VI. Smerdyakov

He really did find his father still at the table. The table had been laid, as was the invariable custom, in the reception room, although there was a proper dining room in the house. This reception room was the largest room in the house, furnished with a sort of old-fashioned pretension. The furniture was very old, white, with shabby red upholstery of half silk. In the piers between the windows were set mirrors in elaborate frames of old-fashioned carving, also white and gold. On the walls, covered with white paper that had already cracked in many places, two large portraits made a show—one of some prince who had been governor-general of the region some thirty years before, and one of some bishop, also long since departed. In the front corner were several icons, before which an icon lamp was lit at night… not so much out of reverence as so that the room would be lighted at night. Fyodor Pavlovich went to bed very late at night, at three or four in the morning, and until then he would keep walking about the room or sitting in an armchair, thinking. He had got into this habit. He often spent the night entirely alone in the house, sending the servants off to the cottage, but for the most part the servant Smerdyakov stayed with him at night, sleeping in the front hall on a bench. When Alyosha came in, dinner was already quite over, but jam and coffee had been served. Fyodor Pavlovich liked sweets with a little cognac after dinner. Ivan Fyodorovich was there at the table too, also taking coffee. The servants Grigory and Smerdyakov were standing by the table. Both masters and servants were in visibly and unusually high spirits. Fyodor Pavlovich was guffawing and laughing loudly; while still in the entryway Alyosha heard his shrill laugh, once so familiar to him, and at once concluded from the sound of the laughter that his father was still far from drunk, and for the time being only in a genial mood.

“Here he is, here he is!” Fyodor Pavlovich howled, suddenly terribly glad to see Alyosha. “Join us, sit down, have some coffee—it’s Lenten, you know, Lenten, and hot, and splendid! I won’t offer you cognac, you’re fasting, but would you like some, would you? No, I’d better give you some liqueur, it’s first-rate! Smerdyakov, off to the cupboard, second shelf, on the right; here are the keys, look sharp!”

Alyosha began to decline the liqueur.

“It will be served all the same; if not for you, then for us,” Fyodor Pavlovich beamed. “But wait, have you had dinner or not?”

“I have,” said Alyosha, who, to tell the truth, had eaten nothing but a slice of bread and drunk a glass of kvass in the abbot’s kitchen. “But I’ll gladly drink some hot coffee.”

“My dear! Good boy! He’ll have a little coffee. Shall we warm it up? No, it’s boiling hot even now. First-rate coffee, Smerdyakov’s. For coffee and fish pies Smerdyakov is an artist with me, and for fish soup too, that’s true. Come for fish soup sometime, let me know beforehand… But wait, wait, didn’t I tell you earlier to move in for good this very day, with your mattress and pillows? Did you drag your mattress along? Heh-heh-heh!…”

“No, I didn’t bring it,” Alyosha smiled too.

“But you were frightened, you were frightened all the same earlier, weren’t you? Ah, my dear boy, how could I ever hurt you? Listen, Ivan, I can’t see him looking into my eyes like that and laughing, I can’t. My whole belly starts laughing at him; I love him! Alyoshka, let me give you a father’s blessing.”

Alyosha stood up, but Fyodor Pavlovich had thought better of it.

“No, no, I’ll only make the sign of the cross over you now, like this; sit down. Well, now you’re in for a treat, and on your very own subject. You’ll laugh yourself sick. Our Balaam’s ass has started talking, and how he talks, how he talks!”

Balaam’s ass turned out to be the lackey Smerdyakov. Still a young man, only about twenty-four, he was terribly unsociable and taciturn. Not that he was shy or ashamed of something, no; on the contrary, he was haughty in character and seemed to despise everyone. But here it is impossible to pass on without saying at least two words about him, and precisely now. He had been brought up by Marfa Ignatyevna and Grigory Vasilyevich, but the boy grew up “without any gratitude,” as Grigory put it, a wild boy, looking out at the world from a corner. As a child he was very fond of hanging cats and then burying them with ceremony. For this he would put on a sheet, which made a sort of vestment, as it were, and sing and wave something over the dead cat, as if swinging a censer. All this on the quiet, in the greatest secrecy. Grigory once caught him at this exercise and punished him painfully with the birch. The boy went off into a corner and glowered from there for a week. “He doesn’t love us, you and me, this monster,” Grigory would say to Marfa Ignatyevna, “and he doesn’t love anyone. Are you a human being?” he would suddenly turn straight to Smerdyakov. “You’re not a human being; you were bred from the slime of the bathhouse, that’s what you are…” Smerdyakov, as it turned out later, never could forgive him those words. Grigory taught him his letters and, once he had turned twelve or so, began to teach him sacred history. But the matter came to nothing at once. One day, at only the second or third lesson, the boy suddenly smirked.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Grigory, looking at him menacingly from under his spectacles.

“Nothing, sir. The Lord God created light on the first day, and the sun, the moon, and the stars on the fourth day. Then where did the light shine from on the first day?”

Grigory was dumbfounded. The boy was looking at his teacher mockingly. There was even something supercilious in his look. Grigory could not contain himself. “Here’s where from!” he shouted, and struck his pupil furiously on the cheek. The boy took the slap without answering a word, but again hid himself away in a corner for several days. It so happened that a week later his falling sickness showed itself for the first time in his life, and it never left him afterward for the rest of his life. On learning of this, Fyodor Pavlovich seemed suddenly to change his view of the boy. Before, he had looked at him somehow with indifference, though he had never scolded him and, when he met him, always gave him a kopeck. When he was in a genial mood he sometimes sent the boy something sweet from the table. But now, learning of the illness, he decidedly began to look after him, called in a doctor, began trying to have him treated, but it turned out that a cure was impossible. On average the fits came once a month, and at varying intervals. The fits were of varying strength too—some mild, others very severe. Fyodor Pavlovich most strictly forbade Grigory to punish the boy bodily and began to let him come upstairs to his rooms. He also forbade him to be taught anything whatever for the time being. But once, when the boy was already about fifteen, Fyodor Pavlovich noticed him hanging about the bookcase and reading the titles through the glass. Fyodor Pavlovich had a fair number of books, a hundred volumes or more, but nobody ever saw him with a book himself. He at once handed the key of the bookcase over to Smerdyakov: “Well, go on and read; you’ll be the librarian; instead of loafing about the yard, sit down and read. Here, read this one,” and Fyodor Pavlovich took out for him Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.

The lad read it, but was left dissatisfied; not once did he smile; on the contrary, he finished it frowning.

“Well? Isn’t it funny?” asked Fyodor Pavlovich.

Smerdyakov was silent.

“Answer, you fool.”

“It’s all written about things that aren’t true,” Smerdyakov mumbled with a smirk.

“Then go to the devil, you lackey’s soul. Wait, here’s Smaragdov’s Universal History for you; everything in it is true; read it.”

But Smerdyakov did not read even ten pages of Smaragdov; it seemed boring to him. And so the bookcase was shut up again. Soon afterward Marfa and Grigory reported to Fyodor Pavlovich that a sort of terrible fastidiousness had little by little suddenly shown itself in Smerdyakov: he would sit over his soup, take his spoon, and search and search in the soup, bend over it, peer into it, scoop up a spoonful and hold it up to the light.

“A cockroach, is it?” Grigory would ask.

“A fly, maybe,” Marfa would remark.

The cleanly youth never answered, but with bread, and with meat, and with every dish it turned out the same: he would hold up a morsel on his fork to the light, examine it as if under a microscope, take a long time making up his mind, and at last make up his mind to put it in his mouth. “Look what a little gentleman has turned up,” Grigory would mutter, looking at him. Fyodor Pavlovich, hearing of this new quality in Smerdyakov, decided at once that he should be a cook, and sent him off to Moscow to be trained. He spent several years in training and came back much changed in face. He had suddenly aged in some extraordinary way, had become wrinkled quite out of proportion to his age, had turned yellow, had come to look like a eunuch. Morally, however, he came back almost exactly the same as before he went to Moscow: he was just as unsociable and felt not the slightest need of anyone’s company. In Moscow too, as was told afterward, he had kept silent all the time; Moscow itself had somehow interested him extremely little, so that he had found out only a thing or two about it and paid no attention to anything else. He had even been to the theater once, but had come back silent and displeased. On the other hand, he arrived back among us from Moscow nicely dressed, in a clean frock coat and clean linen, brushed his clothes himself very carefully, invariably twice a day, and was terribly fond of polishing his smart calfskin boots with a special English blacking so that they shone like a mirror. He turned out to be an excellent cook. Fyodor Pavlovich set him a wage, and Smerdyakov spent almost the whole of this wage on clothes, pomade, scent, and so on. But he seemed to despise the female sex as much as the male, and conducted himself with it sedately, almost unapproachably. Fyodor Pavlovich began to regard him from a certain other point of view as well. The fact was that his fits of the falling sickness had increased, and on those days the food was prepared by Marfa Ignatyevna, which did not suit Fyodor Pavlovich at all.

“Why are you having fits more often?” he would sometimes say, looking askance at the new cook and peering into his face. “If only you’d marry some girl; would you like me to marry you off?…”

But at such talk Smerdyakov only turned pale with vexation and answered nothing. Fyodor Pavlovich would walk away with a wave of his hand. The main thing was that he was certain of his honesty, and certain once and for all that he would take nothing and steal nothing. It happened once that Fyodor Pavlovich, a little drunk, dropped in the mud of his own yard three rainbow-colored hundred-ruble notes that he had only just received, and missed them only the next day: he had only just begun searching his pockets in alarm when suddenly he found all three notes already lying on his table. Where had they come from? Smerdyakov had picked them up and had already brought them in the day before. “Well, brother, I’ve never seen the likes of you,” Fyodor Pavlovich snapped then, and gave him ten rubles. It must be added that he was not only certain of his honesty, but for some reason even loved him, although the lad looked at him just as sidelong as at everyone else and was always silent. He rarely spoke. If at that time it had occurred to anyone to ask, looking at him: what is this fellow interested in, and what is most often on his mind? then, really, it would have been impossible to decide by looking at him. And yet sometimes in the house, or else in the yard, or in the street, he would happen to stop, fall into thought, and stand like that even for ten minutes or so. A physiognomist, studying him, would have said that there was neither thought nor reflection here, but only a sort of contemplation. The painter Kramskoy has a remarkable picture called The Contemplator: it shows a forest in winter, and in the forest, on the road, in a ragged little caftan and little bast shoes, stands a peasant fellow, all alone, who has wandered off into the deepest solitude; he stands as though lost in thought, but he is not thinking; he is “contemplating” something. If you nudged him, he would start and look at you as if just waking up, but understanding nothing. True, he would come to himself at once, but if he were asked what he had been standing there thinking about, he would surely remember nothing, but he would surely keep hidden in himself the impression he had been under during his contemplation. These impressions are dear to him, and he is surely storing them up, imperceptibly and even without being aware of it—for what purpose and why, of course, he does not know either: perhaps, suddenly, having stored up impressions for many years, he will drop everything and go off to Jerusalem to wander and work out his salvation, or perhaps he will suddenly burn down his native village, or perhaps both will happen together. There are quite a few contemplators among the people. And Smerdyakov was surely one of these contemplators, and he too was surely storing up his impressions greedily, almost without knowing himself as yet what for.