VI. The First Meeting with Smerdyakov

This was already the third time since his return from Moscow that Ivan Fyodorovich was going to talk with Smerdyakov. The first time after the catastrophe he had seen him and talked with him on the very first day of his arrival, then he had visited him once more two weeks later. But after this second time he had stopped his meetings with Smerdyakov, so that it was now more than a month since he had seen him, and he had heard almost nothing about him. Ivan Fyodorovich had returned from Moscow that time only on the fifth day after his parent’s death, so that he did not find even the coffin: the burial had taken place just the day before his arrival. The reason for Ivan Fyodorovich’s delay was that Alyosha, not knowing his exact Moscow address, had turned to Katerina Ivanovna in order to send a telegram, and she, also not knowing his actual address, had telegraphed to her sister and aunt, counting on Ivan Fyodorovich calling on them as soon as he arrived in Moscow. But he called on them only on the fourth day after his arrival and, having read the telegram, of course came flying to us at once, headlong. Here he met Alyosha first, but, after talking with him, was very surprised that Alyosha would not even think of suspecting Mitya but pointed straight at Smerdyakov as the murderer, which ran contrary to all other opinions in our town. Having then seen the police chief and the prosecutor and learned the details of the charge and the arrest, he was even more surprised at Alyosha and ascribed his opinion solely to his brotherly feeling, roused to the last degree, and to his compassion for Mitya, whom Alyosha, as Ivan knew, loved very much. By the way, let us say just two words, once and for all, about Ivan’s feelings toward his brother Dmitri Fyodorovich: he decidedly did not love him, and at the very most he sometimes felt compassion for him, but even that was mixed with great contempt, amounting to squeamish disgust. Mitya as a whole, even his whole figure, was extremely unsympathetic to him. Ivan looked upon Katerina Ivanovna’s love for Mitya with indignation. With the accused Mitya, however, he had also had a meeting on the first day of his arrival, and this meeting not only did not weaken his conviction of Mitya’s guilt but even strengthened it. He found his brother at that time anxious, in a morbid agitation. Mitya was talkative, but absentminded and all over the place, spoke very sharply, accused Smerdyakov, and got terribly muddled. Most of all he kept talking about the same three thousand that the dead man had “stolen” from him. “The money was mine, it was mine,” Mitya kept insisting, “even if I had stolen it, I would have been in the right.” He hardly disputed any of the evidence that stood against him, and if he interpreted the facts in his own favor, it was again very confusedly and absurdly, generally as though he did not even wish to justify himself at all before Ivan or anyone else; on the contrary, he got angry, proudly disdained the accusations, swore, and boiled over. At Grigory’s testimony about the open door he only laughed contemptuously and insisted that “the devil opened it.” But he could offer no coherent explanation of this fact. At this first meeting he even managed to insult Ivan Fyodorovich, telling him sharply that it was not for those who themselves maintained that “everything is permitted” to suspect him and question him. In general he was very unfriendly to Ivan Fyodorovich this time. Right after this meeting with Mitya, Ivan Fyodorovich had then gone to Smerdyakov.

While still in the train, flying from Moscow, he had kept thinking about Smerdyakov and about his last conversation with him on the evening before his departure. Much troubled him, much seemed suspicious. But in giving his evidence to the investigator, Ivan Fyodorovich kept silent for the time being about that conversation. He put it all off until he had seen Smerdyakov. Smerdyakov was in the town hospital at the time. Doctor Herzenstube and the physician Varvinsky, whom Ivan Fyodorovich met at the hospital, answered Ivan Fyodorovich’s insistent questions firmly that Smerdyakov’s falling sickness was beyond doubt, and they were even surprised at the question: “Wasn’t he shamming on the day of the catastrophe?” They let him understand that this fit had even been an unusual one, that it had lasted and recurred for several days, so that the patient’s life had been in decided danger, and that only now, after the measures taken, could it be said with assurance that the patient would live, though it was quite possible (Doctor Herzenstube added) that his reason would remain partly disordered “if not for life, then for a rather prolonged time.” To Ivan Fyodorovich’s impatient question whether “that means he is mad now?” they answered that “this is not yet so in the full sense, but certain abnormalities are to be observed.” Ivan Fyodorovich resolved to find out for himself what these abnormalities were. At the hospital they admitted him at once. Smerdyakov was in a separate room and was lying on a cot. Right next to him there was another cot, occupied by a feeble townsman, all swollen with dropsy, evidently ready to die tomorrow or the day after; he could not interfere with their conversation. Smerdyakov grinned mistrustfully on catching sight of Ivan Fyodorovich and in the first instant even seemed to grow timid. So at least it flashed upon Ivan Fyodorovich. But it was only an instant; on the contrary, for all the rest of the time Smerdyakov almost astonished him by his calm. From the very first glance at him Ivan Fyodorovich was convinced beyond doubt of his complete and extraordinary state of illness: he was very weak, he spoke slowly and as though moving his tongue with difficulty; he had grown very thin and sallow. Through the whole twenty minutes or so of the visit he complained of a headache and of an aching in all his limbs. His dry, eunuch-like face seemed to have become so small, the hair at his temples was tousled, and in place of the forelock only a single thin little wisp of hair stuck up. But the screwed-up left eye, which seemed to be hinting at something, betrayed the former Smerdyakov. “Even talking with a clever man is worth it,” Ivan Fyodorovich at once remembered. He sat down at his feet on a stool. Smerdyakov stirred his whole body on the bed with suffering, but did not speak first; he kept silent, and he no longer looked very curious, as it were.

“Can you talk to me?” asked Ivan Fyodorovich. “I won’t tire you much.”

“I very well can, sir,” Smerdyakov mumbled in a weak voice. “Have you been pleased to arrive long ago?” he added condescendingly, as though encouraging an embarrassed visitor.

“Only today… To clear up the mess you’ve all cooked up here.”

Smerdyakov sighed.

“What are you sighing for, you knew, didn’t you?” Ivan Fyodorovich blurted straight out.

Smerdyakov kept a solid silence.

“How could I not know, sir? It was clear beforehand. Only how could I know, sir, that they’d go and do it like that?”

“Do what? Don’t you wriggle! Why, didn’t you predict that you would have a falling fit the moment you climbed down into the cellar? You pointed straight at the cellar like that.”

“Have you already stated that in your testimony?” Smerdyakov inquired calmly.

Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly got angry.

“No, I haven’t stated it yet, but I certainly will. You must explain a great deal to me right now, brother, and know this, my dear fellow, that I won’t allow anyone to play games with me!”

“And what would I want such a game for, sir, when all my hope is in you, just like in the Lord God, sir!” said Smerdyakov, still quite calmly, and only closing his little eyes for a moment.

“In the first place,” Ivan Fyodorovich began, “I know that a falling fit cannot be predicted beforehand. I’ve made inquiries, so don’t wriggle. The day and the hour cannot be predicted. Then how did you predict both the day and the hour to me that time, and the cellar into the bargain? How could you know beforehand that you would fall down precisely into that cellar in a fit, if you didn’t sham the falling sickness on purpose?”

“I had to go to the cellar anyhow, sir, several times a day even, sir,” Smerdyakov drawled unhurriedly. “In just the same way a year ago I went flying off the attic, sir. It’s for certain sure that the falling sickness can’t be predicted beforehand by the day and the hour, but one can always have a presentiment.”

“But you predicted the day and the hour!”

“As to my falling sickness, sir, you had best inquire of the doctors here, sir: whether it was a genuine one with me or not a genuine one, and I have nothing more to say to you on this subject.”

“And the cellar? How did you foreknow about the cellar?”

“You do keep on about that very cellar! When I climbed down into that cellar that time, I was in fear and in doubtation; mostly in fear, because, bein’ deprived of you, I no longer expected protection from anyone in the whole world. So I climb down into that very cellar that time and think: ‘Here it’ll come now, now it’ll strike, will I fall or not?’ and from that very doubtation that same inevitable spasm suddenly seized me by the throat, sir… well, and down I went flying. All this very thing, and our whole previous conversation with you, sir, on the evening of the day before, at the gate, sir, how I told you then of my fear, and about the cellar, sir, all this I disclosed in detail to Mr. Doctor Herzenstube and to the investigator Nikolai Parfenovich, and they wrote it all down in the record, sir. And the doctor here, Mr. Varvinsky, specially insisted before all of them that it happened precisely from thinking about it, that is, from that very apprehensiveness, ‘will I fall or won’t I?’ And just then it caught me. So they wrote it down, sir, that it was bound for certain sure to happen just that way, that is, from my fear alone, sir.”

Having said this, Smerdyakov, as though worn out with fatigue, drew a deep breath.

“So you’ve already declared that in your testimony?” asked Ivan Fyodorovich, somewhat taken aback. He had precisely meant to frighten him by saying that he would declare their conversation of that time, and it turned out that Smerdyakov had already declared it all himself.

“What have I to be afraid of? Let them write down the whole true truth,” Smerdyakov said firmly.

“And did you tell them everything, word for word, about our conversation at the gate?”

“No, not exactly everything word for word, sir.”

“And did you also tell them that you know how to sham the falling sickness, as you boasted to me then?”

“No, I didn’t tell them that either, sir.”

“Now tell me, why did you send me to Chermashnya that time?”

“I was afraid you’d go off to Moscow; Chermashnya is nearer, after all, sir.”

“You’re lying, you yourself urged me to leave: go away, you said, keep clear of sin!”

“That I said then solely out of friendship for you and my heartfelt devotion, sir, having a presentiment of trouble in the house, out of pity for you. Only I pitied myself more than you, sir. That’s why I said: go away, keep clear of sin, so that you would understand that things would go badly at home, and would stay to protect your parent.”

“Then you should have said it more plainly, you fool!” Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly flared up.

“How could I have said it more plainly then, sir? It was only fear speaking in me, sir, and you might have got angry, too. I might, of course, have feared that Dmitri Fyodorovich would make some sort of scandal and carry off that very money, since they regarded it as good as their own, but who could have known it would end in such a murderment? I thought they would simply just make off with that three thousand rubles that was lying under the master’s mattress, sir, in an envelope, sir, but there they went and killed him, sir. How could even you have guessed, sir?”

“Well, if you say yourself that it couldn’t be guessed, then how could I have guessed and stayed? What are you muddling?” Ivan Fyodorovich said, pondering.

“You could have guessed because I was steering you to Chermashnya instead of to that Moscow, sir.”

“But how could anyone guess from that!”

Smerdyakov seemed very tired and again was silent for a minute.

“By that very thing, sir, you could have guessed, sir, that if I’m turning you aside from Moscow to Chermashnya, it means I wish for your presence here close by, because Moscow is far, and Dmitri Fyodorovich, knowin’ you were not far off, would not be so emboldened. And also you could come with greater speed, in case of anything, and protect me too, for I had pointed out to you Grigory Vasilyich’s illness besides, and also that I was afraid of the falling sickness. And having explained to you about those knocks by which one could get in to the deceased, and that Dmitri Fyodorovich knew all of them through me, I thought you would guess then yourself that they would certainly do something, and would not go even to Chermashnya, but would stay altogether.”

“He talks very coherently,” thought Ivan Fyodorovich, “though he mumbles; what disorder of the faculties was Herzenstube talking about?”

“You’re being cunning with me, the devil take you!” he exclaimed, getting angry.

“And I, I confess, thought then that you had guessed completely,” Smerdyakov parried with the most simple-hearted air.

“If I had guessed, I would have stayed!” cried Ivan Fyodorovich, flaring up again.

“Well, sir, and I thought that you, havin’ guessed everything, were leaving as fast as possible only to keep clear of sin, only to run off somewhere, saving yourself out of fear, sir.”

“You thought everyone was the same coward as you?”

“Forgive me, sir, I thought you were like me too.”

“Of course I ought to have guessed,” Ivan said in agitation, “and indeed I did guess at something vile on your part… Only you’re lying, you’re lying again,” he cried, suddenly remembering. “Do you remember how you came up to the carriage then and said to me: ‘Even talking with a clever man is worth it.’ So you were glad that I was leaving, since you praised me?”

Smerdyakov sighed again and again. Something like color seemed to come into his face.

“If I was glad,” he said, gasping somewhat, “it was solely because you agreed to Chermashnya and not Moscow. Because it’s nearer, all the same; only those very words I said to you then not in praise, sir, but in reproach. You didn’t make that out, sir.”

“What reproach?”

“Why, that, having a presentiment of such a misfortune, you were abandoning your own parent, sir, and didn’t want to protect us, because they could always haul me in over that three thousand, sir, saying I’d stolen it.”

“The devil take you!” Ivan swore again. “Wait: did you tell the investigator and the prosecutor about the signals, about those knocks?”

“I told them everything just as it was, sir.”

Again Ivan Fyodorovich was inwardly surprised.

“If I thought about anything then,” he began again, “it was solely about some vileness on your part. Dmitri might kill, but that he would steal, I didn’t believe then… But from you I expected any vileness. You yourself told me you know how to sham the falling sickness; why did you tell me that?”

“Out of my simple-heartedness alone. And never in my life have I shammed the falling sickness on purpose, I said it just so, to boast before you. Pure foolishness, sir. I came to love you very much then and was with you in all simplicity.”

“My brother accuses you outright of killing him and of stealing.”

“Well, what else is left to them?” Smerdyakov grinned bitterly. “And who will believe them after all that evidence? Grigory Vasilyevich saw the door open, sir; how can it be after that, sir? Well, what of it, God be with them! They’re trembling to save themselves…”

He was quietly silent for a while and suddenly, as though on reflection, added:

“Why, there it is again, sir, that very thing: they wish to put it on me, that this is the work of my hands, sir; I’ve heard that already, sir; but take just this very thing, that I’m a master at shamming the falling sickness: would I have told you beforehand that I know how to sham, if I had really had some design on your parent then? If I had already planned such a murderment, could one be such a fool as to tell beforehand such evidence against oneself, and to the man’s own son, too, good gracious, sir?! Does that look like likelihood? For that to be possible, sir, why, on the contrary, never at all, sir. Here now, nobody hears this conversation of ours except Providence itself, sir, and if you were to tell it to the prosecutor and Nikolai Parfenovich, you could by that very thing defend me completely, sir: for what sort of villain is he, if he’s so simple-hearted beforehand? They can very well reason all that out.”

“Listen,” Ivan Fyodorovich rose from his place, struck by Smerdyakov’s last argument and breaking off the conversation, “I do not suspect you at all and even consider it ridiculous to accuse you… on the contrary, I’m grateful to you for setting my mind at rest. I’m going now, but I’ll come again. Goodbye for now, get well. Do you need anything?”

“I’m grateful for everything, sir. Marfa Ignatyevna doesn’t forget me, sir, and assists in everything, if I need anything, out of her former kindness. Kind people visit me daily.”

“Goodbye. I won’t tell, though, that you know how to sham… and I advise you not to testify to it either,” Ivan suddenly said for some reason.

“I awful well understand, sir. And if you don’t testify to that, then I, sir, won’t declare the whole of our conversation of that time at the gate either…”

Here it happened that Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly went out, and only after he had walked some ten paces down the corridor did he suddenly feel that there was some insulting meaning in Smerdyakov’s last phrase. He was about to go back, but this only flashed through him, and saying “Nonsense!” he quickly left the hospital. The main thing was that he felt he really had been set at rest, and precisely by the circumstance that the guilty one was not Smerdyakov but his brother Mitya, though one would have thought it ought to turn out the other way around. Why this was so he did not want to examine at the time; he even felt a disgust at rummaging in his sensations. He wanted, as it were, to forget something as quickly as possible. Then, in the course of the next few days, he became completely convinced of Mitya’s guilt, when he acquainted himself more closely and thoroughly with all the evidence weighing on him. There was the testimony of the most insignificant people, but almost overwhelming, for instance Fenya’s and her mother’s. About Perkhotin, about the tavern, about Plotnikov’s shop, about the witnesses at Mokroye, there was no need even to speak. Above all, the details weighed heavily. The news about the secret “knocks” struck the investigator and the prosecutor almost to the same degree as Grigory’s testimony about the open door. Grigory’s wife, Marfa Ignatyevna, in answer to Ivan Fyodorovich’s inquiry, declared to him straight out that Smerdyakov had lain the whole night behind their partition, “he wasn’t three steps from our bed,” and that although she herself had slept soundly, she had woken many times, hearing him moaning there: “He moaned the whole time, moaned without stopping.” Having talked with Herzenstube and told him his opinion that Smerdyakov did not seem to him mad at all but only weak, he only elicited a thin little smile from the old man. “And do you know what he is especially occupied with now?” he asked Ivan Fyodorovich. “He is learning French vocables by heart; there is a little notebook lying under his pillow, and the French words have been written out in Russian letters by someone, heh-heh-heh!” Ivan Fyodorovich at last abandoned all doubts. He could no longer even think of his brother Dmitri without loathing. One thing was strange, all the same: that Alyosha stubbornly went on maintaining that it was not Dmitri who had killed, but “in all probability” Smerdyakov. Ivan had always felt that Alyosha’s opinion counted highly with him, and so now he was greatly puzzled at him. It was strange, too, that Alyosha did not seek conversations with him about Mitya and never began them himself, but only answered Ivan’s questions. This too Ivan Fyodorovich noticed keenly. However, at that time he was very much distracted by one entirely unrelated circumstance: on arriving from Moscow, he had in the very first days given himself up entirely and irrevocably to his fiery and insane passion for Katerina Ivanovna. This is not the place to begin about this new passion of Ivan Fyodorovich’s, which was afterward reflected in the whole of his life: all this could serve as the canvas for another story, another novel, which I do not know whether I shall ever undertake. But all the same I cannot keep silent even now about the fact that when Ivan Fyodorovich, walking with Alyosha that night from Katerina Ivanovna’s, as I have already described, said to him “I’m not keen on her,” he was lying terribly at that moment: he loved her insanely, though it is true as well that at times he hated her so much that he could even have killed her. Many causes came together here: utterly shaken by what had happened with Mitya, she had thrown herself at Ivan Fyodorovich, who had come back to her again, as though at some savior of hers. She was hurt, insulted, humiliated in her feelings. And now there had appeared again the man who had loved her so much even before (oh, she knew that only too well), and whose mind and heart she had always placed so high above herself. But the strict young woman did not give herself up as a sacrifice entirely, in spite of all the Karamazov unrestraint of her lover’s desires and all his charm for her. At the same time she was tormented incessantly by remorse at having betrayed Mitya, and in the menacing, quarrelsome moments with Ivan (and there were many of them) she told him so outright. It was this that he had called, speaking with Alyosha, “lies upon lies.” There was, of course, in fact a great deal of lying here, and that irritated Ivan Fyodorovich most of all… but all this later. In a word, for a time he almost forgot about Smerdyakov. And yet, two weeks after his first visit to him, he again began to be tormented by the same strange thoughts as before. Suffice it to say that he began to ask himself incessantly: why had he, that time, on his last night in Fyodor Pavlovich’s house, before his departure, gone out quietly, like a thief, onto the stairs and listened to what his father was doing downstairs? Why had he remembered it with loathing afterward, why on the next morning, on the road, had he suddenly been seized with such anguish, and on entering Moscow said to himself: “I am a scoundrel!” And now it once occurred to him that because of all these tormenting thoughts he was perhaps ready to forget even Katerina Ivanovna, so strongly had they suddenly taken possession of him again! Just as he thought this, he met Alyosha in the street. He at once stopped him and suddenly put a question to him:

“Do you remember when Dmitri burst into the house after dinner and beat father, and afterward I told you in the yard that I reserve ‘the right to wish’ for myself? Tell me, did you think then that I wished for father’s death, or not?”

“I did,” Alyosha answered quietly.

“It was so, however; there was nothing to guess there. But didn’t it also occur to you then that what I wished was precisely that ‘one viper would devour the other,’ that is, precisely that Dmitri would kill father, and the sooner the better… and that I myself was even not averse to helping it along?”

Alyosha turned slightly pale and looked silently into his brother’s eyes.

“Speak, then!” exclaimed Ivan. “I want with all my strength to know what you thought then. I need to; the truth, the truth!” He drew a heavy breath, already looking at Alyosha beforehand with a sort of spite.

“Forgive me, I thought that too then,” Alyosha whispered, and fell silent, without adding a single “extenuating circumstance.”

“Thank you!” Ivan snapped and, leaving Alyosha, walked quickly on his way. From then on Alyosha noticed that brother Ivan had somehow begun abruptly to withdraw from him and even seemed to have taken a dislike to him, so that afterward he himself stopped going to see him. But at that moment, right after that meeting with him, Ivan Fyodorovich, without going home, suddenly headed for Smerdyakov’s again.