VI. The Prosecutor Catches Mitya

Something began that was quite unexpected and astonishing for Mitya. Never before, not even a minute earlier, could he have imagined that anyone could treat him, Mitya Karamazov, like this! The main thing was that something humiliating had appeared, and on their part something “arrogant and contemptuous toward him.” Taking off his frock coat would have been nothing, but he was asked to undress further. And not so much asked as, in fact, ordered; he understood that perfectly well. Out of pride and contempt he submitted completely, without a word. Besides Nikolai Parfenovich, the prosecutor came in behind the curtain too, and several peasants were present, “for force, of course,” thought Mitya, “and maybe for something else as well.”

“What, do I have to take off my shirt too?” he started to ask sharply, but Nikolai Parfenovich did not answer him: together with the prosecutor he was absorbed in examining the frock coat, trousers, waistcoat, and cap, and it was plain that both of them were very much interested in the examination. “They don’t stand on ceremony at all,” flashed through Mitya’s mind. “They don’t even observe the most necessary politeness.”

“For the second time I am asking you: do I have to take off my shirt or not?” he said, even more sharply and irritably.

“Don’t trouble yourself, we will inform you,” Nikolai Parfenovich answered, even in a somehow commanding tone. At least so it seemed to Mitya.

Meanwhile a careful consultation in undertones was going on between the investigator and the prosecutor. On the frock coat, especially on the left skirt, at the back, there turned out to be huge bloodstains, dried, stiffened, and not much rubbed off yet. On the trousers as well. Nikolai Parfenovich, besides that, with his own hands, in the presence of the attesting witnesses, felt with his fingers over the collar, over the cuffs, and over every seam of the frock coat and trousers, evidently looking for something—money, of course. The main thing was that they did not hide from Mitya their suspicion that he might have sewn the money into his clothes and was capable of it. “That’s treating me straight out like a thief, not like an officer,” he grumbled to himself. And they shared their thoughts with each other in front of him with a strange frankness. For instance, the clerk, who had also turned up behind the curtain and was bustling about and helping, drew Nikolai Parfenovich’s attention to the cap, which they felt over too. “You remember Gridenka the copying clerk, sir,” the clerk remarked. “In the summer he went to collect the salaries for the whole office, and when he came back he declared he had lost the money while drunk—and where was it found? Right in these very pipings, in his cap, sir, the hundred-ruble notes rolled up into little tubes, sir, and sewn into the pipings.” Both the investigator and the prosecutor remembered the Gridenka affair very well, and so they set Mitya’s cap aside too and decided that all this would have to be gone over seriously later, and all the clothes as well.

“Excuse me,” Nikolai Parfenovich suddenly cried out, noticing that the right cuff of the right sleeve of Mitya’s shirt was turned inward and was all soaked with blood, “excuse me, sir, what is this, blood?”

“Blood,” Mitya snapped.

“That is, what sort of blood, sir… and why is it turned in inside the sleeve?”

Mitya told how he had soiled the cuff while fussing over Grigory and had turned it in back at Perkhotin’s, when he was washing his hands there.

“We shall have to take your shirt as well, this is very important… for material evidence.” Mitya flushed and flew into a rage.

“What, am I supposed to stay naked?” he shouted.

“Don’t trouble yourself… We will set that right somehow, and meanwhile kindly take off your socks as well.”

“You’re not joking? Is that really so necessary?” Mitya’s eyes flashed.

“We are in no mood for jokes,” Nikolai Parfenovich parried sternly.

“Well, if I must… I…” Mitya began to mutter, and, sitting down on the bed, began taking off his socks. He felt unbearably abashed: everyone was dressed, and he was undressed, and, strange to say—undressed, he seemed to feel himself guilty before them, and, above all, he himself almost agreed that he really had suddenly become lower than all of them and that now they had every right to despise him. “If everyone’s undressed, there’s no shame, but when one is undressed and everyone is looking—it’s a disgrace!” flashed through his mind again and again. “Just like a dream; in dreams I’ve sometimes seen such disgraces come upon me.” But taking off his socks was even agonizing for him: they were very dirty, and so was his underclothing, and now everyone had seen it. And the main thing was that he did not like his own feet; for some reason he had found the big toes on both his feet ugly all his life, especially one coarse, flat nail on the right foot that somehow curled downward, and now they would all see. Out of unbearable shame he suddenly became still ruder, and now deliberately so. He tore off his shirt himself.

“Wouldn’t you like to search somewhere else too, if you’re not ashamed?”

“No, sir, that’s not necessary for now.”

“What, so I’m to stay naked like this?” he added fiercely.

“Yes, for the moment that is necessary… Kindly sit down here for now; you may take the blanket from the bed and wrap yourself up, and I… I will settle all this.”

All the things were shown to the attesting witnesses, a report of the examination was drawn up, and at last Nikolai Parfenovich went out, and the clothes were carried out after him. Ippolit Kirillovich went out too. Only the peasants remained with Mitya, and they stood silently, not taking their eyes off him. Mitya wrapped himself in the blanket; he had grown cold. His bare feet stuck out, and he could not manage to pull the blanket over them so as to cover them. Nikolai Parfenovich for some reason did not come back for a long time, “torturingly long.” “He takes me for a puppy,” Mitya ground his teeth. “That trash of a prosecutor has gone out too, out of contempt, no doubt; it got disgusting for him to look at a naked man.” All the same, Mitya supposed that his clothes would be examined somewhere out there and brought back. But what was his indignation when Nikolai Parfenovich suddenly returned with quite different clothes, which a peasant carried behind him.

“Well, here are some clothes for you,” he said in a free and easy way, apparently very pleased with the success of his errand. “Mr. Kalganov donates these for this curious occasion, as well as a clean shirt for you. He happened, fortunately, to have all this in his trunk. You may keep your own underclothes and socks.”

Mitya boiled up terribly.

“I don’t want anybody else’s clothes!” he shouted menacingly. “Give me mine!”

“Impossible.”

“Give me mine, to the devil with Kalganov, and his clothes, and himself!”

They spent a long time persuading him. Somehow, however, they calmed him down. It was impressed upon him that his clothes, being stained with blood, must “join the collection of material evidence,” and that to leave them on him they now “had not even the right… in view of how the case may end.” Somehow Mitya understood this at last. He fell gloomily silent and began to dress in a hurry. He only remarked, as he put the clothes on, that they were richer than his old clothes and that he would not want to “take advantage.” Besides that, “they’re humiliatingly tight. Am I supposed to play the motley clown in them… for your delectation?”

Again it was impressed upon him that here too he was exaggerating, that Mr. Kalganov, though taller than he, was only a little taller, and that perhaps only the trousers would come out a bit long. But the frock coat did in fact turn out to be tight in the shoulders.

“Devil take it, I can hardly button it,” Mitya started grumbling again. “Be so kind as to convey from me to Mr. Kalganov, this very moment, that I did not ask him for his clothes and that I have been rigged out as a buffoon myself.”

“He understands that very well and regrets… that is, he does not regret his clothes, but, properly speaking, this whole occurrence…” Nikolai Parfenovich began to mumble.

“I spit on his regret! Well, where now? Or do I just keep sitting here?”

He was asked to go out again into “that room.” Mitya came out scowling with spite and trying not to look at anyone. In another man’s clothes he felt utterly disgraced, even before those peasants and Trifon Borisovich, whose face for some reason suddenly flashed in the doorway and disappeared. “He came to take a peek at the mummer,” thought Mitya. He sat down on his former chair. Something nightmarish and absurd haunted him; it seemed to him that he was not in his right mind.

“Well, what now, are you going to start flogging me with birch rods, or what? There’s nothing else left, after all,” he ground out, addressing the prosecutor. He no longer even wanted to turn toward Nikolai Parfenovich, as if not deigning even to speak with him. “He examined my socks much too closely, and he even had them turned inside out, the scoundrel; he did that on purpose, to show everybody what dirty underclothes I have!”

“Well, now we shall have to proceed to the questioning of the witnesses,” Nikolai Parfenovich pronounced, as if in answer to Dmitri Fyodorovich’s question.

“Yes, sir,” the prosecutor said thoughtfully, also as if he were working something out.

“We have done what we could, Dmitri Fyodorovich, in your own interests,” Nikolai Parfenovich went on, “but having received from you so radical a refusal to explain to us the origin of the sum found on you, we, at the present moment…”

“What is that ring of yours made of?” Mitya suddenly interrupted, as though coming out of some reverie, and pointing his finger at one of the three large rings that adorned Nikolai Parfenovich’s right hand.

“The ring?” Nikolai Parfenovich asked again in surprise.

“Yes, this one… here, on the middle finger, with the little veins, what stone is it?” Mitya insisted, somehow irritably, like a stubborn child.

“It is a smoky topaz,” Nikolai Parfenovich smiled. “Would you like to look at it? I’ll take it off…”

“No, no, don’t take it off!” Mitya cried fiercely, suddenly coming to his senses and growing furious with himself. “Don’t take it off, there’s no need… Devil… Gentlemen, you have befouled my soul! Do you really think I would hide it from you, if I really had killed my father, that I would dodge, lie, and hide? No, Dmitri Karamazov is not that kind, he couldn’t bear it, and if I were guilty, I swear, I would not have waited for your arrival here and for the sunrise, as I first intended, but would have destroyed myself still earlier, without even waiting for dawn! I feel that now in myself. In twenty years of living I wouldn’t have learned as much as I have found out in this accursed night!… And would I be like this, would I be like this tonight and at this minute now, sitting with you—would I talk like this, move like this, look like this at you and at the world, if I really were a parricide, when even this accidental killing of Grigory would not let me rest the whole night—not out of fear, oh! not only out of fear of your punishment! The disgrace of it! And you want me to start revealing and telling to scoffers like you, who see nothing and believe nothing, blind moles and scoffers, yet another vileness of mine, yet another disgrace, even if it saved me from your accusation? Why, I’d sooner go to penal servitude! The one who opened the door to my father and went in by that door, he killed him, he robbed him. Who he is—I am at a loss and in torment, but it is not Dmitri Karamazov, know that—and that is all I can tell you, and enough, don’t pester me… Exile me, execute me, but don’t provoke me any more. I have fallen silent. Call your witnesses!”

Mitya delivered his sudden monologue as though he had made up his mind once and for all to be silent from now on. The prosecutor had been watching him all the while, and the instant he fell silent, with the coldest and calmest air, he suddenly said, exactly as if it were the most ordinary thing:

“Precisely in connection with this open door, which you have just mentioned, we can communicate to you, and most opportunely, precisely now, a certain extraordinarily curious and in the highest degree important piece of testimony, for you and for us, from the old man Grigory Vasilyev, whom you wounded. When he came to, in reply to our questions, he told us clearly and insistently that at the very time when, having gone out onto the porch and heard a certain noise in the garden, he decided to go into the garden through the little gate, which stood unlocked, then, having gone into the garden, even before he noticed you in the darkness running away, as you have already told us, from the open window at which you had seen your parent, he, Grigory, casting a glance to the left and indeed noticing this open window, noticed at the same time, much nearer to himself, the door as well, standing wide open, the very door about which you have stated that it remained locked the whole time you were in the garden. I will not hide from you that Vasilyev himself firmly concludes and testifies that you must have run out of that door, although, of course, he did not see with his own eyes how you ran out, having first caught sight of you already at some distance from himself, in the middle of the garden, running away toward the fence…”

Mitya had jumped up from his chair halfway through the speech.

“Nonsense!” he suddenly yelled in a frenzy. “A brazen fraud! He couldn’t have seen the door open, because it was locked then… He’s lying!…”

“I consider it my duty to repeat to you that his testimony is firm. He does not waver. He stands by it. We asked him again several times.”

“Precisely, I asked him again several times!” Nikolai Parfenovich warmly confirmed.

“It’s not true, it’s not true! Either it’s a slander against me, or a madman’s hallucination,” Mitya went on shouting. “Simply, plainly, in delirium, in his blood, from the wound, he imagined it when he came to… So now he’s raving.”

“Yes, sir, but he noticed the open door not when he came to from his wound, but before that, when he was just going into the garden from the cottage.”

“But it’s not true, it’s not true, it can’t be! He’s slandering me out of spite… He couldn’t have seen… I didn’t run out of the door,” Mitya was gasping.

The prosecutor turned to Nikolai Parfenovich and said to him impressively:

“Show it to him.”

“Do you know this object?” Nikolai Parfenovich suddenly laid on the table a large envelope of thick paper, of office size, on which three seals could still be seen intact. The envelope itself was empty and torn open along one side. Mitya goggled at it.

“That… that must be my father’s envelope,” he muttered, “the very one that had those three thousand in it… and if the inscription is there, let me see: ‘to my little chick’… here: three thousand,” he cried, “three thousand, you see?”

“Of course, sir, we see, but we did not find the money in it any longer; it was empty and had been tossed on the floor next to the bed, behind the screen.”

For several seconds Mitya stood as if stunned.

“Gentlemen, it’s Smerdyakov!” he suddenly shouted with all his might. “It was he who killed him, he who robbed him! He was the only one who knew where the old man had hidden the envelope… It’s him, now it’s clear!”

“But you, too, knew about the envelope, and that it was lying under the pillow.”

“I never knew: I never even saw it at all, this is the first time I’ve seen it, before I only heard about it from Smerdyakov… He was the only one who knew where the old man kept it hidden, but I didn’t know…” Mitya was completely gasping now.

“And yet you yourself testified to us a while ago that the envelope lay under your late parent’s pillow. You said precisely ‘under the pillow,’ so you did know where it lay.”

“That is just how we wrote it down!” Nikolai Parfenovich confirmed.

“Nonsense, absurdity! I didn’t know at all that it was under the pillow. And maybe it wasn’t under the pillow at all… I said ‘under the pillow’ at random… What does Smerdyakov say? Did you ask him where it lay? What does Smerdyakov say? That’s the main thing… And I lied against myself on purpose… I lied to you without thinking that it lay under the pillow, and now you… Well, you know how it is, it slips off your tongue and you tell a lie. But only Smerdyakov knew, only Smerdyakov alone, and nobody else!… He didn’t even tell me where it lay! But it’s him, it’s him; it’s undoubtedly he who killed him, that’s clear as daylight to me now,” Mitya exclaimed in more and more of a frenzy, repeating himself incoherently, growing heated and embittered. “Understand that, and arrest him quickly, quickly… It was precisely he who killed him, when I ran away and when Grigory was lying unconscious, that’s clear now… He gave the signals, and my father opened to him… Because he was the only one who knew the signals, and without the signals my father wouldn’t have opened to anyone…”

“But again you forget the circumstance,” the prosecutor remarked, still with the same restraint, but already as if triumphant, “that there was no need even to give the signals if the door was already standing open, while you were still there, while you were still in the garden…”

“The door, the door,” Mitya muttered, and he stared wordlessly at the prosecutor; he sank helplessly down onto the chair again. Everyone fell silent.

“Yes, the door!… It’s a phantom! God is against me!” he exclaimed, staring before him now quite without thought.

“There, you see,” the prosecutor said gravely, “and judge for yourself now, Dmitri Fyodorovich: on the one hand, this testimony about the open door, out of which you ran, crushing for you and for us. On the other hand, your incomprehensible, stubborn, and almost embittered silence about the origin of the money that suddenly appeared in your hands, when only three hours before you came by this sum you had, by your own testimony, pawned your pistols just to get ten rubles! In view of all this, decide for yourself: what are we to believe and where are we to stop? And do not hold it against us that we are ‘cold cynics and mocking people’ who are incapable of believing in the noble impulses of your soul… Enter, on the contrary, into our position too…”

Mitya was in an inconceivable agitation; he had turned pale.

“Very well!” he suddenly exclaimed. “I will reveal my secret to you, I will reveal where I got the money!… I will reveal my disgrace, so as not to blame either you or myself afterward…”

“And believe me, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” Nikolai Parfenovich chimed in, in a sort of tenderly joyful little voice, “that every sincere and complete confession of yours, made precisely at the present minute, may later have an influence toward the immeasurable alleviation of your lot, and even, besides that…”

But the prosecutor gave him a slight nudge under the table, and he managed to stop in time. Mitya, it is true, was not even listening to him.