V. The Third Ordeal

Though Mitya had begun to speak sternly, he was evidently trying all the harder not to forget or leave out a single detail of what he was relating. He told how he had leaped the fence into his father’s garden, how he had made his way to the window, and, at last, about everything that had happened under the window. Clearly, precisely, as if minting each word, he related the feelings that had agitated him in those moments in the garden, when he had wanted so terribly to know whether Grushenka was at his father’s or not. But strange to say: both the prosecutor and the investigator listened this time somehow terribly reservedly, looked drily, asked far fewer questions. Mitya could conclude nothing from their faces. “They’re angry and offended,” he thought. “Well, the devil with them!” When he told how he had at last decided to give his father the signal that Grushenka had come, so that he would open the window, the prosecutor and the investigator paid no attention at all to the word “signal,” as if they had not understood at all what significance the word had here, so that Mitya even took note of it. When at last he reached the moment when, at the sight of his father leaning out of the window, he had boiled up with hatred and snatched the pestle out of his pocket, he suddenly stopped, as if on purpose. He sat looking at the wall, and he knew that they had simply fastened their eyes on him.

“Well, sir,” said the investigator, “you snatched out the weapon and… and what happened next?”

“Next? Next I killed him… hit him on the crown and split his skull open… That’s how it was, according to you, isn’t it?” His eyes suddenly flashed. All his anger, which had nearly died down, suddenly rose up in his soul with extraordinary force.

“According to us,” Nikolai Parfenovich repeated. “Well, and according to you?”

Mitya lowered his eyes and was silent for a long time.

“According to me, gentlemen, according to me, here is how it was,” he began quietly. “Whether it was someone’s tears, or my mother prayed God for me, or a bright spirit kissed me at that moment—I don’t know, but the devil was overcome. I rushed away from the window and ran to the fence… My father took fright, and here for the first time he made me out, gave a cry, and jumped back from the window—I remember that very clearly. And I went through the garden to the fence… and right there Grigory caught up with me, when I was already sitting on the fence…”

Here at last he raised his eyes to his listeners. They seemed to be looking at him with perfectly serene attention. A kind of spasm of indignation passed through Mitya’s soul.

“Why, you’re laughing at me this minute, gentlemen!” he suddenly broke off.

“Why do you conclude that?” Nikolai Parfenovich remarked.

“You don’t believe a single word, that’s why! I do understand that I’ve come to the main point: the old man is lying there now with his head broken in, and I—having described tragically how I wanted to kill him and how I’d already snatched out the pestle, I suddenly run away from the window… A poem! In verse! A fine fellow, you can take him at his word! Ha-ha! You’re scoffers, gentlemen!”

And he turned on his chair with his whole body, so that the chair creaked.

“And did you not notice,” the prosecutor began suddenly, as if paying no attention to Mitya’s agitation, “did you not notice, as you were running from the window, whether the door to the garden, which is at the other end of the house, was open or not?”

“No, it wasn’t open.”

“It was not?”

“It was shut, on the contrary, and who could have opened it? Bah, the door, wait!” he suddenly seemed to come to himself and almost shuddered. “Why, did you find the door open?”

“Open.”

“Then who could have opened it, if you didn’t open it yourselves?” Mitya was suddenly terribly surprised.

“The door stood open, and the murderer of your parent undoubtedly went in through this door and, having committed the murder, went out by this same door,” the prosecutor pronounced slowly and distinctly, as if minting each word. “That is perfectly clear to us. The murder took place, evidently, in the room and not through the window, which is positively clear from the report of the examination made, from the position of the body, and from everything. There can be no doubts whatever about this circumstance.”

Mitya was terribly struck.

“But that’s impossible, gentlemen!” he cried, utterly at a loss. “I… I didn’t go in… I positively, I’m telling you exactly, the door stayed shut all the while I was in the garden, and when I ran out of the garden. I only stood under the window and saw him through the window, and that’s all, that’s all… I remember it up to the last minute. And even if I didn’t remember it, I know it all the same, because the signals were known only to me and to Smerdyakov, and to him, the dead man, and without the signals he wouldn’t have opened to anyone in the world!”

“Signals? What signals are these?” the prosecutor said with greedy, almost hysterical curiosity, and in an instant lost all his reserved bearing. He asked as if timidly creeping up. He had scented an important fact, not yet known to him, and at once felt the greatest fear that Mitya might not want to disclose it in full.

“So you didn’t know!” Mitya winked at him, smiling mockingly and spitefully. “And what if I don’t tell? Who will you find out from then? The ones who knew about the signals were the dead man, I, and Smerdyakov, that’s all, and heaven knew too, but heaven isn’t going to tell you, you know. And it’s a curious little fact, the devil knows what can be built on it, ha-ha! Take comfort, gentlemen, I’ll reveal it; you’ve got foolishness on your minds. You don’t know whom you’re dealing with! You’re dealing with a defendant who testifies against himself, testifies to his own harm! Yes, sir, for I am a knight of honor, and you—are not!”

The prosecutor swallowed all these pills; he was only trembling with impatience to learn about the new fact. Mitya set out for them precisely and at length everything concerning the signals that Fyodor Pavlovich had invented for Smerdyakov; he told what exactly each knock on the window meant, even tapped out these signals on the table, and to Nikolai Parfenovich’s question whether, then, he, Mitya, when he knocked on the old man’s window, had tapped out precisely the signal that meant “Grushenka has come,” he answered precisely that he had tapped it out precisely so, that is, “Grushenka has come.”

“There you are, now go build your tower!” Mitya broke off and with contempt turned away from them again.

“And only your late parent, you, and the servant Smerdyakov knew about these signals? And no one else?” Nikolai Parfenovich inquired once more.

“Yes, the servant Smerdyakov, and heaven too. Write down heaven as well; it won’t be amiss to write that down. And you yourselves will have need of God.”

And of course they began writing it down, but while they were writing, the prosecutor, as if stumbling quite suddenly on a new idea, said:

“And yet if Smerdyakov too knew about these signals, and you radically reject any accusation against yourself in the death of your parent, then could it not have been he who, tapping out the agreed signals, made your father open to him, and then… committed the crime?”

Mitya looked at him with a deeply mocking but at the same time terribly hateful gaze. He looked for a long time and in silence, so that the prosecutor’s eyes began to blink.

“You’ve caught the fox again!” Mitya said at last. “You’ve pinched the vile thing by the tail, heh-heh! I see right through you, prosecutor! You thought, didn’t you, that I would jump up at once, seize on what you’re prompting me with, and shout at the top of my lungs: ‘Ai, it’s Smerdyakov, there’s the murderer!’ Admit you thought that, admit it, then I’ll go on.”

But the prosecutor did not admit it. He was silent and waited.

“You’re mistaken, I won’t shout about Smerdyakov!” said Mitya.

“And you don’t even suspect him at all?”

“And do you suspect him?”

“We have suspected him too.”

Mitya fixed his eyes on the floor.

“Joking aside,” he said gloomily, “listen: right from the start, almost from the moment I came running out to you from behind that curtain earlier, this thought had already flashed through my mind: ‘Smerdyakov!’ Here I sat at the table and shouted that I was not guilty of the blood, and all the while I kept thinking: ‘Smerdyakov!’ And Smerdyakov wouldn’t leave my soul. And just now I suddenly thought the same thing: ‘Smerdyakov,’ but only for a second: at once, right alongside, I thought: ‘No, not Smerdyakov!’ This isn’t his doing, gentlemen!”

“In that case, do you not suspect some other person as well?” Nikolai Parfenovich began to ask cautiously.

“I don’t know who or what person, the hand of heaven or Satan, but… not Smerdyakov!” Mitya snapped decisively.

“But why do you assert so firmly and with such insistence that it was not he?”

“From conviction. From my impression. Because Smerdyakov is a man of the lowest nature and a coward. He isn’t a coward, he’s the sum of all the cowardice in the world put together, walking on two legs. He was born of a hen. Talking with me, he trembled every time lest I kill him, while I never even raised a hand. He fell at my feet and cried, he kissed these very boots of mine, literally, begging me not to ‘frighten’ him. Do you hear: ‘not frighten him’—what sort of word is that? And I even gave him presents. He’s a sickly hen with the falling sickness, with a weak mind, whom an eight-year-old boy could thrash. Is that a nature? It isn’t Smerdyakov, gentlemen, and besides, he doesn’t love money, he wouldn’t take presents from me at all… And besides, why should he kill the old man? Why, he may be his son, his illegitimate son, do you know that?”

“We have heard that legend. But then you too are your father’s son, and yet you yourself told everyone that you wanted to kill him.”

“A stone thrown into my garden! And a low, nasty stone! I’m not afraid! Oh, gentlemen, perhaps it’s too base of you to say that to my face! Base, because I told it to you myself. I not only wanted to kill him, I could have killed him, and I even volunteered it against myself that I nearly killed him! But I didn’t kill him, you know, my guardian angel saved me—that is what you haven’t taken into consideration… And that’s why it’s base of you, base! Because I did not kill him, did not kill him, did not kill him! Hear that, prosecutor: I did not kill him!”

He was almost choking. In the whole course of the interrogation he had not once been in such agitation.

“And what did he tell you, gentlemen, Smerdyakov, I mean?” he concluded suddenly, after a silence. “May I ask you that?”

“You may ask us about anything,” the prosecutor answered with a cold and stern look, “about anything that concerns the factual side of the case, and we, I repeat it, are even obliged to satisfy you on every question. We found the servant Smerdyakov, about whom you ask, lying unconscious in his bed in an extraordinarily severe fit of the falling sickness, recurring perhaps for the tenth time in a row. The physician who was with us, having examined the sick man, even told us that he might not live till morning.”

“Well, in that case the devil killed my father!” suddenly broke from Mitya, as if he had been asking himself all along, until this very minute: “Smerdyakov or not Smerdyakov?”

“We will come back to this fact,” Nikolai Parfenovich decided. “Now, though, would you not wish to continue your testimony further?”

Mitya asked for a rest. He was politely allowed one. After resting, he took up his story again. But it was evidently hard for him. He was worn out, insulted, and morally shaken. Besides, the prosecutor, now as if on purpose, began irritating him every minute by fastening on “petty details.” No sooner had Mitya described how, sitting astride the fence, he had struck Grigory on the head with the pestle as he clung to his left leg, and had then at once jumped down to the fallen man, than the prosecutor stopped him and asked him to describe in more detail how he had been sitting on the fence. Mitya was surprised.

“Well, I was sitting like this, sitting astride, one leg there, the other here…”

“And the pestle?”

“The pestle in my hand.”

“Not in your pocket? You remember that in such detail? Well, did you swing your arm hard?”

“Must have been hard; what do you want that for?”

“If you would sit on a chair exactly as you sat on the fence then, and show us visibly, for clarity, how and where you swung, in which direction?”

“Why, you aren’t laughing at me, are you?” asked Mitya, glancing haughtily at his interrogator, but the man did not even blink. Mitya turned convulsively, sat astride the chair, and swung his arm:

“That’s how I struck him! That’s how I killed him! What more do you want?”

“Thank you. Would you not take the trouble now to explain why, properly speaking, you jumped down, with what aim, and what, properly speaking, you had in view?”

“Well, the devil… I jumped down to the fallen man… I don’t know what for!”

“Being in such agitation? And while running away?”

“Yes, in agitation and while running away.”

“You wanted to help him?”

“Help him, what an idea… Yes, maybe to help him, I don’t remember.”

“You were not yourself? That is, you were even in a certain state of oblivion?”

“Oh no, not in oblivion at all, I remember everything. Every last thread. I jumped down to have a look and wiped the blood off him with my handkerchief.”

“We have seen your handkerchief. Did you hope to bring the man you had struck down back to life?”

“I don’t know whether I hoped to. I just wanted to make certain whether he was alive or not.”

“Ah, so you wanted to make certain? Well, and what then?”

“I’m not a physician, I couldn’t decide. I ran away thinking I’d killed him, and look, he’s come to.”

“Excellent, sir,” the prosecutor concluded. “Thank you. That was all I needed. Kindly go on further.”

Alas, it never even entered Mitya’s head to tell, though he remembered it, that he had jumped down out of pity, and that, standing over the man he had killed, he had even uttered a few pitying words: “The old man’s caught it, nothing to be done, well, lie there, then.” The prosecutor, though, drew only one conclusion: that a man had jumped down, “at such a moment and in such agitation,” only in order to make certain whether the only witness of his crime was alive or not. And that, consequently, what must the strength, the resolve, the coolness, and the calculation of the man have been, even at such a moment… and so on, and so on. The prosecutor was pleased: “I irritated the sickly man with ‘petty details,’ so he gave himself away.”

With torment Mitya went on further. But at once he was stopped again, this time by Nikolai Parfenovich:

“How could you have run in to the servant Fedosya Markova with your hands so covered in blood, and, as it turned out afterward, your face?”

“Why, I didn’t even notice then that I was covered in blood!” answered Mitya.

“That is plausible, that is just how it happens,” the prosecutor exchanged glances with Nikolai Parfenovich.

“Precisely, I didn’t notice; you put that excellently, prosecutor,” Mitya too suddenly approved. But next came the story of Mitya’s sudden decision to “step aside” and “let the happy ones pass by.” And now he could in no way bring himself, as he had earlier, to lay his heart bare again and tell about “the queen of his soul.” It sickened him to do it before these cold people, “fastening into him like bedbugs.” And so to their repeated questions he declared briefly and sharply:

“Well, and I decided to kill myself. Why go on living? That question jumped up of itself. Her first one had appeared, her indisputable one, her offender, but come galloping with love after five years to round off the offense with lawful marriage. Well, and I understood that everything was lost for me… And behind me disgrace, and that blood, Grigory’s blood… Why live? So I went to redeem the pistols I’d pawned, to load one and put a bullet into my noggin by dawn…”

“And at night a grand feast?”

“At night a grand feast. Eh, the devil, gentlemen, finish quickly. I certainly meant to shoot myself, right near here, past the edge of the village, and I’d have dealt with myself around five o’clock in the morning, and I had a slip of paper ready in my pocket; I wrote it at Perkhotin’s when I loaded the pistol. Here it is, the slip of paper, read it. It isn’t for your sake I’m telling it!” he added suddenly with contempt. He tossed the slip of paper from his waistcoat pocket onto the table in front of them; the investigators read it with curiosity and, as is the custom, attached it to the file.

“And you still did not think of washing your hands, even when going in to Mr. Perkhotin’s? You were not afraid of suspicion, then?”

“What suspicion? Suspicion or none, it’s all the same, I’d have galloped off here and shot myself at five o’clock, and nobody would have had time to do anything. Why, if it hadn’t been for what happened to my father, you wouldn’t have found out anything and wouldn’t have come here. Oh, it’s the devil who did it, the devil killed my father, it’s through the devil that you found out so soon too! How did you manage to get here so soon? A marvel, a fantasy!”

“Mr. Perkhotin told us that when you came in to his place you were holding in your hands… in your bloodstained hands… your money… a large amount of money… a wad of hundred-ruble notes, and that the boy who serves him saw it too!”

“So it was, gentlemen, I seem to remember that it was.”

“Now one little question comes up. Could you not tell us,” Nikolai Parfenovich began extraordinarily gently, “where you suddenly got so much money, when it appears from the case, even by reckoning the time, that you did not stop at home?”

The prosecutor winced a little at the question, put so point-blank, but did not interrupt Nikolai Parfenovich.

“No, I didn’t stop at home,” answered Mitya, apparently very calmly, but looking at the ground.

“Allow me to repeat the question, in that case,” Nikolai Parfenovich continued, somehow creeping up. “Where could you have obtained such a sum all at once, when, by your own admission, at five o’clock that same day…”

“I needed ten rubles and pawned my pistols at Perkhotin’s, then went to Khokhlakova for three thousand, and she didn’t give it, and so on, and all that sort of thing,” Mitya interrupted sharply. “Yes, there you are, gentlemen, I was in need, and then suddenly thousands appeared, eh? You know, gentlemen, you’re both afraid now: what if he won’t say where he got it? Just so: I won’t say, gentlemen, you’ve guessed it, you won’t find out,” Mitya suddenly rapped out with extraordinary resolve. The investigators were silent for a tiny moment.

“Understand, Mr. Karamazov, that it is essentially necessary for us to know this,” Nikolai Parfenovich said quietly and meekly.

“I understand, and still I won’t say.”

The prosecutor too put in and again reminded him that the person under interrogation might of course decline to answer questions if he considered it most advantageous for himself, and so on, but in view of the harm the suspect might do himself by his silence, and especially in view of questions of such importance, which…

“And so on, gentlemen, and so on! Enough, I’ve heard that sermon before!” Mitya cut him off again. “I understand myself how important the matter is and that this is the most essential point, and still I won’t say.”

“What is it to us, sir? It isn’t our affair, after all, but yours; you will harm yourself,” Nikolai Parfenovich remarked nervously.

“You see, gentlemen, joking aside,” Mitya raised his eyes and looked firmly at them both. “From the very beginning I had a presentiment that we would butt heads on this point. But at first, when I began testifying earlier, it was all in a distant fog, everything was floating, and I was even so simple as to begin by proposing ‘mutual trust between us.’ Now I see myself that there could be no such trust, because all the same we would have come to this cursed fence! Well, and here we are! It can’t be, and that’s that! However, I don’t blame you, you can’t take me at my word either, I understand that!”

He fell gloomily silent.

“And could you not, without in the least breaking your resolve to keep silent about the chief point, could you not at the same time give us at least the slightest hint as to what precisely such strong motives could lead you to silence at a moment of the present testimony so dangerous for you?”

Mitya smiled sadly and somehow thoughtfully.

“I’m much kinder than you think, gentlemen; I’ll let you know the reason and drop you that hint, though you haven’t earned it. I keep silent, gentlemen, because there is disgrace in it for me. In the answer to the question where I got this money there lies for me such disgrace as could not be equaled even by the murder and robbery of my father, if I had murdered and robbed him. That is why I cannot speak. Because of the disgrace I cannot. What’s this, gentlemen, you want to write that down?”

“Yes, we will write it down,” Nikolai Parfenovich babbled.

“You oughtn’t to write that down, that about ‘disgrace.’ I showed it to you only out of the goodness of my heart, and I didn’t have to show it, I made you a present of it, so to speak, and you count it against me at once. Well, write, write whatever you like,” he concluded contemptuously and squeamishly. “I’m not afraid of you, and… I’m proud before you.”

“And will you not tell us what sort of disgrace this might be?” Nikolai Parfenovich began to babble.

The prosecutor frowned terribly.

“No, no, c’est fini, don’t trouble yourselves. And it isn’t worth soiling myself. I’ve soiled myself on you enough as it is. You aren’t worth it, neither you nor anyone… Enough, gentlemen, I break it off.”

This was said too decisively. Nikolai Parfenovich stopped insisting, but from Ippolit Kirillovich’s looks he managed in a flash to see that the man had not yet lost hope.

“Can you not at least state what was the size of the sum in your hands when you came in with it to Mr. Perkhotin, that is, how many rubles exactly?”

“I can’t state that either.”

“To Mr. Perkhotin, it seems, you declared it was three thousand, supposedly received by you from Mrs. Khokhlakova?”

“Maybe I did declare it. Enough, gentlemen, I won’t say how much.”

“Kindly describe, in that case, how you drove here and everything you did after arriving here.”

“Oh, ask everyone here about that. But then, I dare say I’ll tell it myself.”

He told it, but we will not reproduce the story. He told it drily, cursorily. Of the raptures of his love he did not speak at all. He did tell, however, how his resolve to shoot himself had passed, “in view of new facts.” He told it without giving reasons, without going into details. And the investigators did not trouble him much this time either: it was clear that for them too the main point did not lie there now.

“We will verify all this; we will come back to everything during the questioning of the witnesses, which will of course be conducted in your presence,” Nikolai Parfenovich concluded the interrogation. “Now, though, allow me to turn to you with the request that you lay out here on the table all your things that you have on you, and above all, all the money you now have.”

“Money, gentlemen? Certainly, I understand it’s necessary. I’m even surprised you weren’t curious earlier. True, I couldn’t go anywhere, I’m sitting in plain view. Well, here it is, my money, here, count it, take it, that’s all of it, I think.”

He took everything out of his pockets, even the small change; he pulled out two twenty-kopeck pieces from the side pocket of his waistcoat. They counted the money; it turned out to be eight hundred and thirty-six rubles and forty kopecks.

“And is that all?” asked the investigator.

“That’s all.”

“You were pleased to say just now, while giving your testimony, that you left three hundred rubles at the Plotnikovs’ shop, gave Perkhotin ten, the coachman twenty, lost two hundred here, then…”

Nikolai Parfenovich counted it all up. Mitya readily helped. They recalled every kopeck and included it in the reckoning. Nikolai Parfenovich quickly totted up the sum.

“With these eight hundred, then, you had at first altogether about fifteen hundred?”

“So it seems,” Mitya snapped.

“How is it, then, that everyone asserts there was much more?”

“Let them assert it.”

“And you yourself asserted it.”

“And I myself asserted it.”

“We will verify all this further by the evidence of other persons not yet questioned; do not be uneasy about your money, it will be kept where it should be and will be at your service at the end of all… that has begun… if it turns out, or, so to speak, is proved, that you have an indisputable right to it. Well, sir, and now…”

Nikolai Parfenovich suddenly stood up and firmly announced to Mitya that he was “compelled and obliged” to carry out a most detailed and most exact examination “both of your clothing and of everything…”

“Certainly, gentlemen, I’ll turn out all my pockets, if you like.”

And he really did start turning out his pockets.

“It will even be necessary to take off your clothes.”

“What? Undress? Pfoo, the devil! Search me as I am! Can’t you do it like this?”

“By no means, Dmitri Fyodorovich. You must take off your clothes.”

“As you wish,” Mitya submitted gloomily, “only please, not here; behind the curtains. Who is going to do the examining?”

“Behind the curtains, of course,” Nikolai Parfenovich bowed his head in sign of agreement. His little face expressed even a special gravity.