VII. And in the Open Air

“The air is clean, sir, and in my mansion it really isn’t fresh, in every sense even. Let us walk slowly, sir. I should very much like to interest you, sir.”

“I too have an extraordinary matter to see you about…” Alyosha remarked, “only I don’t know how to begin.”

“How could I not know that you have a matter with me, sir? Without a matter you would never have looked in on me. Or did you really come only to complain about the boy, sir? Now that’s unbelievable, sir. And speaking of the boy, sir: I couldn’t explain everything to you in there, sir, but here and now I will describe that scene to you, sir. You see, the wisp of bast was thicker, sir, only a week ago; I’m talking about my little beard, sir; it’s my little beard they’ve nicknamed the wisp of bast, the schoolboys mainly, sir. Well, sir, so there, sir, your brother Dmitri Fyodorovich is pulling me by my little beard that time, he’s dragged me out of the tavern into the square, and just then the schoolboys are coming out of school, and Ilyusha with them. As soon as he saw me in such a state, sir, he rushed to me: ‘Papa,’ he cries, ‘Papa!’ He grabs hold of me, hugs me, wants to pull me free, cries to the man who was insulting me: ‘Let go, let go, it’s my papa, my papa, forgive him’; that’s just what he cries: ‘Forgive him’; and he took hold of him too with his little hands, and his hand, that very hand of his, he kisses it, sir… I remember what his little face was like at that moment, sir; I haven’t forgotten, sir, and I won’t forget, sir!…”

“I swear,” Alyosha exclaimed, “my brother will express his repentance to you in the most sincere way, the fullest, even on his knees in that very square… I will make him, or else he is no brother of mine!”

“Aha, so it’s still only at the planning stage. Not straight from him, but proceeding only from the nobility of your own ardent heart, sir. You should have said so, sir. No, in that case allow me to finish telling you about your brother’s most exalted knightly and officerly nobility as well, for he expressed it that time, sir. When he had finished dragging me by the wisp of bast, he set me free, sir: ‘You,’ he says, ‘are an officer, and I am an officer; if you can find a second, a decent man, then send him, I’ll give you satisfaction, scoundrel though you are!’ That’s what he said, sir. A truly knightly spirit! We went away then, Ilyusha and I, and that family genealogical picture was imprinted forever in Ilyusha’s soul’s memory. No, how can we go on being gentlefolk, sir. And judge for yourself, sir; you were just now in my mansion yourself, sir, what did you see there, sir? Three ladies sitting there, sir, one without legs and feeble-minded, another without legs and hunchbacked, and the third with legs, but much too clever, a student of the women’s courses, sir, she’s itching to go back to Petersburg, to seek out the rights of the Russian woman there on the banks of the Neva. I don’t speak of Ilyusha, sir, only nine years old, sir, alone in the world, for if I die, what will become of all these depths, that is the only thing I will ask you, sir? And if that’s so, then suppose I challenge him to a duel and he kills me on the spot, well, what then? What will become of all of them then, sir? Worse still if, instead of killing me, he only cripples me: then I can’t work, but the mouth remains all the same, so who will feed it then, my mouth, and who will feed all of them then, sir? Or am I to send Ilyusha out every day to beg instead of going to school? So that is what it means for me, sir, to challenge him to a duel, sir; it’s a stupid word, sir, and nothing more, sir.”

“He will ask you to forgive him; in the middle of the square he will bow down at your feet,” Alyosha cried again, his eyes alight.

“I wanted to take him to court,” the staff captain went on, “but open our code: how much satisfaction will I get from the offender for the personal insult to me, sir? And then suddenly Agrafena Alexandrovna summons me and shouts: ‘Don’t you dare think of it! If you take him to court, I’ll fix it so that the whole world learns publicly that he beat you for your own swindling, and then they’ll put you yourself on trial.’ But God alone sees from whom that swindling came, sir, and on whose orders I acted in it as a small fry, sir: wasn’t it by her own instructions and Fyodor Pavlovich’s? ‘And besides,’ she adds, ‘I’ll drive you away forever, and you’ll never earn anything from me again. And I’ll tell my merchant too’ (that’s what she calls him, the old man: my merchant), ‘and he’ll drive you away too.’ So I think: if the merchant drives me away too, then what, from whom will I earn anything? Why, those two are the only ones I have left, since your papa Fyodor Pavlovich has not only stopped trusting me, for an extraneous reason, sir, but, having got hold of my promissory notes, wants to drag me into court himself. In consequence of all this I’ve kept quiet, sir, and you have seen the depths, sir. And now allow me to ask: did he bite your little finger badly earlier, Ilyusha did? In the mansion I didn’t dare go into this particular in front of him.”

“Yes, very badly, and he was very irritated. He took revenge on me, as a Karamazov, for you; that’s clear to me now. But if you had seen how he was exchanging stones with his schoolmates! It’s very dangerous, they might kill him; they’re children, they’re foolish, a stone flies and can break his head.”

“Why, he’s been hit already, sir; not in the head, but in the chest, sir, above the heart, sir; today, a blow from a stone, a bruise, sir; he came home crying, groaning, and now he’s fallen ill.”

“And you know, it’s he who attacks them all first there; he’s grown spiteful on your account; they say that earlier he stuck one boy, Krasotkin, in the side with a penknife…”

“I heard about that too; it’s dangerous, sir: Krasotkin is an official here, there may yet be trouble over it, sir…”

“I would advise you,” Alyosha went on with fervor, “not to send him to school at all for a while, until he calms down… and this anger in him passes…”

“Anger, sir!” the staff captain took up. “Precisely anger, sir. In a little creature, but a great anger, sir. You don’t know all this, sir. Allow me to explain this story particularly. The thing is that after that event all the schoolboys at school began teasing him with ‘wisp of bast.’ Children in schools are a merciless lot: one by one they’re angels of God, but together, especially in schools, they are very often merciless. They began teasing him, and a noble spirit rose up in Ilyusha. An ordinary boy, a weak son, would have humbled himself, would have been ashamed of his father, but this one rose up alone against them all for his father. For his father and for the truth, sir, for justice, sir. For what he endured then, when he kissed your brother’s hands and cried to him, ‘Forgive Papa, forgive Papa,’ that God alone knows, and I, sir. And that is how our children, that is, not yours, but ours, sir, the children of despised but noble paupers, sir, learn the truth on earth at nine years old, sir. How could the rich? They never fathom such depths in their whole lives, but my Ilyushka, at that very moment in the square, sir, when he was kissing his hands, at that very moment he took in the whole truth, sir. That truth entered into him, sir, and struck him down forever, sir,” the staff captain uttered hotly and again as if in a frenzy, and at the same time struck his left palm with his right fist, as though wishing to show visibly how the “truth” had struck down his Ilyusha. “That same day he came down with a fever, sir, he was delirious all night. All that day he spoke little to me, he was even completely silent, only I noticed: he keeps looking, looking at me from the corner, but more and more he presses himself to the window and pretends to be doing his lessons, but I can see it isn’t lessons on his mind. The next day I drank, sir, and I don’t remember much, sir, sinful man that I am, from grief, sir. Mamma began crying here too, sir (I love Mamma very much, sir), well, from grief I had a nip with the last of the money, sir. Don’t despise me, sir: in Russia our drunken people are the kindest. The kindest people we have are also the most drunken. So there I lie, and I didn’t take much notice of Ilyusha that day, but it was precisely on that day that the boys laughed at him at school too, from the morning on, sir: ‘Wisp of bast,’ they shout at him, ‘your father was dragged out of the tavern by his wisp of bast, and you ran alongside asking forgiveness.’ On the third day he came home from school again, and I look, and he’s white as a sheet, he’s gone pale. What’s the matter with you, I say? He says nothing. Well, in the mansion there was no talking, or Mamma and the girls would join in at once; besides, the girls had already found out everything, even on the first day. Varvara Nikolavna had already started grumbling: ‘Buffoons, clowns, can anything sensible ever come from you?’ ‘Quite so,’ I say, ‘Varvara Nikolavna, can anything sensible ever come from us?’ That’s how I got off that time. So, sir, toward evening I took the boy out for a walk. For he and I, you should know, sir, used to go out walking every evening before that too, along exactly the same way we are walking now, from our gate to that great big stone over there, lying like an orphan by the wattle fence on the road, where the town common begins: a deserted place and a beautiful one, sir. Ilyusha and I walk along, his little hand in mine, as usual; he has a tiny little hand, thin little fingers, cold little fingers; he suffers in his chest, you know. ‘Papa,’ he says, ‘Papa!’ ‘What?’ I say to him; his little eyes, I see, are flashing. ‘Papa, the way he treated you then, Papa!’ ‘What can we do, Ilyusha,’ I say. ‘Don’t make it up with him, Papa, don’t make it up. The boys at school say he gave you ten rubles for it.’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘Ilyusha, I won’t take money from him now for anything.’ So then he began trembling all over, seized my hand in both his little hands, and kisses it again. ‘Papa,’ he says, ‘Papa, challenge him to a duel, at school they tease me that you’re a coward and won’t challenge him to a duel, but you’ll take ten rubles from him.’ ‘I can’t challenge him to a duel, Ilyusha,’ I answer, and I set out for him briefly everything I have just set out to you on this score. He heard me out. ‘Papa,’ he says, ‘Papa, all the same, don’t make it up with him: I’ll grow up, I’ll challenge him myself and kill him!’ His little eyes flashing and burning. Well, for all that, I am his father, after all, I had to tell him a word of truth. ‘It’s a sin,’ I say to him, ‘to kill, even in a duel.’ ‘Papa,’ he says, ‘Papa, I’ll knock him down when I’m big, I’ll knock his saber out of his hand with my saber, I’ll throw myself at him, knock him down, raise my saber over him, and say to him: I could kill you now, but I forgive you, so there!’ You see, you see, sir, what a little process went on in his little head in those two days; it was day and night that he was thinking precisely of this revenge with the saber, and at night, it must be, he was raving about it, sir. Only he began coming home from school badly beaten, it was the day before yesterday that I found it all out, and you are right, sir; I won’t send him to that school anymore, sir. I find out that he’s going alone against the whole class and challenging them all himself, he’s grown spiteful himself, his heart is on fire; I got frightened for him then. Again we walk, we stroll. ‘Papa,’ he asks, ‘Papa, the rich are the strongest of all in the world, aren’t they?’ ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘Ilyusha, there is no one in the world stronger than a rich man.’ ‘Papa,’ he says, ‘I’ll get rich, I’ll become an officer and defeat everybody, the tsar will reward me, I’ll come back, and then nobody will dare…’ Then he was silent awhile and says, his little lips still trembling as before: ‘Papa,’ he says, ‘what a nasty town this town of ours is, Papa!’ ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘Ilyushechka, it isn’t all that good, our town.’ ‘Papa, let’s move to another town, a good one,’ he says, ‘a town where nobody knows about us.’ ‘We’ll move,’ I say, ‘we’ll move, Ilyusha, as soon as I save up some money.’ I was glad of the chance to turn him from his dark thoughts, and we began dreaming together of how we would move to another town and buy a horse of our own and a cart. We’ll seat Mamma and your sisters, cover them up, and we’ll walk alongside, now and then I’ll give you a lift, and I’ll walk beside, because we must spare our horse, we can’t all ride, and so we’ll set off. He was delighted with this, and most of all that we would have our own horse and he would drive it himself. Why, it’s well known that a Russian boy is simply born together with a horse. We chattered for a long time; thank God, I think, I’ve distracted him, comforted him. That was the evening before last, and yesterday evening it turned out something else. In the morning he went to that school again and came back gloomy, very gloomy indeed. In the evening I took him by the little hand, took him out for a walk; he’s silent, he doesn’t talk. A little wind had begun then, the sun had clouded over, there was a breath of autumn, and it was already getting dark; we walk along, and we’re both sad. ‘Well, my boy,’ I say, ‘how are we going to get ready for the road, you and I?’ I’m thinking of leading him back to yesterday’s talk. He’s silent. Only I feel his little fingers give a start in my hand. ‘Eh,’ I think, ‘it’s bad, there’s something new.’ We came, just as now, to this very stone; I sat down on the stone, and up in the sky kites were flying everywhere, humming and rattling, some thirty kites to be seen. It’s the kite season now, you know, sir. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘Ilyusha, it’s time we flew our last year’s kite too. I’ll mend it, where have you hidden it?’ My boy is silent, looking off to the side, standing sideways to me. And just then the wind suddenly howled, sand came blowing… He suddenly threw himself on me, all of him, put both his little arms around my neck, squeezed me tight. You know, when children are silent and proud, and have been holding back their tears a long time, and suddenly they break through, when a great grief comes, then it isn’t just that the tears flow, sir, they gush out, like streams, sir. With those warm gushes he suddenly wet my whole face. He burst into sobs as if in a convulsion, he shook, pressed me to him; I’m sitting on the stone. ‘Papa dear,’ he cries out, ‘Papa dear, dear Papa, how he humiliated you!’ And I burst into sobs then too, sir; we sit there hugging and shaking. ‘Papa dear,’ he says, ‘Papa dear!’ ‘Ilyusha,’ I say to him, ‘Ilyushechka!’ No one saw us then, sir, God alone saw, perhaps he’ll enter it in my service record, sir. Thank your brother, Alexei Fyodorovich. No, sir, I will not whip my boy for your satisfaction, sir!”

He finished again with his crack-brained, spiteful twist of earlier. Alyosha felt, however, that the man trusted him by now, and that had someone else been in his place, this man would not have “talked” like this with that other person and would not have told him what he had just told Alyosha. This encouraged Alyosha, whose soul was trembling with tears.

“Ah, how I would like to make peace with your boy!” he exclaimed. “If you would arrange it.”

“Just so, sir,” the staff captain muttered.

“But not about that now, not about that at all; listen,” Alyosha went on exclaiming, “listen. I have an errand to you: this same brother of mine, this Dmitri, has also insulted his fiancée, a most noble girl, of whom you have surely heard. I have the right to reveal her insult to you, I even ought to, because when she learned of the wrong done you and learned all about your unhappy situation, she charged me just now… earlier… to bring you this assistance from her… but only from her alone, not from Dmitri, who has abandoned her too, not at all, and not from me, his brother, and not from anyone else, but from her, from her alone! She begs you to accept her help… you have both been insulted by one and the same man… And she thought of you only when she had suffered from him the same kind of insult (in the force of the insult) as you have! That means a sister is coming to a brother with help… She charged me precisely to persuade you to accept these two hundred rubles from her, as from a sister. No one will ever know of it, no unjust gossip can come of it; here are the two hundred rubles, and, I swear, you must accept them, otherwise… otherwise it would mean that everyone in the world must be enemies to one another! But there are brothers in the world, too… You have a noble soul, you must understand this, you must!”

And Alyosha held out to him two brand-new rainbow-colored hundred-ruble notes. They were both standing just then precisely by the big stone, by the fence, and there was no one around. The notes seemed to make a tremendous impression on the staff captain: he started, but at first as if from surprise alone: nothing of the kind had even glimmered in his imagination, and he had not expected such an outcome at all. Help from anyone, and such considerable help besides, he had not even dreamed of in his sleep. He took the notes, and for almost a minute he could not even answer; something altogether new flashed across his face.

“This is for me, sir, for me, so much money, two hundred rubles! Good heavens! Why, I haven’t seen such money for four years, Lord! And she says, a sister… and is it true, is it really true?”

“I swear to you that everything I have told you is true!” cried Alyosha. The staff captain turned red.

“Listen, sir, my dear fellow, listen, sir, if I do accept, I won’t be a scoundrel, will I? In your eyes, Alexei Fyodorovich, I won’t be, I won’t be a scoundrel? No, sir, Alexei Fyodorovich, you hear me out, hear me out, sir,” he hurried on, touching Alyosha every minute with both hands, “here you are persuading me to accept on the ground that a ‘sister’ is sending it, but inside, to yourself, won’t you feel contempt for me if I accept, sir, eh?”

“But no, no! I swear to you by my salvation that I won’t! And no one will ever know, only we: I, you, and she, and one other lady, a great friend of hers…”

“Never mind the lady! Listen, Alexei Fyodorovich, hear me out, sir, for now such a moment has come, sir, that you must hear me out, for you can’t even understand what these two hundred rubles may mean to me now,” the poor man went on, gradually passing into a kind of disordered, almost wild rapture. He seemed thrown off his balance, and he was talking in an extreme hurry and rush, as though afraid he would not be allowed to say everything. “Besides its being honestly come by, from so respected and saintly a ‘sister,’ sir, do you know that now I can have Mamma and Ninochka, my little hunchbacked angel, my daughter, treated? Dr. Herzenstube came to me, out of the kindness of his heart, he examined them both for a whole hour: ‘I don’t understand anything,’ he says, and yet the mineral water they have at the pharmacy here (he prescribed it) will undoubtedly do her good, and he prescribed medicinal footbaths for her too. The mineral water costs thirty kopecks, and maybe forty jugs of it have to be drunk. So I took the prescription and put it on the shelf under the icons, and there it lies. And Ninochka he prescribed bathing in some solution, in hot baths of some sort, every day, morning and evening; so how could we ever have managed such a treatment, sir, here at our place, in our mansion, without a servant, without help, without the vessels and the water, sir? And Ninochka is full of rheumatism, I haven’t even told you that yet; at night her whole right side aches, she suffers, and, would you believe it, the angel of God holds out so as not to disturb us, she doesn’t moan, so as not to wake us. We eat whatever comes along, whatever turns up, and she will take the very last piece, the kind you could only throw to a dog: ‘I’m not worth this piece, I’m taking it from you, I sit here as a burden to you.’ That is what her angelic look wants to say. We wait on her, and it’s a burden to her: ‘I’m not worth it, I’m not worth it, I’m an unworthy cripple, useless.’ And how could she not be worth it, sir, when by her angelic meekness she has won all of us from God with her prayers; without her, without her quiet word, we would have hell here, sir; she has softened even Varya. And don’t condemn Varvara Nikolavna either, sir, she’s an angel too, she’s been wronged too. She came to us in the summer, and she had sixteen rubles with her, she earned them by giving lessons and put them aside for her journey, to go back to Petersburg on them in September, that is, now. And we took her bit of money and lived on it, and now she has nothing to go back on, that’s how it is, sir. And she can’t go back anyway, because she works for us like a convict; why, we’ve harnessed and saddled her like a nag; she waits on everybody, mends, does the washing, sweeps the floor, gets Mamma into bed, and Mamma is capricious, sir, and Mamma is tearful, sir, and Mamma is mad, sir!… And now with these two hundred rubles I can hire a servant, sir, do you understand, Alexei Fyodorovich, I can undertake the treatment of these dear creatures, sir, I can send the student off to Petersburg, sir, buy beef, sir, introduce a new diet, sir. Lord, why, it’s a dream!”

Alyosha was terribly glad that he had brought so much happiness and that the poor man had agreed to be made happy.

“Wait, Alexei Fyodorovich, wait,” the staff captain seized again on a new dream that had suddenly presented itself to him, and again began rattling on in a frenzied patter, “why, do you know that Ilyushka and I may perhaps really make our dream come true now: we’ll buy a horse and a covered cart, and a black horse, he asked that it be a black one without fail, and we’ll set off, just as we were picturing it the day before yesterday. I have a lawyer I know in K. province, sir, a friend from childhood, sir; they told me through a reliable person that if I come, he would supposedly give me a place as a clerk in his office, sir; so, who knows, maybe he will give it to me. Well, then, I’d seat Mamma, seat Ninochka, I’ll put Ilyushechka in the driver’s seat, and I’d go on foot, on foot, and I’d take them all away, sir. Lord, if only I could collect one bad little debt here, then maybe there’d be enough even for that, sir!”

“There will be enough, there will be enough!” Alyosha exclaimed. “Katerina Ivanovna will send you more, as much as you like, and you know, I have money too, take as much as you need, as from a brother, as from a friend, you’ll repay me later… (You’ll get rich, you’ll get rich!) And you know what, you could never even think up anything better than this move to another province! In it is your salvation, and above all for your boy; and you know, it should be soon, before winter, before the cold, and you would write to us from there, and we would remain brothers… No, it isn’t a dream!”

Alyosha was about to embrace him, he was so pleased. But glancing at him, he suddenly stopped: the man was standing with his neck stretched out, his lips stretched out, his face frenzied and gone pale, and he was whispering something with his lips, as though wanting to bring something out; there was no sound, yet he kept on whispering with his lips; it was somehow strange.

“What is it?” Alyosha suddenly started for some reason.

“Alexei Fyodorovich… I… you…” the staff captain muttered, breaking off, looking point-blank at him strangely and wildly, with the air of a man who has decided to go flying downhill, and at the same time as though smiling with his lips, “I, sir… you, sir… How would you like me to show you a little trick right now, sir!” he suddenly whispered in a quick, firm whisper; his speech no longer broke off.

“What little trick?”

“A little trick, a hocus-pocus sort of thing,” the staff captain kept whispering; his mouth twisted to the left, his left eye narrowed, and he kept looking at Alyosha without tearing his eyes away, as though riveted to him.

“But what’s the matter with you, what trick?” Alyosha shouted, now thoroughly frightened.

“This kind, look!” the staff captain suddenly shrieked.

And, showing him both the rainbow-colored notes, which all this time, all through the conversation, he had been holding together by a corner between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he suddenly, with a kind of fury, seized them, crumpled them, and squeezed them tight in his right fist.

“Did you see, sir, did you see, sir!” he shrieked at Alyosha, pale and frenzied, and suddenly, raising his fist, with all his might he flung both crumpled notes down on the sand. “Did you see, sir?” he shrieked again, pointing at them with his finger. “Well, then, there you are, sir!…”

And suddenly, lifting his right foot, he fell to trampling them with his heel in wild fury, exclaiming and gasping for breath at each stamp of his foot.

“There’s your money, sir! There’s your money, sir! There’s your money, sir! There’s your money, sir!” Suddenly he sprang back and drew himself up before Alyosha. His whole appearance expressed an inexplicable pride.

“Report to those who sent you that the wisp of bast does not sell its honor, sir!” he cried, stretching his arm out into the air. Then he quickly turned and started to run; but he had not run five steps when, turning all the way around again, he suddenly waved his little hand at Alyosha. But again, before he had run five steps, he turned around for the last time, this time without the twisted laugh on his face; on the contrary, it was all shaking with tears. In a weeping, breaking, choking patter he cried out:

“And what would I have said to my boy if I had taken money from you for our shame?” And having said this, he started running, this time without turning around. Alyosha gazed after him with inexpressible sadness. Oh, he understood that until the very last moment the man himself had not known that he would crumple and fling down the notes. The running man did not turn around once, and Alyosha knew that he would not turn around. He did not want to pursue him and call to him; he knew why. And when the man had disappeared from sight, Alyosha picked up both notes. They were only very crumpled, flattened, and pressed into the sand, but perfectly whole, and they even crackled like new ones when Alyosha unfolded them and smoothed them out. Having smoothed them out, he folded them, put them into his pocket, and set off to Katerina Ivanovna’s to report how her errand had succeeded.