III. Gold Mines

This was precisely that visit of Mitya’s which Grushenka had described to Rakitin with such fear. She was then expecting her “courier” and was very glad that Mitya had not come either yesterday or today, and hoped that, God willing, he would not come before her departure, and then suddenly he descended on her. What followed we know: to get him off her hands, she at once persuaded him to see her to Kuzma Samsonov’s, where she supposedly had a terrible need to go “to count money,” and when Mitya immediately saw her there, she took leave of him at Kuzma’s gate and made him promise to come for her after eleven to see her back home. Mitya was glad of this arrangement too: “She’ll sit at Kuzma’s, so she won’t go to Fyodor Pavlovich’s… unless she’s lying,” he added at once. But to his eye, it seems, she was not lying. He was a jealous man of precisely that kind who, when parted from the woman he loves, at once invents God knows what horrors about what is happening to her and how she is “betraying” him there, but who, running back to her again, shaken, crushed, already irrevocably sure that she has managed to betray him after all, at the very first glance at her face, at the laughing, merry, and affectionate face of this woman—at once revives in spirit, at once loses all suspicion, and with joyful shame scolds himself for his jealousy. Having seen Grushenka there, he rushed home. Oh, he still had so much to get done today! But at least his heart was eased. “Only I must find out quickly from Smerdyakov whether anything happened there last night, whether she, God forbid, went to Fyodor Pavlovich, ugh!” swept through his head. So that before he had even reached his lodging, jealousy was already stirring again in his restless heart.

Jealousy! “Othello is not jealous, he is trusting,” Pushkin remarked, and this remark alone testifies to the extraordinary depth of mind of our great poet. Othello’s soul is simply crushed and his whole view of the world is clouded, because his ideal has perished. But Othello will not hide, spy, peep: he is trusting. On the contrary, he had to be led, prodded, inflamed with extraordinary efforts before he so much as guessed at the betrayal. The true jealous man is not like that. It is impossible even to imagine all the disgrace and moral degradation with which a jealous man is capable of getting along without any pangs of conscience. And it is not that these are all vulgar and dirty souls. On the contrary, with a lofty heart, with a pure love, full of self-sacrifice, one may at the same time hide under tables, bribe the vilest of people, and get along with the foulest filth of spying and eavesdropping. Othello could never in the world have reconciled himself to betrayal—not that he could not have forgiven it, but he could not have reconciled himself to it—though his soul is as guileless and innocent as a babe’s. With the real jealous man it is otherwise: you can hardly imagine what a jealous man of a certain sort can get along with and reconcile himself to, and what he can forgive! It is jealous men who forgive quickest of all, and all women know it. A jealous man can very quickly (after a terrible scene at the start, of course) and is quite capable of forgiving, for instance, an all but proven betrayal, embraces and kisses he has seen with his own eyes, if, for instance, he could at the same time somehow be assured that it was “the last time,” and that his rival would from that hour disappear, go away to the ends of the earth, or that he himself would carry her off somewhere to a place where that terrible rival would never come again. Of course, the reconciliation will last only an hour, because even if the rival really did disappear, the very next day he would invent another, a new one, and be jealous of the new one. And one would think: what is there in a love that has to be spied on like that, and what is a love worth that has to be guarded so strenuously? But that is just what the real jealous man will never understand, and yet among them, truly, there are even men with lofty hearts. What is remarkable, too, is that these very men with lofty hearts, standing in some closet, eavesdropping and spying, though they clearly understand “with their lofty hearts” all the shame into which they have voluntarily crawled, still, at that moment at least, while they are standing in that closet, never feel any pangs of conscience. In Mitya, at the sight of Grushenka, jealousy vanished, and for a moment he became trusting and noble, even despised himself for his bad feelings. But that only meant that in his love for this woman there was something much higher than he himself supposed, and not only passion, not only that “curve of the body” he had talked about to Alyosha. But on the other hand, as soon as Grushenka disappeared, Mitya at once began again to suspect her of all the baseness and treachery of betrayal. And he felt no pangs of conscience about it. And so jealousy boiled up in him again. In any case, he had to hurry. The first thing was to get hold of at least a little money to tide him over. The nine rubles of yesterday had almost all gone on the journey, and without any money at all, as everyone knows, you cannot take a step anywhere. But together with his new plan he had thought out, already earlier in the cart, where to get something to tide him over as well. He had a pair of good dueling pistols with cartridges, and if he had not pawned them until now, it was because he loved that thing more than anything he owned. In the tavern called the Metropolis he had long ago become slightly acquainted with a certain young official, and had somehow learned, also in the tavern, that this bachelor official, a man of quite sufficient means, was passionately fond of weapons, bought pistols, revolvers, daggers, hung them on his walls, showed them to his acquaintances, boasted of them, was a master at explaining the mechanism of a revolver, how to load it, how to fire it, and so on. Without thinking long, Mitya went to him at once and offered him the pistols in pawn for ten rubles. The official was delighted and began to persuade him to sell them outright, but Mitya would not agree, and the other gave him ten rubles, declaring that he would not take interest for anything. They parted friends. Mitya was in a hurry; he rushed off to the back of Fyodor Pavlovich’s place, to his summerhouse, to call out Smerdyakov as soon as possible. But in this way the fact again emerged that only three or four hours before a certain incident, of which I shall speak below, Mitya had not a kopeck of money and pawned a beloved possession for ten rubles, whereas suddenly, three hours later, there turned out to be thousands in his hands… But I am running ahead.

At Marya Kondratyevna’s (Fyodor Pavlovich’s neighbor) he was met by news of Smerdyakov’s illness, which struck and confounded him extremely. He heard the story of the fall into the cellar, then of the falling fit, the doctor’s visit, Fyodor Pavlovich’s concern; he learned with curiosity, too, that his brother Ivan Fyodorovich had already rolled off to Moscow that morning. “He must have passed through Volovya before me,” thought Dmitri Fyodorovich, but Smerdyakov worried him terribly: “What now, who will keep watch, who will pass things on to me?” He began greedily questioning these women whether they had noticed anything last night. They understood very well what he was trying to find out, and reassured him completely: there had been no one, Ivan Fyodorovich had spent the night there, “everything was in perfect order.” Mitya fell to thinking. No doubt he must keep watch today too, but where: here, or at Samsonov’s gate? He decided both here and there, all as he saw fit, but for the present, for the present… The thing was that before him now stood that “plan,” the new and now sure plan of earlier, invented by him in the cart, and its execution could no longer be put off. Mitya decided to sacrifice an hour to it: “In an hour I’ll settle everything, find out everything, and then, then, first of all, to Samsonov’s house, find out whether Grushenka is there, and back here in a flash, and here till eleven o’clock, and then to Samsonov’s again for her, to see her back home.” That was what he decided.

He flew home, washed, did his hair, brushed his clothes, put them on, and set off to Mrs. Khokhlakova’s. Alas, his “plan” lay here. He had decided to borrow three thousand from this lady. And the main thing was that suddenly, somehow unexpectedly, he had acquired an extraordinary certainty that she would not refuse him. People may wonder why, if there was such a certainty, he had not gone here first, to his own society, so to speak, but had gone to Samsonov, a man of an alien cast, with whom he did not even know how to talk. But the fact was that during the last month he had almost entirely dropped his acquaintance with Mrs. Khokhlakova, and even before that had known her little, and besides, he knew very well that she herself could not stand him. This lady had hated him from the very beginning simply because he was Katerina Ivanovna’s fiancé, whereas she had for some reason suddenly wanted Katerina Ivanovna to throw him over and marry “the dear, chivalrously educated Ivan Fyodorovich, who has such beautiful manners.” Mitya’s manners she hated. Mitya even laughed at her and once said of her that this lady was “as lively and free and easy as she is uneducated.” And then, that morning, in the cart, the most brilliant idea had dawned on him: “Why, if she so much doesn’t want me to marry Katerina Ivanovna, and doesn’t want it to such a degree (he knew it was almost to the point of hysterics), then why should she refuse me these three thousand now, precisely so that with this money I can leave Katya and roll off from here forever? These spoiled high-society ladies, once they want something to the point of caprice, will spare nothing to have it their way. And besides, she is so rich,” Mitya reasoned. As for the “plan” proper, it was all the same as before, that is, the offer of his rights to Chermashnya, but no longer with a commercial aim, as with Samsonov yesterday, not tempting this lady, as he had tempted Samsonov yesterday, with the possibility of knocking together a sum twice as large instead of three thousand, some six or seven thousand, but simply as a noble guarantee for the debt. Developing this new idea of his, Mitya reached the point of rapture, but that was how it always went with him in every undertaking, every sudden decision. To each new idea of his he surrendered with passion. Nevertheless, when he stepped onto the porch of Mrs. Khokhlakova’s house, he suddenly felt a chill of horror down his back: only in that second did he realize fully, and now with mathematical clarity, that here, after all, was his very last hope, that beyond this there was nothing left in the world if this broke down, “except to cut someone’s throat and rob him for three thousand, and nothing else…” It was about half past seven when he rang the bell.

At first the thing seemed to smile on him: as soon as he was announced, he was received at once with extraordinary promptness. “As if she’d been expecting me,” flashed through Mitya’s mind, and then suddenly, as soon as he had been shown into the drawing room, the hostess almost ran in and declared to him straight out that she had been expecting him…

“I was expecting you, I was! Why, I couldn’t even think that you would come to see me, you’ll agree yourself, and yet I was expecting you, marvel at my instinct, Dmitri Fyodorovich, all morning I was sure you would come today.”

“That is indeed amazing, madam,” said Mitya, sitting down clumsily, “but… I have come on an extremely important matter… the most important of the important, for me, that is, madam, for me alone, and I am in a hurry…”

“I know it’s on a most important matter, Dmitri Fyodorovich, it isn’t a matter of some presentiments here, of some retrograde leanings toward miracles (have you heard about the elder Zosima?), this, this is mathematics: you could not help coming, after all that happened with Katerina Ivanovna, you couldn’t, you couldn’t, it’s mathematics.”

“The realism of actual life, madam, that is what it is! But allow me, nevertheless, to set forth…”

“Realism precisely, Dmitri Fyodorovich. I’m all for realism now, I’ve been taught too good a lesson about miracles. Have you heard that the elder Zosima has died?”

“No, madam, this is the first I’ve heard,” said Mitya, slightly taken aback. Alyosha’s image flashed through his mind.

“Last night, and just imagine…”

“Madam,” Mitya interrupted, “I can imagine only that I am in the most desperate position and that if you do not help me, everything will collapse, and I will collapse first. Forgive the triviality of the expression, but I am in a fever, I am in a fever heat…”

“I know, I know that you are in a fever, I know everything, you couldn’t be in any other state of mind, and whatever you may say, I know it all in advance. I took your fate into consideration long ago, Dmitri Fyodorovich, I am following it and studying it… Oh, believe me, I am an experienced doctor of souls, Dmitri Fyodorovich.”

“Madam, if you are an experienced doctor, then I in return am an experienced patient,” Mitya forced himself to be gallant, “and I have a presentiment that if you are following my fate so closely, you will help it in its ruin as well, but for that allow me at last to set before you the plan with which I have ventured to appear… and what I expect from you… I have come, madam.”

“Don’t set it forth, that’s of secondary importance. And as for help, you are not the first I have helped, Dmitri Fyodorovich. You have probably heard of my cousin Belmesova, her husband was perishing, he had collapsed, as you so characteristically put it, Dmitri Fyodorovich, and what do you think, I pointed him toward horse breeding, and now he is flourishing. Have you any notion of horse breeding, Dmitri Fyodorovich?”

“Not the slightest, madam—oh, madam, not the slightest!” cried Mitya in nervous impatience, and even started to get up from his seat. “I only beg you, madam, to hear me out, give me only two minutes of free conversation, so that I may first set forth everything to you, the whole project with which I have come. Besides, I need time, I am in a terrible hurry!” Mitya shouted hysterically, feeling that she was about to start talking again, and in the hope of outshouting her. “I have come in despair… in the last degree of despair, to ask you for a loan of money, three thousand, a loan, but on sure, on the surest security, madam, on the surest guarantee! Only allow me to set it forth.”

“You’ll tell me all that later, later!” Mrs. Khokhlakova in her turn waved her hand at him. “And anyway, whatever you may say, I know it all in advance, I’ve told you so already. You are asking for some sum, you need three thousand, but I will give you more, immeasurably more, I will save you, Dmitri Fyodorovich, but you must do as I say!”

Mitya simply leaped up from his seat again.

“Madam, can you really be so kind!” he cried with extraordinary feeling. “Lord, you have saved me. You are saving a man, madam, from a violent death, from the pistol… My eternal gratitude…”

“I will give you infinitely, infinitely more than three thousand!” cried Mrs. Khokhlakova, looking with a radiant smile at Mitya’s rapture.

“Infinitely? But I don’t even need that much. All that is necessary is those three thousand, so fateful for me, and I for my part have come to guarantee you that sum with infinite gratitude, and I propose to you a plan which…”

“Enough, Dmitri Fyodorovich, no sooner said than done,” Mrs. Khokhlakova cut him short with the chaste triumph of a benefactress. “I have promised to save you, and I will save you. I will save you, as I did Belmesov. What do you think of gold mines, Dmitri Fyodorovich?”

“Of gold mines, madam! I have never thought anything about them.”

“But I have thought for you! Thought and thought it over! I have been watching you for a whole month now with this aim. I looked at you a hundred times when you passed by and said to myself: there is an energetic man who ought to go to the mines. I even studied your gait and decided: that man will find a great many mines.”

“By my gait, madam?” Mitya smiled.

“Well, why not, by your gait too. Why, surely you don’t deny that one can tell character by the gait, Dmitri Fyodorovich? The natural sciences confirm the very same thing. Oh, I am a realist now, Dmitri Fyodorovich. From today on, after that whole business at the monastery, which upset me so, I am a complete realist, and I want to throw myself into practical activity. I am cured. Enough! as Turgenev said.”

“But, madam, those three thousand which you so generously promised to lend me…”

“You won’t miss them, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” Mrs. Khokhlakova cut him off at once. “Those three thousand are as good as in your pocket, and not three thousand but three million, Dmitri Fyodorovich, in the shortest time! I’ll tell you your idea: you will find mines, make millions, come back and become a man of action, and you’ll move us too, directing us toward the good. Surely we aren’t going to leave everything to the Yids? You will build buildings and various enterprises. You will help the poor, and the poor will bless you. Ours is the age of railways, Dmitri Fyodorovich. You will become known and indispensable to the Ministry of Finance, which is in such need now. The fall of our paper ruble keeps me awake at night, Dmitri Fyodorovich, people know little of that side of me…”

“Madam, madam!” Dmitri Fyodorovich interrupted again, with a kind of uneasy presentiment. “I may very, very well follow your advice, your clever advice, madam, and go, perhaps, out there… to those mines… and come again to talk to you about it… even many times… but now those three thousand which you so generously… Oh, they would free my hands, and if it were possible today… That is, you see, I have not an hour now, not an hour of time…”

“Enough, Dmitri Fyodorovich, enough!” Mrs. Khokhlakova interrupted insistently. “The question is: are you going to the mines or not, have you completely made up your mind, answer mathematically.”

“I am going, madam, later… I will go wherever you like, madam… but now…”

“Wait, then!” cried Mrs. Khokhlakova, jumped up, and rushed to her magnificent bureau with its countless little drawers, and began pulling out one drawer after another, searching for something in a terrible hurry.

“Three thousand!” thought Mitya, his heart sinking. “And right now, without any papers, without a deed… oh, that’s gentlemanly! A magnificent woman, if only she weren’t so talkative…”

“Here!” Mrs. Khokhlakova cried out joyfully, coming back to Mitya. “Here is what I was looking for!”

It was a tiny silver icon on a cord, of the kind that is sometimes worn together with a baptismal cross.

“This is from Kiev, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” she went on reverently, “from the relics of the Great Martyr Barbara. Allow me to put it around your neck myself, and thereby bless you for a new life and for new deeds.”

And she actually slipped the little icon over his head and began trying to tuck it in. Mitya, in great embarrassment, bent down a little and began to help her, and at last tucked the little icon in under his tie and shirt collar onto his chest.

“Now you can go!” Mrs. Khokhlakova pronounced, solemnly sitting down again in her place.

“Madam, I am so touched… and I don’t even know how to thank you… for such feelings, but if you only knew how precious time is to me now!… That sum which I so look forward to from your generosity… Oh, madam, if you are really this kind, this touchingly generous toward me,” Mitya suddenly exclaimed in inspiration, “allow me to reveal to you… what, however, you have long known already… that I love a certain being here… I have betrayed Katya… Katerina Ivanovna, I mean to say. Oh, I have been inhuman and dishonorable toward her, but here I have come to love another… a certain woman, madam, whom you perhaps despise, because you know everything already, but whom I cannot possibly leave, not possibly, and therefore now, those three thousand…”

“Leave everything, Dmitri Fyodorovich!” Mrs. Khokhlakova interrupted in the most decisive tone. “Leave it, and women especially. Your goal is the mines, and there is no point in taking women there. Later, when you come back in wealth and glory, you will find yourself a companion of your heart in the very highest society. She will be a contemporary girl, with knowledge and without prejudices. By that time the woman question that has now begun will just have ripened, and the new woman will appear…”

“Madam, that’s not it, not it…” Dmitri Fyodorovich began, folding his hands in entreaty.

“It is exactly it, Dmitri Fyodorovich, precisely what you need, what you thirst for without knowing it yourself. I am not at all averse to the present woman question, Dmitri Fyodorovich. The development of women and even the political role of women in the very near future—that is my ideal. I have a daughter myself, Dmitri Fyodorovich, and people know little of that side of me. I wrote to the writer Shchedrin on that subject. That writer has shown me so much, so much about the vocation of woman, that last year I sent him a two-line letter, unsigned: ‘I embrace and kiss you, my writer, for the contemporary woman, go on.’ And I signed it: ‘A mother.’ I was going to sign it ‘A contemporary mother,’ and hesitated, but settled simply on ‘mother’: there is more moral beauty in it, Dmitri Fyodorovich, and besides, the word ‘contemporary’ would have reminded them of The Contemporary—a bitter memory for them in view of the present censorship… Ah, my God, what is the matter with you?”

“Madam,” Mitya jumped up at last, pressing his palms together before her in helpless supplication, “you will make me weep, madam, if you keep putting off what you so generously…”

“Then weep, Dmitri Fyodorovich, weep! Those are beautiful feelings… such a road lies before you! Tears will relieve you, later you will come back and rejoice. You will gallop to me from Siberia on purpose to rejoice with me…”

“But allow me too,” Mitya suddenly howled, “for the last time I implore you, tell me, can I receive this promised sum from you today? And if not, then when exactly should I come for it?”

“What sum, Dmitri Fyodorovich?”

“The three thousand you promised… which you so generously…”

“Three thousand? Rubles, you mean? Oh no, I don’t have three thousand,” Mrs. Khokhlakova said with a kind of calm surprise. Mitya was stunned…

“But how can you… just now… you said… you even put it that they were as good as in my pocket…”

“Oh no, you misunderstood me, Dmitri Fyodorovich. If that’s so, then you didn’t understand me. I was speaking of the mines… It’s true that I promised you more, infinitely more than three thousand, it all comes back to me now, but I had only the mines in mind.”

“And the money? And the three thousand?” Dmitri Fyodorovich exclaimed absurdly.

“Oh, if you meant money, I haven’t any. I have no money at all now, Dmitri Fyodorovich, I’m at war with my steward just now, and only the other day I borrowed five hundred rubles from Miusov myself. No, no, I have no money. And you know, Dmitri Fyodorovich, even if I had any, you wouldn’t get it from me. First of all, I never lend to anyone. To lend means to quarrel. But you, you especially I wouldn’t give it to, because I am fond of you I wouldn’t give it, to save you I wouldn’t give it, because you need only one thing: mines, mines, and mines!…”

“Oh, the devil take…!” Mitya suddenly roared, and struck the table with his fist with all his might.

“A-ah!” Mrs. Khokhlakova screamed in fright and flew off to the other end of the drawing room.

Mitya spat and with rapid steps strode out of the room, out of the house, out into the street, into the dark! He walked on like a madman, beating himself on the breast, on the very spot of his breast on which he had beaten himself two days before in front of Alyosha, when he had seen him for the last time, in the evening, in the dark, on the road. What this beating of himself on the breast on that spot meant, and what he meant to indicate by it—that was for the present still a secret, which no one in the world knew, which he had not revealed even to Alyosha then, but in that secret there lay for him more than disgrace, there lay ruin and suicide, so he had decided, if he did not get those three thousand to pay Katerina Ivanovna and thereby remove from his breast, “from that spot of his breast,” the disgrace he carried on it and which so weighed on his conscience. The reader will have all this fully explained later, but now, after his last hope had vanished, this man, so strong physically, having only just gone a few steps from Mrs. Khokhlakova’s house, suddenly burst into tears like a little child. He walked along, unaware, wiping away his tears with his fist. Thus he came out onto the square and suddenly felt that he had collided with something with his whole body. There was a squealing wail from some little old woman whom he had almost knocked over.

“Lord, you nearly killed me! Why are you stomping along like that, you rascal!”

“What, is it you?” cried Mitya, making out the little old woman in the dark. It was that same old servant who waited on Kuzma Samsonov, and whom Mitya had noticed only too well yesterday.

“And who might you be yourself, my dear sir?” the old woman said in quite a different voice. “I can’t make you out in the dark.”

“You live at Kuzma Kuzmich’s, you wait on him?”

“Just so, my dear sir, I only just ran over to Prokhorych’s… But why is it I still can’t make you out?”

“Tell me, my good woman, is Agrafena Alexandrovna at your place now?” Mitya said, beside himself with expectation. “I saw her there myself earlier.”

“She was, my dear sir, she came, sat a while, and left.”

“What? Left?” cried Mitya. “When did she leave?”

“Why, she left right then, she was only with us a minute, told Kuzma Kuzmich some story, made him laugh, and ran off.”

“You’re lying, curse you!” Mitya howled.

“A-ah!” screamed the old woman, but Mitya had already vanished without a trace; he ran with all his might to Morozova’s house. This was precisely the time when Grushenka had rolled off to Mokroye; not more than a quarter of an hour had passed since her departure. Fenya was sitting with her grandmother, the cook Matryona, in the kitchen, when suddenly “the captain” ran in. Seeing him, Fenya screamed at the top of her lungs.

“You scream?” howled Mitya. “Where is she?” But before the terror-stricken Fenya could answer a word, he suddenly fell down at her feet:

“Fenya, for the sake of our Lord Christ, tell me, where is she?”

“Master, I don’t know anything, Dmitri Fyodorovich, dear, I don’t know anything, kill me if you like, I don’t know anything,” Fenya swore and called God to witness. “You went with her yourself earlier.”

“She came back!…”

“Dear, she didn’t come back, I swear to God, she didn’t come back!”

“You’re lying,” cried Mitya, “I can tell by your fright alone where she is!…”

He rushed out. The frightened Fenya was glad she had got off cheaply, but understood very well that he simply had no time, or else things might have gone badly for her. But as he ran out, he still surprised both Fenya and old Matryona with one most unexpected escapade: on the table stood a brass mortar, and in it a pestle, a small brass pestle, only a quarter of an arshin long, some seven inches. Mitya, running out, and having already opened the door with one hand, with the other suddenly snatched the pestle out of the mortar in passing and thrust it into his side pocket, and off he went with it.

“Oh, Lord, he wants to kill somebody!” Fenya threw up her hands.