Текст книги "The Brothers Karamazov"
Автор книги: Федор Достоевский
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PART IV
BOOK X: BOYS
Chapter 1: Kolya Krasotkin
The beginning of November. We had eleven degrees of frost, and with that came sheet ice. During the night a bit of dry snow had fallen on the frozen ground, and the wind, “dry and sharp,” [276]lifted it up and blew it over the dreary streets of our little town and especially over the marketplace. The morning was dull, but it had stopped snowing. Near the marketplace, close to Plotnikov’s shop, stood a small house, very clean both inside and out, belonging to the widow of the official Krasotkin. Provincial secretary Krasotkin had died long ago, almost fourteen years before, but his widow, thirty years old and still a comely little lady, was alive and lived “on her own means” in her clean little house. She lived honestly and timidly, was of tender but quite cheerful character. She had lost her husband when she was eighteen, after living with him only for about a year and having just borne him a son. Since then, since the very day of his death, she had devoted herself entirely to the upbringing of her treasure, her boy Kolya, and though she had loved him to distraction all those fourteen years, she had of course endured incomparably more suffering than joy on account of him, trembling and dying of fear almost every day lest he become ill, catch cold, be naughty, climb on a chair and fall off, and so on and so forth. When Kolya started going to school and then to our high school, his mother threw herself into studying all the subjects with him, in order to help him and tutor him in his lessons, threw herself into acquaintances with his teachers and their wives, was sweet even to Kolya’s schoolboy friends, fawning on them so that they would not touch Kolya, would not laugh at him or beat him. She went so far that the boys indeed began laughing at him because of her and began teasing him for being a mama’s boy. But the lad knew how to stand up for himself. He was a brave boy, “terrifically strong,” according to the rumor spread about him and quickly established in his class; agile, persistent in character, bold and enterprising in spirit. He was a good student, and there was even a rumor that in both mathematics and world history he could show up the teacher, Dardanelov, himself. Yet, though he looked down on everyone and turned up his nose at them, the boy was still a good friend and not overly conceited. He accepted the schoolboys’ respect as his due, but behaved in a comradely way. Above all, he knew where to draw the line, could restrain himself when need be, and in relation to the authorities never overstepped that final and inscrutable limit beyond which a misdeed turns into disorder, rebellion, and lawlessness, and can no longer be tolerated. Yet he never minded getting into mischief at the first opportunity, any more than the worst boy, not so much for the sake of mischief as to do something whimsical, eccentric, to add some “extra spice,” to dazzle, to show off. Above all, he was extremely vain. He even managed to make his mama submit to him and treated her almost despotically. And she submitted, oh, she had submitted long ago, and the only thing she simply could not bear was the thought that the boy “had little love for her.” She imagined all the time that Kolya was “unfeeling” towards her, and there were occasions when, flooding herself with hysterical tears, she would begin to reproach him with his coldness. The boy did not like it, and the more heartfelt effusions she demanded of him, the more unyielding he became, as if deliberately. Yet it was not deliberate on his part, but involuntary—such was his nature. His mother was mistaken: he loved her very much, only he did not like “sentimental slop,” as he said in his schoolboy’s language. His father had left behind a bookcase in which a few books were kept; Kolya loved reading and had already read several of them on his own. His mother was not troubled by that, and only marveled sometimes at how the boy, instead of going out to play, would spend hours standing by the bookcase poring over some book. And it was thus that Kolya had read certain things that he should not have been given to read at his age. Of late, in any case, though the boy did not like to overstep a certain line in his pranks, there began to be some pranks that genuinely frightened his mother—not immoral ones, true, but desperate, daredevilish. Just that summer, in July, during the holidays, it so happened that the mama and her boy had gone to spend a week in another district, forty-five miles away, with a distant relative whose husband worked at a railway station (the same station, the one closest to our town, from which Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov left for Moscow a month later). There Kolya began by looking over the railroad in detail, studying the procedures, realizing that he would be able to show off his new knowledge among the boys in his school. But just then a few other boys turned up with whom he made friends; some of them lived at the station, others in the neighborhood—about six or seven youths altogether, between twelve and fifteen years old, and two of them happened to be from our town. The boys played together, pulled pranks together, until on the fourth or fifth day of the visit at the station the foolish youngsters made up a most impossible wager, for two roubles—that is: Kolya, who was almost the youngest of all and was therefore somewhat despised by the older boys, out of vanity or reckless bravado, offered to lie face down between the rails that night when the eleven o’clock train came, and to lie there without moving while the train passed over him at full steam. It is true that a preliminary examination had been carried out, which showed that it was indeed possible to stretch out and flatten oneself down between the rails, so that the train, of course, would pass over without touching the person lying there, but still, how would it feel to lie there! Kolya firmly maintained that he would do it. At first they laughed at him, called him a liar, a braggart, but that only egged him on even more. Above all, those fifteen-year-olds turned up their noses too much, and did not even want to be friends with him at first, but regarded him as “a little boy,” which was insufferably offensive. And so it was decided to go that evening to a spot about half a mile from the station, so that the train would have time to get up full speed after pulling out of the station. The boys met together. It was a moonless night, not just dark but almost pitch black. When the time came, Kolya lay down between the rails. The other five boys who were in on the wager waited with sinking hearts, and finally with fear and remorse, below the embankment, in the bushes near the road. At last there came the chugging of the train pulling out of the station. Two red lights flashed through the darkness, they heard the thunder of the approaching monster. “Run, run away from the rails!” the boys, dying with terror, shouted to Kolya from the bushes, but it was too late: the train loomed up and flew by. The boys rushed to Kolya: he lay without moving. They began pulling at him, lifting him up. Suddenly he rose and went silently down the embankment. When he got down he announced that he had pretended to be unconscious on purpose to frighten them, but the truth was that he had indeed fainted, as he himself later confessed long afterwards to his mama. Thus his reputation as a “desperado” was finally established forever. He returned home to the station white as a sheet. The next day he fell slightly ill with a nervous fever, but was in terribly joyful spirits, pleased and delighted. The incident became known in our town, though not at once, penetrated the high school, and reached the authorities. But at this point Kolya’s mama rushed to plead with the authorities on her boy’s behalf, and in the end got Dardanelov, a respected and influential teacher, to stand up and speak for him, and the case was set aside, as if it had never happened. This Dardanelov, a bachelor and not yet an old man, had for many years been passionately in love with Mrs. Krasotkin, and once already, about a year before, had ventured, most reverently, and sinking with fear and delicacy, to offer her his hand; but she flatly refused him, considering that acceptance would be a betrayal of her boy, though Dardanelov, from certain mysterious signs, even had, perhaps, some right to dream that he was not altogether repugnant to the lovely, but too chaste and sensitive, widow. Kolya’s mad prank seemed to have broken the ice, and Dardanelov, in return for his intercession, received a hint with regard to his hopes, though a very remote one; but Dardanelov himself was a miracle of purity and sensitivity, and therefore it sufficed at the time for the fullness of his happiness. He loved the boy, though he would have considered it humiliating to seek his favor, and in class he treated him sternly and demandingly. But Kolya also kept him at a respectful distance, prepared his lessons excellently, was second in his class, addressed Dardanelov drily, and the whole class firmly believed that Kolya was so strong in world history that he could even “show up” Dardanelov himself. And indeed Kolya had once asked him the question “Who founded Troy?”—to which Dardanelov gave only a general answer about peoples, their movements and migrations, about the remoteness of the times, about fable telling, but who precisely had founded Troy—that is, precisely which persons—he could not say, and even found the question for some reason an idle and groundless one. But this only left the boys convinced that Dardanelov did not know who had founded Troy. As for Kolya, he had learned about the founders of Troy in Smaragdov, [277]whose history was in the bookcase left by his father. The upshot of it was that all the boys became interested finally in who precisely had founded Troy, but Krasotkin would not give away his secret, and the glory of his knowledge remained unshakably his own.
After the incident on the railway, a certain change took place in Kolya’s relations with his mother. When Anna Fyodorovna (Krasotkin’s widow) learned of her boy’s deed, she almost went out of her mind with horror. She had such terrible hysterical fits, which continued intermittently for several days, that Kolya, now seriously frightened, gave her his solemn word of honor that such pranks would never be repeated. He swore on his knees before an icon and he swore by his father’s memory, as Mrs. Krasotkin demanded, and the “manly” Kolya himself burst into tears like a six-year-old boy, from “feelings,” and all that day both mother and son kept falling into each other’s arms, sobbing and shaking. The next day Kolya woke up as “unfeeling” as ever, yet he grew more silent, more modest, more stern, more thoughtful. True, about a month and a half later, he was again caught in a prank, and his name even became known to our justice of the peace, but this was a prank of a very different sort, even a silly and funny one, and it turned out that he had not perpetrated it himself, but just happened to be mixed up in it. But of that another time. His mother went on trembling and suffering, and Dardanelov’s hopes increased more and more in measure with her anxiety. It should be noted that Kolya understood and figured out this side of Dardanelov, and, naturally, deeply despised him for his “feelings”; previously he had even been tactless enough to display his contempt before his mother, remotely hinting to her that he understood what Dardanelov was up to. But after the incident on the railway, he changed his behavior in this respect as well: he allowed himself no more hints, not even the remotest, and began to speak more respectfully of Dardanelov in his mother’s presence, which the sensitive Anna Fyodorovna understood at once with boundless gratitude in her heart, but at the same time, the slightest, most inadvertent mention of Dardanelov, even from some unaccustomed guest, if it was in Kolya’s presence, would make her blush all over with embarrassment, like a rose. And at such moments Kolya would either look frowning out the window, or study his face in the tips of his boots, or shout fiercely for Perezvon, a rather big, shaggy, and mangy dog he had acquired somewhere about a month before, dragged home, and for some reason kept secretly indoors, not showing him to any of his friends. He tyrannized over him terribly, teaching him all sorts of tricks and skills, and drove the poor dog so far that he howled in his absence, when he was away at school, and when he came home, squealed with delight, jumped madly, stood on his hind legs, fell down and played dead, and so on; in short, he did all the tricks he had been taught, not on command, but solely from the ardor of his rapturous feelings and grateful heart.
Incidentally, I have forgotten even to mention that Kolya Krasotkin was the same one whom the boy Ilyusha, already known to the reader, son of the retired captain Snegiryov, stabbed in the thigh with a penknife, defending his lather, whom the schoolboys taunted with “whiskbroom.”
Chapter 2: Kids
And so on that cold and wintry November morning, the boy Kolya Krasotkin was sitting at home. It was Sunday, and there was no school. But the clock had just struck eleven and he absolutely had to go out “on very important business,” and yet there he was, left alone in the whole house and decidedly in `harge of it, because it so happened that all of its elder inhabitants were away, owing to some urgent and singular circumstance. There was only one other apartment in the widow Krasotkin’s house, two little rooms across the hall from the widow’s apartment, which she rented out, and which were occupied by a doctor’s wife with two small children. This doctor’s wife was the same age as Anna Fyodorovna, and a great friend of hers, while the doctor himself had gone off somewhere about a year before, first to Orenburg, then to Tashkent, and nothing had been heard of him for the past six months, so that had it not been for the friendship of Mrs. Krasotkin, which somewhat softened the grief of the doctor’s abandoned wife, she would decidedly have drowned herself in the tears of that grief. And now it so happened, as if to crown all the adversities of fate, that Katerina, the doctor’s wife’s only maid, suddenly, and quite unexpectedly for her mistress, announced to her that very night, on Saturday, that she intended to give birth to a baby the next morning. How it happened that no one had noticed it before struck everyone as almost miraculous. The amazed doctor’s wife judged it best, while there was still time, to take Katerina to an establishment kept by a midwife in our town, suitable for such occasions. Since she highly valued her maid, she put her plan into action at once, took her there, and moreover stayed there with her. Later, in the morning, for some reason there was need for all the friendly participation and help of Mrs. Krasotkin herself, who on such an occasion could ask someone for something and wield a certain influence. Thus both ladies were absent, and as for Mrs. Krasotkin’s own maid, Agafya, she had gone to the market, and thus Kolya found himself for a time the keeper and guardian of the “squirts”—that is, the doctor’s wife’s little boy and girl, who were left all alone. Kolya was not afraid of guarding the house; besides he had Perezvon, who was ordered to lie down and “stay” under the bench in the front hall, and, precisely for that reason, every time Kolya, who kept pacing the rooms, came out to the hall, he shook his head and gave two firm and ingratiating thumps on the floor with his tail, but, alas, the summoning whistle did not come. Kolya would give the miserable dog a severe look, and again the dog would obediently freeze. But if anything troubled Kolya, it was the “squirts.” He naturally looked with the deepest contempt upon the unexpected adventure with Katerina, but the orphaned squirts he loved very much, and he had already brought them some children’s book. The older of the two, the girl Nastya, was eight and knew how to read, and the younger squirt, the seven-year-old boy, Kostya, liked it very much when Nastya read to him. Naturally, Krasotkin knew more interesting ways of entertaining them—for instance, by standing them side by side and playing soldiers, or hiding all over the house. He had done it more than once before and did not consider it beneath him, so that the rumor had even spread in his class that Krasotkin played “horses” at home with his little tenants, prancing and tossing his head like an outrunner, but Krasotkin proudly parried the accusation, putting forward the argument that “in our day” it would indeed be disgraceful to play “horses” with one’s peers, with thirteen-year-olds, but that he did so with the “squirts” because he loved them, and no one should dare call him to account for his feelings. And how the two “squirts” adored him! But this was no time for games. He was faced with some very important business of his own, which somehow even appeared almost mysterious, and meanwhile time was passing, and Agafya, with whom he could have left the children, still refused to come back from the market. He had already gone across the hall several times, opened the door to the other apartment, and looked in anxiously at the “squirts,” who, on his orders, were sitting there with a book, and, each time he opened the door, gave him big, silent smiles, expecting him to come in and do something wonderful and amusing. But Kolya was troubled in his soul and would not go in. Finally it struck eleven and he decided firmly and ultimately that if in ten minutes that “cursed” Agafya had not come back, he would leave without waiting for her, of course making the “squirts” give their word that they would not be scared without him, would not get into mischief, and would not cry from fear. With that thought in mind, he put on his padded winter coat with some kind of sealskin collar, slung his bag over his shoulder, and, despite his mother’s oft-repeated pleadings that he not go out “in such cold” without his galoshes, merely glanced at them in disdain, passing through the hall, and went out in just his boots. Perezvon, as soon as he saw him with his coat on, began thumping the floor still harder with his tail, nervously twitching all over, and even uttered a pitiful howl, but Kolya, seeing such passionate yearning in his dog, decided it was bad discipline, and kept him longer, though just a moment longer, under the bench, and only as he was opening the door to the hall did he suddenly whistle for him. The dog jumped up madly and began leaping ecstatically in front of him. Kolya crossed the hall and opened the “squirts’ “ door. They were both still sitting at the table, not reading now, but arguing heatedly about something. The children often argued with each other about various provocative matters of life, and Nastya, being older, always had the upper hand; and Kostya, if he did not agree with her, almost always went to appeal to Kolya Krasotkin, and whatever he decided remained the ultimate verdict for all sides. This time the argument between the “squirts” somewhat interested Krasotkin, and he stopped in the doorway to listen. The children saw he was listening and carried on their dispute with even greater enthusiasm.
“I’ll never, ever believe,” Nastya ardently prattled, “that midwives find little babies in the vegetable garden, between the cabbage rows. It’s winter now and there aren’t any cabbage rows, and the midwife couldn’t have brought Katerina a baby girl.”
“Whe-ew!” Kolya whistled to himself.
“Or maybe it’s like this: they do bring them from somewhere, but only when people get married.” Kostya stared at Nastya, listened gravely, and pondered.
“Nastya, what a fool you are,” he said at last, firmly and without excitement. “Where could Katerina get a baby if she’s not married?”
Nastya grew terribly excited.
“You don’t understand anything,” she cut him short irritably. “Maybe she had a husband, but he’s in prison now, so she went and had a baby.”
“But is her husband in prison?” the staid Kostya inquired gravely.
“Or else,” Nastya swiftly interrupted, completely abandoning and forgetting her first hypothesis, “she hasn’t got a husband, you’re right about that, but she wants to get married, so she started thinking how to get married, and she kept thinking and thinking, and she thought so much that now she got a baby instead.”
“Well, maybe,” agreed the utterly defeated Kostya, “but you didn’t say that before, so how could I know?”
“Well, kids,” said Kolya, taking a step into the room, “you’re dangerous people, I see!”
“And Perezvon, too?” Kostya grinned, and began snapping his fingers and calling Perezvon.
“I’m in trouble, squirts,” Krasotkin began importantly, “and you’ve got to help me: of course Agafya must have broken her leg, since she’s not back yet, that’s signed and sealed, but I have to leave. Will you let me go or not?”
The children worriedly exchanged looks, their grinning faces showed signs of anxiety. However, they still did not quite understand what was wanted of them.
“You won’t get into mischief while I’m gone? You won’t climb on the cupboard and break your leg? You won’t cry from fear if you’re left alone?”
Terrible grief showed on the children’s faces.
“And to make up for it I’ll show you a little something—it’s a little brass cannon that shoots with real powder.”
The children’s faces brightened at once.
“Show us the little cannon,” Kostya said, beaming all over.
Krasotkin thrust his hand into his bag, pulled out a little bronze cannon, and placed it on the table.
“‘Show us, show us! ‘ Look, it has little wheels,” he drove the toy along the table, “and it can shoot. Load it with small shot and it shoots.”
“And can it kill somebody?”
“It can kill everybody, you just have to aim it,” and Krasotkin explained how to put in the powder and roll in the shot, showed the little hole for the primer, and explained to them that there was such a thing as recoil. The children listened with terrible curiosity. What particularly struck their imagination was that there was such a thing as recoil.
“And have you got some powder?” Nastya inquired.
“I have.”
“Show us the powder, too,” she whined with an imploring smile.
Krasotkin again went into his bag, and took out of it a small bottle, which indeed contained some real powder, and a folded paper, which turned out to have a few pellets of shot in it. He even opened the bottle and poured a little powder out in his palm.
“So long as there’s no fire around, or it would explode and kill us all,” Krasotkin warned, for the sake of effect.
The children gazed at the powder with an awestruck fear, which only increased their pleasure. But Kostya liked the shot better.
“Does shot burn?” he inquired.
“Shot does not burn.”
“Give me some shot,” he said in a pleading voice.
“I’ll give you a little, here, take it, only don’t show it to your mother before I come back, or she may think it’s powder, and she’ll die of fear and give you a whipping.”
“Mama never beats us,” Nastya observed at once.
“I know, I just said it for the beauty of the style. And you should never deceive your mama, except this once—till I come back. Well, squirts, can I go or not? Are you going to cry from fear without me?”
“We w-will c-cry,” Kostya whined, already preparing to cry.
“We will, we really will cry!” Nastya added in a frightened patter.
“Oh, children, children, how perilous are your years. [278]So, there’s nothing to be done, chicks, I’ll have to stay with you I don’t know how long. And the time, the time, oof!”
“Tell Perezvon to play dead,” Kostya asked.
“Well, nothing to be done, I’ll have to resort to Perezvon. Ici, Perezvon!” And Kolya began giving orders to the dog, and he began doing all his tricks. He was a shaggy dog, the size of any ordinary mongrel, with a sort of blue gray coat. He was blind in his right eye, and his left ear for some reason had a nick in it. He squealed and jumped, stood and walked on his hind legs, threw himself on his back with all four legs in the air and lay motionless as if dead. During this last trick the door opened and Agafya, Mrs. Krasotkin’s fat maid, a pockmarked woman of about forty, appeared on the threshold, returning from the market with a paper bag full of groceries in her hand. She stood with the bag perched on her left hand and began watching the dog. Kolya, however eagerly he had been waiting for Agafya, did not interrupt the performance, and having kept Perezvon dead for a certain length of time, finally whistled: the dog jumped up and began leaping for joy at having fulfilled his duty.
“Some dog that is!” Agafya said didactically.
“Why are you late, female sex?” Krasotkin asked sternly. “Female sex yourself, pipsqueak.”
“Pipsqueak?”
“Yes, pipsqueak. What’s it to you if I’m late? If I’m late I must have had good reason,” Agafya muttered, as she started bustling about the stove, not at all in a displeased or angry voice, but, on the contrary, sounding very pleased, as if she were glad of the chance to exchange quips with her cheerful young master.
“Listen, you frivolous old woman,” Krasotkin began, rising from the sofa, “will you swear to me by all that’s holy in this world, and something else besides, that you will keep a constant eye on the squirts in my absence? I’m going out.”
“Why should I go swearing to you?” Agafya laughed. “I’ll look after them anyway.”
“No, not unless you swear by the eternal salvation of your soul. Otherwise I won’t go.”
“Don’t go, then. I don’t care. It’s freezing out; stay home.”
“Squirts,” Kolya turned to the children, “this woman will stay with you till I come back, or till your mama comes, because she, too, should have been back long ago. And furthermore she will give you lunch. Will you fix them something, Agafya?”
“Could be.”
“Good-bye, chicks, I’m going with an easy heart. And you, granny,” he said, imposingly and in a low voice, as he passed by Agafya, “spare their young years, don’t go telling them all your old wives’ nonsense about Katerina. Ici, Perezvon!”
“And you know where you can go!” Agafya snarled, this time in earnest. “Funny boy! Ought to be whipped yourself for such talk, that’s what.”
Chapter 3: A Schoolboy
But Kolya was no longer listening. At last he was able to leave. He walked out the gate, looked around, hunched his shoulders, and having said “Freezing!” set off straight down the street and then turned right down a lane to the mar– , ket square. When he reached the next to the last house before the square, he stopped at the gate, pulled a whistle out of his pocket, and whistled with all his might, as if giving a prearranged signal. He did not have to wait more than a minute—a ruddy-cheeked boy of about eleven years old suddenly ran out to him through the gate, also wearing a warm, clean, and even stylish coat. This was the Smurov boy, who was in the preparatory class (whereas Kolya Krasotkin was two years ahead), the son of a well-to-do official, whose parents evidently would not allow him to go around with Krasotkin, a notoriously desperate prankster, so that this time Smurov obviously had escaped on the sly. This Smurov, if the reader has not forgotten, was one of the group of boys who were throwing stones at Ilyusha across the ditch two months before, and had told Alyosha Karamazov then about Ilyusha.
“I’ve been waiting a whole hour for you, Krasotkin,” Smurov said with a determined look, and the boys strode off towards the square.
“I’m late,” Krasotkin replied. “Circumstances arose. They won’t whip you for being with me?”
“Lord, no, they never whip me! So you’ve brought Perezvon?”
“Perezvon, too!”
“He’s going there, too?”
“He’s going, too.”
“Ah, if only it was Zhuchka!”
“Impossible. Zhuchka does not exist. Zhuchka has vanished in the darkness of the unknown.”
“Ah, couldn’t we do it?” Smurov suddenly stopped for a moment. “Ilyusha did say that Zhuchka was shaggy, and gray and smoky, just like Perezvon– couldn’t we tell him it’s really Zhuchka? Maybe he’ll even believe it?”
“Schoolboy, do not stoop to lying, first; and second, not even for a good cause. And above all, I hope you didn’t tell them anything about my coming.”
“God forbid, I know what I’m doing. But you won’t comfort him with Perezvon,” sighed Smurov. “You know, his father, the captain, I mean, the whiskbroom, told us he was going to bring him a puppy today, a real mastiff, with a black nose; he thinks he can comfort Ilyusha with it, only it’s not likely.”
“And Ilyusha himself—how is he?”
“Ah, he’s bad, bad! I think he has consumption. He’s quite conscious, only he keeps breathing, breathing, it’s not healthy the way he breathes. The other day he asked to be walked around the room, they put his boots on, he tried to walk but kept falling down. Ah,’ he said, ‘I told you my old boots were no good, papa, even before I had trouble walking in them.’ He thought he was stumbling because of his boots, but it was simply weakness. He won’t live another week. Herzenstube keeps coming. They’re rich again now, they’ve got a lot of money.”
“Swindlers.”
“Who are swindlers?”
“Doctors, and all medical scum, generally speaking, and, naturally, in particular as well. I reject medicine. A useless institution. But I’m still looking into all that. Anyway, what are these sentimentalities you’ve got going? Seems like your whole class is sitting there.”
“Not the whole class, but about ten of us always go there, every day. It’s all right.”
“What surprises me in all this is the role of Alexei Karamazov: his brother is going on trial tomorrow or the day after for such a crime, and he still finds so much time for sentimentalizing with boys!”
“There isn’t any sentimentalizing in it. You yourself are going now to make peace with Ilyusha.”
“To make peace? A funny expression. Incidentally, I allow no one to analyze my actions.”
