II. The Alarm

Our district police chief, Mikhail Makarovich Makarov, a retired lieutenant colonel redesignated a court councilor, was a widower and a good man. He had come to us only three years before, but had already won general sympathy, chiefly because he “knew how to bring society together.” He never ran out of guests, and it seemed he could not have lived without them himself. Without fail someone dined with him every day, even if only two guests or just one, but without guests they did not even sit down to table. There were formal dinners too, on all sorts of pretexts, sometimes even unexpected ones. The food served, though not exquisite, was abundant, the fish pies were made excellently, and the wines, though they did not shine in quality, made up for it in quantity. In the entrance room stood a billiard table with very decent furnishings, that is, even with pictures of English racehorses in black frames along the walls, which, as is well known, constitutes the indispensable decoration of any billiard room belonging to a bachelor. Every evening there were cards, even if only at one table. But very often all the best society of our town gathered too, with mammas and young ladies, to dance. Mikhail Makarovich, though a widower, lived as a family man, having with him his daughter, herself long since widowed, in her turn the mother of two young ladies, Mikhail Makarovich’s granddaughters. The young ladies were already grown up and had finished their education, were of not unpleasant appearance and of a cheerful disposition, and, although everyone knew they would be given no dowry, nevertheless drew our society youth to their grandfather’s house. In matters of business Mikhail Makarovich was not altogether bright, but he performed his duties no worse than many others. To put it plainly, he was a rather uneducated man and even careless in clearly understanding the limits of his administrative power. Some of the reforms of the present reign he was not so much unable to grasp fully as he understood them with certain errors, sometimes quite noticeable ones, and not at all from any particular incapacity of his own, but simply from the carelessness of his character, because there was never time to look into things. “I have, gentlemen, more of a military soul than a civil one,” he would say of himself. Even about the exact principles of the peasant reform he had still not acquired, as it were, a final and firm notion, and learned about them, so to speak, from year to year, increasing his knowledge practically and involuntarily, and yet he was a landowner himself. Pyotr Ilyich knew precisely that this evening he would certainly meet some of the guests at Mikhail Makarovich’s, only he did not know whom exactly. And meanwhile, just at that moment, sitting at his house over a game of yeralash were the prosecutor and our zemstvo doctor, Varvinsky, a young man who had only just come to us from Petersburg, one of those who had brilliantly completed the course at the Petersburg Medical Academy. The prosecutor, that is, the assistant prosecutor, but whom everyone among us called the prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich, was a peculiar man among us, not old, only about thirty-five, but strongly inclined to consumption, married, besides, to a very fat and childless lady; he was vain and irritable, with a very solid mind, however, and even a kind soul. It seems the whole trouble with his character lay in the fact that he thought of himself somewhat more highly than his true merits allowed. And that is why he always seemed uneasy. There were in him, besides, certain higher and even artistic pretensions, for example to psychology, to a special knowledge of the human soul, to a special gift for understanding the criminal and his crime. In this sense he considered himself somewhat wronged and passed over in the service, and was always sure that there, in the higher spheres, they had not known how to appreciate him and that he had enemies. In gloomy moments he even threatened to go over to being a defense lawyer in criminal cases. The unexpected Karamazov case of parricide seemed to give him a thorough shaking: “It is the kind of case that could become known to all Russia.” But here I am speaking, running ahead.

In the next room, with the young ladies, sat our young court investigator, Nikolai Parfenovich Nelyudov, too, who had come to us from Petersburg only two months before. Afterward people among us talked about it and even marveled that all these persons had, as if on purpose, come together on the evening of the “crime” in the house of the executive power. And yet the matter was much simpler and had come about quite naturally: Ippolit Kirillovich’s spouse had had a toothache since the day before, and he had to run away somewhere from her moaning; and the doctor, by his very nature, could not be anywhere in the evening but at cards. As for Nikolai Parfenovich Nelyudov, he had been planning even three days before to come to Mikhail Makarovich’s that evening, by chance, so to speak, in order suddenly and slyly to astonish Mikhail Makarovich’s elder young lady, Olga Mikhailovna, by letting her see that he knew her secret, that he knew that today was her birthday and that she had purposely wished to conceal it from our society so as not to invite the town to a dance. There was to be much laughter and many hints about her age, that she was supposedly afraid to disclose it, that now, since he was the possessor of her secret, he would tell everyone about it tomorrow, and so on, and so on. The dear young little man was a great tease in that regard; the ladies among us had even nicknamed him the tease, and he, it seems, liked that very much. However, he was of very good society, of good family, good upbringing, and good feelings, and though a pleasure-seeker, a quite innocent one and always proper. In appearance he was small of stature, of weak and delicate build. Several extraordinarily large rings always sparkled on his thin, pale little fingers. When he was carrying out his duties, however, he became uncommonly grave, as if he understood his significance and his obligations as something sacred. He was especially good at disconcerting murderers and other villains from the common people during interrogations, and really did arouse in them, if not respect for himself, then at least a certain surprise.

Pyotr Ilyich, on entering the district police chief’s house, was simply stunned: he suddenly saw that everything was already known there. Indeed, the cards had been thrown down, everyone was standing and discussing, and even Nikolai Parfenovich had run in from the young ladies and had the most combative and impetuous look. Pyotr Ilyich was met with the stunning news that old Fyodor Pavlovich had really and truly been murdered that evening in his house, murdered and robbed. It had become known only just before, in the following way.

Marfa Ignatyevna, the wife of Grigory, struck down by the fence, though she had been sleeping soundly in her bed and might have slept on like that till morning, nevertheless suddenly woke up. What brought it about was the terrible epileptic scream of Smerdyakov, who was lying unconscious in the next little room—that scream with which his falling fits always began and which always, all her life, had terribly frightened Marfa Ignatyevna and acted on her painfully. She could never get used to them. Half awake, she jumped up and, almost out of her senses, rushed into Smerdyakov’s little room. But it was dark there; all that could be heard was that the sick man had begun to snore terribly and thrash about. Here Marfa Ignatyevna screamed herself and was about to call her husband, but suddenly realized that Grigory, when she got up, had seemed not to be in the bed. She ran to the bed and felt it again, but the bed was indeed empty. So he had gone out, but where? She ran out onto the porch and timidly called him from the porch. She received no answer, of course, but instead she heard, amid the silence of the night, from somewhere, as if far off in the garden, some sort of moans. She listened; the moans came again, and it became clear that they really were coming from the garden. “Lord, just like that time with Stinking Lizaveta!” swept through her disordered head. Timidly she went down the steps and made out that the gate into the garden was open. “He must be there, the poor dear,” she thought, went up to the gate, and suddenly heard distinctly that Grigory was calling her, calling out “Marfa, Marfa!” in a weak, groaning, terrible voice. “Lord, keep us from harm,” whispered Marfa Ignatyevna, and rushed toward the call, and that was how she found Grigory. But she found him not by the fence, not at the spot where he had been struck down, but already some twenty paces from the fence. It turned out afterward that, coming to, he had crawled, and had probably crawled for a long time, losing consciousness several times and falling back into oblivion. She noticed at once that he was all covered in blood, and here she began screaming at the top of her lungs. Grigory, though, was babbling quietly and incoherently: “He’s killed… killed his father… what are you screaming for, you fool… run, call…” But Marfa Ignatyevna would not calm down and kept screaming, and suddenly, seeing that the master’s window was open and there was light in the window, she ran to it and began calling Fyodor Pavlovich. But looking in at the window, she saw a terrible sight: the master was lying on his back on the floor, motionless. His light-colored dressing gown and the white shirt on his chest were soaked in blood. The candle on the table brightly lit up the blood and the motionless dead face of Fyodor Pavlovich. Here, in the last degree of horror, Marfa Ignatyevna rushed away from the window, ran out of the garden, opened the bolt of the gates, and ran headlong around the back to the neighbor, Marya Kondratyevna. Both neighbors, mother and daughter, had already gone to sleep by then, but at the redoubled and furious knocking on the shutters and Marfa Ignatyevna’s cries they woke up and sprang to the window. Marfa Ignatyevna, incoherently, squealing and shouting, nevertheless conveyed the main thing and called for help. As it happened, the wandering Foma was spending that night with them. They roused him in a flash, and the three of them ran to the scene of the crime. As they ran, Marya Kondratyevna managed to recall that earlier, after eight o’clock, she had heard a terrible and piercing scream, heard all over the neighborhood, from their garden—and this, of course, was precisely Grigory’s cry when, clutching with his hands at the leg of Dmitri Fyodorovich, who was already sitting on the fence, he shouted: “Parricide!” “Somebody yelled, just once, and suddenly stopped,” Marya Kondratyevna testified as she ran. Running up to the place where Grigory lay, the two women, with Foma’s help, carried him into the cottage. They lit a light and saw that Smerdyakov had still not quieted down and was thrashing about in his little room; his eyes were squinting, and foam was flowing from his lips. They washed Grigory’s head with water and vinegar, and from the water he came fully to his senses and at once asked: “Is the master killed or not?” The two women and Foma then went to the master, and on entering the garden they saw this time that not only the window but also the door from the house into the garden stood wide open, whereas the master had locked himself in tight every evening, every night, for the whole past week, and would not on any account allow even Grigory to knock at his door. On seeing this door open, all of them, the two women and Foma, at once became afraid to go in to the master, “so that nothing would come of it afterward.” And Grigory, when they came back, ordered them to run at once to the district police chief himself. That was when Marya Kondratyevna ran and alarmed everyone at the district police chief’s. She had forestalled Pyotr Ilyich’s arrival by only five minutes, so that he appeared not just with his own guesses and conclusions but as an evident witness, who by his story confirmed still further the general guess as to who the criminal was (which, however, in the depths of his soul, he had gone on refusing to believe right up to this last minute).

It was decided to act energetically. The assistant to the town police inspector was at once instructed to collect as many as four attesting witnesses, and in accordance with all the rules, which I will not describe here, they entered Fyodor Pavlovich’s house and conducted an investigation on the spot. The zemstvo doctor, an ardent man and new, almost begged on his own account to accompany the district police chief, the prosecutor, and the investigator. I will outline only briefly: Fyodor Pavlovich turned out to be quite dead, with his head broken in, but with what?—most probably with the very same weapon with which Grigory too had been struck down afterward. And then the weapon itself was found, after they had heard from Grigory, who had been given what medical help was possible, a fairly coherent account, though told in a weak and faltering voice, of how he had been struck down. They began searching with a lantern by the fence and found, thrown right on the garden path, in plain view, the brass pestle. In the room where Fyodor Pavlovich lay no particular disorder was noticed, but behind the screen, by his bed, they picked up from the floor a large envelope of thick paper, of office size, with the inscription: “A little present of three thousand rubles to my angel Grushenka, if she will come,” and below had been added, probably later, by Fyodor Pavlovich himself: “and to my little chick.” On the envelope were three large seals of red sealing wax, but the envelope had already been torn open and was empty: the money had been carried off. They also found on the floor a thin little pink ribbon, with which the envelope had been tied. In Pyotr Ilyich’s testimony one circumstance among others produced an extraordinary impression on the prosecutor and the investigator, namely: the guess that Dmitri Fyodorovich would certainly shoot himself by dawn, that he had decided it himself, had spoken about it himself to Pyotr Ilyich, had loaded the pistol in front of him, written a little note, put it in his pocket, and so on, and so on. And when Pyotr Ilyich, so he said, still not wanting to believe him, threatened that he would go and tell someone so as to prevent the suicide, then Mitya himself, so he said, grinning, had answered him: “You won’t be in time.” Consequently, they had to hurry to the spot, to Mokroye, in order to catch the criminal before he perhaps really did take it into his head to shoot himself. “That’s clear, that’s clear!” the prosecutor kept repeating in extraordinary excitement. “That is exactly, precisely how it’s done with such madcaps: tomorrow I’ll kill myself, and before death, a spree.” The story of how he had taken wine and goods from the shop only inflamed the prosecutor still more. “Remember that fellow, gentlemen, who killed the merchant Olsufyev, robbed him of fifteen hundred, and at once went and had his hair curled, and then, without even hiding the money properly, likewise almost carrying it in his hands, set off to the girls.” Everyone was held up, however, by the investigation, the search of Fyodor Pavlovich’s house, the formalities, and so on. All this required time, and so, some two hours ahead of themselves, they sent off to Mokroye the rural police officer, Mavriky Mavrikievich Shmertsov, who had come to town just the day before, in the morning, for his salary. Mavriky Mavrikievich was given the instruction: on arriving at Mokroye, and without raising any alarm, to keep watch over the “criminal” unremittingly until the arrival of the proper authorities, as well as to have attesting witnesses, village constables, and so on, and so on, ready. And so Mavriky Mavrikievich did; he kept his incognito and let only one man, Trifon Borisovich, his old acquaintance, partly into the secret of the matter. This time coincided exactly with the moment when Mitya met the innkeeper on the dark gallery as he was looking for him, and noticed at the same time that there was a sudden change of some sort in Trifon Borisovich’s face and talk. Thus neither Mitya nor anyone else knew that they were being watched; and his case of pistols had long since been made off with by Trifon Borisovich and hidden away in a secluded spot. And only after four o’clock in the morning, almost at dawn, did all the authorities arrive, the district police chief, the prosecutor, and the investigator, in two carriages, with two troikas. The doctor, though, stayed behind at Fyodor Pavlovich’s house, with a view to performing an autopsy on the body of the murdered man in the morning, but, above all, he had become interested precisely in the condition of the sick servant Smerdyakov: “Such violent and such long falling fits, recurring incessantly in the course of two days and nights, are rarely met with, and this belongs to science,” he said in excitement to his departing partners, and they, laughing, congratulated him on his find. And the prosecutor and the investigator remembered very well that the doctor added, in the most decisive tone, that Smerdyakov would not live till morning.

Now, after a long but, it seems, necessary explanation, we have returned precisely to that moment of our story at which we broke it off in the previous book.