V. A Strain in the Drawing Room

But in the drawing room the conversation was already ending; Katerina Ivanovna was in great excitement, though she had a resolute air. At the moment when Alyosha and Mrs. Khokhlakova came in, Ivan Fyodorovich was getting up to leave. His face was somewhat pale, and Alyosha looked at him uneasily. The thing was that here one of Alyosha’s doubts was now being resolved, an uneasy riddle that had been tormenting him for some time. As much as a month ago it had been suggested to him several times and from various sides that brother Ivan loved Katerina Ivanovna and, above all, really intended to “win her away” from Mitya. Until quite recently this had seemed monstrous to Alyosha, though it had troubled him greatly. He loved both his brothers and dreaded such a rivalry between them. Meanwhile Dmitri Fyodorovich himself had suddenly declared to him outright yesterday that he was even glad of brother Ivan’s rivalry and that it would help him, Dmitri, in many ways. Help him in what? To marry Grushenka? But that Alyosha considered a desperate and last resort. Besides all this, Alyosha had believed without a doubt, right up to yesterday evening, that Katerina Ivanovna herself loved his brother Dmitri passionately and stubbornly, but he had believed it only up to yesterday evening. Besides, for some reason he kept imagining that she could not love a man like Ivan, but loved his brother Dmitri, and precisely such as he was, in spite of all the monstrousness of such a love. But yesterday, in the scene with Grushenka, something else had suddenly seemed to glimmer before him. The word “strain,” just uttered by Mrs. Khokhlakova, almost made him start, because precisely that night, half waking at dawn, he had suddenly said, probably in answer to his dream: “A strain, a strain!” All night he had been dreaming of yesterday’s scene at Katerina Ivanovna’s. Now Mrs. Khokhlakova’s sudden, direct, and stubborn assurance that Katerina Ivanovna loved brother Ivan, and only of her own accord, on purpose, out of some sort of game, out of “strain,” was deceiving herself and tormenting herself with her put-on love for Dmitri, out of some supposed gratitude, struck Alyosha: “Yes, perhaps the whole truth really does lie precisely in those words!” But in that case, what was brother Ivan’s position? Alyosha felt by some instinct that a character like Katerina Ivanovna’s needed to dominate, and she could dominate only someone like Dmitri, and by no means someone like Ivan. For only Dmitri could (granted, if only over a long time) humble himself before her at last, “to his own happiness” (which Alyosha would even have wished), but not Ivan; Ivan could not humble himself before her, and such humility would not have given him happiness either. Such was the notion of Ivan that Alyosha had for some reason involuntarily formed. And now all these hesitations and considerations flew and flashed through his mind at the instant he was entering the drawing room. Still another thought flashed through it, suddenly and irresistibly: “And what if she loves no one, neither the one nor the other?” I will note that Alyosha was as it were ashamed of such thoughts and reproached himself for them when they happened to come to him during the past month. “Well, what do I understand about love and women, and how can I come to such conclusions?” he thought reproachfully after each such thought or guess of his. And yet it was impossible not to think. He understood by instinct that now, for instance, in the destinies of his two brothers this rivalry was too important a question, and that too much depended on it. “One viper will devour the other,” brother Ivan had said yesterday, speaking in irritation about their father and brother Dmitri. So, then, brother Dmitri was a viper in his eyes, and perhaps had been a viper for a long time? Was it not ever since brother Ivan had come to know Katerina Ivanovna? Those words, of course, had escaped Ivan yesterday involuntarily, but all the more important for being involuntary. If so, what peace could there be here? Were these not, on the contrary, new occasions for hatred and enmity in their family? And above all, whom was he, Alyosha, to pity? And what was he to wish for each of them? He loved them both, but what was he to wish for each of them amid such terrible contradictions? One could get completely lost in this tangle, and Alyosha’s heart could not bear uncertainty, because his love was always of an active character. He could not love passively; once he had come to love, he at once set about helping as well. And for that he had to set himself an aim, he had to know firmly what was good and needful for each of them, and once he was confirmed in the rightness of the aim, naturally, to help each of them. But instead of a firm aim, there was nothing in all of it but vagueness and tangle. “Strain” had been uttered now! But what could he understand even in this strain? He did not understand even the first word in all this tangle!

Seeing Alyosha, Katerina Ivanovna said quickly and joyfully to Ivan Fyodorovich, who had already got up from his seat to leave:

“Just a minute! Stay one more minute. I want to hear the opinion of this man here, whom I trust with my whole being. Katerina Osipovna, don’t you go either,” she added, turning to Mrs. Khokhlakova. She sat Alyosha down beside her, and Mrs. Khokhlakova sat opposite, next to Ivan Fyodorovich.

“Here are all my friends, all I have in the world, my dear friends,” she began ardently, in a voice in which sincere tears of suffering trembled, and Alyosha’s heart at once turned toward her again. “You, Alexei Fyodorovich, you were a witness yesterday of that… horror, and you saw what I was like. You didn’t see it, Ivan Fyodorovich, he did. What he thought of me yesterday I don’t know; I know only one thing, that if the same thing were repeated today, now, I would express the same feelings as yesterday: the same feelings, the same words, and the same movements. You remember my movements, Alexei Fyodorovich, you yourself held me back in one of them…” (As she said this, she blushed, and her eyes flashed.) “I declare to you, Alexei Fyodorovich, that I cannot be reconciled to anything. Listen, Alexei Fyodorovich, I don’t even know whether I love him now. I have come to pity him; that is poor evidence of love. If I loved him, if I went on loving him, then perhaps I would not pity him now, but, on the contrary, hate him…”

Her voice trembled, and little tears glistened on her lashes. Alyosha started inwardly. “This girl is truthful and sincere,” he thought, “and… and she no longer loves Dmitri!”

“That’s so! That’s so!” Mrs. Khokhlakova was about to exclaim.

“Wait, dear Katerina Osipovna, I haven’t said the main thing, I haven’t said the final thing that I decided this night. I feel that my decision is perhaps terrible, for me, but I have a feeling that I will not change it for anything, for anything, all my life long; so it will be. My dear, my kind, my constant and magnanimous counselor and deep reader of hearts and my only friend, the only one I have in the world, Ivan Fyodorovich, approves of me in everything and praises my decision… He knows it.”

“Yes, I approve of it,” Ivan Fyodorovich said in a quiet but firm voice.

“But I want Alyosha too (ah, Alexei Fyodorovich, forgive me for calling you simply Alyosha), I want Alexei Fyodorovich too to tell me right now, in front of both my friends, whether I am right or not. I have an instinctive feeling that you, Alyosha, my dear brother (because you are my dear brother),” she said rapturously again, seizing his cold hand in her hot one, “I have a feeling that your decision, your approval, in spite of all my torments, will give me peace, because after your words I will grow quiet and be reconciled; I have a feeling of it!”

“I don’t know what you are going to ask me,” Alyosha brought out, his face flushing, “I only know that I love you and wish you happiness at this moment more than I wish it for myself!… But I don’t know anything about these matters…” for some reason he suddenly hastened to add.

“In these matters, Alexei Fyodorovich, in these matters the main thing now is honor and duty, and I don’t know what else, but something higher, perhaps even higher than duty itself. My heart tells me of this irresistible feeling, and it draws me irresistibly. It all comes down to two words, though: I have already made up my mind. Even if he marries that… creature,” she began solemnly, “whom I can never, never forgive, I will still not abandon him! From now on I will never, never abandon him!” she uttered with a kind of strain, a kind of pale, tortured rapture. “That is, not that I would trail after him, keep turning up before his eyes every minute, torment him; oh no, I will go away to another town, wherever you like, but all my life, all my life I will watch over him untiringly. And when he becomes unhappy with that woman, and that is certain to happen, and right away, then let him come to me, and in me he will meet a friend, a sister… A sister only, of course, and it will stay that way forever, but he will be convinced at last that this sister really is his sister, loving him and having sacrificed her whole life to him. I will achieve it, I will insist on it, that at last he will know me and tell me everything without being ashamed!” she exclaimed as though in a frenzy. “I will be his god, to whom he will pray, and that at the very least he owes me for his betrayal and for what I endured through him yesterday. And let him see all his life long that all my life I will be faithful to him and to the word I once gave him, in spite of his having been unfaithful and having betrayed me. I will… I will turn myself into nothing but a means to his happiness (or how should I put it), an instrument, a machine for his happiness, and that for all my life, for all my life, and let him see it from now on all his life! That is my whole decision! Ivan Fyodorovich approves of me in the highest degree.”

She was breathless. She would perhaps have liked to express her thought much more worthily, more skillfully, and more naturally, but it had come out too hastily and too nakedly. There was much youthful lack of restraint in it; much of it echoed only yesterday’s irritation, the need to show her pride; she felt this herself. Her face somehow suddenly darkened, the expression of her eyes turned unpleasant. Alyosha noticed all this at once, and compassion stirred in his heart. And just then brother Ivan added to it.

“I have only expressed my own thought,” he said. “In any other woman all this would have come out cracked, forced, but not in you. Another woman would be wrong, but you are right. I don’t know how to give reasons for it, but I see that you are sincere in the highest degree, and therefore you are right…”

“But it’s only for this moment… And what is this moment? Nothing but yesterday’s insult, that is what this moment means!” Mrs. Khokhlakova suddenly could not hold back; she evidently had not wanted to interfere, but could not restrain herself and suddenly spoke a very true thought.

“Yes, yes,” Ivan interrupted, with a kind of sudden heat, and visibly angered at being interrupted, “yes, but in another woman this moment would be only yesterday’s impression and only a moment, whereas with Katerina Ivanovna’s character this moment will stretch out over her whole life. What for others is only a promise is for her an everlasting, heavy, grim perhaps, but unflagging duty. And she will feed on the feeling of this fulfilled duty! Your life, Katerina Ivanovna, will now be passed in suffering contemplation of your own feelings, your own great deed, and your own grief, but afterward this suffering will soften, and your life will turn into the sweet contemplation of a firm and proud design fulfilled once and for all, truly proud in its way, desperate in any case, but one you have mastered, and this awareness will at last give you the fullest satisfaction and reconcile you to everything else…”

He said this decidedly with a kind of spite, evidently on purpose, and perhaps even not wishing to hide his intention, that is, that he was speaking on purpose and in mockery.

“Oh God, how wrong all this is!” Mrs. Khokhlakova exclaimed again.

“Alexei Fyodorovich, you say something! I need so painfully to know what you will tell me!” exclaimed Katerina Ivanovna, and suddenly dissolved in tears. Alyosha got up from the sofa.

“It’s nothing, nothing!” she went on, weeping. “It’s from being upset, from last night, but next to two such friends as you and your brother I still feel strong… because I know… you will both never abandon me…”

“Unfortunately, I may have to leave for Moscow tomorrow and leave you for a long time… And that, unfortunately, cannot be changed…” Ivan Fyodorovich said suddenly.

“Tomorrow, to Moscow!” Katerina Ivanovna’s whole face was suddenly contorted. “But… but my God, how fortunate that is!” she cried in an instant, in a completely changed voice, and in an instant driving away her tears, so that not a trace was left. Precisely in an instant an astonishing change took place in her, which amazed Alyosha extremely: instead of the poor insulted girl who had just been crying in a kind of strain of feeling, there suddenly appeared a woman in complete command of herself and even extremely pleased about something, as though she were suddenly glad of something.

“Oh, it isn’t that it’s fortunate that I’m losing you, of course not,” she corrected herself, as it were, suddenly, with a charming society smile. “A friend like you cannot think that; on the contrary, I am only too unhappy at losing you” (she suddenly rushed impetuously to Ivan Fyodorovich and, seizing him by both hands, pressed them with warm feeling); “but what is fortunate is that you yourself, in person, will be able now in Moscow to convey to my aunt and to Agasha my whole position, all my present horror, in complete frankness with Agasha and sparing my dear aunt, the way you yourself will know how to do it. You cannot imagine how unhappy I was yesterday and this morning, at a loss how to write them this dreadful letter… because in a letter there’s no way, no way at all, to convey it… But now it will be easy for me to write, because you will be there with them in person and will explain everything. Oh, how glad I am! But I am glad only of that, again, believe me. You yourself, of course, are irreplaceable to me… I’ll run and write the letter right now,” she concluded suddenly, and even took a step to leave the room.

“And Alyosha? And Alexei Fyodorovich’s opinion, which you wanted so absolutely to hear?” cried Mrs. Khokhlakova. A caustic and angry little note sounded in her words.

“I have not forgotten it,” Katerina Ivanovna suddenly stopped short, “and why are you so hostile to me at such a moment, Katerina Osipovna?” she said with bitter, hot reproach. “What I said, I stand by. I need his opinion, and more than that: I need his decision! Whatever he says, so it will be: that is how much, on the contrary, I thirst for your words, Alexei Fyodorovich… But what is the matter with you?”

“I never thought it, I can’t picture such a thing!” Alyosha suddenly exclaimed in sorrow.

“What, what?”

“He is going to Moscow, and you cried out that you’re glad; you cried out on purpose! And then at once you began explaining that it’s not that you’re glad about, but that, on the contrary, you’re sorry that… you’re losing a friend; but that too you played on purpose… you played it as in a comedy at the theater!…”

“At the theater? What?… What is this?” exclaimed Katerina Ivanovna in deep astonishment, flushing all over and knitting her brows.

“However much you assure him that you’re sorry to lose a friend in him, all the same you insist to his face that it’s fortunate he is leaving…” Alyosha said, somehow quite breathless by now. He was standing at the table and did not sit down.

“What are you talking about, I don’t understand…”

“I don’t know myself… It’s as if a light suddenly dawned on me… I know that I’m saying it badly, but I’ll say everything all the same,” Alyosha went on in the same trembling and faltering voice. “What dawned on me is that perhaps you don’t love brother Dmitri at all… and never did, from the very beginning… And Dmitri, too, perhaps doesn’t love you at all either… and never did, from the very beginning… but only esteems you… I really don’t know how I dare say all this now, but somebody has to tell the truth… because nobody here wants to tell the truth…”

“What truth?” cried Katerina Ivanovna, and something hysterical rang in her voice.

“This truth,” Alyosha babbled, as though he were flying off a roof, “call Dmitri now, I’ll find him, and let him come here and take you by the hand, then take brother Ivan by the hand and join your hands. Because you are tormenting Ivan only because you love him… and you torment him because you love Dmitri out of strain… love him untruly… because you have persuaded yourself so…”

Alyosha broke off and fell silent.

“You… you… you’re a little holy fool, that’s what you are!” Katerina Ivanovna suddenly snapped, her face already pale and her lips twisted with spite. Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly laughed and got up from his seat. His hat was in his hands.

“You are mistaken, my good Alyosha,” he said, with an expression on his face that Alyosha had never seen in him before, an expression of a kind of youthful sincerity and of strong, irrepressibly candid feeling. “Katerina Ivanovna has never loved me! She knew all the time that I loved her, though I never said a word to her about my love; she knew, but she did not love me. Nor have I ever been her friend, not once, not for a single day: a proud woman had no need of my friendship. She kept me by her for continual revenge. She took her revenge on me, and through me, for all the insults she has been enduring constantly and every minute all this while from Dmitri, insults from their very first meeting… Because that very first meeting of theirs has stayed in her heart as an insult. That is the kind of heart she has! All this time I have done nothing but listen to her talk about her love for him. I am going away now, but know, Katerina Ivanovna, that you really do love only him. And the more he insults you, the more you love him. That is precisely your strain. You love him precisely as he is, you love him for insulting you. If he reformed, you would drop him at once and stop loving him altogether. But you need him in order to contemplate continually your own great deed of faithfulness and to reproach him with his unfaithfulness. And all this comes from your pride. Oh, there is much self-abasement and humiliation in it, but all of it comes from pride… I am too young, and I loved you too strongly. I know that I ought not to say this to you, that it would be more dignified on my part simply to walk out on you; it would also be less insulting to you. But I am going far away, and I will never come back. This is forever, after all… I don’t want to sit beside a strain… But I no longer know how to talk, I’ve said everything… Goodbye, Katerina Ivanovna, you cannot be angry with me, because I am punished a hundred times more than you: punished by this alone, that I will never see you. Goodbye. I don’t need your hand. You tormented me too knowingly for me to forgive you at this moment. Later I will forgive you, but now I don’t need your hand.

“Den Dank, Dame, begehr ich nicht (I want no thanks, lady),”

he added with a twisted smile, proving, however, quite unexpectedly, that he too could read Schiller to the point of learning him by heart, which Alyosha would not have believed before. He went out of the room without even saying goodbye to the hostess, Mrs. Khokhlakova. Alyosha threw up his hands.

“Ivan,” he shouted after him like a lost man, “come back, Ivan! No, no, now he won’t come back for anything!” he exclaimed again in sorrowful insight. “But it’s I, I am to blame, I began it! Ivan spoke spitefully, wrongly. Unjustly and spitefully…” Alyosha was exclaiming like a half-wit.

Katerina Ivanovna suddenly went out into the other room.

“You haven’t done anything wrong, you acted charmingly, like an angel,” Mrs. Khokhlakova whispered quickly and rapturously to the sorrowing Alyosha. “I shall make every effort to see that Ivan Fyodorovich doesn’t leave…”

Joy shone on her face, to Alyosha’s great distress; but Katerina Ivanovna suddenly came back. In her hands were two rainbow-colored banknotes.

“I have one big request to make of you, Alexei Fyodorovich,” she began, turning straight to Alyosha in an apparently calm and even voice, exactly as if nothing had really happened just now. “A week ago, yes, a week ago, I believe, Dmitri Fyodorovich did a hot-tempered and unjust thing, a very ugly thing. There is a bad place here, a tavern. In it he met that retired officer, that staff captain, whom your father has been employing in some affairs of his. Getting angry for some reason at this staff captain, Dmitri Fyodorovich seized him by the beard and in front of everyone led him out into the street in that humiliating position, and in the street went on leading him for a long time, and they say that a boy, this staff captain’s son, who goes to the school here, still a child, seeing it, ran alongside the whole way crying aloud and begging for his father, and rushed up to everyone and begged them to protect him, and everyone laughed. Forgive me, Alexei Fyodorovich, I cannot recall this shameful act of his without indignation… one of those acts that only Dmitri Fyodorovich could bring himself to commit in his anger… and in his passions! I can’t even tell it, I’m not able to. I’m getting my words mixed up. I made inquiries about this injured man and learned that he is a very poor man. Snegiryov is his name. He was at fault in some way in the service, he was dismissed, I can’t tell you about it, and now he and his family, an unhappy family of sick children and a wife, who is insane, I believe, have fallen into terrible poverty. He has been here in town for a long time, he does something, he used to be a clerk somewhere, and now suddenly they aren’t paying him anything. I cast my eyes on you… that is, I thought… I don’t know, I’m somehow getting confused… you see, I wanted to ask you, Alexei Fyodorovich, my kindest Alexei Fyodorovich, to go to him, to find some pretext, to go in to them, that is, to this staff captain, oh God, how confused I’m getting, and delicately, carefully, just as only you will know how to do it” (Alyosha suddenly blushed), “to manage to give him this assistance, here, two hundred rubles. He will surely accept… that is, persuade him to accept… Or no, how should I put it? You see, it’s not payment to him for a reconciliation, so that he won’t lodge a complaint (because I believe he wanted to lodge a complaint), but simply sympathy, a wish to help, from me, from me, from Dmitri Fyodorovich’s fiancée, and not from him himself… In a word, you’ll know how… I would go myself, but you will know how to do it much better than I. He lives on Ozernaya Street, in the house of Kalmykova, a tradesman’s widow… For God’s sake, Alexei Fyodorovich, do this for me, and now… now I am a little… tired. Goodbye…”

She suddenly turned and disappeared again behind the portiere so quickly that Alyosha did not have time to say a word, and he wanted to say something. He wanted to ask forgiveness, to accuse himself, well, to say something, because his heart was full, and he decidedly did not want to leave the room without it. But Mrs. Khokhlakova seized him by the hand and led him out herself. In the front hall she stopped him again, as she had earlier.

“Proud, she struggles with herself, but kind, charming, magnanimous!” Mrs. Khokhlakova exclaimed in a half-whisper. “Oh, how I love her, especially at times, and how glad I am now of everything, everything, all over again! Dear Alexei Fyodorovich, you didn’t know this: know, then, that all of us, all of us, I, both her aunts, well, everyone, even Lise, for a whole month now we have wished and prayed for nothing but that she should break with your favorite Dmitri Fyodorovich, who doesn’t want to know her and doesn’t love her in the least, and marry Ivan Fyodorovich, an educated and excellent young man, who loves her more than anything in the world. Why, we’ve formed a whole conspiracy here, and perhaps that is the only reason I’m not going away…”

“But she was crying, insulted again!” cried Alyosha.

“Don’t believe a woman’s tears, Alexei Fyodorovich; I am always against women in such cases, I am on the side of men.”

“Mamma, you’re spoiling him and ruining him,” Lise’s thin little voice was heard from behind the door.

“No, it’s I who am the cause of it all, I am terribly to blame!” the inconsolable Alyosha kept repeating in a fit of tormenting shame for his outburst, and even covering his face with his hands for shame.

“On the contrary, you acted like an angel, like an angel, I’m ready to repeat it thousands and thousands of times.”

“Mamma, why did he act like an angel?” Lise’s little voice was heard again.

“Looking at all this, for some reason I suddenly imagined,” Alyosha went on, as if he had not heard Liza, “that she loves Ivan, and so I said that stupid thing… and what will happen now!”

“But with whom, with whom?” exclaimed Lise. “Mamma, you surely want to be the death of me. I ask you, and you don’t answer me.”

At that moment the maid ran in.

“Katerina Ivanovna is in a bad way… She’s crying… hysterics, she’s thrashing about.”

“What is it?” cried Lise, in an alarmed voice now. “Mamma, it’s I who will have hysterics, not she!”

“Lise, for God’s sake, don’t shout, don’t kill me. You are still at an age when you cannot know everything that grown-ups know; I’ll come running back and tell you everything that can be told you. Oh my God! I’m running, running… Hysterics are a good sign, Alexei Fyodorovich, it’s excellent that she’s having hysterics. That is just as it should be. In such cases I am always against women, against all these hysterics and women’s tears. Yulia, run and tell them I’m flying. And as for Ivan Fyodorovich’s walking out like that, she has only herself to blame. But he won’t leave. Lise, for God’s sake, don’t shout! Ah yes, you’re not shouting, it’s I who am shouting, forgive your mamma, but I’m in raptures, raptures, raptures! And did you notice, Alexei Fyodorovich, what a young man Ivan Fyodorovich turned out to be just now, he said all that and walked out! I thought he was so learned, an academic, and suddenly he was so hotly, hotly, candidly and youthfully, inexperiencedly and youthfully, and all so beautifully, beautifully, just like you… And he recited that little German verse, just exactly like you! But I’m running, running. Alexei Fyodorovich, hurry quickly on that errand and come back quickly. Lise, don’t you need anything? For God’s sake, don’t keep Alexei Fyodorovich a single minute, he’ll come back to you right away…”

Mrs. Khokhlakova ran off at last. Alyosha, before going, was about to open the door to Lise.

“Not for anything!” cried Lise. “Not for anything now! Talk like this, through the door. What did you do to get made an angel? That’s the only thing I want to know.”

“A terrible piece of stupidity, Lise! Goodbye.”

“Don’t you dare leave like that!” Lise was about to cry.

“Lise, I have a serious sorrow! I’ll come back soon, but I have a great, great sorrow!”

And he ran out of the room.