The Brothers Karamazov (67 page)

Three days later, he left the monastery in accordance with the wish of his late elder, who had directed him to “go out into the world.”

Book VIII: Mitya

Chapter 1: Kuzma Samsonov

WHILE GRUSHENKA, before starting out on her new life, was sending Dmitry Karamazov her regards and bidding him to remember forever the “short hour” during which she had loved him, Dmitry himself was having a hectic time, although he knew nothing of what was happening to her. For the previous two days he had been in such an unimaginable state that he could very well have contracted brain fever, as he said himself later. On the previous morning, Alyosha had not been able to find him anywhere and he had never turned up to meet Ivan at the inn. His landlady would not reveal his whereabouts, on his express orders. “I was fighting my fate, trying to escape it,” he said later about those two days. Terrified as he was to take his eye off Grushenka even for a second, he nevertheless made a hurried trip out of town for a few hours on urgent business. All these details came out later and were thoroughly documented, but for now we shall confine ourselves to the essential events of these two nightmarish days that preceded the horrible catastrophe that was suddenly to engulf him.

Although it was true that Grushenka had loved him “for an hour,” truly and sincerely, this had never prevented her from treating him cruelly, and at times with complete ruthlessness. The worst of it was that he could never make out what she really wanted. Neither his passionate tenderness nor his fits of violence were of any use: he felt that she would never yield to him either way and that he only risked making her angry, making her turn her back on him for good. He suspected then—and rightly as it turned out—that she herself was passing through a profound crisis, that she was desperately trying to decide something, and that she could not make the decision; he suspected, with good reason, that there were moments in which she actually loathed him, his passion for her, and everything about him. But with all that, he still never understood what was actually causing Grushenka’s torment. To him the whole business had only two possible outcomes: it would be either he, Mitya, or his father. It must be clearly noted here that he was certain his father would propose to Grushenka—if he had not done so already—for he never believed that the old lecher could get her for a mere three thousand rubles. Mitya knew Grushenka and her character too well for that. And this was why he was under the impression, much of the time, that Grushenka’s tenseness and torment came from the tantalizing choice before her: she could not decide which of the two to choose, which would be the more profitable choice. As to the imminent return of “the officer,” the man who had played such a fateful role in Grushenka’s life, Dmitry somehow did not even give it much thought during those days. It is true that Grushenka had not mentioned the matter to him recently, although she had told him about the letter from her seducer a month before and had even shown him some passages in it. Grushenka had done so to torment him, in one of her wicked moments, but, to her considerable surprise, Dmitry had shown very little interest in it. It would be difficult to explain why he had been so indifferent. Perhaps it was because he was so disgusted by the monstrousness and the horror of his rivalry with his own father over this woman that, at the time, he could not imagine anything worse or more threatening. Indeed, he somehow could not envisage this man who had suddenly come to life after vanishing for five years, and he did not believe in the man’s imminent appearance on the scene. Besides, in this first letter that Dmitry had seen, the man’s arrival was only hinted at and the whole letter seemed very vague and high-flown, and was filled with sentimental clichés. Actually, Grushenka had not let him see the closing lines, in which the sender’s forthcoming arrival was mentioned more definitely. Dmitry had also sensed Grushenka’s scorn for the message in that letter from Siberia, her contempt having escaped her in an unguarded moment. And since then, Grushenka had not mentioned her further communications with the new rival. So eventually Dmitry forgot about him altogether. In general, Dmitry felt that, whatever happened later, whichever way things turned out, he had to face the imminent clash with his father first. So, holding his breath, he waited for Grushenka’s decision, which he expected her to make without warning, on the spur of the moment. She might, for instance, say to him without any preamble: “Take me, I’m yours forever.” And that would be that: he would take her and they would leave at once for the edge of the world. Ah, yes, he would take her away at once, if not to the edge of the world, then at least as far as possible, to the edge of Russia, where he would marry her and live with her, knowing no one, here or there, or anywhere. Then a completely new life would start for them! Of that new, “virtuous” life (it absolutely had to be “virtuous”), he would dream and daydream constantly, obsessively. He craved that renewal and regeneration. The foul quagmire in which he was sinking of his own volition made him sick and, like so many others under such circumstances, he believed in the magic of a change of place—just to get away from this spot, to be surrounded by different people, to be in a different situation, where everything would be new and different! That is what Dmitry believed in and yearned for.

But all this would come about only if the whole business had a happy outcome. There was another possible outcome, though, a tragic one. She might suddenly say: “Go away. I’ve come to an agreement with your father and have decided to marry him. I don’t need you anymore.” Well, in that case . . . Actually, Mitya was none too sure what would happen then, and, up till the very last moment, he still didn’t know. That much must be said for him. He had no definite ideas and was not contemplating committing a crime. He watched, spied, and suffered all that time, but he expected the first, the happy, outcome to the fateful dilemma. He deliberately refused to envisage any other possibility.

There was something else, though, that also tormented him, a new and unrelated trouble, but one that was also fateful and that he could not resolve. If things did turn out well, if she did say to him, “I’m yours, take me away,” how would he take her away? Where would he get the necessary money? His resources, which for many years had consisted solely of the sums he received from his father, had now run dry. Grushenka, of course, had money, but Mitya’s pride would keep him from touching it: he had to pay for their journey himself and then earn their living by his own efforts; he could not live on her capital. The mere thought of accepting money from her made him physically sick.

I don’t want to dwell here on this attitude of his; I don’t wish to analyze it and will only state that this is how he felt at that particular moment. This feeling may have stemmed indirectly, unconsciously perhaps, from the guilt he felt over having dishonestly spent Katerina’s money. “Isn’t it enough to have acted despicably with the other one? Must I act like a despicable wretch with this one too?” he thought, as he was to admit later. Besides, he was worried that “if Grushenka should ever learn about that matter, she wouldn’t want to have anything to do with a wretch like me!” But where was he to get the money he needed so desperately? “Is it possible that the opportunity will be wasted and nothing will come of it, just because I have no money?” he ranted on in despair. “Ah, what a disgrace!”

I must say here, in anticipation, that he may have known where he could get hold of the money he needed and perhaps he knew exactly where it was hidden. I won’t go into the details for the time being, for it will become clear later on, but I will say that Dmitry’s situation was aggravated by his conviction that, before he could take the money, before he could consider himself “entitled” to it, he would first have to pay back the three thousand rubles he owed Katerina. “Otherwise,” he reasoned, “I’m nothing but a wretched, petty thief and I have no desire to start out on my new life as a petty thief.” And so he decided to turn the whole world upside down if he had to, in order to get three thousand rubles to pay back Katerina, 
before anything else
. This decision had taken shape on the road to the monastery. That day, when Grushenka had insulted Katerina and Mitya had heard of it from Alyosha, he had admitted his despicable act to Alyosha and asked him to tell Katerina about it, “if that would make her feel any better.” And, after leaving his young brother that night, Mitya had felt, in his wound-up state, that he would murder and rob someone if that were the only way he could get the money to pay back Katerina. “I’d rather be condemned as a thief and a murderer before my victim and before all other men, and be sent to Siberia,” he thought that night, “than give Katya the right to say that, after having betrayed her, I stole her money and used it to run away with Grushenka and start a new, ‘virtuous’ life with her. No, that is one thing I could not do!”

This is what Mitya, gnashing his teeth, was saying to himself, and so it is hardly surprising that he thought he might end up with brain fever. But, meantime, he tried desperately to do whatever he could.

It may seem that, having come to such a decision, there was nothing left for Dmitry but despair, for where could a penniless man like him find such a large sum of money? But, strangely enough, up until the very last moment, he kept hoping to find the three thousand, to get hold of it somehow or other, to see it drop from the sky, as it were. But that is the way people like Dmitry Karamazov usually are about money: they only know how to spend it, how to throw around whatever they inherit, and have not the slightest notion of how money is earned. After he had left Alyosha, a most fantastic whirlwind started in his head, leaving his thoughts in utter confusion. And he started his search for money, on a wild hunch, in the most improbable place imaginable. But, then, perhaps the least likely and most fantastic undertakings come most naturally to such men.

It was the merchant Samsonov, Grushenka’s protector, whom Dmitry chose to approach first. He decided to ask him for the entire sum he needed and to propose a certain “plan” to him. Dmitry had no doubts about the business side of the deal he was going to offer Samsonov; he was only worried about how Samsonov would regard the deal from a non-commercial point of view. Mitya knew Samsonov only by sight. They had never spoken to each other, but somehow he had long felt that the old seducer, now a dying man, would not object to Grushenka’s settling down to an honest life and marrying a “reliable man.” In fact, Dmitry thought that, far from objecting, this was what Samsonov wanted and that he would be glad to promote it if the opportunity presented itself. In any case, whether he had heard it from other people or perhaps had gathered it from Grushenka herself, he was under the impression that Samsonov would prefer her to marry him rather than his father.

Some readers may possibly find Dmitry’s reliance on the help of his fiancée’s protector and his willingness to, as it were, accept her from his hands, rather coarse and even unsavory. To that I can only reply that he now viewed Grushenka’s past as non-existent. He was filled with infinite compassion for her and had decided with passionate enthusiasm that, as soon as she told him she loved him and would marry him, she would become a different Grushenka and he would become a new Dmitry Karamazov—one without vices, with only virtues—and they would forgive each other and from then on live a different life. As to Kuzma Samsonov, Dmitry looked upon him as a shadow from Grushenka’s vanished past, a man who had played a fateful part in her life but whom she had never loved, who had now been left behind and was no longer there. Mitya could not even consider him as a man now, for everyone in town knew that Samsonov was a wreck, whose relations with Grushenka could only be those of a father with his daughter—not at all what they had been before—and that it had been that way for quite some time already, almost a whole year. In any case, there was a great deal of child-like simplicity in Mitya’s way of thinking. For all his debauchery and his vices, he was really a very naive, child-like person. And this same child-like simplicity also led Mitya to believe that, since old Kuzma was about to depart for the other world, he must sincerely repent his past relations with Grushenka and that now she could not find a better friend or protector than that harmless old man.

After his conversation with Alyosha on the road to the monastery, Mitya stayed awake almost all night, and at ten o’clock the next morning he walked into Samsonov’s house and asked the servant to announce him. It was a bleak old two-story house, very large, surrounded by a courtyard, a cottage, and several sheds and barns. On the ground floor lived Samsonov’s two married sons with their families, his elderly sister, and an unmarried daughter. In the cottage lived two of his shipping clerks, one of them with his family. Samsonov’s children and his clerks were rather crowded in their quarters, while the old man had the entire upper floor of the house all to himself; he would not even allow his daughter to live there, although she looked after him and had to run upstairs whenever he called her, at any hour of the day or night, despite her chronic asthma.

The top floor consisted of a succession of large living rooms furnished in the old style of Russian merchants’ houses, with endless rows of heavy, cumbersome mahogany chairs and armchairs lined up along the walls, with cut-glass chandeliers in dust-covers, with somber mirrors between the windows. All these rooms seemed deserted, for the sick old man lived mostly in one room, his smallish bedroom at the far end of the house, where he was waited on by an old woman-servant with a kerchief on her head and a young valet who spent most of his time sitting on a chest in the corridor. Because of his swollen legs, the old man could hardly walk; he seldom left his big leather armchair and when he did was usually supported by the old maid-servant who led him around the room. He hardly even spoke to this old woman and was very stern with her.

When they announced that “Captain Karamazov” was there to see him, he at once declared he would not receive him. But Mitya insisted, sending the servant back to the old man. Samsonov then asked his valet what the Captain looked like, whether he didn’t seem drunk, and whether he was behaving decently. When he was told that the visitor was sober but that he would not leave, the old man sent once more to tell Dmitry that he would not receive him. Having anticipated the old man’s refusal, Dmitry had brought with him a piece of paper and a pencil. Now he wrote hurriedly on it: “I am here on very important business concerning Miss Grushenka Svetlov,” and sent it up to the old man. The old man deliberated for a while, then sent the valet to show the visitor into the main living room and ordered the old woman to get his younger son and bring him upstairs.