I. At Grushenka’s

Alyosha set off toward Cathedral Square, to the house of the merchant’s widow Morozova, to Grushenka. Early that morning she had sent Fenya to him with an urgent request to come and see her. Questioning Fenya, Alyosha learned that her mistress had been in some great and particular alarm since the day before. In all these two months since Mitya’s arrest Alyosha had often dropped in at the Morozova house, both on his own impulse and on errands from Mitya. Some three days after Mitya’s arrest Grushenka had fallen seriously ill and had been sick for nearly five weeks. For one week out of the five she had lain unconscious. Her face had changed a great deal, she had grown thin and sallow, although for almost two weeks now she had been able to go out. But in Alyosha’s view her face had become, as it were, even more attractive, and he liked to meet her eyes when he came in to see her. Something firm and thoughtful seemed to have grown strong in her look. Some spiritual upheaval made itself felt; there appeared a kind of steadfast, humble, but good and irrevocable resolve. Between her eyebrows a small vertical line had appeared on her forehead, which gave her lovely face a look of self-absorbed pensiveness, almost severe, even, at first glance. Of her former flightiness, for instance, not a trace remained. It was strange to Alyosha, too, that in spite of all the misfortune that had befallen the poor woman, the betrothed of a man arrested for a terrible crime almost at the very instant she became betrothed to him, in spite, then, of her illness and of the almost inevitable verdict of the court that threatened ahead, Grushenka had nonetheless not lost her former youthful gaiety. In her once proud eyes there now shone a kind of quietness, although… although, however, those eyes would now and then flame up again with a certain ominous little fire, when she was visited by one old care that had not only not died down but had even grown in her heart. The object of this care was still the same: Katerina Ivanovna, whom Grushenka, while she was still lying ill, had mentioned even in her delirium. Alyosha understood that she was terribly jealous of her over Mitya, Mitya the prisoner, even though Katerina Ivanovna had not once visited him in confinement, though she could have done so whenever she liked. All this turned into a kind of difficult problem for Alyosha, for Grushenka confided her heart to him alone and was constantly asking him for advice; and sometimes he was quite unable to tell her anything at all.

He entered her lodgings full of concern. She was already home; she had come back from Mitya’s about half an hour earlier, and from the very quickness of the movement with which she jumped up from her armchair at the table to meet him he concluded that she had been waiting for him with great impatience. Cards lay on the table, and a game of fools had been dealt. On the leather sofa on the other side of the table a bed had been made up, and on it, in a dressing gown and a cotton nightcap, half reclined Maximov, evidently ill and weak, though smiling sweetly. This homeless little old man, ever since he had come back with Grushenka from Mokroye that time, some two months ago now, had simply stayed on at her place and by her side, never leaving it, from then on. Arriving with her then in the rain and slush, soaked through and frightened, he had sat down on the sofa and fixed his eyes on her in silence, with a timid, pleading smile. Grushenka, who was in terrible grief and already in the first stage of a fever, and who had almost forgotten about him in the first half hour after their arrival amid all her various bustling, suddenly looked at him somehow intently: he giggled pitifully and forlornly, right into her eyes. She called Fenya and had her give him a bite to eat. The whole of that day he sat on in his place, hardly stirring; but when it grew dark and the shutters were closed, Fenya asked her mistress:

“Well, ma’am, is he going to stay the night, then?”

“Yes, make him up a bed on the sofa,” Grushenka answered.

Questioning him in more detail, Grushenka learned from him that he really had nowhere at all to go just now, and that “Mr. Kalganov, my benefactor, told me straight out, ma’am, that they won’t take me in any more, and made me a present of five rubles.” “Well, God be with you, stay, then,” Grushenka decided in her anguish, smiling at him compassionately. The old man twitched at her smile, and his lips trembled with grateful weeping. And so the wandering hanger-on had stayed at her place ever since. Even during her illness he did not leave the house. Fenya and her mother, Grushenka’s cook, did not drive him out but went on feeding him and making up his bed on the sofa. Later on Grushenka even got used to him and, coming home from Mitya’s (whom she had begun visiting as soon as she was a little better, before she had even properly recovered), to kill her anguish she would sit down and start talking with “Maximushka” about all sorts of trifles, just so as not to think about her grief. It turned out that the little old man could sometimes tell a thing or two, so that in the end he even became necessary to her. Apart from Alyosha, who, however, did not come every day, and always only for a short while, Grushenka received almost no one. Her old man, meanwhile, the merchant, was lying terribly ill by then, “passing away,” as they said in town, and in fact he died only a week after Mitya’s trial. Three weeks before his death, sensing that the finale was near, he had at last summoned his sons upstairs to him, with their wives and children, and commanded them not to leave his side any more. From that very moment he strictly forbade the servants to admit Grushenka at all, and if she came, to tell her: “He bids you, so to speak, to live long and merrily, and to forget him entirely.” Grushenka, however, sent almost every day to inquire after his health.

“You’ve come at last!” she cried, throwing down her cards and greeting Alyosha joyfully. “And Maximushka kept scaring me that you might not come at all. Ah, how I need you! Sit down at the table; well, what will you have, coffee?”

“Why not,” said Alyosha, sitting down at the table, “I’m very hungry.”

“That’s right; Fenya, Fenya, coffee!” cried Grushenka. “It’s been boiling a long while now, waiting for you, and bring some little pies, and see they’re hot. No, wait, Alyosha, I had a thunderstorm over those pies today. I took them to him in the jail, and he, would you believe it, threw them back at me, wouldn’t eat them. One pie he flung right on the floor and stamped on it. So I said: ‘I’ll leave them with the guard; if you don’t eat them by evening, it means it’s venomous spite that feeds you!’ and with that I left. We quarreled again, you know, believe it. Every time I come, we quarrel.”

Grushenka said all this in one breath, in agitation. Maximov, at once growing timid, was smiling, his little eyes cast down.

“And what did you quarrel about this time?” asked Alyosha.

“Why, I never expected it at all! Imagine, he got jealous of my ‘first one’: ‘Why,’ he says, ‘are you keeping him? So you’ve begun keeping him, have you?’ He’s jealous all the time, all the time he’s jealous of me! Asleep and eating, he’s jealous. Last week he even got jealous of Kuzma once.”

“But he knew about your ‘first one,’ didn’t he?”

“Well, there you are. He knew from the very beginning right up to today, and today he suddenly stood up and began to curse. It’s shameful even to say what he said. Fool! Rakitka came to see him as I was leaving. Maybe it’s Rakitka egging him on, eh? What do you think?” she added, as though absentmindedly.

“He loves you, that’s what it is, he loves you very much. And just now he’s on edge.”

“I should think he’s on edge, they try him tomorrow. And I went there meaning to tell him what I had to say about tomorrow, because, Alyosha, it frightens me even to think what will happen tomorrow! There you say he’s on edge, but how on edge am I! And he goes on about the Pole! What a fool! Now Maximushka, I’ll bet, he isn’t jealous of.”

“My spouse, too, was very jealous of me, ma’am,” Maximov put in his little word.

“Well, you,” Grushenka laughed in spite of herself, “who would anyone be jealous of with you?”

“Of the housemaids, ma’am.”

“Oh, hush, Maximushka, I’m in no mood for laughing now, it even makes me cross. Don’t goggle at the pies, I won’t give you any, they’re bad for you, and I won’t give you any of the cordial either. Here’s another one to fuss over; it’s just as if my house were an almshouse, really,” she laughed.

“I am not worthy of your kindnesses, ma’am, I am a nonentity, ma’am,” Maximov said in a tearful little voice. “You would do better to lavish your kindnesses on those who are needier than me, ma’am.”

“Ah, everyone is needy, Maximushka, and how’s anyone to tell who’s needier than who. If only there were no such Pole at all, Alyosha; he too took it into his head to fall ill today. I went to see him too. So now I’ll send him pies on purpose, I wasn’t sending any, but Mitya accused me of sending them, so now I’ll send them on purpose, on purpose! Ah, here’s Fenya with a letter! Well, of course, it’s from the Poles again, asking for money again!”

Pan Mussyalovich had indeed sent an extraordinarily long and, as was his custom, flowery letter, in which he asked her to lend him three rubles. Enclosed with the letter was a receipt acknowledging the sum, with an undertaking to repay it within three months; pan Vrublevsky had signed the receipt too. Grushenka had already received many such letters, all with just such receipts, from her “first one.” It had started from the very time of Grushenka’s recovery, some two weeks before. She knew, however, that the two pans had come to ask after her health during her illness as well. The first letter Grushenka received was long, written on a large sheet of letter paper, sealed with a big family seal, and terribly obscure and flowery, so that Grushenka read only half of it and tossed it aside, having understood absolutely nothing. And besides, she was in no state for letters then. This first letter was followed the next day by a second, in which pan Mussyalovich asked her to lend him two thousand rubles for the very shortest term. Grushenka left this letter unanswered as well. Then followed a whole series of letters, a letter a day, all just as pompous and flowery, but in which the sum requested as a loan, gradually coming down, dropped to a hundred rubles, to twenty-five, to ten rubles, and at last Grushenka suddenly received a letter in which the two pans asked her for just one ruble and enclosed a receipt, which they had both signed. Then Grushenka suddenly felt sorry for them, and at dusk she ran over to the pan herself. She found both Poles in terrible poverty, almost destitute, without food, without firewood, without cigarettes, in debt to their landlady. The two hundred rubles won from Mitya at Mokroye had quickly vanished somewhere. What surprised Grushenka, though, was that both pans met her with arrogant pomposity and independence, with the greatest etiquette, with inflated speeches. Grushenka only laughed and gave her “first one” ten rubles. She told Mitya about it then and there, laughing, and he was not jealous at all. But since then the pans had fastened on to Grushenka and bombarded her every day with letters asking for money, and every time she sent a little. And now suddenly today Mitya had taken it into his head to be cruelly jealous.

“Fool that I am, I ran in to see him too, just for a minute, on my way to Mitya, because he’s fallen ill too, that first pan of mine,” Grushenka began again, fussily and in a hurry. “So I’m laughing and telling Mitya about it: imagine, I say, my Pole took it into his head to sing me the old songs on his guitar, he thinks I’ll be moved and marry him. And Mitya, how he jumped up, cursing… So, no, I’m going to send the pans some pies! Fenya, is that the girl they sent over? Here, give her three rubles and wrap up a dozen pies in paper for them and tell her to take them, and you, Alyosha, be sure to tell Mitya that I sent them pies.”

“Not for anything will I tell him,” said Alyosha, smiling.

“Ah, you think he’s suffering; but he got jealous on purpose, and he himself doesn’t care,” Grushenka said bitterly.

“How do you mean, on purpose?” asked Alyosha.

“You’re silly, Alyoshenka, that’s what, you don’t understand anything here for all your brains, that’s what. It isn’t that he got jealous of me, the way I am, that hurts me; it would hurt me if he weren’t jealous at all. That’s how I am. I won’t take offense at jealousy, I’ve got a cruel heart myself, I’ll be jealous myself. Only what hurts me is that he doesn’t love me at all and got jealous now on purpose, that’s what. Am I blind, or what, that I can’t see? All of a sudden he starts telling me about that one, about Katka: she’s this and she’s that, she sent to Moscow for a doctor for the trial, for me, to save me she sent for him, and she sent for a lawyer too, the very first one, the most learned. So he loves her, if he’s started praising her to my face, the shameless eyes of him! He’s guilty before me himself, so he’s picked on me, to make me guilty first, before him, and put it all on me alone: ‘You,’ he says, ‘were with the Pole before me, so now it’s become allowable for me with Katka.’ That’s what it is! He wants to put all the guilt on me alone. He picked on me on purpose, on purpose, I tell you, only I’ll…”

Grushenka did not finish saying what she would do; she covered her eyes with her handkerchief and burst into terrible sobs.

“He does not love Katerina Ivanovna,” Alyosha said firmly.

“Well, whether he loves her or not, I’ll find that out myself soon enough,” Grushenka said, a menacing note in her voice, as she took the handkerchief away from her eyes. Her face was contorted. With sorrow Alyosha saw how her face suddenly turned from meek and quietly cheerful to sullen and spiteful.

“Enough of this nonsense!” she snapped suddenly. “That’s not at all what I called you for. Alyosha, dear, tomorrow, what will happen tomorrow? That’s what torments me! It torments only me! I look at everyone, and nobody thinks about it, it’s nobody’s concern at all. Do you at least think about it? They try him tomorrow, after all! Tell me, how are they going to try him there? It was the lackey, the lackey who killed him, the lackey! Lord! Can it be they’ll condemn him for the lackey, and no one will stand up for him? They haven’t troubled the lackey at all, have they?”

“He was questioned severely,” Alyosha remarked thoughtfully, “but everyone concluded it wasn’t he. Now he’s lying very ill. He’s been ill ever since, since that falling fit. Really ill,” Alyosha added.

“Lord, if only you would go to this lawyer yourself and tell him the whole thing face to face. They say they sent for him from Petersburg for three thousand.”

“The three of us gave the three thousand, I, brother Ivan, and Katerina Ivanovna, but the doctor from Moscow she sent for herself, for two thousand. The lawyer Fetyukovich would have asked for more, but the case has made a noise all over Russia, it’s being discussed in all the newspapers and journals, and Fetyukovich agreed to come more for the glory of it, because the case has become just too famous. I saw him yesterday.”

“Well, and what? Did you tell him?” Grushenka started up hurriedly.

“He listened and said nothing. He said that he had already formed a definite opinion. But he promised to take my words into consideration.”

“What do you mean, into consideration! Ah, the swindlers! They’ll ruin him! Well, and the doctor, why did she send for the doctor?”

“As an expert. They want to make out that my brother is mad and killed in a fit of insanity, not knowing what he was doing,” Alyosha smiled quietly, “only my brother won’t agree to that.”

“Ah, but that would be the truth, if he had killed him!” exclaimed Grushenka. “He was out of his mind then, completely out of his mind, and it’s I, base creature that I am, I who am guilty of that! Only he didn’t kill him, he didn’t! And they’re all against him, saying he killed him, the whole town. Even Fenya testified so that it comes out as if he killed him. And in the shop, and that official, and before that in the tavern they heard him! All of them, all of them are against him, they’re all clamoring.”

“Yes, the evidence has multiplied terribly,” Alyosha remarked gloomily.

“And Grigory, Grigory Vasilyich, he sticks to it that the door was open, he holds out stubbornly that he saw it, you can’t shake him, I ran over to him, talked to him myself. He even swears at me!”

“Yes, that is perhaps the strongest evidence against my brother,” said Alyosha.

“And as for Mitya being out of his mind, he’s just the same even now,” Grushenka suddenly began with a peculiarly anxious and mysterious air. “You know, Alyoshenka, I’ve been meaning to tell you about this for a long time: I go to him every day and I simply wonder at him. Tell me, what do you think: what is it he’s begun talking about all the time now? He talks and talks, and I can’t understand a thing; I think it must be about something clever, well, I’m stupid, I think, I can’t understand it; only he suddenly began talking to me about the babe, that is, about some little babe, ‘Why,’ he says, ‘is the babe poor?’ ‘It’s for that babe I’ll go to Siberia now, I didn’t kill him, but I must go to Siberia!’ What does it mean, what babe, I didn’t understand a single thing. Only I burst into tears while he was saying it, because he said it so very beautifully, he’s crying himself, and I started crying, and suddenly he kissed me and made the sign of the cross over me. What does it mean, Alyosha, tell me, what is this ‘babe’?”

“It’s Rakitin who has for some reason taken to visiting him,” Alyosha smiled, “however… this doesn’t come from Rakitin. I didn’t see him yesterday; I’ll go today.”

“No, it isn’t Rakitka, it’s his brother Ivan Fyodorovich who is troubling him, he’s the one who goes to see him, that’s what…” said Grushenka, and suddenly seemed to stop short. Alyosha stared at her as if thunderstruck.

“What do you mean, goes to see him? Has he really been to see him? Mitya himself told me Ivan never came once!”

“Well… well, look at me! I’ve blurted it out!” exclaimed Grushenka in confusion, suddenly blushing all over. “Wait, Alyosha, keep quiet; so be it, since I’ve blurted it out, I’ll tell you the whole truth: he has been to see him twice, the first time just after he arrived back then, for he came galloping straight from Moscow at the time, I hadn’t even taken to my bed yet, and the second time he came a week ago. He told Mitya not to tell you about it, absolutely forbade it, and not to tell anyone at all, he came in secret.”

Alyosha sat deep in thought, working something out. The news had evidently struck him.

“Brother Ivan doesn’t talk to me about Mitya’s case,” he said slowly, “and in general in all these two months he has talked to me very little, and when I went to see him he was always displeased that I had come, so that I haven’t been going to him for three weeks now. Hm… If he was there a week ago, then… in this week some change really has taken place in Mitya…”

“A change, a change!” Grushenka quickly took up. “They have a secret, they had a secret! Mitya himself told me it was a secret, and, you know, such a secret that Mitya can’t calm down. And before he was cheerful, and he’s cheerful even now, only, you know, when he starts shaking his head like this and pacing about the room, and tugging at the hair here on his temple with this right finger, then I know there’s something uneasy on his soul… I know it!… But he used to be cheerful; and today too he was cheerful!”

“But you said he was on edge?”

“He is on edge, and cheerful. He’s on edge all the time, but for a minute, and then he’s cheerful, and then suddenly on edge again. And you know, Alyosha, I keep wondering at him: there’s such a terror ahead, and yet sometimes he even laughs out loud at such trifles, as if he were a babe himself.”

“And is it true that he told you not to say anything to me about Ivan? He said just that: don’t tell him?”

“He said just that: don’t tell him. It’s you, mainly, that he’s afraid of, Mitya is. Because there’s a secret here, he said himself it was a secret… Alyosha, dear, go and find out: what sort of secret is it they have, and come and tell me,” Grushenka suddenly started up and implored him. “Settle it for me, poor thing that I am, so that I’ll know my cursed fate at last! That’s why I called you.”

“You think it’s something about you? But then he wouldn’t have mentioned the secret in front of you.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s me he wants to tell, but he doesn’t dare. He’s warning me. There’s a secret, he says, but what secret he didn’t say.”

“And what do you think yourself?”

“What do I think? That it’s the end of me, that’s what I think. The three of them have got an end ready for me, because Katka is in it. It’s all Katka, it all comes from her. ‘She’s this and she’s that,’ that means I’m not. He’s telling me beforehand, warning me beforehand. He means to throw me over, that’s the whole secret here! The three of them thought it up together, Mitka, Katka, and Ivan Fyodorovich. Alyosha, I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time: a week ago he suddenly reveals to me that Ivan is in love with Katka, because he goes to see her so often. Was it the truth he told me, or not? Tell me on your conscience, cut me to the quick.”

“I won’t lie to you. Ivan is not in love with Katerina Ivanovna, so I think.”

“There, that’s just what I thought at the time! He’s lying to me, the shameless thing, that’s what! And he got jealous of me now so as to put the blame on me afterward. He’s a fool, after all, he doesn’t know how to cover his tracks, he’s so open, after all… Only I’ll show him, I’ll show him! ‘You believe,’ he says, ‘that I killed him,’ he says that to me, to me, it’s me he reproached with that! God be with him! Well, just wait, that Katka will have a bad time of it from me at the trial! I’ll say one little word there… I’ll say everything there!”

And again she wept bitterly.

“Here is what I can tell you firmly, Grushenka,” said Alyosha, getting up from his place. “First, that he loves you, loves you more than anyone in the world, and you alone, believe me in this. I know it. I do know it. Second, I’ll tell you that I don’t want to worm the secret out of him, but if he tells me himself today, I’ll tell him straight out that I promised to tell you. Then I’ll come to you this very day and tell you. Only… it seems to me… Katerina Ivanovna has nothing whatever to do with it, and this secret is about something else. And that is surely so. And it doesn’t seem at all as though it’s about Katerina Ivanovna, so it appears to me. Goodbye for now!”

Alyosha pressed her hand. Grushenka was still crying. He saw that she put very little faith in his comforting, but it had already done her good that she had at least let out her grief and spoken her mind. He was sorry to leave her in such a state, but he was in a hurry. He still had a great deal to do.