II. Stinking Lizaveta

There was one particular circumstance here which shook Grigory deeply, finally confirming in him a certain unpleasant and loathsome suspicion he had had before. This Stinking Lizaveta was a very short girl, “two arshins and a bit,” well under five feet, as many of the pious old women of our little town recalled about her with tender feeling after her death. Her twenty-year-old face, healthy, broad, and ruddy, was entirely idiotic; the gaze of her eyes was fixed and unpleasant, though meek. All her life, summer and winter, she went about barefoot and in nothing but a hempen shift. Her almost black hair, extremely thick and curly like a ram’s, sat on her head in the form of some sort of enormous cap, as it were. Besides that, it was always dirty with earth and mud, with little leaves, splinters, and shavings stuck in it, because she always slept on the ground and in the mud. Her father was a homeless, ruined, and ailing tradesman, Ilya, who drank heavily and had lived on for many years as a sort of hired hand with some well-to-do people, also tradesmen of our town. Lizaveta’s mother had died long ago. The eternally sickly and spiteful Ilya used to beat Lizaveta inhumanly whenever she came home. But she came home rarely, because she lived as a dependent all over the town, as a holy fool, a person of God. Ilya’s employers, and Ilya himself, and even many of the compassionate people of the town, mostly merchants and merchants’ wives, tried more than once to dress Lizaveta more decently than in a shift alone, and toward winter they always put a sheepskin coat on her and boots on her feet; but she usually let them put everything on her without objection, and then went away, and somewhere, mostly on the porch of the cathedral church, she invariably took off everything that had been given her—a kerchief, or a skirt, a sheepskin, boots—left it all on the spot, and went off barefoot and in nothing but her shift as before. It once happened that the new governor of our province, inspecting our little town in passing, was much offended in his finest feelings on seeing Lizaveta, and though he understood that she was a “holy fool,” as was reported to him, he nevertheless pointed out that a young girl wandering about in nothing but a shift offended against propriety, and so this was not to happen in the future. But the governor left, and Lizaveta was left as she was. At last her father died, and by that very fact she became even dearer to all the pious persons in the town, as an orphan. In fact, everyone even seemed to love her; even the boys did not tease her or hurt her, and our boys, especially at school, are a mischievous lot. She would walk into strangers’ houses, and nobody drove her out; on the contrary, everyone would give her a kind word and a half-kopeck. They would give her a half-kopeck, she would take it and at once carry it off and drop it into some alms box, the church’s or the jail’s. They would give her a bagel or a roll at the market, and she would invariably go and give the bagel or roll to the first little child she met, or else she would stop one of our very richest ladies and give it to her; and the ladies even accepted it gladly. She herself lived on nothing but black bread and water. She would go into a rich shop, as it used to be, and sit down; there were expensive goods lying about, and money too, but the owners never watched out for her: they knew that you could lay out thousands in money in front of her and forget it, and she would not take a kopeck of it. She seldom went into a church, and she slept either on church porches or in somebody’s kitchen garden, having climbed over somebody’s wattle fence (we still have many wattle fences instead of board fences, even to this day). She came home, that is, to the house of the people with whom her late father had lived, about once a week, and in winter she came every day, but only for the night, and would sleep either in the entryway or in the cowshed. People marveled that she could endure such a life, but she was used to it; though she was small, she had an uncommonly strong constitution. Some of the gentlefolk here maintained that she did it all only out of pride, but somehow that did not fit: she could not say a single word, and only rarely moved her tongue a little and mumbled—what sort of pride is that? And it happened once (it was a good while ago), on a bright, warm September night, at the full moon, very late by our standards, that a drunken band of our gentlemen out on a spree, five or six young bucks, were returning home from the club “by the back ways.” On both sides of the lane ran a wattle fence, and behind it stretched the kitchen gardens of the adjoining houses; the lane led out onto a footbridge over our long, stinking puddle, which we sometimes like to call a little river. By the fence, in the nettles and burdocks, our company caught sight of Lizaveta asleep. The gentlemen, who had had a drop too much, stopped over her, roaring with laughter, and began making witticisms with all possible lack of censorship. It suddenly entered the head of one young gentleman to put a quite eccentric question on an impossible subject: “Could anyone at all, they say, take such a beast for a woman, right now, for instance, and so on.” They all decided with proud disgust that no one could. But Fyodor Pavlovich happened to be in that little group, and he instantly jumped forward and decided that she could be taken for a woman, very much so even, and that there was even something piquant of a special kind in it, and so on, and so on. True, in those days he was pushing himself forward among us for his role of buffoon in an overly deliberate way even, liked to jump forward and amuse the gentlemen, with apparent equality, of course, but in fact as a perfect boor before them. It was just at the time when he had received word from Petersburg of the death of his first wife, Adelaida Ivanovna, and when, with crape on his hat, he drank and carried on so disgracefully that some in the town, even among the most dissolute, were sickened at the sight of him. The band, of course, burst out laughing at the unexpected opinion; one of the band even began to egg Fyodor Pavlovich on, but the rest began to spit even harder, though still with excessive merriment, and at last they all went off on their way. Afterward Fyodor Pavlovich swore up and down that he too had left then together with all the others; perhaps that is just how it was; nobody knows for certain and nobody ever knew, but some five or six months later everyone in town began to talk with sincere and extreme indignation of how Lizaveta was going about pregnant, and they asked and inquired: whose sin was it, who was the offender? And it was just then that a strange rumor suddenly spread all over town that the offender was this very Fyodor Pavlovich. Where did this rumor come from? Of that band of revelers only one participant still remained in town by that time, and he an elderly and respectable state councilor, a man with a family and grown-up daughters, who would certainly not have spread anything, even if there had been something; the other participants, some five men, had left by then. But the rumor pointed straight at Fyodor Pavlovich and went on pointing. Of course, he did not even make much of an objection to it: he would not even have answered some petty merchants or tradesmen. In those days he was proud and talked only in his own company of officials and noblemen, whom he amused so much. It was just at that time that Grigory took his master’s side energetically and with all his might, and not only defended him against all this slander, but got into quarrels and wrangles on his behalf and made many people change their minds. “She herself is to blame, the low creature,” he said positively, and the offender was none other than “Karp with the Screw” (that was the name of a terrible convict, well known to the town then, who had by that time escaped from the provincial jail and was living secretly in our town). This guess seemed plausible; people remembered Karp, remembered precisely that on those very nights, toward autumn, he had been roaming about the town and had robbed three people. But this whole incident and all this talk not only did not turn the general sympathy away from the poor holy fool, but everyone began to guard and protect her even more. The merchant’s widow Kondratyeva, a well-to-do woman, even arranged to take Lizaveta into her house at the end of April, intending not to let her out until her confinement. They kept watch on her unceasingly, but it so happened that in spite of all the unceasing watch, on the very last day, in the evening, Lizaveta suddenly slipped away secretly from Kondratyeva’s and turned up in Fyodor Pavlovich’s garden. How she, in her condition, climbed over the high, strong fence of the garden remained a riddle of a sort. Some insisted that she had been “carried over,” others that “something” had carried her over. Most likely it all happened in a very tricky but natural way, and Lizaveta, who knew how to climb over wattle fences into other people’s gardens to sleep in them, somehow got up onto Fyodor Pavlovich’s fence as well, and jumped down from it into the garden, though she hurt herself doing it, in spite of her condition. Grigory rushed to Marfa Ignatyevna and sent her to help Lizaveta, and he himself ran for an old midwife, a tradeswoman who, as it happened, lived not far away. The baby was saved, but toward dawn Lizaveta died. Grigory took the infant, brought it into the house, sat his wife down, and laid it on her lap, right against her breast: “God’s orphan child is kin to everyone, and to you and me all the more. Our little dead one has sent us this one, and this one has come from the devil’s son and a righteous woman. Nurse him, and weep no more from now on.” And so Marfa Ignatyevna brought the baby up. They christened him and named him Pavel, and as for the patronymic, everyone, without being told, began of their own accord to call him Fyodorovich. Fyodor Pavlovich did not object to anything, and even found it all amusing, though he went on denying everything with all his might. The town liked his having taken in the foundling. Later Fyodor Pavlovich made up a surname for the foundling as well: he called him Smerdyakov, after his mother’s nickname, Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya, Stinking Lizaveta. And it was this Smerdyakov who turned out to be Fyodor Pavlovich’s second servant, and at the beginning of our story he was living in the cottage together with old Grigory and old Marfa. He was employed as cook. I really ought to add something about him in particular too, but I am ashamed to distract my reader’s attention for so long to such ordinary lackeys, and therefore I pass on to my story, trusting that Smerdyakov will somehow come in of himself in the further course of the tale.