IV. The Second Ordeal

“You would not believe how much you encourage us yourself, Dmitri Fyodorovich, by this readiness of yours…” Nikolai Parfenovich began with an animated look and with visible pleasure, which shone in his large, light-gray, protruding eyes, very nearsighted, however, from which he had taken off his spectacles a minute before. “And you remarked justly just now about this mutual trust of ours, without which it is sometimes even impossible in matters of such importance, in the event and in the sense that the suspected person really wishes, hopes, and is able to clear himself. For our part we will employ everything that depends on us, and you yourself could see, even now, how we are conducting this case… You approve, Ippolit Kirillovich?” he turned suddenly to the prosecutor.

“Oh, without doubt,” the prosecutor approved, though somewhat drily in comparison with Nikolai Parfenovich’s outburst.

I will note once and for all: Nikolai Parfenovich, newly arrived among us, from the very beginning of his career here had felt an extraordinary respect for our Ippolit Kirillovich, the prosecutor, and had become almost a bosom friend of his. He was almost the only man who believed unconditionally in the extraordinary psychological and oratorical talent of our Ippolit Kirillovich, “wronged in the service,” and fully believed too that he had been wronged. He had heard of him back in Petersburg. On the other hand, the young Nikolai Parfenovich turned out in his turn to be likewise the only person in the whole world whom our “wronged” prosecutor sincerely loved. On the way here they had managed to come to an understanding on a few points and to make arrangements about the case before them, and now, at the table, the sharp little mind of Nikolai Parfenovich caught on the fly and understood every hint, every movement in the face of his senior colleague, from half a word, from a glance, from a wink of the eye.

“Gentlemen, just let me tell it myself and don’t interrupt me with trifles, and I’ll lay it all out for you in a flash,” Mitya was boiling over.

“Excellent, sir. Thank you. But before we proceed to hearing your statement, would you allow me only to establish one more little fact, very curious for us, namely about those ten rubles that you took as a loan yesterday, around five o’clock, from your friend Pyotr Ilyich Perkhotin, pledging your pistols for them.”

“I pawned them, gentlemen, I pawned them, for ten rubles, and what of it? That’s all there is to it; as soon as I got back to town from my trip, I pawned them.”

“So you got back from a trip? You had gone out of town?”

“I had, gentlemen, I’d gone forty versts, and you didn’t know?”

The prosecutor and Nikolai Parfenovich exchanged glances.

“And in general, what if you began your tale with a systematic description of your whole day yesterday, from the very morning? Allow us, for example, to learn: why did you leave town, and when exactly did you go and come back… and all these facts…”

“Then you should have asked like that from the very beginning,” Mitya laughed loudly, “and if you like, the matter has to begin not with yesterday but with the day before yesterday, from the very morning; then you’ll understand where, how, and why I went and drove off. I went, gentlemen, the day before yesterday in the morning, to the local merchant Samsonov, to borrow three thousand in money from him on the surest security—it was suddenly urgent, gentlemen, suddenly urgent…”

“Allow me to interrupt you,” the prosecutor broke in politely. “Why did you need so suddenly precisely such a sum, that is, three thousand rubles?”

“Eh, gentlemen, we don’t need petty details: how, when, and why, and why precisely so much money and not so much, and all this rigmarole… why, at this rate you couldn’t fit it into three volumes, and you’d need an epilogue besides!”

Mitya said all this in the good-natured yet impatient, familiar way of a man who wishes to tell the whole truth and is filled with the very best intentions.

“Gentlemen,” he suddenly seemed to catch himself, “don’t grumble at me for my kicking, I ask you again: believe once more that I feel complete respect and understand the real state of affairs. Don’t think I’m drunk, either. I’ve sobered up by now. And being drunk wouldn’t be in the way at all. With me it goes like this:

Sobered up and got wise, then I’m stupid;
Got drunk and turned stupid, then I’m wise.

Ha-ha! But then, I see, gentlemen, that it isn’t yet proper for me to be making jokes before you, until we’ve had our explanation, that is. Allow me to observe my own dignity too. Why, I do understand the present difference: after all, here I sit before you a criminal, and so, to the highest degree, not your equal, and you are charged with keeping an eye on me: you’re not going to pat me on the head for Grigory, you really can’t break old men’s heads with impunity, after all, you’ll certainly put me away for him by sentence of the court, well, for half a year, well, for a year in the house of correction, I don’t know how they sentence people with you, though without deprivation of rights, it’s without deprivation of rights, isn’t it, prosecutor? Well, so then, gentlemen, I do understand this difference… But you must agree too that you could confuse God himself with such questions: where did you step, how did you step, when did you step, and what did you step in? Why, I’ll get confused, if it’s like that, and you’ll pounce on every slip at once and write it down, and what will come of it? Nothing will come of it! And finally, since I’ve started running on now, I’ll finish, and you, gentlemen, as men of the highest education and the noblest of men, will forgive me. I’ll finish precisely with a request: unlearn, gentlemen, this official routine of interrogation, that is, first, you see, they start, so to speak, with something miserable, something trivial: how did you get up, what did you eat, how did you spit, and “having lulled the criminal’s attention,” suddenly you catch him with a stunning question: “Whom did you kill, whom did you rob?” Ha-ha! There’s your official routine, that’s your rule, after all, that’s what all your cunning rests on! But, you know, it’s peasants you should lull with such tricks, not me. Why, I understand the business, I served myself, ha-ha-ha! Don’t be angry, gentlemen, do you forgive my impertinence?” he cried, looking at them with an almost astonishing good nature. “It was Mitka Karamazov who said it, after all, so you can excuse it, because it’s inexcusable in a clever man, but in Mitka it’s excusable! Ha-ha!”

Nikolai Parfenovich listened and laughed too. The prosecutor, though he did not laugh, was keenly examining Mitya, without taking his eyes off him, as if not wishing to miss the slightest little word, the slightest movement of his, the slightest quiver of the slightest feature of his face.

“And yet that is precisely how we began with you at the outset,” Nikolai Parfenovich responded, still laughing. “We did not confuse you with questions about how you got up in the morning and what you ate, but even began with something all too essential.”

“I understand, I’ve understood it and I value it, and I value still more the kindness you are showing me now, unexampled, worthy of the noblest souls. We three have come together here, men of honor, and let everything between us be just so, on the mutual trust of educated men of society, bound by nobility and honor. In any case, allow me to count you as my best friends in this moment of my life, in this moment when my honor is humiliated! It isn’t offensive to you, gentlemen, is it, it isn’t offensive?”

“On the contrary, you have expressed all this so beautifully, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” Nikolai Parfenovich agreed gravely and approvingly.

“And the petty details, gentlemen, all these pettifogging details, away with them,” Mitya exclaimed rapturously, “or else it’ll simply turn out the devil knows what, isn’t that so?”

“I will follow your sensible advice fully,” the prosecutor suddenly put in, addressing Mitya, “but I will not give up my question, however. It is too essentially necessary for us to learn why exactly you needed such a sum, that is, precisely three thousand?”

“Why I needed it? Well, for this and for that… well, to pay back a debt.”

“To whom exactly?”

“That I positively refuse to say, gentlemen! You see, not because I couldn’t say it, or didn’t dare, or was afraid, because all this is a trifling matter and utter nonsense, but I won’t say it because there’s a principle here: this is my private life, and I will not allow anyone to intrude into my private life. That’s my principle. Your question has nothing to do with the case, and everything that has nothing to do with the case is my private life! I wanted to pay back a debt, I wanted to pay back a debt of honor, but to whom—I won’t say.”

“Allow us to write that down,” said the prosecutor.

“Be my guest. Write it down just like that: that I won’t say, and I won’t say. Write, gentlemen, that I even consider it dishonorable to say it. Ekh, what a lot of time you have for writing!”

“Allow me, my dear sir, to warn you and to remind you once more, if only you did not know it,” the prosecutor said with a special and very stern admonition, “that you have the full right not to answer the questions now being put to you, and we, conversely, have no right whatever to extort answers from you if you yourself decline to answer for one reason or another. That is a matter of your personal consideration. But our business consists, again, in pointing out to you, in a case like the present one, and making clear to you, the full degree of the harm you are doing yourself by refusing to give this or that testimony. And now I ask you to continue.”

“Gentlemen, I’m not angry, you know… I…” Mitya started to mutter, somewhat abashed by the admonition. “So, sir, you see, gentlemen, this same Samsonov, whom I went to then…”

We will not, of course, reproduce in detail his story of what is already known to the reader. The teller impatiently wanted to tell everything down to the slightest detail and at the same time to have it come out quickly. But as he testified, his statements were being written down, and consequently he had necessarily to be stopped. Dmitri Fyodorovich condemned this but submitted; he got angry, but still good-naturedly for the time being. True, he would sometimes cry out: “Gentlemen, this would infuriate the Lord God himself,” or: “Gentlemen, do you know that you’re only irritating me for nothing?” but even while exclaiming this he did not yet change his friendly, expansive mood. In this way he told how Samsonov had “fooled” him the day before yesterday. (He fully guessed by now that he had been fooled then.) The sale of his watch for six rubles to get money for the journey, quite unknown as yet to the investigator and the prosecutor, at once aroused their extraordinary attention, and, already to Mitya’s boundless indignation, they found it necessary to write this fact down in detail, in view of its being a second confirmation of the circumstance that even the day before he had had hardly a kopeck to his name. Little by little Mitya began to grow sullen. Then, having described the journey to Lyagavy and the night spent in the fume-filled cottage and so on, he brought his story up to his return to town, and here he began of his own accord, without any special request now, to describe in detail his jealous torments over Grushenka. They listened to him silently and attentively; they went especially into the circumstance that he had long since set up an observation post on Grushenka at Fyodor Pavlovich’s, “out back,” in Marya Kondratyevna’s house, and into the fact that Smerdyakov had been carrying information to him: this they took special note of and wrote down. He spoke of his jealousy hotly and at length, and though inwardly ashamed that he was exposing his most intimate feelings, so to speak, to “universal disgrace,” he was evidently overcoming his shame in order to be truthful. The impassive severity of the investigator’s and especially the prosecutor’s gazes, fixed intently on him during his story, disconcerted him at last rather strongly: “This boy, Nikolai Parfenovich, with whom only a few days ago I was talking nonsense about women, and this sick prosecutor aren’t worth my telling them this,” flashed sadly through his mind. “What a disgrace! ‘Endure, humble yourself, and be silent,’” he concluded his musing with a line of verse, but again pulled himself together so as to go on. Passing on to the story of Khokhlakova, he even cheered up again and even wanted to tell a special recent little anecdote about this little lady, not pertinent to the case, but the investigator stopped him and politely suggested that he pass on “to something more essential.” At last, having described his despair and told about the moment when, coming out of Khokhlakova’s, he had even thought “to cut somebody’s throat, quick, and get three thousand,” he was stopped again, and it was written down that he had “wanted to cut someone’s throat.” Mitya silently let them write it down. At last the matter came to the point in his story when he suddenly learned that Grushenka had deceived him and had left Samsonov’s as soon as he had brought her there, whereas she herself had said that she would sit with the old man till midnight: “If I didn’t kill that Fenya then, gentlemen, it was only because I had no time,” suddenly burst from him at this point in his story. And this was carefully written down. Mitya waited gloomily and was beginning to narrate how he had run to his father’s garden, when suddenly the investigator stopped him and, opening his big briefcase, which lay beside him on the sofa, took out of it the brass pestle.

“Is this object known to you?” he showed it to Mitya.

“Ah, yes!” he grinned gloomily. “How could I not know it! Let me have a look… Ah, the devil, never mind!”

“You forgot to mention it,” the investigator remarked.

“Ah, the devil! I wouldn’t have hidden it from you; I dare say it couldn’t have been done without it, what do you think? It just slipped my memory.”

“Be so good, then, as to tell us in detail how you armed yourself with it.”

“Certainly, I’ll be so good, gentlemen.”

And Mitya told how he had taken the pestle and run off.

“But what aim did you have in view, arming yourself with such a weapon?”

“What aim? No aim at all! I grabbed it and ran.”

“Why, then, if it was without aim?”

Vexation was boiling up in Mitya. He looked intently at the “boy” and grinned gloomily and spitefully. The fact was that he was growing more and more ashamed of having just told “such people” the story of his jealousy so sincerely and with such outpourings.

“Damn the pestle!” suddenly burst from him.

“Nevertheless, sir.”

“Well, I grabbed it against dogs. Well, the dark… Well, just in case.”

“And before, when you went out of the house at night, did you also take some weapon, if you were so afraid of the dark?”

“Eh, the devil, pah! Gentlemen, it’s literally impossible to talk with you!” Mitya cried out in the last degree of irritation and, turning to the clerk, all red with spite, said quickly to him, with a kind of frenzied note in his voice:

“Write down at once… at once… ‘that I grabbed the pestle and took it with me in order to run and kill my father… Fyodor Pavlovich… with a blow on the head!’ Well, are you satisfied now, gentlemen? Have you eased your hearts?” he said, staring defiantly at the investigator and the prosecutor.

“We understand all too well that you gave such testimony just now in irritation with us and in vexation at the questions we are putting to you, which you consider petty and which are, in essence, very essential,” the prosecutor said drily to him in reply.

“But for pity’s sake, gentlemen! Well, I took the pestle… Well, why does anyone take something in his hand in such cases? I don’t know why. I grabbed it and ran. That’s all. Shame on you, gentlemen, passons (let’s move on), or else, I swear, I’ll stop telling you anything!”

He leaned his elbow on the table and propped his head on his hand. He sat sideways to them and looked at the wall, overcoming a bad feeling in himself. In fact he wanted terribly to get up and announce that he would not say another word, “even if you lead me off to be executed.”

“You see, gentlemen,” he said suddenly, overcoming himself with difficulty, “you see. I listen to you, and I seem to see… you see, I sometimes have a dream… a certain dream, and I often dream it, it keeps coming back, that someone is chasing me, someone I’m terribly afraid of, he’s chasing me in the dark, at night, looking for me, and I hide somewhere from him behind a door or behind a cupboard, I hide humiliatingly, and the main thing is that he knows perfectly well where I’ve hidden from him, but he seems to pretend on purpose that he doesn’t know where I’m sitting, so as to torment me longer, so as to enjoy my fear… That’s what you’re doing now too! That’s what it’s like!”

“Is that the sort of dream you have?” the prosecutor inquired.

“Yes, that’s the sort of dream I have… And you wouldn’t like to write that down, would you?” Mitya grinned crookedly.

“No, sir, not write it down, but you do have curious dreams, all the same.”

“Now it isn’t a dream anymore! Realism, gentlemen, the realism of actual life! I’m a wolf, and you are hunters, well, go on and hunt down the wolf.”

“You are wrong to choose such a comparison…” Nikolai Parfenovich was about to begin, extraordinarily gently.

“Not wrong, gentlemen, not wrong!” Mitya boiled up again, although, having evidently relieved his soul with the outburst of sudden anger, he was already beginning to grow kinder again with every word. “You may not believe a criminal or a defendant tortured by your questions, but a most noble man, gentlemen, the noblest impulses of the soul (I shout it boldly!)—no! that you cannot help believing… you haven’t even the right… but—

Be silent, heart,
Endure, humble yourself, and be silent!

Well, then, shall I go on?” he broke off gloomily.

“By all means, please do,” answered Nikolai Parfenovich.