Текст книги "The Brothers Karamazov"

Автор книги: Федор Достоевский

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Текущая страница: 54 (всего у книги 70 страниц)

“I’m grateful in all things, sir. Marfa Ignatievna doesn’t forget me, sir, and assists me in everything, if there’s ever anything I need, according to her usual goodness. Good people visit every day.”

“Good-bye. Incidentally, I won’t mention that you know how to sham ... and I advise you not to testify to it,” Ivan said suddenly for some reason.

“I understand ver-ry well, sir. And since you won’t testify about that, sir, I also will not report the whole of our conversation by the gate that time ...”

What happened then was that Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly went out, and only when he had already gone about ten steps down the corridor did he suddenly feel that Smerdyakov’s last phrase contained some offensive meaning. He was about to turn back, but the impulse left him, and having said “Foolishness!” he quickly walked out of the hospital. He felt above all that he was indeed reassured, and precisely by the circumstance that the guilty one was not Smerdyakov but his brother Mitya, though it might seem that it should have been the opposite. Why this was so, he did not want to analyze then, he even felt disgusted at rummaging in his feelings. He wanted sooner to forget something, as it were. Then, during the next few days, when he had more closely and thoroughly acquainted himself with all the evidence weighing against him, he became completely convinced of Mitya’s guilt. There was the evidence of the most insignificant people, yet almost astounding in itself, Fenya’s and her mother’s, for example. To say nothing of Perkhotin, the tavern, Plotnikov’s shop, the witnesses at Mokroye. Above all, the details weighed against him. The news of the secret “knocks” struck the district attorney and the prosecutor almost to the same degree as Grigory’s evidence about the open door. In reply to Ivan Fyodorovich’s question, Grigory’s wife, Marfa Ignatievna, told him directly that Smerdyakov had been lying all night behind the partition, “less than three steps from our bed,” and that, though she herself was a sound sleeper, she had awakened many times hearing him moaning there: “He moaned all the time, moaned constantly.” When he spoke with Herzenstube and told him of his doubts, that Smerdyakov did not seem mad to him at all but simply weak, he only evoked a thin little smile in the old man. “And do you know what he is especially doing now?” he asked Ivan Fyodorovich. “He is learning French vocables by heart; he has a notebook under his pillow, and someone has written out French words for him in Russian letters, heh, heh, heh!” Ivan Fyodorovich finally dismissed all doubts. He could not even think of his brother Dmitri now without loathing. One thing was strange, though: Alyosha kept stubbornly insisting that Dmitri was not the murderer, and that “in all probability” it was Smerdyakov. Ivan had always felt that Alyosha’s opinion was very high for him, and therefore he was quite puzzled by him now. It was also strange that Alyosha did not try to talk with him about Mitya, and never began such conversations himself, but merely answered Ivan’s questions. This Ivan Fyodorovich noticed very well. However, at the time he was much diverted by an altogether extraneous circumstance: in the very first days after his return from Moscow, he gave himself wholly and irrevocably to his fiery and mad passion for Katerina Ivanovna. This is not the proper place to begin speaking of this new passion of Ivan Fyodorovich’s, which later affected his whole life: it could all serve as the plot for another story, for a different novel, which I do not even know that I shall ever undertake. But, all the same, even now I cannot pass over in silence that when Ivan Fyodorovich, as I have already described, leaving Katerina Ivanovna’s with Alyosha at night, said to him: “But I don’t fancy her,” he was lying terribly at that moment: he loved her madly, though it was true that at times he also hated her so much that he could even have killed her. Many causes came together here: all shaken by what had happened with Mitya, she threw herself at Ivan Fyodorovich, when he returned to her, as if he were somehow her savior. She was wounded, insulted, humiliated in her feelings. And here the man who had loved her so much even before—oh, she knew it only too well—had appeared again, the man whose mind and heart she always placed so far above herself. But the strict girl did not sacrifice herself entirely, despite all the Karamazovian unrestraint of her lover’s desires and all his charm for her. At the same time she constantly tormented herself with remorse for having betrayed Mitya, and in terrible, quarreling moments with Ivan (and there were many of them), she used to tell him so outright. It was this that, in talking with Alyosha, he had called “lie upon lie.” Of course there was indeed much lying here, and that annoyed Ivan Fyodorovich most of all ... but of all that later. In short, he almost forgot about Smerdyakov for a time. And yet, two weeks after his first visit to him, the same strange thoughts as before began tormenting him again. Suffice it to say that he began asking himself constantly why, on his last night in Fyodor Pavlovich’s house, before his departure, he had gone out silently to the stairs, like a thief, and listened for what his father was doing down below. Why had he recalled it later with such loathing, why had he suddenly felt such anguish the next morning on the road, why had he said to himself on reaching Moscow: “I am a scoundrel”? And then it once occurred to him that because of all these tormenting thoughts, he was perhaps even ready to forget Katerina Ivanovna, so strongly had they suddenly taken possession of him again! Just as this occurred to him, he met Alyosha in the street. He stopped him at once and suddenly asked him a question:

“Do you remember when Dmitri burst into the house after dinner and beat father, and I then said to you in the yard that I reserved ‘the right to wish’ for myself—tell me, did you think then that I wished for father’s death?”

“I did think so,” Alyosha answered softly.

“You were right, by the way, there was nothing to guess at. But didn’t you also think then that I was precisely wishing for ‘viper to eat viper’—that is, precisely for Dmitri to kill father, and the sooner the better ... and that I myself would not even mind helping him along?”

Alyosha turned slightly pale and looked silently into his brother’s eyes.

“Speak!” Ivan exclaimed. “I want with all my strength to know what you thought then. I need it; the truth, the truth!” He was breathing heavily, already looking at Alyosha with some sort of malice beforehand.

“Forgive me, I did think that, too, at the time,” Alyosha whispered, and fell silent, without adding even a single “mitigating circumstance.”

“Thanks!” Ivan snapped, turned from Alyosha, and quickly went his way. Since then, Alyosha had noticed that his brother Ivan somehow abruptly began to shun him and even seemed to have begun to dislike him, so that later Alyosha himself stopped visiting him. But at that moment, just after that meeting with him, Ivan Fyodorovich, without going home, suddenly made his way to Smerdyakov again.

Chapter 7: The Second Visit to Smerdyakov

Smerdyakov had already been discharged from the hospital by then. Ivan Fyodorovich knew his new lodgings: precisely in that lopsided little log house with its two rooms separated by a hallway. Maria Kondratievna was living in one room with her mother, and Smerdyakov in the other by himself. God knows on what terms he lived with them: was he paying, or did he live there free? Later it was supposed that he had moved in with them as Maria Kondratievna’s fiance and meanwhile lived with them free. Both mother and daughter respected him greatly and looked upon him as a superior person compared with themselves. Having knocked until the door was opened to him, Ivan Fyodorovich went into the hallway and, on Maria Kondratievna’s directions, turned left and walked straight into the “good room” occupied by Smerdyakov. The stove in that room was a tiled one, and it was very well heated. The walls were adorned with blue wallpaper, all tattered, it is true, and behind it, in the cracks, cockroaches swarmed in terrible numbers, so that there was an incessant rustling. The furniture was negligible: two benches along the walls and two chairs by the table. But the table, though it was a simple wooden one, was nevertheless covered by a tablecloth with random pink designs. There was a pot of geraniums in each of the two little windows. In the corner was an icon stand with icons. On the table stood a small, badly dented copper samovar and a tray with two cups. But Smerdyakov was already finished with his tea and the samovar had gone out ... He himself was sitting at the table on a bench, looking into a notebook and writing something with a pen. A bottle of ink stood by him, as well as a low, cast-iron candlestick with, incidentally, a stearine candle. Ivan Fyodorovich concluded at once from Smerdyakov’s face that he had recovered completely from his illness. His face was fresher, fuller, his tuft was fluffed up, his side-whiskers were slicked down. He was sitting in a gaily colored quilted dressing gown, which, however, was rather worn and quite ragged. On his nose he had a pair of spectacles, which Ivan Fyodorovich had never seen on him before. This most trifling circumstance suddenly made Ivan Fyodorovich even doubly angry, as it were: “Such a creature, and in spectacles to boot!” Smerdyakov slowly raised his head and peered intently through the spectacles at his visitor; then he slowly removed them and raised himself a little from the bench, but somehow not altogether respectfully, somehow even lazily, with the sole purpose of observing only the most necessary courtesy, which it is almost impossible to do without. All of this instantly flashed through Ivan, and he at once grasped and noted it all, and most of all the look in Smerdyakov’s eyes, decidedly malicious, unfriendly, and even haughty: “Why are you hanging about here,” it seemed to say, “didn’t we already settle everything before? Why have you come again?” Ivan Fyodorovich could barely contain himself:

“It’s hot in here,” he said, still standing, and unbuttoned his coat.

“Take it off, sir,” Smerdyakov allowed.

Ivan Fyodorovich took his coat off and threw it on a bench, took a chair with his trembling hands, quickly moved it to the table, and sat down. Smerdyakov managed to sit down on his bench ahead of him.

“First of all, are we alone?” Ivan Fyodorovich asked sternly and abruptly. “Won’t they hear us in there?”

“No one will hear anything, sir. You saw yourself: there’s a hallway.”

“Listen, my friend, what was that remark you came out with as I was leaving you at the hospital, that if I said nothing about you being an expert at shamming the falling sickness, then you also would not tell the district attorney about the whole of our conversation at the gate that time? What whole?What could you mean by that? Were you threatening me or what? Have I entered into some league with you or what? Am I afraid of you or what?”

Ivan Fyodorovich uttered this quite in a rage, obviously and purposely letting it be known that he scorned all deviousness, all beating around the bush, and was playing an open hand. Smerdyakov’s eyes flashed maliciously, his left eye began winking, and at once, though, as was his custom, with measure and reserve, he gave his answer—as if to say, “You want us to come clean, here’s some cleanness for you.”

“This is what I meant then, and this is why I said it then: that you, having known beforehand about the murder of your own parent, left him then as a sacrifice; and so as people wouldn’t conclude anything bad about your feelings because of that, and maybe about various other things as well—that’s what I was promising not to tell the authorities.”

Though Smerdyakov spoke unhurriedly and was apparently in control of himself, all the same there was something hard and insistent, malicious and insolently defiant in his voice. He stared boldly at Ivan Fyodorovich, who was even dazed for the first moment.

“How? What? Are you out of your mind?”

“I’m perfectly in my mind, sir.”

“But did I knowabout the murder then?” Ivan Fyodorovich cried out at last, and brought his fist down hard on the table. “What is the meaning of ‘various other things’? Speak, scoundrel!”

Smerdyakov was silent and went on studying Ivan Fyodorovich with the same insolent look.

“Speak, you stinking scum, what ‘various other things’?” the latter screamed.

“And by ‘various other things’ just now, I meant that maybe you yourself were even wishing very much for your parent’s death then.”

Ivan Fyodorovich jumped up and hit him as hard as he could on the shoulder with his fist, so that he rocked back towards the wall. In an instant his whole face was flooded with tears, and saying, “Shame on you, sir, to strike a weak man!” he suddenly covered his eyes with his blue-checkered and completely sodden handkerchief and sank into quiet, tearful weeping. About a minute passed.

“Enough! Stop it!” Ivan Fyodorovich finally said peremptorily, sitting down on the chair again. “Don’t drive me out of all patience.”

Smerdyakov took the rag from his eyes. Every line on his puckered face spoke of the offense he had just endured.

“So, you scoundrel, you thought I was at one with Dmitri in wanting to kill father?”

“I didn’t know your thoughts then, sir,” Smerdyakov said in an injured voice, “and that was why I stopped you then, as you were coming in the gate, in order to test you on that same point, sir.”

“To test what? What?”

“Precisely that same circumstance: whether you did or did not want your parent to be killed soon.”

What aroused Ivan Fyodorovich’s indignation most of all was this insistent, insolent tone, which Smerdyakov stubbornly refused to give up.

“You killed him!” he exclaimed suddenly. Smerdyakov grinned contemptuously. “That I did not kill him, you yourself know for certain. And I’d have thought that for an intelligent man there was no more to be said about it.”

“But why, why did you have such a suspicion about me then?”

“From fear only, sir, as you already know. Because I was in such a state then, all shaking from fear, that I suspected everybody. And I decided to test you, sir, because I thought that if you, too, wanted the same thing as your brother, then it would be the end of the whole business, and I’d perish, too, like a fly.”

“Listen, you said something else two weeks ago.”

“It was the same thing I had in mind when I spoke with you in the hospital, only I thought you’d understand without so many words, and that you yourself didn’t want to talk straight out, being a most intelligent man, sir.”

“Is that so! But answer me, answer, I insist: precisely how could I then have instilled such a base suspicion about myself into your mean soul?”

“As for killing—you, personally, could never have done it, sir, and you didn’t want to do it either; but as for wanting someone else to kill—that you did want.”

“And he says it so calmly, so calmly! But why should I want it, why in hell should I have wanted it?”

“What do you mean, why in hell, sir? What about the inheritance, sir?” Smerdyakov picked up venomously and even somehow vindictively. “After your parent, you, each of you three good brothers, would then get nearly forty thousand, and maybe even more, sir, but if Fyodor Pavlovich was to marry that same lady, Agrafena Alexandrovna, she would surely transfer all the capital to herself, right after the wedding, because she’s not at all stupid, sir, so that your parent wouldn’t even leave you two roubles, for all three of you good brothers. And was marriage so far off, sir? Only a hair’s breadth, sir: the lady had only to beckon to him with her little finger, and he’d have run after her to church at once with his tongue hanging out.”

Ivan Fyodorovich painfully managed to restrain himself.

“All right,” he said at last, “you see I didn’t jump up, I didn’t beat you, I didn’t kill you. Go on: so, according to you, I meant brother Dmitri to do it, I was counting on him?”

“How could you not count on him, sir; if he killed him, then he’d be deprived of all rights of nobility, of rank and property, and be sent to Siberia, sir. And then his share, sir, after your parent, would be left for you and your brother, Alexei Fyodorovich, equally, sir, meaning not forty then but sixty thousand for each of you, sir. So you surely must have been counting on Dmitri Fyodorovich!”

“What I suffer from you! Listen, scoundrel: if I had been counting on anyone then, it would most certainly have been you and not Dmitri, and, I swear, I even did anticipate some sort of loathsomeness from you ... at the time ... I remember my impression!”

“And I, too, thought for a moment then that you were counting on me as well,” Smerdyakov grinned sarcastically, “so that you thereby gave yourself away even more to me, because if you were anticipating on me and you left all the same, it was just as if you told me thereby: you can kill my parent, I won’t prevent you.”

“Scoundrel! So that’s how you understood it!”

“It was all from that same Chermashnya, sir. For pity’s sake! You were going to Moscow, and refused all your parent’s pleas to go to Chermashnya, sir! And after just one foolish word from me, you suddenly agreed, sir! And why did you have to agree to Chermashnya? If you went to Chermashnya instead of Moscow for no reason, after one word from me, then it means you expected something from me.”

“No, I swear I did not!” Ivan yelled, gnashing his teeth.

“What do you mean ‘no,’ sir? On the contrary, after such words from me then, you, being your parent’s son, ought first of all to have reported me to the police and given me a thrashing, sir ... at least slapped me in the mug right there, but you, for pity’s sake, sir, on the contrary, without getting the least bit angry, at once amicably fulfilled everything exactly according to my rather foolish word, sir, and left—which was altogether absurd, sir, for you ought to have stayed to protect your parent’s life ... How could I not conclude?”

Ivan sat scowling, leaning convulsively with both fists on his knees.

“Yes, it’s a pity I didn’t slap you in the mug,” he grinned bitterly. “I couldn’t have dragged you to the police then—who would have believed me, and what did I have to show them? But as for your mug ... ach, it’s a pity it didn’t occur to me; though beating is forbidden, I’d have made hash out of your ugly snout.”

Smerdyakov looked at him almost with delight.

“In the ordinary occasions of life,” he spoke in that complacently doctrinaire tone in which he used to argue about religion with Grigory Vasilievich and tease him while they were standing at Fyodor Pavlovich’s table, “in the ordinary occasions of life, mug-slapping is indeed forbidden by law nowadays, and everyone has stopped such beatings, sir, but in distinctive cases of life, not only among us but all over the world, be it even the most complete French republic, beatings do go on all the same, as in the time of Adam and Eve, sir, and there will be no stop to it, sir, but even then, in a distinctive case, you did not dare, sir.”

“What are you doing studying French vocables? “ Ivan nodded towards the notebook on the table. “And why shouldn’t I be studying them, sir, so as to further my education thereby, supposing that some day I myself may chance to be in those happy parts of Europe.”

“Listen, monster,” Ivan’s eyes started flashing, and he was shaking all over, “I am not afraid of your accusations, give whatever evidence you like against me, and if I haven’t beaten you to death right now, it is only because I suspect you of this crime, and I shall have you in court. I shall unmask you yet!”

“And in my opinion you’d better keep silent, sir. Because what can you tell about me, in view of my complete innocence, and who will believe you? And if you begin, then I, too, will tell everything, sir, for how could I not defend myself?”

“Do you think I’m afraid of you now?”

“Maybe in court they won’t believe all the words I was just telling you, sir, but among the public they will believe, sir, and you will be ashamed, sir.”

“So once again: ‘It’s always interesting to talk with an intelligent man’– eh?” Ivan snarled.

“Right on the mark, if I may say so, sir. So be intelligent, sir.”

Ivan Fyodorovich stood up all trembling with indignation, put his coat on, and no longer replying to Smerdyakov, not even looking at him, quickly left the cottage. The fresh evening air refreshed him. The moon was shining brightly in the sky. A terrible nightmare of thoughts and feelings seethed in his soul. “Go and denounce Smerdyakov right now? But denounce him for what: he’s innocent all the same. On the contrary, he will accuse me. Why, indeed, did I go to Chermashnya then? Why? Why?” Ivan Fyodorovich kept asking.”Yes, of course, I was expecting something, he’s right ... “And again for the hundredth time he recalled how, on that last night at his father’s, he had eavesdropped from the stairs, but this time he recalled it with such suffering that he even stopped in his tracks as if pierced through: “Yes, that is what I expected, it’s true! I wanted the murder, I precisely wanted it! Did I want the murder, did I ... ? I must kill Smerdyakov...! If I don’t dare kill Smerdyakov now, life is not worth living...!” Without going home, Ivan Fyodorovich then went straight to Katerina Ivanovna and frightened her by his appearance: he seemed insane. He told her the whole of his conversation with Smerdyakov, down to the last little detail. He could not be calmed, no matter how she talked to him; he kept pacing the room and spoke abruptly, strangely. Finally he sat down, put his elbows on the table, rested his head in both hands, and uttered a strange aphorism:

“If it was not Dmitri but Smerdyakov who killed father, then, of course, I am solidary with him, because I put him up to it. Whether I did put him up to it—I don’t know yet. But if it was he who killed him, and not Dmitri, then, of course, I am a murderer, too.” Hearing this, Katerina Ivanovna silently rose from her seat, went to her desk, opened a box standing on it, took out a piece of paper, and placed it before Ivan. This piece of paper was the same document of which Ivan Fyodorovich later told Alyosha, calling it “a mathematical proof” that brother Dmitri had killed their father. It was a letter to Katerina Ivanovna, written by Mitya in a drunken state the same evening he had met Alyosha in the fields on his way back to the monastery, after the scene in Katerina Ivanovna’s house when Grushenka had insulted her. Then, having parted with Alyosha, Mitya rushed to Grushenka; it is not known whether he saw her or not, but towards nightfall he turned up at the “Metropolis” tavern, where he got properly drunk. Once drunk, he called for pen and paper, and penned an important document against himself. It was a frenzied, verbose, and incoherent letter– precisely “drunk.” It was the same as when a drunken man comes home and begins telling his wife or someone in the house, with remarkable ardor, how he has just been insulted; what a scoundrel his insulter is; what a fine man, on the contrary, he himself is; and how he is going to show that scoundrel—and it is all so long, long, incoherent, and agitated, with pounding of fists on the table, with drunken tears. The paper they gave him for the letter in the tavern was a dirty scrap of some ordinary writing paper, of poor quality, on the back of which some bill had been written. Apparently there was not space enough for drunken verbosity, and Mitya not only filled all the margins with writing, but even wrote the last lines across the rest of the letter. The content of the letter was as follows:

Fatal Katya! Tomorrow I will get money and give you back your three thousand, and farewell, woman of great wrath, but farewell, too, my love! Let us end it! Tomorrow I’ll try to get it from all people, and if I don’t get it from people, I give you my word of honor, I will go to my father and smash his head in and take it from under his pillow, if only Ivan goes away. I may go to hard labor, but I will give you back the three thousand. And—farewell to you. I bow to you, to the ground, for I am a scoundrel before you. Forgive me. No, better not forgive, it will be easier for me and for you! Better hard labor than your love, for I love another, and you’ve found out too much

. about her today to be able to forgive. I will kill my thief. I will go away from you all, to the East, so as not to know anyone. From her as well, for you are not my only tormentor, but she is, too. Farewell!

P.S. I am writing a curse, yet I adore you! I hear it in my heart. One string

is left, and it sings. Better to tear my heart asunder! I will kill myself, but that dog first. I’ll tear the three thousand from him and throw it to you. Though I’m a scoundrel before you, I am not a thief! Wait for the three thousand. Under the dog’s mattress, with a pink ribbon. I am not a thief, but I will kill

my thief. Katya, don’t look contemptuous: Dmitri is not a thief, he is a murderer! He’s killed his father and ruined himself in order to stand up and not have to endure your pride. And not to love you. P.P.S. I kiss your feet, farewell!

P.P.P.S. Katya, pray to God they give me the money. Then there won’t be blood on me, but otherwise—blood there will be! Kill me!

Your slave and enemy, D. Karamazov.

When Ivan finished reading the “document,” he stood up, convinced. So his brother was the murderer, and not Smerdyakov. Not Smerdyakov, and therefore not he, Ivan. This letter suddenly assumed a mathematical significance in his eyes. There could be no further doubt for him now of Mitya’s guilt. Incidentally, the suspicion never occurred to Ivan that Mitya might have done the murder together with Smerdyakov; besides, it did not fit the facts. Ivan was set completely at ease. The next morning he recalled Smerdyakov and his jeers merely with contempt. A few days later he was even surprised that he could have been so painfully offended by his suspicions. He resolved to despise him and forget him. And so a month passed. He no longer made any inquiries about Smerdyakov, but a couple of times he heard in passing that he was very ill and not in his right mind. “He’ll end in madness,” the young doctor, Varvinsky, once said of him, and Ivan remembered it. During the last week of that month, Ivan himself began to feel very bad. He had already gone to consult the doctor from Moscow, invited by Katerina Ivanovna, who arrived just before the trial. And precisely at the same time his relations with Katerina Ivanovna intensified to the utmost. The two were some sort of enemies in love with each other. Katerina Ivanovna’s reversions to Mitya, momentary but strong, now drove Ivan to perfect rage. It is strange that until the very last scene at Katerina Ivanovna’s, which we have already described, when Alyosha came to her from seeing Mitya, he, Ivan, had never once heard any doubts of Mitya’s guilt from her during that whole month, despite all her “reversions” to him, which he hated so much. It was also remarkable that, though he felt he hated Mitya more and more every day, he understood at the same time that he hated him not because of Katya’s “reversions” to him, but precisely because he had killed their father!He himself felt it and was fully aware of it. Nevertheless, some ten days before the trial, he went to Mitya and offered him a plan of escape—a plan apparently already conceived long ago. Here, apart from the main reason prompting him to take such a step, the cause also lay in a certain unhealing scratch left on his heart by one little remark of Smerdyakov’s, that it was supposedly in his, Ivan’s, interest that his brother be convicted, because then the amount of the inheritance for himself and Alyosha would go up from forty to sixty thousand. He decided to sacrifice thirty thousand from his own portion to arrange for Mitya’s escape. Coming back from seeing him then, he felt terribly sad and confused: he suddenly began to feel that he wanted this escape not only so as to sacrifice the thirty thousand to it, and thus heal the scratch, but also for some other reason. “Is it because in my soul I’m just as much a murderer?” he asked himself. Something remote, but burning, stung his soul. Above all, his pride suffered greatly all that month, but of that later ... When, after his conversation with Alyosha, he stood with his hand on the bell of his apartment and suddenly decided to go to Smerdyakov, Ivan Fyodorovich was obeying some peculiar indignation that suddenly boiled up in his breast. He suddenly recalled how Katerina Ivanovna had just exclaimed to him in Alyosha’s presence: “It was you, you alone, who convinced me that he” (that is, Mitya) “is the murderer!” Recalling it, Ivan was dumbfounded: never in his life had he assured her that Mitya was the murderer, on the contrary, he had actually suspected himself before her when he came to her from Smerdyakov. On the contrary, it was she, she who had then laid the “document” before him and proved his brother’s guilt! And suddenly it was she who exclaimed: “I myself went to see Smerdyakov!” Went when? Ivan knew nothing of it. So she was not so sure of Mitya’s guilt! And what could Smerdyakov have told her? What, what precisely did he tell her? Terrible wrath began burning in his heart. He did not understand how he could have missed those words of hers half an hour ago and not shouted right then. He let go of the bell and set out for Smerdyakov. “This time maybe I’ll kill him,” he thought on the way.

Chapter 8: The Third and Last Meeting with Smerdyakov

He was only halfway there when a sharp, dry wind arose, the same as early that morning, and fine, thick, dry snow began pouring down. It fell on the earth without sticking to it, the wind whirled it about, and soon a perfect blizzard arose. We have almost no streetlamps in the part of town where Smerdyakov was living. Ivan Fyodorovich strode through the darkness without noticing the blizzard, finding his way instinctively. His head ached and there was a painful throbbing in his temples. His hands were cramped, he could feel it. Some distance from Maria Kondratievna’s house, Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly met with a solitary drunk little peasant in a patched coat, who was walking in zigzags, grumbling and cursing, and then would suddenly stop cursing and begin to sing in a hoarse, drunken voice: