XI. Another Reputation Ruined

From the town to the monastery it was no more than a verst and a little over. Alyosha walked hurriedly along the road, deserted at that hour. It was almost night now, and at thirty paces it was already hard to make things out. Halfway there was a crossroads. At the crossroads, under a solitary willow, a figure of some sort came into view. No sooner had Alyosha stepped onto the crossroads than the figure tore itself from its place, rushed at him, and shouted in a furious voice:

“Your money or your life!”

“So it’s you, Mitya!” said Alyosha in surprise, though he had started violently all the same.

“Ha-ha-ha! You didn’t expect it? I thought: where shall I wait for you? At her house? Three roads go from there, and I might miss you. At last I hit on waiting here, because here he’ll pass for certain, there’s no other way to the monastery. Well, out with the truth, crush me like a cockroach… But what’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing, brother… it’s just the fright. Ah, Dmitri! That blood of Father’s earlier…” Alyosha began to cry; he had long wanted to cry, and now something seemed suddenly to snap in his soul. “You almost killed him… you cursed him… and here you are now… just now… playing jokes… ‘your money or your life’!”

“Ah, well, what of it? Indecent, is it? Doesn’t suit the situation?”

“No… I just…”

“Wait. Look at the night: you see what a gloomy night it is, the clouds, what a wind has come up! I hid here under the willow, waiting for you, and suddenly I thought (God be my witness!): why go on suffering any longer, what is there to wait for? Here’s a willow, I have a handkerchief, I have a shirt, a rope can be twisted right now, braces into the bargain, and—no more burdening the earth, no more dishonoring it with my base presence! And then I hear you coming. Lord, it was as if something had suddenly flown down on me: why, so there is a man after all whom even I love, why, there he is, there is that little fellow, my dear little brother, whom I love more than anyone in the world and whom alone I love! And I loved you so much, I loved you so at that moment, that I thought: I’ll throw myself on his neck right now! But a stupid idea came to me: ‘I’ll amuse him, I’ll give him a fright.’ And I shouted like a fool: ‘Your money!’ Forgive the foolery, it’s only nonsense, but in my soul… it’s decent too… Well, devil take it, tell me, though, what happened there? What did she say? Crush me, strike me, don’t spare me! Did she go into a frenzy?”

“No, not that… It was something quite different there, Mitya. There… I found the two of them there just now.”

“What two of them?”

“Grushenka at Katerina Ivanovna’s.”

Dmitri Fyodorovich was dumbfounded.

“Impossible!” he cried. “You’re raving! Grushenka at her house?”

Alyosha told everything that had happened to him from the very moment he had gone in to Katerina Ivanovna’s. He told it for about ten minutes, not, it cannot be said, smoothly and coherently, but he conveyed it clearly, it seems, catching the most important words, the most important gestures, and vividly conveying, often with a single stroke, his own feelings. Brother Dmitri listened in silence, staring point-blank with a dreadful immobility, but it was clear to Alyosha that he had already understood everything, had grasped the whole fact. But the further the story went, the more his face became, not exactly gloomy, but somehow menacing. He knit his brows, clenched his teeth, his fixed gaze grew as it were still more fixed, more stubborn, more terrible… All the more unexpected was it when suddenly, with incomprehensible swiftness, his whole face, until then wrathful and ferocious, changed at a stroke, his compressed lips parted, and Dmitri Fyodorovich suddenly dissolved in the most irrepressible, the most genuine laughter. He literally dissolved in laughter; for a long time he could not even speak for laughing.

“So she didn’t kiss her hand! So she never kissed it, she just ran off!” he kept shouting in some sick rapture, an insolent rapture, one might also say, if this rapture had not been so artless. “So the other one screamed that she’s a tiger! A tiger she is! So she ought to go to the scaffold? Yes, yes, she ought to, she ought, I’m of that opinion myself, she ought to, she ought to long ago! You see, brother, let it be the scaffold, but first I have to get well. I understand the queen of insolence, that’s all of her, all of her came out in that little hand, the infernal woman! She’s the queen of all the infernal women that can be imagined in the world! A rapture in its own way! So she ran off home? I’ll go right now… ah… I’ll just run over to her! Alyoshka, don’t blame me, I do agree that strangling would be too good for her…”

“And Katerina Ivanovna!” Alyosha exclaimed sadly.

“Her too, I see her through and through, her too, and I see her as never before! It’s a whole discovery of all four corners of the world, five, that is! What a step! That’s exactly the same Katenka, the little institute girl, who wasn’t afraid to run to an absurd, coarse officer out of a magnanimous idea of saving her father, at the terrible risk of being insulted! But our pride, but our need for risk, but our challenge to fate, a challenge to infinity! That aunt tried to stop her, you say? She’s a headstrong one herself, that aunt, she’s the own sister of that general’s widow in Moscow, she used to turn up her nose even higher than the other, but her husband was caught embezzling government funds and lost everything, the estate and everything, and the proud spouse suddenly lowered her tone and has never risen again since. So she tried to hold Katya back, but Katya wouldn’t listen. ‘I can conquer everything, says she, everything is in my power; if I want, I’ll cast a spell on Grushenka too,’ and she believed it herself, she was showing off to herself, so who’s to blame? You think she kissed Grushenka’s hand first on purpose, with a cunning calculation? No, she really did, she really fell in love with Grushenka, that is, not with Grushenka but with her own dream, her own delirium, because, you see, it’s my dream, my delirium! Alyosha, my dear, how did you ever escape from them, from women like that? Ran away, did you, hitching up your cassock? Ha-ha-ha!”

“Brother, it seems you haven’t even noticed how you insulted Katerina Ivanovna by telling Grushenka about that day, and she threw it in her face just now that she herself ‘used to go to gentlemen secretly to sell her beauty!’ Brother, what insult could be greater than that?” Alyosha was tormented most of all by the thought that his brother was actually glad of Katerina Ivanovna’s humiliation, though of course that could not be.

“Bah!” Dmitri Fyodorovich suddenly frowned terribly and struck his forehead with his palm. He had only now noticed it, though Alyosha had told everything earlier all at once, the insult as well as the cry Katerina Ivanovna had let out, “Your brother is a scoundrel!” “Yes, in fact, perhaps I did tell Grushenka about that ‘fatal day,’ as Katya says. Yes, that’s so, I told her, I remember! It was that same time, in Mokroye, I was drunk, the gypsy girls were singing… But I was sobbing, sobbing myself then, I was on my knees, I was praying to Katya’s image, and Grushenka understood that. She understood everything then, I remember, she cried herself… Ah, the devil! But could it have been otherwise now? Then she cried, and now… Now ‘a dagger in the heart’! That’s women for you.”

He looked down and fell to thinking.

“Yes, I’m a scoundrel! An unquestionable scoundrel,” he suddenly said in a gloomy voice. “Cried or didn’t cry, it makes no difference, a scoundrel all the same! Tell them there that I accept the title, if that can be any comfort. Well, and enough, goodbye, what’s the use of chattering! There’s nothing cheerful in it. You go your way and I’ll go mine. And I don’t want to see you anymore, not until some very last minute. Goodbye, Alexei!” He firmly pressed Alyosha’s hand and, still looking down and not raising his head, as though tearing himself loose, strode quickly off toward the town. Alyosha gazed after him, not believing that he would go away like that, so completely and suddenly.

“Wait, Alexei, one more confession, to you alone!” Dmitri Fyodorovich suddenly came back. “Look at me, look closely: you see, right here, right here—a terrible dishonor is being prepared.” (As he said “right here,” Dmitri Fyodorovich struck himself on the chest with his fist, and with as strange an air as if the dishonor lay and was kept precisely there on his chest, in some particular place, in a pocket perhaps, or hung sewn up around his neck.) “You know me already: a scoundrel, a confessed scoundrel! But know that whatever I have done before, now, or in the future, nothing, nothing can compare in baseness with the dishonor that precisely now, precisely at this moment, I carry here on my chest, right here, here, which is at work and being carried out, and which I am fully master to stop, I can stop it or carry it out, mark that! Well, know then that I will carry it out and not stop it. I told you everything earlier, but this I didn’t tell, because even I hadn’t a brazen enough face for that! I can still stop; by stopping, I could get back a whole half of my lost honor tomorrow, but I won’t stop, I will carry out the base design, and be my witness beforehand that I say this in advance and knowingly! Ruin and darkness! There’s nothing to explain, you’ll find out in due time. A stinking back alley and an infernal woman! Goodbye. Don’t pray for me, I’m not worth it, and it isn’t needed at all, not needed at all… I don’t need it in the least! Away!…”

And suddenly he went off, this time for good. Alyosha went on toward the monastery. “How, how will I never see him, what is he saying?” came wildly into his mind. “Why, tomorrow I’ll certainly see him and look for him, I’ll look for him on purpose, what is he saying!…”

He went around the monastery and through the pine grove straight to the hermitage. They opened for him there, though at that hour no one was let in any longer. His heart was trembling when he entered the elder’s cell: “Why, why did he go out, why did the elder send him ‘into the world’? Here is quiet, here is holiness, and there—confusion, there is a darkness in which one is lost at once and goes astray…”

In the cell were the novice Porfiry and the hieromonk Father Paisy, who all day long had been coming in every hour to ask after the health of Father Zosima, who, as Alyosha learned with dread, was getting worse and worse. Even the usual evening talk with the brethren could not take place this time. Ordinarily, in the evening, after the service, every day, before going to sleep, the monastery brethren gathered in the elder’s cell, and each of them confessed aloud to him the day’s transgressions, sinful dreams, thoughts, temptations, even quarrels among themselves, if any such had occurred. Some confessed on their knees. The elder absolved, reconciled, instructed, imposed penance, blessed, and dismissed them. It was against these brotherly “confessions” that the opponents of the institution of elders rose up, saying that this was a profanation of confession as a sacrament, almost a blasphemy, though here it was something quite different. They even represented to the diocesan authorities that such confessions not only failed to reach a good end but really and deliberately led into sin and temptation. Many of the brethren, they said, found it a burden to go to the elder, and came against their will because everyone was going, so as not to be taken for proud and rebellious in their thoughts. It was told that some of the brethren, setting off for the evening confession, agreed among themselves beforehand: “I’ll say, you see, that I got angry at you this morning, and you confirm it,” this so that there would be something to say, just to get it over with. Alyosha knew that this really did happen sometimes. He also knew that there were some among the brethren who were highly indignant that, by custom, even letters from relatives received by the monks of the hermitage were first brought to the elder, so that he might unseal them before those to whom they were addressed. It was presumed, of course, that all this was to be done freely and sincerely, with all one’s heart, in the name of free humility and saving edification, but in fact, as it turned out, it sometimes went on very insincerely as well, and, on the contrary, in an affected and false way. But the senior and most experienced of the brethren stood their ground, reasoning that “for those who have entered these walls sincerely, to be saved, all these obediences and feats will undoubtedly prove saving and will bring them great benefit; whereas he who finds it a burden and grumbles is as good as no monk at all and has come to the monastery for nothing; his place is in the world. And from sin and from the devil you cannot keep yourself safe, not only in the world but even in the church, and so there is no reason to indulge sin.”

“He has grown weak, drowsiness has come over him,” Father Paisy told Alyosha in a whisper, after blessing him. “It is even hard to wake him. But there is no need to wake him. He woke for about five minutes, asked that his blessing be carried to the brethren, and asked the brethren for their prayers for him in the night. In the morning he intends to receive communion once more. He remembered you, Alexei, he asked whether you had gone; he was told that you were in town. ‘That is why I blessed him; his place is there, and for the present not here’: that is what he pronounced about you. He remembered you lovingly, with concern; do you understand what you have been granted? Only how is it that he has appointed you a term in the world for the present? It means he foresees something in your destiny! Understand, Alexei, that even if you return to the world, it must be as though to an obedience laid upon you by your elder, and not for vain frivolity and worldly merriment…”

Father Paisy went out. That the elder was dying there was no doubt for Alyosha, though he might live another day or two. Alyosha resolved firmly and ardently that, in spite of the promises he had given to see his father, the Khokhlakovs, his brother, and Katerina Ivanovna, tomorrow he would not leave the monastery at all and would stay by his elder until his very end. His heart was set on fire with love, and he bitterly reproached himself for having been able, for a moment, there in town, even to forget the one he had left in the monastery on his deathbed and whom he revered above everyone in the world. He went into the elder’s little bedroom, knelt, and bowed down to the ground before the sleeping man. The elder slept quietly, without stirring, breathing evenly and barely perceptibly. His face was peaceful.

Going back into the other room, the very one in which the elder had received his guests that morning, Alyosha, hardly undressing and only taking off his boots, lay down on the hard, narrow little leather sofa on which he always slept, and had for a long time now, every night, bringing only a pillow. As for the mattress his father had shouted about earlier, he had long since forgotten to spread it for himself. He took off only his cassock and covered himself with it in place of a blanket. But before sleeping he threw himself on his knees and prayed for a long time. In his ardent prayer he did not ask God to make his confusion clear to him, but only thirsted for joyful tenderness, the former tenderness that had always visited his soul after the praise and glorification of God, of which his prayer before sleep usually consisted entirely. This joy that visited him brought after it a light and peaceful sleep. Praying now as well, he suddenly happened to feel in his pocket that little pink envelope which Katerina Ivanovna’s maid had given him when she caught up with him on the road. He was disconcerted, but he prayed to the end. Then, after hesitating a little, he unsealed the envelope. It held a little letter to him, signed Lise: that same young daughter of Mrs. Khokhlakova who had laughed at him so that morning in front of the elder.

“Alexei Fyodorovich,” she wrote, “I am writing to you secretly from everyone, even from Mamma, and I know how wrong it is. But I cannot live any longer if I do not tell you what has been born in my heart, and no one but the two of us must know it until the time comes. But how am I to tell you what I so want to tell you? Paper, they say, doesn’t blush; I assure you that this is not true and that it blushes exactly as I am blushing all over now. Dear Alyosha, I love you, I have loved you since childhood, since Moscow, when you were not at all the way you are now, and I will love you all my life. I have chosen you with my heart, to be united with you, and to end our life together in old age. On condition, of course, that you leave the monastery. As for our ages, we will wait as long as the law requires. By that time I will certainly be well, I will walk and dance. There can be no talk about that.

“You see how I have thought it all out; only one thing I cannot think out: what will you think of me when you read this? I am always laughing and being naughty, I made you angry earlier, but I assure you that just now, before I took up my pen, I prayed to the icon of the Mother of God, and I am praying now too and almost crying.

“My secret is in your hands; tomorrow, when you come, I don’t know how I will even look at you. Ah, Alexei Fyodorovich, what if I can’t hold back again, like a fool, and laugh, as I did earlier, looking at you? You’ll take me for a nasty mocker and won’t believe my letter. And so I beg you, dear, if you have any compassion for me, when you come in tomorrow, don’t look me too straight in the eyes, because when mine meet yours I will perhaps be sure to burst out laughing, and besides, you will be in that long dress… Even now I go all cold when I think of it, and so when you come in, don’t look at me at all for a while, but look at Mamma or at the window…

“There, I have written you a love letter, my God, what have I done! Alyosha, don’t despise me, and if I have done something very bad and upset you, forgive me. Now the secret of my reputation, ruined forever perhaps, is in your hands.

“I will certainly cry today. Goodbye until we meet, until our terrible meeting. Lise.

“P.S. Alyosha, only you must come, you must, you must! Lise.”

Alyosha read it with surprise, read it twice, thought, and suddenly laughed softly and sweetly. He gave a start; this laughter seemed sinful to him. But a moment later he laughed again just as softly and just as happily. Slowly he put the letter back into the little envelope, crossed himself, and lay down. The turmoil in his soul suddenly passed. “Lord, have mercy on them all, the ones from today, keep them, the unhappy and the stormy ones, and guide them. All ways are yours: by the ways that you know, save them. You are love, you will send joy to all!” Alyosha murmured, crossing himself and falling into a serene sleep.