“Strange things do happen: no one in the street then noticed her coming into my place, so for the town it just vanished. I rented my lodgings from two widows of local officials, two ancient crones, they also served me, respectful women, they obeyed me in everything, and this time, on my orders, they were as silent as iron posts. Of course, I at once understood everything. She came in and looked squarely at me, her dark eyes resolute, defiant even, but on her lips and around her mouth I noticed some irresolution.
“‘My sister told me you would give us forty-five hundred roubles if I came ... to get them myself. I have come ... give me the money ... !’ She couldn’t keep it up, she choked, got frightened, her voice broke off, and the corners of her mouth and the lines around her mouth trembled. Alyoshka, are you listening or sleeping?”
“Mitya, I know you will tell me the whole truth,” Alyosha said with emotion.
“So I will. If you want the whole truth, this is it, I won’t spare myself. My first thought was a Karamazov thought. Once, brother, I was bitten by a spider, and was laid up with a fever for two weeks; it was the same now, I could feel the spider bite my heart, an evil insect, understand? I sized her up. Have you seen her? A real beauty. And she was beautiful then, but for a different reason. She was beautiful at that moment because she was noble, and I was a scoundrel; she was there in the majesty of her magnanimity and her sacrifice for her father, and I was a bedbug. And on me, a bedbug and a scoundrel, she depended entirely, all of her, all of her entirely, body and soul. No way out. I’ll tell you honestly: this thought, this spider’s thought, so seized my heart that it almost poured out from the sheer sweetness of it. It seemed there could even be no struggle: I had to act precisely like a bedbug, like an evil tarantula, without any pity ... I was breathless. Listen: naturally I would come the next day to ask for her hand, so that it would all end, so to speak, in the noblest manner, and no one, therefore, would or could know of it. Because although I’m a man of base desires, I am honest. And then suddenly, at that very second, someone whispered in my ear: ‘But tomorrow, when you come to offer your hand, a girl like this will not even see you, she’ll have the coachman throw you out: Go cry it all over town, I’m not afraid of you!’ I glanced at the girl. The voice was right: that was certainly what she would do. I’d be thrown out, you could see it in the look on her face. Anger boiled up in me. I wanted to pull some mean, piggish, merchant’s trick: to give her a sneering look, and right there, as she stood before me, to stun her with the tone of voice you only hear from some petty merchant:
“‘But four thousand is much too much! I was joking, how could you think it? You’ve been too gullible, madam. Perhaps two hundred, even gladly and with pleasure, but four thousand—it’s too much money, miss, to throw away on such trifles. You have gone to all this trouble for nothing.’”
“You see, I’d lose everything, of course, she would run away, but on the other hand, such infernal revenge would be worth it all. I might have spent the rest of my life howling with remorse, but right then I just wanted to pull this little stunt. Believe me, never in such a moment have I looked at any woman, not a single one, with hatred—see, I’m making the sign of the cross—but I looked at this one for three or five seconds, then, with terrible hatred—the kind of hatred that is only a hair’s breadth from love, the maddest love! I went to the window, leaned my forehead on the frozen glass, and I remember that the ice burned my forehead like fire. I didn’t keep her long, don’t worry; I turned around, went to the table, opened the drawer and took out a five percent bank note for five thousand roubles, with no name filled in (it was stuck in a French dictionary). I silently showed it to her, folded it, handed it to her, opened the door to the hallway for her, and, stepping back, bowed deeply to her, with a most respectful and heartfelt bow, believe me! She was startled, she looked intently at me for a second, turned terribly pale—white as a sheet—and suddenly, also without saying a word, not impulsively but very gently, deeply, quietly, bent way down and fell right at my feet—with her forehead to the ground, not like an institute girl but like a Russian woman! Then she jumped up and ran away. When she ran out—I was wearing my sword—I drew it and wanted to stab myself right there—why, I don’t know, it was terribly foolish, of course, but probably from a certain kind of ecstasy. Do you understand that one can kill oneself from a certain kind of ecstasy? But I didn’t stab myself, I only kissed the sword and put it back in the scabbard—which detail, by the way, I needn’t have mentioned. And it even seems that while I was telling about all these agonies just now, I must have been filling them out a little, to praise myself. But let it be, let it be so, and to hell with all spies into the human heart! That’s the whole of my past ‘incident’ with Katerina Ivanovna. So now brother Ivan knows about it, and you—and that’s all.”
Dmitri Fyodorovich got up, took a step, then another in his agitation, pulled out his handkerchief, wiped the sweat from his brow, then sat down again, not in the same place as before, but on another bench against the opposite wall, so that Alyosha had to turn all the way around to face him.
Chapter 5: The Confession of an Ardent Heart. “Heels Up”
“Now,” said Alyosha, “I understand the first half of this business.”
“You understand the first half: it’s a drama, and it took place there. The second half is a tragedy, and will take place here.”
“I still don’t understand anything of the second half,” said Alyosha.
“And I? Do I understand it?”
“Wait, Dmitri, there is one key word here. Tell me: you are her fiancé, aren’t you still her fiancé?”
“I became her fiancé, not at once, but only three months after those events. The day after it happened I told myself that the case was closed, done with, there would be no sequel. To come with an offer of my hand seemed a base thing to do. For her part, during all the six weeks she then spent in our town, she never once let me hear a word of herself. Except, indeed, in one instance: on the day after her visit, their maid slipped into my room, and without saying a word handed me an envelope. It was addressed to me. I opened it—there was the change from the five-thousand-rouble bank note. They needed only forty-five hundred, and there was a loss of about two hundred and something on the sale of the note. She sent me back only two hundred and sixty roubles, I think, I don’t quite remember, and just the money—no note, no word, no explanation. I looked into the envelope for some mark of a pencil—nothing! So meanwhile I went on a spree with the rest of my roubles, until the new major also finally had to reprimand me. And the colonel did hand over the government funds—satisfactorily and to everyone’s surprise, because nobody believed any longer that he had them intact. He handed them over, and came down sick, lay in bed for about three weeks, then suddenly he got a softening of the brain, and in five days he was dead. He was buried with military honors, since his discharge hadn’t come through yet. Katerina Ivanovna, her sister, and her aunt, having buried the father, set out for Moscow ten days later. And just before their departure, on the very day they left (I didn’t see them or say good-bye), I received a tiny letter, a blue one, on lacy paper, with only one line penciled on it: ‘I’ll write to you. Wait. K.’ That was all.
“I’ll explain the rest in two words. Once they were in Moscow, things developed in a flash and as unexpectedly as in an Arabian tale. The widow of the general, her main relative, suddenly lost both of her closest heirs, her two closest nieces, who died of smallpox in one and the same week. The shaken old woman welcomed Katya like her own daughter, like a star of salvation, fell upon her, changed her will at once in her favor, but that was for the future, and meanwhile she gave her eighty thousand roubles outright—here’s a dowry for you, she said, do as you like with it. A hysterical woman, I observed her later in Moscow. So then suddenly I received forty-five hundred roubles in the mail; naturally, I was bewildered and struck dumb. Three days later came the promised letter as well. It’s here with me now, I always keep it with me, and shall die with it—do you want to see it? You must read it: she offers to be my fiancée, she offers herself, ‘I love you madly,’ she says, ‘even if you do not love me—no matter, only be my husband. Don’t be afraid, I shan’t hinder you in any way, I’ll be your furniture, the rug you walk on ... I want to love you eternally, I want to save you from yourself . . .’ Alyosha, I’m not worthy even to repeat those lines in my mean words and in my mean tone, in my eternally mean tone that I can never be cured of! This letter pierced me even to this day, and is it easy for me now, is it easy for me today? I wrote a reply at once (I couldn’t manage to go to Moscow in person). I wrote it in tears. One thing I am eternally ashamed of: I mentioned that she was now rich and had a dowry, and I was just a poverty-stricken boor—I mentioned money! I should have borne it, but it slipped off my pen. Then I wrote at once to Ivan, in Moscow, and explained everything to him, as far as I could in a letter, it was a six-page letter, and sent Ivan to her. Why are you looking, why are you staring at me? So, yes, Ivan fell in love with her, is in love with her still, I know it, I did a foolish thing, in your worldly sense, but maybe just this foolishness will now save us all! Ah! Don’t you see how she reveres him, how she respects him? Can she compare the two of us and still love a man like me, especially after all that’s happened here?”