VI. Why Does Such a Man Live!

Dmitri Fyodorovich, a young man of twenty-eight, of medium height and with a pleasant face, looked, however, much older than his years. He was muscular, and one could guess that he had considerable physical strength; nevertheless his face expressed something, as it were, sickly. His face was lean, his cheeks hollow, and their color had a sort of unhealthy yellowish tinge. His rather large, dark, prominent eyes looked out, apparently with firm determination, but somehow vaguely. Even when he was agitated and speaking irritably, his gaze seemed not to obey his inner mood and expressed something else, sometimes not at all in keeping with the present moment. “It’s hard to know what he’s thinking,” people who talked with him would sometimes say. Others, who saw something thoughtful and sullen in his eyes, were sometimes startled by his sudden laughter, which bore witness to merry and playful thoughts in him at the very time when he was looking so sullen. However, a certain sickliness in his face at the present moment could be understood: everyone knew or had heard of the extremely restless and “carousing” life he had been leading here precisely lately, just as everyone knew of the extraordinary irritation he had reached in his quarrels with his father over the disputed money. Several anecdotes about it were already going around town. True, he was irritable by nature too, “of an abrupt and irregular mind,” as our justice of the peace, Semyon Ivanovich Kachalnikov, characteristically put it about him at a certain gathering. He came in impeccably and smartly dressed, in a buttoned frock coat, black gloves, and with a top hat in his hand. As a military man recently retired, he wore a mustache and for the time being shaved his beard. His dark brown hair was cut short and combed somehow forward at the temples. He walked with long, resolute strides, like a soldier on parade. He stopped for an instant on the threshold and, glancing around at everyone, went straight to the elder, guessing that he was the host. He bowed low to him and asked for his blessing. The elder, rising a little, blessed him; Dmitri Fyodorovich respectfully kissed his hand and said with extraordinary agitation, almost with irritation:

“Be generous and forgive me for making you wait so long. But the servant Smerdyakov, whom my father sent, twice answered my insistent question about the time in the most decided tone, that it was set for one o’clock. Now I suddenly learn…”

“Do not trouble yourself,” the elder interrupted, “it is nothing, you were a little delayed, no harm done…”

“I am extremely grateful to you, and could expect no less from your kindness.” Having snapped this out, Dmitri Fyodorovich bowed once more, and then, turning suddenly toward his “papa,” made him too just such a respectful and low bow. It was evident that he had thought out this bow beforehand and had thought it out sincerely, considering it his duty to express by it his respect and his good intentions. Fyodor Pavlovich, though caught off guard, at once found his feet in his own way: in answer to Dmitri Fyodorovich’s bow he jumped up from his chair and answered his son with exactly the same low bow. His face suddenly became grave and imposing, which, however, gave him a decidedly malicious look. Then, silently, with a general bow to all who were in the room, Dmitri Fyodorovich walked with his long, resolute strides to the window, sat down on the only chair left, not far from Father Paisy, and, leaning all the way forward on the chair, at once prepared to listen to the continuation of the conversation he had interrupted.

Dmitri Fyodorovich’s appearance had taken no more than some two minutes, and the conversation could not but resume. But this time Pyotr Alexandrovich did not consider it necessary to answer Father Paisy’s insistent and almost irritable question.

“Allow me to decline this subject,” he said with a certain worldly carelessness. “Besides, the subject is a tricky one. Here is Ivan Fyodorovich smiling at us; he must have something curious to say on this point as well. Ask him.”

“Nothing in particular, except a small remark,” Ivan Fyodorovich answered at once, “that European liberalism in general, and even our Russian liberal dilettantism, often and for a long time now has confused the final results of socialism with those of Christianity. This wild conclusion is, of course, a characteristic feature. However, as it turns out, it is not only liberals and dilettantes who confuse socialism with Christianity, but in many cases, along with them, the gendarmes too, the foreign ones, of course. Your Paris anecdote is rather characteristic, Pyotr Alexandrovich.”

“In general, I again ask permission to leave this subject,” Pyotr Alexandrovich repeated, “and instead I will tell you, gentlemen, another anecdote, about Ivan Fyodorovich himself, a most interesting and most characteristic one. No more than five days ago, in a certain local society, mainly of ladies, he solemnly declared in an argument that there is decidedly nothing in the whole world that would make people love their fellow men, that there is no law of nature at all that man should love mankind, and that if there is and has been love on earth until now, it is not from natural law but solely because people believed in their immortality. Ivan Fyodorovich added in parentheses that this is precisely what the whole natural law consists of, so that if you destroy mankind’s belief in its immortality, not only love but every living force for continuing the life of the world would at once dry up in it. More than that: then nothing would be immoral anymore, everything would be permitted, even cannibalism. And even that is not all: he concluded by asserting that for every private person, like ourselves now, for instance, who believes neither in God nor in his own immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately change into the complete opposite of the former, religious one, and that egoism, even to the point of villainy, should not only be permitted to man but even recognized as necessary, the most reasonable and almost the noblest outcome of his situation. From such a paradox, gentlemen, you can judge everything else that our dear eccentric and lover of paradoxes Ivan Fyodorovich is pleased to proclaim, and that he perhaps intends to proclaim still.”

“Excuse me,” Dmitri Fyodorovich suddenly shouted unexpectedly, “so that I don’t mishear: ‘Villainy should not only be permitted but even recognized as the most necessary and the most intelligent way out of the situation of every atheist’! Is that so or not?”

“Exactly so,” said Father Paisy.

“I’ll remember that.”

Having said this, Dmitri Fyodorovich fell silent as suddenly as he had flown into the conversation. Everyone looked at him with curiosity.

“Are you really of such a conviction about the consequences of the drying up of people’s faith in the immortality of their souls?” the elder suddenly asked Ivan Fyodorovich.

“Yes, I asserted that. There is no virtue if there is no immortality.”

“You are blessed if you believe so, or else very unhappy!”

“Why unhappy?” Ivan Fyodorovich smiled.

“Because, in all likelihood, you yourself believe neither in the immortality of your soul nor even in what you have written about the church and the church question.”

“Perhaps you are right!… But all the same, I was not altogether joking…” Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly and strangely admitted, flushing quickly, however.

“You were not altogether joking, that is true. This idea is not yet resolved in your heart, and it torments it. But a martyr, too, likes at times to amuse himself with his despair, as if, again, out of despair. For the time being you too amuse yourself out of despair, with magazine articles and drawing-room arguments, not believing in your own dialectics and smiling at them to yourself with an aching heart… In you this question is not resolved, and in this is your great grief, for it urgently demands resolution…”

“And can it be resolved in me? Resolved in the positive direction?” Ivan Fyodorovich went on asking strangely, still looking at the elder with a sort of inexplicable smile.

“If it cannot be resolved in the positive, it will never be resolved in the negative either; you know yourself this quality of your heart; and in this lies its whole torment. But thank the Creator that he has given you a lofty heart, capable of being tormented by such torment, ‘to set your mind on things above and to seek the things that are above, for our citizenship is in heaven.’ God grant that your heart’s resolution come to you while you are still on earth, and may God bless your ways!”

The elder raised his hand and was about to make the sign of the cross over Ivan Fyodorovich from where he sat. But Ivan suddenly rose from his chair, came up to him, accepted his blessing, kissed his hand, and returned to his seat without a word. His look was firm and serious. This act, and the whole preceding conversation with the elder, so unexpected from Ivan Fyodorovich, somehow struck everyone with its mysteriousness and even with a sort of solemnity, so that for a minute everyone fell silent, and Alyosha’s face expressed something almost like fright. But Miusov suddenly shrugged his shoulders, and at the same moment Fyodor Pavlovich jumped up from his chair.

“Divine and most holy elder!” he cried, pointing at Ivan Fyodorovich. “This is my son, flesh of my flesh, my most beloved flesh! He is my most respectful Karl Moor, so to speak, and this son who has just come in, Dmitri Fyodorovich, against whom I am seeking justice from you, is the most disrespectful Franz Moor, both from Schiller’s Robbers, and I, I myself in that case am the Regierender Graf von Moor (the reigning Count von Moor)! Judge between us and save us! We need your prophecies as well as your prayers.”

“Speak without playing the holy fool, and do not begin by insulting the members of your household,” the elder answered in a weak, exhausted voice. He was evidently growing more and more tired, and was noticeably losing his strength.

“An unworthy comedy, which I foresaw even on my way here!” Dmitri Fyodorovich exclaimed indignantly, also jumping up from his seat. “Forgive me, reverend father,” he turned to the elder, “I am an uneducated man and I don’t even know how to address you, but you have been deceived, and you were too kind in allowing us to gather here. All my father wants is a scandal; what for, that is his calculation. He always has his own calculation. But I think I know now what for…”

“They all accuse me, all of them!” Fyodor Pavlovich shouted in his turn. “Now Pyotr Alexandrovich accuses me too. You did accuse me, Pyotr Alexandrovich, you did!” He turned suddenly to Miusov, though Miusov had no thought of interrupting him. “They accuse me of hiding my children’s money in my boot and cheating them; but excuse me, aren’t there courts of law? There they will reckon up for you, Dmitri Fyodorovich, by your own receipts, letters, and agreements, how much you had, how much you’ve squandered, and how much you have left! Why does Pyotr Alexandrovich avoid giving his opinion? Dmitri Fyodorovich is no stranger to him. Because they’re all against me, and in the end Dmitri Fyodorovich owes me money, and not just a little, but several thousand, sir, for which I have all the documents! The whole town is buzzing and booming with his carousals! And there, where he served before, he paid a thousand and two thousand a time for seducing respectable girls; we know about that, Dmitri Fyodorovich, sir, in the most secret details, and I will prove it, sir… Most holy father, would you believe it, he made the noblest of girls fall in love with him, of good family, with a fortune, the daughter of his former commander, a brave colonel, a decorated one, who wore the Order of St. Anne with swords at his neck; he compromised the girl by proposing marriage, now she is here, now she is an orphan, his fiancée, and he, before her very eyes, goes to see a certain local seductress. But though this seductress did live, so to speak, in a civil marriage with a certain respectable man, she is of an independent character, a fortress impregnable to all, just like a lawful wife, for she is virtuous, yes, sir! holy fathers, she is virtuous! And Dmitri Fyodorovich wants to unlock this fortress with a golden key, that’s why he is swaggering over me now, he wants to squeeze money out of me, and meanwhile he’s already thrown away thousands on this seductress; that’s why he keeps borrowing money all the time, and, among others, from whom, what do you think? Shall I say it or not, Mitya?”

“Silence!” shouted Dmitri Fyodorovich. “Wait until I’ve gone, and don’t you dare blacken the noblest of girls in my presence… The very fact that you dare to breathe a word about her is a disgrace to her. I won’t allow it!”

He was choking.

“Mitya! Mitya!” cried Fyodor Pavlovich, with weak nerves and squeezing out tears. “And what about a parent’s blessing? What if I curse you, what then?”

“Shameless hypocrite!” Dmitri Fyodorovich roared furiously.

“That’s how he talks to his father, his father! Then how does he treat others? Gentlemen, imagine: there is a poor but respectable man here, a retired captain, he met with misfortune, was dismissed from the service, but not publicly, not by court-martial, keeping his honor intact, burdened with a numerous family. And three weeks ago our Dmitri Fyodorovich grabbed him by the beard in a tavern, hauled him out into the street by that same beard, and beat him in the street in public, and all because he acts as my unofficial agent in a certain little business of mine.”

“It’s all a lie! True on the outside, a lie on the inside!” Dmitri Fyodorovich was trembling all over with anger. “Papa! I don’t justify my actions; yes, I confess publicly: I behaved like a beast with that captain, and now I regret it and loathe myself for my beastly anger, but this captain of yours, your agent, went to that very lady whom you call a seductress, and began proposing to her, in your name, that she take the promissory notes of mine that you have and sue me on them, so as to have me locked up on these notes if I pressed you too hard in the settlement of my property. And now you reproach me for having a weakness for this lady, when you yourself coached her to lure me! Why, she tells it straight to your face, she told me herself, laughing at you! And you want to have me locked up only because you are jealous of me over her, because you yourself have begun to approach this woman with your love, and again I know all about it, and again she laughed, do you hear, laughing at you as she told it. So there you have him, holy men, this man, this father who reproaches his depraved son! Gentlemen witnesses, forgive my anger, but I foresaw that this crafty old man had called you all here for a scandal. I came intending to forgive, if he held out his hand to me, to forgive and to ask forgiveness! But since he has just now insulted not only me but the noblest of girls, whose name I dare not even speak in vain out of reverence for her, I have resolved to expose his whole game publicly, even though he is my father!…”

He could not go on. His eyes were flashing, he was breathing with difficulty. But everyone in the cell was agitated too. Everyone except the elder rose anxiously from their seats. The fathers, the hieromonks, looked stern, but were waiting nonetheless for the elder’s will. He sat now quite pale, not from agitation but from sickly weakness. An imploring smile shone on his lips; now and then he raised his hand as though wishing to stop the raging men, and of course one gesture of his would have been enough to end the scene; but he himself seemed to be waiting for something still, and was watching intently, as though wishing to understand something more, as though he had not yet made something clear to himself. At last Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov felt himself finally humiliated and disgraced.

“We are all to blame for this scandal!” he said hotly. “But all the same I did not foresee it on my way here, though I knew whom I was dealing with… This must be ended at once! Your Reverence, believe me, I did not know exactly all the details that have come out here, I did not want to believe them, and only now am I learning them for the first time… A father is jealous of his son over a woman of bad behavior and himself conspires with this creature to put his son in prison… And in such company I have been forced to come here… I have been deceived, I declare to everyone that I have been deceived no less than the others…”

“Dmitri Fyodorovich!” Fyodor Pavlovich suddenly howled in a voice not his own. “If only you were not my son, I would challenge you to a duel this very minute… with pistols, at three paces… across a handkerchief! across a handkerchief!” he ended, stamping both feet.

Old liars who have been play-acting all their lives have moments when they get so carried away by their pose that they truly tremble and weep with emotion, although even at that very moment (or only a second later) they might whisper to themselves: “You’re lying, you shameless old man, you’re an actor even now, in spite of all your ‘holy’ anger and your ‘holy’ moment of anger.”

Dmitri Fyodorovich frowned terribly and looked at his father with inexpressible contempt.

“I thought… I thought,” he said somehow quietly and with restraint, “that I would come to my native place with the angel of my soul, my fiancée, to cherish his old age, and all I see is a depraved sensualist and a most despicable comedian!”

“A duel!” the old wretch howled again, gasping and spraying saliva with every word. “And you, Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov, know, my dear sir, that perhaps in all your family there is not and never has been a higher and more honest, do you hear, more honest woman than this one, whom you dared to call a creature just now! And you, Dmitri Fyodorovich, have exchanged your fiancée for this very ‘creature,’ which means you yourself have judged that your fiancée isn’t worth the sole of her shoe, that’s the sort of creature she is!”

“Shameful!” suddenly burst from Father Iosif.

“Shameful and disgraceful!” Kalganov, who had been silent the whole time, suddenly shouted in his adolescent voice, trembling with emotion, and blushing all over.

“Why does such a man live!” Dmitri Fyodorovich growled in a hollow voice, almost in a frenzy of anger now, raising his shoulders somehow extraordinarily high and almost hunching over from it. “No, tell me, can he still be allowed to disgrace the earth with himself?” He looked around at everyone, pointing at the old man with his hand. He spoke slowly and evenly.

“Do you hear, do you hear, you monks, the parricide?” Fyodor Pavlovich fell upon Father Iosif. “There’s the answer to your ‘shameful’! What is shameful? This ‘creature,’ this ‘woman of bad behavior,’ may be holier than you yourselves, you hieromonks working out your salvation! She may have fallen in her youth, devoured by her environment, but she ‘loved much,’ and Christ too forgave her who loved much…”

“It was not for that kind of love Christ forgave…” broke impatiently from the meek Father Iosif.

“No, for that kind, for that very kind, monks, for that! You work out your salvation here on cabbage and think you’re righteous! You eat gudgeons, a gudgeon a day, and think you can buy God with gudgeons!”

“Impossible, impossible!” was heard from all sides of the cell.

But this whole scene, which had reached the point of outrage, came to an end in the most unexpected way. Suddenly the elder rose from his seat. Alyosha, almost completely beside himself with fear for him and for everyone, nonetheless managed to support him by the arm. The elder stepped toward Dmitri Fyodorovich and, coming right up to him, sank to his knees before him. Alyosha thought he had fallen from weakness, but it was not that. Kneeling, the elder bowed down at Dmitri Fyodorovich’s feet in a full, distinct, deliberate bow, and even touched the ground with his forehead. Alyosha was so astounded that he did not even manage to support him when he got up. A faint smile barely glimmered on his lips.

“Forgive me! Forgive me, all of you!” he said, bowing on all sides to his guests.

Dmitri Fyodorovich stood for a few moments as if thunderstruck: a bow down to his feet, what did it mean? At last he suddenly cried out, “Oh God!” and, covering his face with his hands, rushed out of the room. All the guests poured out after him in a crowd, in their confusion not even saying goodbye or bowing to their host. Only the hieromonks went up again for his blessing.

“What was that, bowing down at his feet, is it some sort of emblem?” Fyodor Pavlovich, who for some reason had suddenly grown subdued, tried to begin a conversation, not daring, however, to address anyone in particular. They were all going out of the hermitage enclosure at that moment.

“I am not responsible for a madhouse and for madmen,” Miusov answered at once, angrily, “but I will at least rid myself of your company, Fyodor Pavlovich, and believe me, forever. Where is that monk from before?…”

But “that monk,” that is, the one who had invited them to dine with the abbot earlier, did not keep them waiting. He met the guests at once, the moment they came down the steps from the elder’s cell, as if he had been standing there waiting all along.

“Do me the kindness, reverend father, of conveying all my profound respect to the Father Abbot, and of apologizing for me personally, Miusov, to His Reverence, that owing to suddenly arisen, unforeseen circumstances I cannot possibly have the honor of taking part in his meal, in spite of my most sincere wish,” Pyotr Alexandrovich said irritably to the monk.

“But the unforeseen circumstance, that’s me!” Fyodor Pavlovich took it up at once. “Do you hear, Father, it’s Pyotr Alexandrovich who doesn’t wish to stay together with me, otherwise he’d go at once. And you will go, Pyotr Alexandrovich, be so good as to go to the Father Abbot, and good appetite to you! Know that it’s I who am declining, not you. Home, home, I’ll eat at home, here I feel incapable, Pyotr Alexandrovich, my dearest kinsman.”

“I am not your kinsman and never have been, you base man!”

“I said it on purpose to infuriate you, because you shy away from the kinship, though you are a kinsman all the same, however you wriggle, I’ll prove it by the church calendar; I’ll send the horses for you in due course, Ivan Fyodorovich, you stay too, if you like. And you, Pyotr Alexandrovich, even propriety requires you to go to the Father Abbot now; you must apologize for the mess we made there, you and I…”

“But is it true that you are leaving? You are not lying?”

“Pyotr Alexandrovich, how would I dare after what has happened! I got carried away, forgive me, gentlemen, I got carried away! And besides, I’m shaken! And ashamed, too. Gentlemen, one man has a heart like Alexander of Macedon’s, and another like the little dog Fidelka’s. Mine is like the little dog Fidelka’s. I’ve lost my nerve! Well, how could I, after such an escapade, go to dinner and gobble up monastery sauces? I’m ashamed, I can’t, excuse me!”

“The devil knows, what if he’s deceiving me!” Miusov stopped in thought, following the departing buffoon with a puzzled look. The buffoon turned around and, noticing that Pyotr Alexandrovich was watching him, blew him a kiss.

“And are you going to the abbot’s?” Miusov asked Ivan Fyodorovich abruptly.

“Why not? Besides, I was specially invited by the abbot yesterday.”

“Unfortunately, I really do feel myself almost obliged to appear at this damned dinner,” Miusov went on with the same bitter irritability, not even paying attention to the fact that the little monk was listening. “There, at least, we must apologize for what we’ve done here, and explain that it wasn’t us… What do you think?”

“Yes, we must explain that it wasn’t us. Besides, my father won’t be there,” Ivan Fyodorovich remarked.

“That would be all we need, with your father! This damned dinner!”

And yet they all went. The little monk was silent and listened. On the way through the little wood he remarked only once that the Father Abbot had long been waiting for them and that they were over half an hour late. No one answered him. Miusov looked at Ivan Fyodorovich with hatred.

“And he’s going to dinner as if nothing had happened!” he thought. “Brazen face and a Karamazov conscience.”