II. Smerdyakov with a Guitar

Besides, he had no time. A thought had flashed through his mind while he was still saying goodbye to Lise. The thought was this: how could he, by the slyest possible means, catch brother Dmitri right now, since he was evidently hiding from him? It was no longer early, it was about three o’clock in the afternoon. With his whole being Alyosha was straining toward the monastery, to his “great one,” who was dying, but the need to see brother Dmitri overpowered everything: with every hour the conviction was growing in Alyosha’s mind that a terrible catastrophe was inevitable and ready to happen. What exactly the catastrophe consisted of, and what he would have wanted to say to his brother at that moment, perhaps he himself could not have defined. “Let my benefactor die without me, but at least I shall not reproach myself all my life that perhaps I could have saved something and did not, that I passed by, in a hurry to get to my own home. In doing this, I shall be doing according to his great word…”

His plan was to catch brother Dmitri unawares, namely: to climb over that wattle fence as he had yesterday, go into the garden, and settle himself in that summerhouse. “And if he isn’t there,” thought Alyosha, “then, without saying a word to Foma or to the women of the house, I’ll hide and wait in the summerhouse, even until evening. If he’s still keeping watch for Grushenka to come, it’s very likely that he’ll come to the summerhouse…” Alyosha did not, however, reason very much over the details of the plan, but he resolved to carry it out, even if it meant not getting to the monastery today…

Everything went off smoothly: he climbed over the fence at almost the very spot where he had yesterday and stole unseen into the summerhouse. He did not want to be noticed: both the landlady and Foma (if he was there) might be on his brother’s side and obey his orders, and so might either not let Alyosha into the garden or warn his brother in time that someone was looking and asking for him. There was no one in the summerhouse. Alyosha sat down in his place of yesterday and began to wait. He looked around the summerhouse; for some reason it seemed to him much more dilapidated than yesterday, and so shabby this time. The day, however, was just as clear as yesterday. On the green table was the imprint of a ring left by yesterday’s glass of cognac, which must have been spilled. Empty thoughts of no use whatever crept into his head, as always during a tedious wait: for instance, why, coming in here now, had he sat down in precisely the same spot where he had sat yesterday, and why not in another? At last he felt very sad, sad from anxious uncertainty. But he had not been sitting there a quarter of an hour when suddenly, somewhere very close, the chord of a guitar was heard. Someone had been sitting, or had just sat down, some twenty paces from him, no farther, somewhere in the bushes. A memory suddenly flashed through Alyosha’s mind that yesterday, as he was leaving his brother in the summerhouse, he had seen, or something like a glimpse had flickered before him, of a low, old green garden bench to the left by the fence, among the bushes. So it was on it that the visitors had now settled. But who? A man’s voice suddenly began singing a couplet in a sugary falsetto, accompanying itself on the guitar:

By a force invincible
I am bound to my dear one.
Lord, have me-e-ercy
On her and on me!
On her and on me!
On her and on me!

The voice stopped. A lackey’s tenor, and a lackey’s flourish to the song. Another voice, a woman’s this time, suddenly spoke caressingly and as if timidly, but with a great deal of affectation, though:

“Why haven’t you come to see us in so long, Pavel Fyodorovich, why do you keep despising us?”

“Not at all, ma’am,” answered the man’s voice, politely enough, but above all with insistent and firm dignity. Evidently the man had the upper hand, and the woman was the one doing the flirting. “The man, it seems, is Smerdyakov,” thought Alyosha, “by the voice at least, and the lady must be the daughter of the woman who owns the little house here, the one who came from Moscow, who wears a dress with a train and goes to Marfa Ignatyevna for soup…”

“I terribly love any verse, if it’s smooth,” the woman’s voice went on. “Why don’t you go on?”

The voice began to sing again:
What’s a royal crown to me
If only my dear one keeps well.
Lord, have me-e-ercy
On her and on me!
On her and on me!
On her and on me!

“It came out even better last time,” the woman’s voice remarked. “You sang about the crown: ‘If only my darling keeps well.’ That came out more tender; you must have forgotten today.”

“Verse is rubbish, ma’am,” Smerdyakov snapped.

“Oh no, I love a little verse very much.”

“When it comes to verse, ma’am, it’s essential rubbish, ma’am. Judge for yourself: who in the world talks in rhyme? And if we all started talking in rhyme, even by order of the authorities, how much would we get said, ma’am? Verse is no business, Marya Kondratyevna.”

“How clever you are in everything, how did you come to be so in everything?” the woman’s voice fawned more and more.

“I could have done more than that, ma’am, I could have known more than that, ma’am, if it weren’t for my lot ever since from my childhood. I would have shot dead in a duel, with a pistol, any man who told me that I was a scoundrel because I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they threw that in my face even in Moscow; it crept over there from here, thanks to Grigory Vasilyevich. Grigory Vasilyevich reproaches me that I rebel against my birth: ‘You,’ he says, ‘opened her womb.’ As for the womb, let it be, but I would have allowed myself to be killed while still in the womb, just so as not to come into the world at all, ma’am. They used to say in the market, and your mamma too took it into her head to tell me, out of her great indelicacy, that she went about with her hair all matted, and was only two arshins and a bi-it in height. Why ‘a bi-it,’ when one can simply say ‘a bit,’ the way all people pronounce it? She wanted to say it tearfully, but that is a peasant’s tear, so to speak, ma’am, the most peasant feelings. Can a Russian peasant have feelings to compare with an educated man? Owing to his lack of education he can’t have any feeling at all. Ever since from my childhood, whenever I used to hear ‘a bi-it,’ I could have dashed myself against the wall. I hate all of Russia, Marya Kondratyevna.”

“If you were a little army cadet or a young little hussar, you wouldn’t talk like that, but you’d draw your saber and start defending all Russia.”

“Not only do I not wish to be an army hussar, Marya Kondratyevna, but on the contrary I wish for the abolition of all soldiers, ma’am.”

“But when the enemy comes, who’s going to defend us?”

“There’s no need at all, ma’am. In the year twelve there was a great invasion of Russia by the Emperor Napoleon of France, the first, the father of the present one, and it would have been a good thing if those same Frenchmen had conquered us then: an intelligent nation would have conquered a very stupid one, ma’am, and annexed it. There would even have been quite a different order of things, ma’am.”

“Are they really so much better over there than ours? I wouldn’t swap one of our young dandies for three of the youngest Englishmen,” Marya Kondratyevna said tenderly, no doubt accompanying her words at that moment with the most languishing of glances.

“That’s according to each one’s fancy, ma’am.”

“And you yourself are just like a foreigner, just like a most noble foreigner, I tell you that though it makes me blush.”

“If you wish to know, then when it comes to depravity, the people over there and ours are all alike. They’re all rogues, ma’am, only the one over there walks about in patent-leather boots, while our scoundrel stinks in his poverty and sees nothing wrong in it. The Russian people need flogging, ma’am, as Fyodor Pavlovich rightly said yesterday, though he is a madman, he and all his children, ma’am.”

“But you said yourself you respect Ivan Fyodorovich so much.”

“And he referred to me as a stinking lackey. He considers me someone who might rebel; there he is mistaken, ma’am. If I had a certain sum in my pocket, I’d have been gone from here long ago. Dmitri Fyodorovich is worse than any lackey, in his conduct, and his mind, and his poverty, ma’am, and he doesn’t know how to do anything at all, and yet, on the contrary, he’s respected by everyone. I, let’s say, am only a broth-boy, but with luck I could open a café-restaurant in Moscow on Petrovka Street. Because I cook specially, and not one of them in Moscow, except the foreigners, can serve anything specially. Dmitri Fyodorovich is a beggar without pants to his name, ma’am, and yet let him challenge the very first count’s son to a duel, and that one will go out with him, ma’am, and how is he better than me, ma’am? Because he’s incomparably stupider than me. How much money he’s whistled away without any use whatever, ma’am.”

“I think a duel must be very nice,” Marya Kondratyevna suddenly remarked.

“How so, ma’am?”

“It’s so frightening and brave, especially when young little officers with pistols in their hands fire away at each other over some girl or other. A perfect picture. Oh, if only they let girls watch, I’d terribly like to see one.”

“It’s fine when he’s the one aiming, but when they aim right at his own snout, then it’s the stupidest feeling, ma’am. You’d run from the spot, Marya Kondratyevna.”

“Would you really run away?”

But Smerdyakov did not deign to answer. After a minute’s silence a chord rang out again, and the falsetto poured forth the last couplet:

However much I try,
I will take myself away,
To enjo-o-oy my life
And live in the capital!
I will not grieve.
I won’t grieve at all,
I don’t even intend to grieve at all!

Here something unexpected happened: Alyosha suddenly sneezed; on the bench they instantly fell silent. Alyosha stood up and went toward them. It was indeed Smerdyakov, all dressed up, pomaded, and very nearly curled, in patent-leather boots. The guitar lay on the bench. The lady was Marya Kondratyevna, the landlady’s daughter; she had on a pale blue dress with a train two arshins long; the girl was still quite young and would not have been bad-looking, but her face was just too round, and she had dreadful freckles.

“Will brother Dmitri be back soon?” said Alyosha as calmly as he could.

Smerdyakov slowly rose from the bench; Marya Kondratyevna rose too.

“And why should I be apprised of Dmitri Fyodorovich; it would be another matter if I were employed as his watchman?” Smerdyakov answered quietly, distinctly, and disdainfully.

“But I only asked whether you knew,” Alyosha explained.

“I know nothing of his whereabouts, sir, and I don’t wish to know.”

“But my brother told me precisely that it’s you who let him know about everything that goes on in the house, and that you promised to let him know when Agrafena Alexandrovna comes.”

Slowly and imperturbably Smerdyakov raised his eyes to him.

“And how did you deign to get in this time, since the gate here has been on the latch for an hour?” he asked, looking intently at Alyosha.

“I came in from the lane, over the fence, straight into the summerhouse. I hope you’ll forgive me for it,” he turned to Marya Kondratyevna. “I had to catch my brother quickly.”

“Oh, how could we take offense at you,” drawled Marya Kondratyevna, flattered by Alyosha’s apology, “since Dmitri Fyodorovich often comes to the summerhouse that way too, we don’t even know it, and there he is already sitting in the summerhouse.”

“I’m looking for him very hard just now, I would very much like to see him or learn from you where he is now. Believe me, it’s on a matter very important to him himself.”

“He doesn’t tell us where he goes,” babbled Marya Kondratyevna.

“Although I come here merely as an acquaintance,” Smerdyakov began again, “he has been inhumanly pressing me even here with ceaseless questions about the master: what, he says, how are things with him, who comes and who goes, and can’t I tell him anything else? Twice he even threatened me with death.”

“With death, how so?” Alyosha was surprised.

“Why, what would that amount to for him, sir, with his character, which you yourself deigned to observe yesterday, sir? If, he says, I let Agrafena Alexandrovna in and she spends the night here, you’ll be the first one dead. I’m very much afraid of him, sir, and if I weren’t even more afraid, I ought to report him to the town authorities. God knows what he may be capable of, sir.”

“The other day he told him, ‘I’ll pound you to bits in a mortar,’” added Marya Kondratyevna.

“Well, if it’s in a mortar, then that’s perhaps only talk…” remarked Alyosha. “If I could meet him right now, I might say something to him about that too…”

“Here is the only thing I can tell you,” Smerdyakov said, as though he had suddenly thought better of it. “I come here by way of our longstanding neighborly acquaintance, and why shouldn’t I come, sir? On the other hand, Ivan Fyodorovich sent me at daybreak today to Dmitri Fyodorovich’s lodgings on Ozernaya Street, without a letter, sir, so that Dmitri Fyodorovich should without fail come to the tavern here on the square, sir, so that they could dine together. I went, sir, but I didn’t find Dmitri Fyodorovich at his lodgings, sir, and it was already eight o’clock. ‘He was in,’ they say, ‘but he’s all gone out’: that’s in so many words what the people he lodges with told me. It’s exactly as if there were some sort of conspiracy between them, sir, a mutual one, sir. And now, perhaps, at this very minute he’s sitting in that tavern with his brother Ivan Fyodorovich, since Ivan Fyodorovich didn’t come home to dinner, and Fyodor Pavlovich dined alone an hour ago and has now gone to lie down for a nap. I most earnestly beg you, though, not to say anything to him about me and about what I have told you, sir, for he’ll kill me for nothing, sir.”

“Brother Ivan invited Dmitri to the tavern today?” Alyosha asked again quickly.

“That is exactly so, sir.”

“To the Metropolis tavern, on the square?”

“That very one, sir.”

“That’s very possible!” exclaimed Alyosha in great excitement. “Thank you, Smerdyakov, that’s important news, I’ll go there at once.”

“Don’t give me away, sir,” Smerdyakov said after him.

“Oh no, I’ll turn up at the tavern as if by chance, don’t worry.”

“But where are you going, I’ll unlock the gate for you,” Marya Kondratyevna cried out.

“No, it’s shorter this way, I’ll go over the fence again.”

The news shook Alyosha terribly. He set off for the tavern. It was unseemly for him to go into a tavern in his clothes, but to inquire on the stairs and call them out, that was possible. But just as he came up to the tavern, a window suddenly opened and brother Ivan himself shouted down to him from it:

“Alyosha, can you come in here to me right now or not? You’d do me a tremendous favor.”

“I certainly can, only I don’t know how it will be in my clothes.”

“I happen to be in a private room, go round to the front steps, I’ll run down to meet you…”

A minute later Alyosha was seated next to his brother. Ivan was alone and having his dinner.