II. At His Father’s

First of all Alyosha went to his father. As he approached, he remembered that his father had insisted very much the day before that he should somehow come in without brother Ivan’s knowing. “But why?” it now suddenly occurred to Alyosha. “If Father wants to tell me something by myself, secretly, why should I have to come in secretly? He must have wanted to say something else yesterday in his agitation, and didn’t have time,” he decided. Nonetheless he was very glad when Marfa Ignatyevna, who opened the gate for him (Grigory, it turned out, had fallen ill and was lying in the cottage), told him in answer to his question that Ivan Fyodorovich had gone out two hours ago, sir.

“And Father?”

“He’s up, he’s having his coffee,” Marfa Ignatyevna answered somehow drily.

Alyosha went in. The old man sat by himself at the table, in slippers and an old little coat, looking over some accounts for amusement, without much attention, however. He was all alone in the whole house (Smerdyakov too had gone out to buy provisions for dinner). But it was not the accounts that occupied him. Though he had got out of bed early in the morning and was keeping his spirits up, he looked tired and weak all the same. His forehead, on which huge purple bruises had spread overnight, was bound with a red handkerchief. His nose, too, had swollen badly overnight, and on it as well several bruises had formed in blotches, insignificant, it is true, but decidedly giving his whole face a peculiarly spiteful and irritated look. The old man knew this himself and looked with unfriendly eyes at Alyosha as he came in.

“The coffee’s cold,” he cried sharply, “I’m not offering you any. I myself, brother, am living on nothing but Lenten fish soup today, and I’m not inviting anyone. What have you come for?”

“To find out about your health,” said Alyosha.

“Yes. And besides, I told you myself yesterday to come. It’s all nonsense. You needn’t have deigned to trouble yourself. I knew, though, that you’d come dragging yourself here at once…”

He said this with the most hostile feeling. Meanwhile he got up from his seat and anxiously looked at his nose in the mirror (perhaps for the fortieth time since morning). He also began arranging the red handkerchief on his forehead more becomingly.

“Red is better; in white it looks like a hospital,” he remarked sententiously. “Well, what’s new with you? How’s your elder?”

“He is very bad, he may die today,” Alyosha answered, but his father did not even catch it, and at once forgot his own question.

“Ivan has gone out,” he said suddenly. “He’s trying with all his might to steal Mitka’s fiancée away from him, that’s why he’s living here,” he added spitefully, and, twisting his mouth, looked at Alyosha.

“Can he really have told you so himself?” asked Alyosha.

“Yes, and he told me long ago. What do you think: some three weeks ago he told me. He didn’t come here to cut my throat on the sly too, did he? He must have come for something, mustn’t he?”

“What are you saying! Why do you talk like that?” Alyosha was terribly embarrassed.

“He doesn’t ask for money, true, but all the same he won’t get a fig from me. I, my dearest Alexei Fyodorovich, intend to live in this world as long as possible, be it known to you, and therefore I need every kopeck, and the longer I live, the more I’ll need it,” he went on, pacing the room from corner to corner, his hands in the pockets of his wide, greasy coat of yellow summer linen. “For the moment I’m still a man, all the same, only fifty-five, but I want to go on standing in the ranks of men another twenty years or so; and when I get old I’ll be foul, they won’t come to me of their own free will then, well, and that’s just when I’ll need my little bit of money. So now I’m saving up more and more, for myself alone, sir, my dear son Alexei Fyodorovich, be it known to you, because I want to live in my filth to the very end, be it known to you. In filth it’s sweeter: everyone curses it, but everyone lives in it, only they all do it on the sly, and I do it openly. And it’s for this simplicity of mine that all the filthy ones have fallen on me. And I don’t want to go to that paradise of yours, Alexei Fyodorovich, be it known to you, and it isn’t even proper for a decent man to go to that paradise of yours, even if there is one. To my mind, you fall asleep and don’t wake up, and there’s nothing; remember me if you like, and if you don’t, the devil take you. That’s my philosophy. Yesterday Ivan talked well here, though we were all drunk. Ivan is a braggart, and there’s no such learning in him… and no special education either, he keeps quiet and grins at you without a word: that’s the only thing that carries him.”

Alyosha listened to him and was silent.

“Why doesn’t he talk to me? And when he does talk, he puts on airs; he’s a scoundrel, that Ivan of yours! And I’ll marry Grushka right now, if I only want to. Because with money you only have to want, sir, Alexei Fyodorovich, and everything will be yours. That’s just what Ivan is afraid of, and he’s guarding me so I won’t marry, and for that reason he’s pushing Mitka to marry Grushka: in that way he wants to keep me away from Grushka as well (as if I’d leave him money if I don’t marry Grushka!), and on the other hand, if Mitka marries Grushka, then Ivan will take his rich fiancée for himself, that’s his calculation! He’s a scoundrel, that Ivan of yours!”

“How irritable you are. It’s from yesterday; you should go and lie down,” said Alyosha.

“There, you say that,” the old man suddenly remarked, as if it had come into his head for the first time, “you say it, and I’m not angry with you, but if Ivan had said that very thing to me, I’d have been angry. Only with you alone have I had my kindly little moments, otherwise I’m a wicked man, you know.”

“You aren’t a wicked man, you’re a twisted one,” Alyosha smiled.

“Listen, I was going to have that brigand Mitka locked up today, and even now I don’t know how I’ll decide. Of course, in these fashionable times it’s the accepted thing to consider fathers and mothers a prejudice, but by the laws, I believe, even in our times it isn’t permitted to drag old fathers by the hair and beat them in the face with your heels on the floor, in their own house, and to boast you’ll come and kill them outright, all in front of witnesses, sir. If I wanted, I could bend him double and have him locked up right now for yesterday.”

“So you don’t want to lodge a complaint, no?”

“Ivan talked me out of it. I wouldn’t give a spit for Ivan, but I know a trick myself…”

And bending toward Alyosha, he went on in a confidential half-whisper:

“If I have him locked up, the scoundrel, she’ll hear that I had him locked up and run to him at once. But if she hears today that he beat me, a weak old man, half to death, then, I dare say, she’ll drop him and come to visit me… That’s the kind of characters we’re endowed with: only to do the contrary. I know her through and through! What, won’t you have a drop of cognac? Take a little cold coffee, and I’ll pour you a quarter of a little glass into it, it’s good for the taste, brother.”

“No, thank you, I won’t. I’ll take this bread roll with me, if you’ll let me,” said Alyosha, and, taking a three-kopeck French roll, he put it in the pocket of his cassock. “And you shouldn’t drink cognac either,” he advised warily, looking into the old man’s face.

“You’re right, it irritates, it gives no peace. But just one little glass… I’ll get it from the little cupboard…”

He unlocked the “little cupboard,” poured a little glass, drank it, then locked the little cupboard and put the key back in his pocket.

“And that’s enough, one glass won’t kill me.”

“There, now you’ve become kinder,” Alyosha smiled.

“Hm! I love you even without cognac, but with scoundrels I’m a scoundrel too. Vanka isn’t going to Chermashnya, and why? He has to spy: how much I’ll give Grushenka, if she comes. They’re all scoundrels! And I don’t acknowledge Ivan at all. Where did such a one come from? Not our kind of soul at all. As if I’d leave him anything! Why, I won’t even leave a will, be it known to you. And Mitka I’ll crush like a cockroach. I crush black cockroaches at night with my slipper: they go crack when you step on them. Your Mitka will go crack too. Your Mitka, because you love him. There, you love him, and I’m not afraid of your loving him. But if Ivan loved him, I’d be afraid for myself because of his loving him. But Ivan loves nobody, Ivan isn’t our kind of man, these people like Ivan, brother, aren’t our kind of people, they’re dust that’s been raised… The wind will blow, and the dust will pass… Yesterday a stupid idea came into my head when I told you to come today: I wanted to find out through you about Mitka, whether, if I counted him out a thousand now, well, maybe another, he’d agree, the beggar and blackguard, to clear out of here altogether, for five years, or better for thirty-five, and without Grushka, and give her up completely, eh?”

“I… I’ll ask him…” Alyosha muttered. “If it were the whole three thousand, perhaps he…”

“Liar! There’s no need to ask him now, no need for anything! I’ve changed my mind. That stupidity crept into my noggin yesterday out of sheer stupidity. I won’t give him anything, not a blessed thing, I need my little bit of money myself,” the old man waved his hand. “I’ll squash him like a cockroach without that anyway. Don’t say anything to him, or he’ll start hoping. And there’s nothing at all for you to do here, off you go. That fiancée, that Katerina Ivanovna, whom he so carefully hid from me the whole time, is she marrying him or not? You went to see her yesterday, I believe?”

“She won’t leave him for anything.”

“That’s just the kind these tender young ladies love, rakes and scoundrels! They’re trash, I tell you, these pale young ladies; now, something else… Well! If I had his youth, and my face as it was then (because I was better-looking than he is at twenty-eight), I’d have made conquests exactly the way he does. The rascal! But he won’t get Grushenka all the same, sir, he won’t get her, sir… I’ll turn him into dirt!”

He had flown into a rage again at these last words.

“You go too, there’s nothing for you to do here today,” he snapped sharply.

Alyosha went up to say goodbye and kissed him on the shoulder.

“What’s that for?” the old man was a little surprised. “We’ll see each other again, won’t we? Or do you think we won’t?”

“Not at all, I just did it, without thinking.”

“Why, and me too, I just meant… nothing…” the old man was looking at him. “Listen, you, listen,” he shouted after him, “come sometime, soon, and for fish soup, I’ll cook a fish soup, a special one, not like today’s, be sure to come! Come tomorrow, do you hear, tomorrow!”

And as soon as Alyosha had gone out the door, he went up to the little cupboard again and tossed off another half glass.

“No more!” he muttered, clearing his throat with a grunt, again locked the little cupboard, again put the key in his pocket, then went into the bedroom, lay down on the bed in exhaustion, and in an instant fell asleep.