XII. And There Was No Murder Either

“Allow me, gentlemen of the jury, a human life is at stake here, and one must be more careful. We heard how the prosecution itself testified that up to the very last day, up to today, up to the day of the trial, it hesitated to accuse the defendant of full and complete premeditation of the murder, hesitated until this very fatal ‘drunken’ letter presented to the court today. ‘It was accomplished as it was written!’ But again I repeat: he ran to her, after her, solely and only to find out where she was. That, after all, is an irrefutable fact. Had she happened to be at home, he would not have run anywhere, but would have stayed with her and would not have kept what he had promised in the letter. He ran by chance and suddenly, and perhaps he did not even remember his ‘drunken’ letter at all then. ‘He grabbed a pestle, they say’—and remember how out of this one pestle a whole psychology was deduced for us: why, they say, he was bound to take this pestle for a weapon, to seize it as a weapon, and so on, and so on. Here a most ordinary thought occurs to me: well, what if this pestle had not been lying in view, not on the shelf from which the defendant snatched it, but had been put away in a cupboard?—why, then it would not have flashed before the defendant’s eyes, and he would have run off without a weapon, with empty hands, and so perhaps he would then have killed no one. How, then, can I draw conclusions from the pestle as proof of arming and premeditation? Yes, but he shouted in the taverns that he would kill his father, and two days before, on the evening when he wrote his drunken letter, he was quiet and quarreled in the tavern with only one merchant’s clerk, ‘because, they say, a Karamazov could not help quarreling.’ And I will answer to this that if he had planned such a murder, and according to a plan at that, according to what was written, then surely he would not have quarreled even with the clerk, and perhaps would not have gone into the tavern at all, because a soul that has planned such a deed seeks quiet and self-effacement, seeks to disappear, so as not to be seen, not to be heard: ‘Forget about me, if you can,’ and this not from calculation only, but from instinct. Gentlemen of the jury, psychology has two ends, and we too know how to understand psychology. As for all these tavern shouts during the whole of this month, how many times do children or drunken revelers, coming out of pothouses and quarreling with one another, shout: ‘I’ll kill you,’ but surely they don’t kill. And this fatal letter itself—well, is it not also drunken irritation, the shout of a man coming out of a pothouse: I’ll kill you, he says, I’ll kill the lot of you! Why not so, why could it not have been so? Why is this letter fatal, why, on the contrary, is it not ridiculous? Why, precisely because the corpse of the murdered father has been found, because a witness saw the defendant in the garden, armed and running away, and was himself struck down by him, therefore everything was accomplished as written, and therefore the letter is not ridiculous but fatal. Thank God, we have reached the point: ‘if he was in the garden, it means he killed.’ With these two little words, ‘if he was, then it certainly means,’ everything is exhausted, the whole accusation: ‘he was, so it means.’ And what if it does not mean, even though he was? Oh, I agree that the sum of the facts, the coincidence of the facts, is really rather eloquent. But examine, however, all these facts separately, without being swayed by their sum: why, for example, will the prosecution not for anything allow the truthfulness of the defendant’s testimony that he ran away from his father’s window? Remember even the sarcasms in which the prosecution indulges here concerning the respectfulness and the ‘pious’ feelings that suddenly seized the murderer. And what if there really was something of the sort here, that is, if not respectfulness of feeling, then piety of feeling? ‘My mother must have prayed God for me at that minute,’ the defendant testifies at the investigation, and so he ran away as soon as he had made sure that Miss Svetlova was not in his father’s house. ‘But he could not have made sure through the window,’ the prosecution objects to us. And why could he not? Why, the window did open at the signals given by the defendant. Here Fyodor Pavlovich might have uttered some word or other of the sort, some cry or other of the sort might have escaped him—and the defendant could suddenly have made certain that Miss Svetlova was not there. Why necessarily suppose it was as we imagine, as we have proposed to imagine? In reality a thousand things may flash by that escape the observation of the subtlest novelist. ‘Yes, but Grigory saw the door open, and therefore the defendant was surely in the house, and therefore he killed.’ About this door, gentlemen of the jury… You see, only one person testifies about this open door, a person who was, however, at the time in such a state himself that… But so be it, so be it, let us say the door was open, let us say the defendant denied it, lied out of a feeling of self-defense so understandable in his position, so be it, so be it, let us say he got into the house, was in the house—well, and what then, why necessarily, if he was there, did he kill? He could have burst in, run through the rooms, could have pushed his father, could even have struck his father, but, having made sure that Miss Svetlova was not with him, he ran away, glad that she was not there and that he had run away without killing his father. Perhaps it was precisely for this reason that a minute later he jumped down from the fence to Grigory, whom he had struck down in the heat of the moment, because he was in a condition to feel a pure feeling, a feeling of compassion and pity, because he had run away from the temptation to kill his father, because he felt in himself a pure heart and joy that he had not killed his father. Eloquently to the point of horror the prosecutor describes to us the terrible state of the defendant in the village of Mokroye, when love opened to him anew, calling him into a new life, and when he could no longer love, because behind him was the bloodied corpse of his father, and beyond the corpse, punishment. And nevertheless the prosecutor did allow love, which he explained according to his psychology: ‘The drunken state, he says, the criminal is being driven to execution, there is still long to wait, and so on, and so on.’ But have you not created a different person, Mr. Prosecutor, I ask again? Is the defendant so, is he so coarse and soulless that he could still think at that moment of love and of wriggling before the court, if his father’s blood were really on him? No, no, and no! No sooner had it been revealed that she loved him, was calling him to go with her, was promising him a new happiness—oh, I swear, he must then have felt a double, a triple need to kill himself, and he would certainly have killed himself if his father’s corpse had been lying behind him! Oh no, he would not have forgotten where his pistols lay! I know the defendant: the wild, wooden heartlessness with which the prosecution has charged him is incompatible with his character. He would have killed himself, that is certain; he did not kill himself precisely because ‘his mother prayed God for him,’ and his heart was innocent of his father’s blood. He was tormented, he grieved that night in Mokroye only over the old man Grigory whom he had struck down, and prayed to God within himself that the old man would get up and come to, that his blow would not be fatal and that punishment for it would pass him by. Why not accept such an interpretation of events? What firm proof do we have that the defendant is lying to us? But what about the father’s corpse, they will point out to us at once again: he ran out, he did not kill, well, then who killed the old man?

“I repeat, here is the whole logic of the prosecution: who killed, if not he? There is no one, they say, to put in his place. Gentlemen of the jury, is that so? Is it really, actually so, that there is absolutely no one at all to put in his place? We heard how the prosecution counted off on its fingers all those who were and all those who had been in that house that night. Five persons were found. Three of them, I agree, are entirely out of the question: the murdered man himself, old Grigory, and his wife. That leaves, then, the defendant and Smerdyakov, and so the prosecutor exclaims with pathos that the defendant points to Smerdyakov because he has no one else to point to, that if there were someone else here, a sixth, even the ghost of some sixth, then the defendant himself would at once give up accusing Smerdyakov, ashamed of it, and would point to this sixth. But, gentlemen of the jury, why could I not conclude exactly the opposite? There stand two: the defendant and Smerdyakov—why should I not say that you accuse my client solely because you have no one else to accuse? And there is no one else only because you, with complete prejudice, have excluded Smerdyakov beforehand from all suspicion. Yes, it is true, only the defendant himself, his two brothers, and Miss Svetlova point to Smerdyakov, and that is all. But surely there is someone else among those who testify: it is a certain, though unclear, ferment in society of some question, of some suspicion, some unclear rumor is heard, one feels that some sort of expectation exists. Finally, a certain juxtaposition of facts also testifies, a very characteristic one, though, I confess, an indefinite one: in the first place, this fit of the falling sickness precisely on the day of the catastrophe, a fit which the prosecutor for some reason was forced to defend and uphold so assiduously. Then this sudden suicide of Smerdyakov on the eve of the trial. Then the no less sudden testimony of the defendant’s elder brother, today in court, who until now had believed in his brother’s guilt and who suddenly brings the money and also proclaims, once again, the name of Smerdyakov as the murderer! Oh, I am fully convinced, together with the court and the prosecution, that Ivan Karamazov is ill and in a fever, that his testimony may really have been a desperate attempt, conceived, besides, in delirium, to save his brother by shifting the blame onto the dead man. But nevertheless, all the same, the name of Smerdyakov has been pronounced, and again something enigmatic seems to be heard. Something here seems to have been left unsaid, gentlemen of the jury, and left unfinished. And perhaps it will yet be said. But let us leave that for now, that is still ahead. The court decided a while ago to continue the session, but now, for the time being, while we wait, I could nevertheless remark on something, for example, regarding the character sketch of the late Smerdyakov, drawn so subtly and so talentedly by the prosecutor. But while I marvel at the talent, I cannot, however, fully agree with the substance of the sketch. I visited Smerdyakov, I saw him and spoke with him, and he made an entirely different impression on me. He was weak in health, that is true, but in character, in heart—oh no, he was not at all so weak a man as the prosecution concluded. In particular I did not find timidity in him, that timidity which the prosecutor described to us so characteristically. Of simple-heartedness there was none in him at all; on the contrary, I found a terrible mistrustfulness hiding under naivety, and a mind capable of contemplating a very great deal. Oh! the prosecution all too simple-heartedly took him for feeble-minded. On me he made a perfectly definite impression: I left with the conviction that this being was decidedly spiteful, inordinately ambitious, vindictive, and burningly envious. I gathered some information: he hated his origin, was ashamed of it, and remembered with a gnashing of teeth that he was ‘descended from the Stinking woman.’ Toward the servant Grigory and his wife, who had been the benefactors of his childhood, he was disrespectful. He cursed Russia and laughed at her. He dreamed of going away to France in order to make himself over into a Frenchman. He had often and at length talked even earlier of his lacking the means for this. It seems to me that he loved no one but himself, while he respected himself strangely highly. Enlightenment he saw in good clothes, in clean shirtfronts, and in polished boots. Considering himself (and there are facts to support this) the illegitimate son of Fyodor Pavlovich, he might have hated his position in comparison with his master’s legitimate children: to them, he would say, everything, and to him nothing, to them all the rights, to them the inheritance, while he is only a cook. He told me that he himself, together with Fyodor Pavlovich, had put the money into the envelope. The purpose of this sum—a sum that might have made his career—was of course hateful to him. Besides, he saw three thousand rubles in bright new rainbow-colored notes (I asked him about this on purpose). Oh, never show an envious and vain man a large sum of money all at once, and he had seen such a sum in one hand for the first time. The impression of the rainbow-colored wad might have reflected itself morbidly in his imagination, for the first time, for the present, without any consequences. The highly talented prosecutor sketched for us with unusual subtlety all the pros and contras of the supposition that Smerdyakov could be accused of the murder, and he asked particularly: why should the other have pretended to have a falling fit? Yes, but he may not have pretended at all, the fit may have come quite naturally, but surely it could also have passed off quite naturally, and the sick man could have come to. Not recovered, let us say, but all the same at some point come to himself and wake up, as happens with the falling sickness. The prosecution asks: where is the moment when Smerdyakov committed the murder? But it is extremely easy to point out this moment. He could have come to and got up from a deep sleep (for he was only asleep: after fits of the falling sickness a deep sleep always comes on) precisely at the instant when old Grigory, seizing the escaping defendant by the leg on the fence, howled for the whole neighborhood to hear: ‘Parricide!’ That extraordinary cry, in the stillness and in the darkness, could very well have woken Smerdyakov, whose sleep by that time may not have been very sound: he may naturally have begun waking up an hour before. Having got up from his bed, he sets off almost unconsciously and without any intention toward the cry, to see what it is. In his head there is a morbid fog, his reason is still dozing, but now he is in the garden, he goes up to the lighted windows and hears the terrible news from the master, who was of course glad to see him. His reason flares up at once in his head. From the frightened master he learns all the details. And so, gradually, in his disordered and sick brain, an idea takes shape—terrible, but tempting and irresistibly logical: to kill, to take the three thousand in money, and afterward to shift everything onto the young master: whom will they think of now, if not the young master, whom can they accuse, if not the young master—all the evidence, he was here? A terrible thirst for money, for booty, might have taken his breath away, together with the consideration of impunity. Oh, these sudden and irresistible impulses come so often when the occasion offers and, above all, come suddenly, to murderers of this kind, who a minute before did not know that they would want to kill! And so Smerdyakov could have gone in to the master and carried out his plan, with what, with what weapon—why, with the first stone he picked up in the garden. But what for, with what aim? Why, the three thousand, that is a career. Oh! I am not contradicting myself: the money may have been there and have existed. And perhaps even Smerdyakov alone knew where to find it, where exactly the master kept it. ‘Well, and the wrapper of the money, and the torn envelope on the floor?’ A while ago, when the prosecutor, speaking of this envelope, set out his extremely subtle consideration that it was precisely an unpracticed thief who could have left it on the floor, precisely one like Karamazov, and not at all Smerdyakov, who would never for anything have left such evidence against himself—a while ago, gentlemen of the jury, as I listened, I suddenly felt that I was hearing something extremely familiar. And imagine, this very same consideration, this conjecture about how Karamazov might have dealt with the envelope, I had already heard exactly two days before from Smerdyakov himself; more than that, it was just this that struck me about him: it precisely seemed to me that he was falsely playing the innocent, running on ahead, forcing this idea on me, so that I would arrive at this very consideration myself, and as it were prompting me to it. Did he not prompt this consideration to the investigation as well? Did he not force it on the highly talented prosecutor as well? They will say: and the old woman, Grigory’s wife? Why, she heard the sick man moaning beside her all night long. So she did, but surely this consideration is extremely shaky. I knew a lady who complained bitterly that a little cur in the yard had woken her all night and kept her from sleeping. And yet the poor little dog, as it became known, had yapped only two or three times in the whole night. And this is natural; a person sleeps and suddenly hears a moan, he wakes up annoyed at having been woken, but falls asleep again instantly. Some two hours later there is another moan, again he wakes up and again falls asleep; finally, a moan once more, and again two hours later, three times in all in the night. In the morning the sleeper gets up and complains that someone moaned all night long and woke him ceaselessly. But that is just how it is bound to seem to him; the intervals of sleep, two hours each, he slept through and does not remember, and has remembered only the minutes of his waking, and so it seems to him that he was woken all night long. But why, why, the prosecution exclaims, did Smerdyakov not confess in his posthumous note? ‘There was conscience enough, it says, for the one thing and not for the other.’ But allow me: conscience is already repentance, but there may have been no repentance in the suicide, but only despair. Despair and repentance are two entirely different things. Despair may be spiteful and implacable, and the suicide, laying hands on himself, may at that moment have doubly hated those whom he had envied all his life. Gentlemen of the jury, beware of a judicial error! In what, in what way is everything I have just presented and depicted to you implausible? Find the error in my exposition, find the impossibility, the absurdity! But if there is even a shadow of possibility, even a shadow of plausibility in my suppositions—refrain from the verdict. And is there only a shadow here? I swear by all that is sacred, I fully believe in my interpretation of the murder, the one I have just presented to you. And above all, above all, I am troubled and driven out of patience by the same thought, that of the whole mass of facts heaped up by the prosecution against the defendant, there is not a single one that is in any way precise and irrefutable, and that the unhappy man is perishing solely through the sum of these facts. Yes, this sum is terrible; this blood, this blood dripping from the fingers, the linen in blood, this dark night ringing with the howl of ‘Parricide!’ and the man shouting it falling with a broken head, and then this mass of sayings, testimonies, gestures, shouts—oh, this has such an influence, it can so bribe one’s conviction, but can it, gentlemen of the jury, can it bribe your conviction? Remember, you have been given a boundless power, the power to bind and to loose. But the stronger the power, the more terrible its application! I do not retreat one iota from what I have just said, but let it be, so be it, let me too agree for a minute with the prosecution that my unhappy client stained his hands with his father’s blood. This is only a supposition, I repeat, I do not doubt his innocence for an instant, but so be it, I will suppose that my defendant is guilty of parricide, but listen, nevertheless, to what I have to say, even if I were to allow such a supposition. It is in my heart to tell you something more, for I sense a great struggle in your hearts and minds too… Forgive me these words, gentlemen of the jury, about your hearts and minds. But I want to be truthful and sincere to the end. Let us all be sincere!…”

At this point the defense counsel was interrupted by rather loud applause. In fact, he had pronounced his last words with such a sincere-sounding note that everyone felt that perhaps he really did have something to say and that what he would say now was the most important thing of all. But the presiding judge, hearing the applause, loudly threatened to “clear” the courtroom if “such an incident” was repeated once more. Everything fell silent, and Fetyukovich began in a sort of new, heartfelt voice, entirely different from the one in which he had spoken until then.