IV. In the Dark

Where did he run? Obviously: “Where could she be but at Fyodor Pavlovich’s? She ran straight to him from Samsonov’s, that’s clear now. The whole intrigue, the whole deception is obvious now…” All this went flying like a whirlwind through his head. He did not run into Marya Kondratyevna’s yard: “No need to go there, no need at all… so there’s not the slightest alarm… they’d pass it on at once and betray me… Marya Kondratyevna is obviously in the plot, Smerdyakov too, he too, they’ve all been bought!” Another intention had taken shape in him: he ran around Fyodor Pavlovich’s house by a long detour, through a side street, ran down Dmitrovskaya Street, then across the little bridge, and came straight into a secluded lane at the back, empty and uninhabited, fenced on one side by the wattle fence of a neighbor’s kitchen garden, and on the other by the strong high fence that ran all around Fyodor Pavlovich’s garden. Here he chose a spot, and, it seems, the very one where, according to the tradition known to him, Stinking Lizaveta had once climbed over the fence. “If she could climb over,” God knows why it flashed through his head, “then how could I not climb over?” And indeed, he leaped up and in a flash managed to catch hold of the top of the fence with his hand, then hoisted himself up energetically, climbed up in one go, and sat astride the fence. Close by, in the garden, stood the little bathhouse, but from the fence the lighted windows of the house could also be seen. “Just as I thought, there’s a light in the old man’s bedroom, she’s there!” And he jumped down from the fence into the garden. Though he knew that Grigory was ill, and that perhaps Smerdyakov too really was ill, and that there was no one to hear him, he instinctively hid, froze on the spot, and began to listen. But everywhere there was dead silence and, as if on purpose, complete stillness, not the slightest breath of wind.

“‘And only the silence whispers,’” this little line of verse flashed for some reason through his head. “If only no one heard me jump over; I think not.” After standing for a minute, he went quietly through the garden, over the grass; going around the trees and bushes, he walked a long time, stealing every step, listening himself to each of his steps. It took him some five minutes to reach the lighted window. He remembered that there, right under the windows, were several big, tall, thick bushes of elder and guelder rose. The door from the house into the garden, on the left side of the front, was locked, and he had purposely and carefully looked to see this as he passed. At last he reached the bushes and hid behind them. He was not breathing. “I must wait now,” he thought, “if they heard my steps and are listening now, so that they’ll be reassured… if only I don’t cough or sneeze…”

He waited a couple of minutes, but his heart was beating terribly, and at moments he was almost suffocating. “No, the palpitations won’t pass,” he thought, “I can’t wait any longer.” He stood in shadow behind a bush; the front half of the bush was lit up from the window. “Guelder rose, the berries, how red they are!” he whispered, not knowing why. Quietly, with separate, inaudible steps, he went up to the window and rose on tiptoe. Fyodor Pavlovich’s whole little bedroom lay before him as plain as the palm of his hand. It was a small room, divided all the way across by a little red screen, “a Chinese one,” as Fyodor Pavlovich called it. “Chinese,” swept through Mitya’s mind, “and behind the screen, Grushenka.” He began to examine Fyodor Pavlovich. The old man had on his new little striped silk dressing gown, one Mitya had never yet seen him in, belted with a silk cord with tassels. From under the collar of the dressing gown peeped clean, foppish linen, a fine Holland shirt with gold studs. On Fyodor Pavlovich’s head was the same red bandage that Alyosha had seen on him. “All dressed up,” thought Mitya. Fyodor Pavlovich stood near the window, seemingly deep in thought; all at once he jerked his head up, listened for a moment, and, hearing nothing, went to the table, poured half a glass of cognac from the decanter, and drank it. Then he sighed with his whole chest, stood still again, went absently to the mirror between the windows, lifted the red bandage a little from his forehead with his right hand, and began to examine his bruises and scabs, which had not yet gone. “He’s alone,” thought Mitya, “in all probability alone.” Fyodor Pavlovich moved away from the mirror, suddenly turned to the window and looked out of it. Mitya instantly leaped back into the shadow.

“She may be behind the screen with him, perhaps she’s asleep already,” stabbed at his heart. Fyodor Pavlovich moved away from the window. “He was looking out of the window for her, so she isn’t there: why else would he look into the dark?… it means impatience is devouring him…” Mitya at once leaped up and began looking through the window again. The old man was already sitting at the little table, evidently grieving. At last he leaned on his elbow and laid his right palm against his cheek. Mitya gazed greedily.

“Alone, alone!” he repeated again. “If she were here, he’d have a different face.” A strange thing: in his heart there suddenly boiled up a kind of senseless and odd vexation that she was not there. “Not that she isn’t here,” Mitya grasped and answered himself at once, “but that I can’t possibly find out for certain whether she’s here or not.” Mitya himself recalled afterward that his mind at that moment was extraordinarily clear and took in everything to the last detail, grasped every little feature. But anguish, the anguish of not knowing and of indecision, was growing in his heart with immeasurable speed. “Is she here, after all, or isn’t she?” boiled up spitefully in his heart. And suddenly he made up his mind, stretched out his hand, and softly tapped on the window frame. He tapped out the signal agreed on between the old man and Smerdyakov: the first two times rather softly, and then three times faster: knock-knock-knock—the signal that meant “Grushenka has come.” The old man gave a start, jerked up his head, jumped up quickly, and rushed to the window. Mitya leaped back into the shadow. Fyodor Pavlovich opened the window and thrust his whole head out.

“Grushenka, is it you? Is it you?” he said in a kind of trembling half-whisper. “Where are you, my little mother, my little angel, where are you?” He was in terrible agitation, he was gasping.

“Alone!” Mitya decided.

“Where are you, then?” the old man cried again, and thrust his head out still further, thrust it out with his shoulders, looking around in all directions, right and left. “Come here; I’ve got a little present ready, come, I’ll show you!…”

“He means the envelope with the three thousand,” flashed through Mitya’s mind.

“But where are you?… At the door, maybe? I’ll open it right away…”

And the old man almost climbed out of the window, peering to the right, toward the side where the door into the garden was, and trying to make things out in the dark. A second more, and he would surely have run to unlock the door without waiting for Grushenka to answer. Mitya was watching from the side and did not stir. The whole profile of the old man, so loathsome to him, his whole sagging Adam’s apple, his hooked nose, his lips smiling in voluptuous expectation, all this was brightly lit by the slanting light of the lamp from the left, from inside the room. A terrible, frenzied fury suddenly boiled up in Mitya’s heart: “There he is, his rival, his tormentor, the tormentor of his life!” It was a surge of that very sudden, vengeful, and frenzied fury of which, as if foreseeing it, he had spoken to Alyosha in their conversation in the summerhouse four days before, when he answered Alyosha’s question, “How can you say that you’ll kill our father?”

“I don’t know, you see, I don’t know,” he had said then. “Maybe I won’t kill, and maybe I will. I’m afraid that at that very moment his face will suddenly become hateful to me. I hate his Adam’s apple, his nose, his eyes, his shameless sneer. I feel a personal loathing. That’s what I’m afraid of, and then I won’t hold back…”

The personal loathing was growing unbearable. Mitya was no longer in possession of himself, and suddenly he pulled the brass pestle out of his pocket…

“God,” as Mitya himself said afterward, “was watching over me then”: precisely at that very time the sick Grigory Vasilyevich woke up on his bed. Toward evening of that same day he had performed on himself the well-known treatment of which Smerdyakov had told Ivan Fyodorovich, that is, with his wife’s help he had rubbed himself all over with vodka mixed with some secret, very strong infusion, and drunk the rest with “a certain prayer” whispered over him by his wife, and had lain down to sleep. Marfa Ignatyevna had partaken too, and, being no drinker, had fallen into a dead sleep beside her husband. But then, quite unexpectedly, Grigory suddenly woke in the night, considered for a minute, and though he at once felt a burning pain in the small of his back again, he sat up in bed. Then he thought something over again, got up, and dressed hastily. Perhaps a pang of conscience pricked him because he was sleeping while the house was without a watchman “at such a dangerous time.” Smerdyakov, shattered by his falling fit, lay motionless in the other little room. Marfa Ignatyevna did not stir. “The woman’s all worn out,” thought Grigory Vasilyevich, glancing at her, and, groaning, went out onto the porch. Of course he meant only to take a look from the porch, because he was in no condition to walk; the pain in the small of his back and in his right leg was unbearable. But just then he suddenly remembered that he had not locked the garden gate that evening. He was a most punctilious and exact man, a man of an order once established and of habits of many years’ standing. Limping and writhing with pain, he went down from the porch and made for the garden. Just as he thought: the gate was wide open. Mechanically he stepped into the garden: perhaps he imagined something, perhaps he heard some sound, but, glancing to the left, he saw the master’s window open, an empty window now, no one was looking out of it anymore. “Why is it open, it isn’t summer now!” thought Grigory, and suddenly, at that very instant, something extraordinary flitted right before him in the garden. Some forty paces ahead of him a man seemed to be running in the dark; some shadow was moving very fast. “Lord!” said Grigory, and beside himself, forgetting the pain in the small of his back, he set off to cut across the runner’s path. He took a shorter way; the garden was evidently better known to him than to the runner; the runner was making for the bathhouse, ran behind the bathhouse, rushed to the wall… Grigory followed him, not losing sight of him, and ran beside himself. He reached the fence just at the moment when the fugitive was already climbing over it. Beside himself, Grigory yelled, rushed at him, and seized his leg with both hands.

Just as he thought, his presentiment had not deceived him; he recognized him, it was he, “the monster, the parricide”!

“Parricide!” the old man shouted for the whole neighborhood to hear, but that was all he managed to shout; he suddenly fell as if struck by lightning. Mitya jumped back down into the garden and stooped over the man he had felled. The brass pestle was in Mitya’s hands, and he mechanically flung it into the grass. The pestle fell two paces from Grigory, but not into the grass, onto the path instead, in the most conspicuous place. For a few seconds he examined the man lying before him. The old man’s head was all covered with blood; Mitya stretched out his hand and began to feel it. He clearly remembered afterward that he had wanted terribly at that moment “to make quite sure” whether he had broken the old man’s skull or only “stunned” him with the pestle on the crown of his head. But the blood was flowing, flowing terribly, and in an instant drenched Mitya’s trembling fingers in a hot stream. He remembered that he had snatched out of his pocket the new white handkerchief he had provided himself with on going to Mrs. Khokhlakova’s, and pressed it to the old man’s head, trying senselessly to wipe the blood off his forehead and face. But the handkerchief too was instantly soaked through with blood. “Lord, what am I doing this for?” Mitya suddenly came to himself. “If I’ve broken it, how can I find out now… And what does it matter now anyway!” he suddenly added hopelessly. “If I’ve killed him, I’ve killed him… The old man’s caught it, so lie there!” he said aloud, and suddenly rushed at the fence, jumped over into the lane, and took to his heels. He had the blood-soaked handkerchief crumpled in his right fist, and on the run he stuffed it into the back pocket of his frock coat. He ran headlong, and a few rare passersby who met him in the dark, in the streets of the town, remembered afterward that they had met a frenziedly running man that night. He was flying again to Morozova’s house. Earlier, as soon as he had gone, Fenya had rushed to the head yard porter, Nazar Ivanovich, and begun begging him “for Christ God’s sake” “not to let the captain in again either today or tomorrow.” Nazar Ivanovich, having heard her out, agreed, but as ill luck would have it went off upstairs to the mistress, where he was suddenly called, and on the way, meeting his nephew, a lad of about twenty only recently arrived from the country, told him to stay in the yard, but forgot to tell him about the captain. Having run up to the gate, Mitya knocked. The lad recognized him at once: Mitya had more than once given him tips. He opened the wicket gate for him immediately, let him in, and, smiling cheerfully, hastened obligingly to inform him that “Agrafena Alexandrovna isn’t at home now, you know, sir.”

“Where is she, then, Prokhor?” Mitya suddenly stopped.

“She left earlier, two hours ago or so, with Timofei, for Mokroye.”

“What for?” Mitya shouted.

“That I can’t know, sir, to some officer, someone called her from there and sent horses…”

Mitya left him and ran in to Fenya like a man half out of his mind.