to you, or, best of all, to meet you again in the same place, he would ask your forgiveness in front of everyone ... if you wish.”
“You mean he pulls my beard out and then asks my forgiveness ... and it’s all over and everyone’s satisfied, is that it, sir?” “Oh, no, on the contrary, he will do whatever you want and however you want!”
“So if I asked his excellency to go down on his knees to me in that very tavern, sir—the ‘Metropolis’ by name—or in the public square, he would do it?”
“Yes, he would even go down on his knees.”
“You’ve pierced me, sir. Pierced me to tears, sir. I’m too inclined to be sensitive . Allow me to make a full introduction: my family, my two daughters and my son—my litter, sir. If I die, who will so love them, sir, and while I live, who will so love me, a little wretch, if not them? This great thing the Lord has provided for every man of my sort, sir. For it’s necessary that at least someone should so love a man of my sort, sir...”
“Ah, that is perfectly true!” exclaimed Alyosha.
“Enough of this clowning! Some fool comes along and you shame us all,” the girl at the window suddenly cried out, addressing her father with a disgusted and contemptuous look.
“Wait a little, Varvara Nikolaevna, allow me to sustain my point,” her father cried to her in a peremptory tone, looking at her, however, quite approvingly. “It’s our character, sir,” he turned again to Alyosha.
“And in all nature there was nothing He would give his blessing to– [119]only it should be in the feminine: that she would give her blessing to, sir. But allow me to introduce you to my wife: this is Arina Petrovna, sir, a crippled lady, about forty-three years old, she can walk, but very little, sir. From simple people. Arina Petrovna, smooth your brow; this is Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov. Stand up, Alexei Fyodorovich,” he took him by the arm and, with a force one would not have suspected in him, suddenly raised him up. “You are being introduced to a lady, you should stand up, sir. Not that Karamazov, mama, the one who ... hm, and so on, but his brother, shining with humble virtues. Allow me, Arina Petrovna, allow me, mama, allow me preliminarily to kiss your hand.”
And he kissed his wife’s hand respectfully and even tenderly. The girl at the window indignantly turned her back on the scene; the haughtily questioning face of the wife suddenly took on a remarkably sweet expression.
“How do you do, sit down, Mr. Chernomazov,” [120]she said.
“Karamazov, mama, Karamazov—we’re from simple people, sir,” he whispered again.
“Well, Karamazov, or whatever it is, but I always say Chernomazov ... But sit down, why did he get you up? A crippled lady, he says, but my legs still work, only they’re swollen like buckets, and the rest of me is dried up. Once I was good and fat, but now it’s as if I swallowed a needle...”
“We’re from simple people, sir, simple people,” the captain prompted once again.
“Papa, oh, papa!” the hunchbacked girl, who until then had been silent on her chair, said suddenly, and suddenly hid her eyes in her handkerchief.
“Buffoon!” the girl at the window flung out.
“You see what sort of news we have,” the mother spread her arms, pointing at her daughters, “like clouds coming over; the clouds pass, and we have our music again. Before, when we were military, we had many such guests. I’m not comparing, dear father. If someone loves someone, let him love him. The deacon’s wife came once and said: ‘Alexander Alexandrovich is a man of excellent soul, but Nastasya,’ she said, ‘Nastasya Petrovna is a hellcat.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we all have our likes, and you’re a little pile, but you smell vile.’ And you need to be kept in your place,’ she said. ‘Ah, you black sword,’ I said to her, ‘who are you to teach me?”I’m letting in fresh air,’ she said, ‘yours is foul.”Go and ask all the gentlemen officers,’ I told her, ‘whether the air in me is foul or otherwise.’ And from that time on it’s been weighing on my heart, and the other day I was sitting here, like now, and saw the same general come in who visited us in Holy Week: ‘Tell me, now, Your Excellency,’ I said to him, ‘can a noble lady let in free air?”Yes,’ he said to me, ‘you should open the window or the door, because that the air in here is not clean.’ And it’s always like that! What’s wrong with my air? The dead smell even worse. ‘I’m not spoiling your air,’ I tell them, ‘I’ll order some shoes and go away.’ My dear ones, my darlings, don’t reproach your own mother! Nikolai llyich, dear father, don’t I please you? I have only one thing left—that Ilyushechka comes home from school and loves me. Yesterday he brought me an apple. Forgive me, my dears, forgive me, my darlings, forgive your own mother, I’m quite lonely, and why is my air so offensive to you?”
And the poor woman suddenly burst into sobs, tears streamed from her eyes. The captain quickly leaped to her side.
“Mama, mama, darling, enough, enough! You’re not lonely. Everyone loves you, everyone adores you!” and he again began kissing both her hands and tenderly caressing her face with his palms; and taking a napkin, he suddenly began wiping the tears from her face. Alyosha even fancied that there were tears shining in his eyes, too. “Well, sir, did you see? Did you hear, sir?” he suddenly turned somehow fiercely to Alyosha, pointing with his hand to the poor, feebleminded woman.
“I see and hear,” murmured Alyosha. “Papa, papa! How can you ... with him ... stop it, papa!” the boy suddenly cried, rising in his bed and looking at his father with burning eyes.
“Enough of your clowning, showing off your stupid antics, which never get anywhere...!” Varvara Nikolaevna shouted from the same corner, quite furious now, and even stamping her foot.
“You are perfectly justified, this time, to be so good as to lose your temper, Varvara Nikolaevna, and I shall hasten to satisfy you. Put on your hat, Alexei Fyodorovich, and I’ll take my cap—and let us go, sir. I have something serious to tell you, only outside these walls. This sitting girl here—she’s my daughter, sir, Nina Nikolaevna, I forgot to introduce her to you—is God’s angel in the flesh ... who has flown down to us mortals ... if you can possibly understand that ...”
“He’s twitching all over, as if he had cramps,” Varvara Nikolaevna went on indignantly.
“And this one who is now stamping her little foot and has just denounced me as a clown—she, too, is God’s angel in the flesh, sir, and rightly calls me names. Let us go, Alexei Fyodorovich, we must bring this to an end, sir...”
And seizing Alyosha’s arm, he led him from the room and straight outside.
Chapter 7: And in the Fresh Air
“The air is fresh, sir, and in my castle it is indeed not clean, not in any sense. Let’s walk slowly, sir. I should very much like to enlist your interest, sir.”
“And I, too, have some extraordinary business with you ... .”Alyosha remarked, “only I don’t know how to begin.”
“Didn’t I know that you must have some business with me, sir? Without some business, you would never come to call on me. Unless you came, indeed, only to complain about the boy, sir? But that is improbable. By the way, about the boy, sir: I couldn’t explain everything in there, but here I will describe that scene to you. You see, the whiskbroom used to be thicker, sir, just a week ago—I’m referring to my beard, sir; my beard is nicknamed a whiskbroom, mostly by the schoolboys, sir. Well, and so, sir, your good brother, Dmitri Fyodorovich, dragged me by my beard that day, he dragged me out of the tavern to the square, and just then the schoolboys were getting out of school, and Ilyusha with them. When he saw me in such a state, sir, he rushed up to me: ‘Papa,’ he cried, ‘papa! ‘ He caught hold of me, hugged me, tried to pull me away, crying to my offender: ‘Let go, let go, it’s my papa, my papa, forgive him’—that was what he cried: ‘Forgive him!’ And he took hold of him, too, with his little hands, and kissed his hand, that very hand, sir ... I remember his face at that moment, I have not forgotten it, sir, and I will not forget it...!”
“I swear to you,” exclaimed Alyosha, “that my brother will express his repentance in the most sincere, the fullest manner, even if it means going down on his knees in that very square ... I will make him, or he is no brother of mine!”
“Aha, so it’s still in the planning stage! And proceeds not directly from him, but only from the nobility of your fervent heart. Why didn’t you say so, sir? No, in that case, allow me to finish telling you about the highly chivalrous and soldierly nobility of your good brother, for he showed it that time, sir. So he finished dragging me by my whiskbroom and set me free: ‘You,’ he said, ‘are an officer, and I am an officer; if you can find a second, a decent man, send him to me—I shall give you satisfaction, though you are a scoundrel! ‘ That is what he said, sir. Truly a chivalrous spirit! Ilyusha and I withdrew then, but this genealogical family picture forever imprinted itself in the memory of Ilyusha’s soul. No, it’s not for us to stay gentry, sir. And judge for yourself, sir, you were just so good as to visit my castle—what did you see, sir? Three ladies sitting there, sir, one crippled and feebleminded, another crippled and hunchbacked, the third not a cripple, but too smart, sir, a student, longing to go back to Petersburg and search for the rights of the Russian woman, there on the banks of the Neva. Not to mention Ilyusha, sir, he’s only nine years old, alone in the world, for if I were to die, what would become of those depths, that’s all I ask, sir. And so, if I challenge him to a duel, what if he kills me on the spot– well, what then? Then what will happen to them all, sir? Still worse, if he doesn’t kill me but just cripples me: work would be impossible, but there would still be a mouth to feed, and who will feed my mouth then, who will feed them all, sir? Or should I then send Ilyusha out daily to beg instead of going to school? So that’s what it means for me to challenge him to a duel, sir. It’s foolish talk, sir, and nothing else.”
“He will ask your forgiveness, he will bow at your feet in the middle of the square,” Alyosha again cried, his eyes glowing.
“I thought of taking him to court,” the captain went on, “but open our code of law, how much compensation would I get from the offender for a personal offense, sir? And then suddenly Agrafena Alexandrovna summoned me and shouted: ‘Don’t you dare think of it! If you take him to court, I’ll fix it so that the whole world will publicly know that he beat you for your own cheating, and you’ll wind up in the dock yourself.’ But the Lord knows who was the source of this cheating, sir, and on whose orders some small fry like me was acting—wasn’t it her own orders and Fyodor Pavlovich’s? And besides,’ she added, ‘I’ll turn you out forever, and you’ll never earn anything from me again. And I’ll tell my merchant, too’—that’s what she calls the old man: ‘my merchant’—’and he will turn you out as well.’ So I thought to myself, if even the merchant turns me out, then where will I earn any money? Because I only had the two of them left, since your father, Fyodor Pavlovich, not only stopped trusting me for some unrelated reason, sir, but even wants to drag me into court himself, on the strength of some receipts he has from me. As a result of all that, I’ve kept quiet, sir, and the depths, sir, you’ve seen for yourself. And now, allow me to ask: did he bite your finger badly, my Ilyusha? Inside my castle, in his presence, I didn’t dare go into such details.”
“Yes, very badly, and he was very angry. He took revenge for you upon me, as a Karamazov, it’s clear to me now. But if you had seen how he was fighting with his schoolmates, throwing stones! It’s very dangerous, they might kill him, they’re children, stupid, a stone goes flying and could break his head.”
“Yes, he got it, sir, not in the head but in the chest, over the heart, a stone hit him today, bruised him, he came home crying, groaning, and now he’s fallen sick.”
“And you know, he starts it himself, he attacks everyone, he’s bitter because of you; they say the other day he stabbed a boy, Krasotkin, in the side with a penknife ...”
“I heard about that, too, it’s dangerous, sir: Krasotkin is a local official, there could still be trouble ...”
“I would advise you,” Alyosha continued fervently, “not to send him to ‘ school at all for a while, until he calms down ... and this wrath in him passes ...”
“Wrath, sir!” the captain chimed in, “wrath indeed, sir! A small creature, but a great wrath, sir! You don’t know all of it. Allow me to explain the story more particularly. The thing is that after that event all the children at school began calling him whiskbroom. Schoolchildren are merciless people: separately they’re God’s angels, but together, especially in school, they’re quite often merciless. They began teasing him, and a noble spirit arose in Ilyusha. An ordinary boy, a weak son, would have given in, would have felt ashamed of his father, but this one stood up for his father, alone against everyone. For his father, and for the truth, sir, for justice, sir. Because what he suffered then, as he kissed your brother’s hand and cried to him: ‘Forgive my papa, forgive my papa’—that only God alone knows, and I, sir. And that is how our children—I mean, not yours but ours, sir, the children of the despised but noble poor—learn the truth on earth when they’re just nine years old, sir. The rich ones—what do they know? In their whole lives they never sound such depths, and my Ilyushka, at that very moment in the square, sir, when he kissed his hand, at that very moment he went through the whole truth, sir. This truth, sir, entered into him and crushed him forever,” the captain said fervently, again as if in a frenzy, hitting his left palm with his right fist, as if he wished to show physically how “the truth” had crushed his Ilyusha. “That same day he came down with a fever, he was delirious all night. All that day he hardly spoke to me, he was even quite silent, only I noticed him looking, looking at me from the corner, but he kept leaning more towards the window, pretending he was doing his homework, but I could see that he didn’t have homework on his mind. The next day I did some drinking, sir, and forgot a lot, I’m a sinful man, from grief, sir. Mama there also began crying—and I love mama very much, sir—well, from grief I had a drop on my last few kopecks. Don’t despise me, my good sir: in Russia, drunks are our kindest people. Our kindest people are also the most drunk. So I was lying there and I didn’t much remember Ilyusha that day, and it was precisely that day when the boys started jeering at him in school, that morning, sir: ‘Whiskbroom,’ they shouted at him, ‘your father was dragged out of the tavern by his whiskbroom, and you ran along asking forgiveness.’ On the third day he came home from school, and I saw that he looked pale, awful. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. Silence. Well, there was no talking about it in our castle, otherwise mama and the girls would immediately take part—and besides, the girls already knew all about it even on the first day. Varvara Nikolaevna was already grumbling: ‘Clowns, buffoons, can you never be reasonable?’ ‘Right,’ I said, ‘Varvara Nikolaevna, we can never be reasonable. ‘ I got off with that at the time. So, sir, towards evening I took my boy out for a walk. And you should know, sir, that even before that, every evening he and I used to take a walk, just the same way we’re going now, from our gate to that big stone over there, standing like an orphan in the road near the wattle fence, where the town common begins: the place is deserted and beautiful, sir. We were walking along, Ilyusha and I, his little hand in my hand, as usual; he has such a tiny hand, his little fingers are so thin and cold—my boy suffers from a weak chest. ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘papa! ‘ ‘What?’ I said to him, and I could see that his eyes were flashing. ‘Papa, the way he treated you, papa!’ ‘It can’t be helped, Ilyusha,’ I said. ‘Don’t make peace with him, papa, don’t make peace. The boys say he gave you ten roubles for it.’ ‘No, Ilyusha,’ I said, ‘I won’t take any money from him, not for anything.’ Then he started shaking all over, seized my hand in both his hands, and kissed it again. ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘papa, challenge him to a duel; they tease me at school, they say you’re a coward and won’t challenge him to a duel, but you’ll take his ten roubles.’ ‘It’s not possible for me to challenge him to a duel, Ilyusha,’ I answered, and explained to him briefly all that I just explained to you about that. He listened. ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘papa, even so, don’t make peace with him: I’ll grow up, I’ll challenge him myself, and I’ll kill him!’ And his eyes were flashing and shining. Well, I’m still his father for all that, I had to tell him the right thing. ‘It’s sinful to kill,’ I said, ‘even in a duel.’ ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘papa, I’ll throw him down when I’m big, I’ll knock the sword out of his hand with my sword, I’ll rush at him, throw him down, hold my sword over him and say: I could kill you now, but I forgive you, so there! ‘ You see, sir, you see what a process went on in his little head over those two days! Day and night he was thinking precisely about that revenge with the sword, and that must have been in his delirium at night, sir. Only he started coming home from school badly beaten up, I learned of it the day before yesterday, and you’re right, sir, I won’t send him to that school any more. When I learned that he was going alone against the whole class, and was challenging everyone, and that he was so bitter, that his heart was burning–I was afraid for him. Again we went for a walk. ‘Papa,’ he asked, ‘papa, is it true that the rich are stronger than anybody in the world?’ ‘Yes, Ilyusha,’ I said, ‘no one in the world is stronger than the rich.’ ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘I’ll get rich, I’ll become an officer, and I’ll beat everybody, and the tsar will reward me. Then I’ll come back, and nobody will dare . . .’He was silent for a while, then he said, and his little lips were still trembling as before: ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘our town is not a good town, papa!”Yes, Ilyushechka,’ I said, ‘it’s really not a very good town.”Papa, let’s move to another town, a good one,’ he said, ‘a town where they don’t know about us.”We will,’ I said, ‘we will move, Ilyusha, as soon as I save some money.’ I was glad to be able to distract him from his dark thoughts, and so we began dreaming of how we’d move to another town, how we’d buy our own horse and cart. ‘We’ll sit mama and your sisters in the cart and cover them, and we ourselves will walk beside it, and from time to time you’ll get in and ride and I’ll walk beside, because we must spare our horse, we shouldn’t all ride, and so we’ll set off.’ He was delighted with that, most of all because we’d have our own horse and he could ride it. Everyone knows that a Russian boy is born with a horse. We chattered for a long time: thank God, I thought, I’ve diverted him, comforted him. That was two days ago, in the evening, but by yesterday evening it all turned out differently. That morning he went to school again and came back gloomy, much too gloomy. In the evening I took him by the hand, we went for a walk; he was silent, he didn’t speak. The breeze picked up, the sun clouded over, there was autumn in the air, and dusk was already coming—we walked along, both feeling sad. ‘Well, my boy,’ I said, ‘how are we going to get ourselves ready for the road?’—thinking to bring him around to our conversation of the day before. Silence. But I could feel his little fingers trembling in my hand. Eh, I thought, that’s bad, there’s something new. We came to this very stone, just as we are now, I sat on the stone, and in the sky there were kites humming and flapping on their strings, about thirty of them. It’s the season for kites, sir. ‘Look, Ilyusha,’ I said, ‘it’s time we flew our kite from last year. I’ll mend it. Where do you keep it?’ My boy was silent, he looked away, turned aside from me. And suddenly the wind whistled and blew up some sand ... He rushed to me suddenly, threw his little arms around my neck, and hugged me. You know, when children are silent and proud, and have been holding back their tears for a long time, when they suddenly burst out, if a great grief comes, the tears don’t just flow, sir, they pour out in streams. With these warm streams he suddenly wet my whole face. He suddenly sobbed as if he were in convulsions, and began shaking and pressing me to him as I sat there on the stone. ‘Papa,’ he cried, ‘papa, dear papa, how he humiliated you! ‘Then I began weeping, too, sir. We were sitting, holding each other, and sobbing. ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘dear papa! ‘ ‘Ilyusha,’ I said, ‘dear Ilyusha! ‘ No one saw us then, sir, only God saw us—let’s hope he’ll enter it into my record, sir. Thank your good brother, Alexei Fyodorovich. No, sir, I will not whip my boy for your satisfaction, sir!”
