“Your money or your life!”

“Ah, it’s you, Mitya!” Alyosha, though badly startled, said in surprise.

“Ha, ha, ha! You didn’t expect me? I wondered where to wait for you. Near her house? There are three roads from there, and I might have missed you. Finally I decided, I’ll wait here, because he’ll have to pass here, there’s no other way to the monastery. Well, give me the truth, crush me like a cockroach ... Why, what’s the matter?” “Nothing, brother ... Just that you startled me. Oh, Dmitri! Father’s blood today ...” Alyosha began to cry. He had been wanting to cry for a long time, and now it was as if something suddenly snapped in his soul. “You all but killed him ... you cursed him ... and now ... here ... you’re making jokes ... ‘Your money or your life!’”

“Well, what of it? Improper, eh? Doesn’t fit my position?”

“No ... I just. . .”

“Wait. Look at the night: see what a gloomy night it is, what clouds, how the wind is rising! I hid myself here, under the willow, waiting for you, and suddenly thought (as God is my witness): why languish any longer, why wait? Here is the willow, there is a handkerchief, a shirt, I can make a rope right now, plus suspenders, and—no longer burden the earth, or dishonor it with my vile presence! And then I heard you coming—Lord, just as if something suddenly flew down on me: ah, so there is a man that I love, here he is, here is that man, my dear little brother, whom I love more than anyone in the world, and who is the only one I love! And I loved you so, I loved you so at that moment that I thought: I’ll throw myself on his neck! But then a foolish thought came to me: ‘I’ll amuse him, I’ll give him a scare.’ So I yelled: ‘Your money!’ like a fool. Forgive my foolishness—it’s only nonsense, and in my soul ... it’s also fitting ... Well, damn it, tell me what happened! What did she say? Crush me, strike me down, don’t spare me! Was she furious?”

“No,notthat ... It wasn’t like that at all, Mitya. It was ... I found the two of them there together.”

“What two?”

“Grushenka and Katerina Ivanovna.”

Dmitri Fyodorovich was dumbstruck.

“Impossible!” he cried. “You’re raving! Grushenka with her?”

Alyosha told him everything that had happened to him from the very moment he entered Katerina Ivanovna’s house. He spoke for about ten minutes, one would not say fluently or coherently, but he seemed to convey it clearly, grasping the main words, the main gestures, and vividly conveying his own feelings, often with a single stroke. His brother Dmitri listened silently, staring point blank at him with horrible fixity, but it was clear to Alyosha that he already understood everything and comprehended the whole fact. But his face, as the story went on, became not merely grim but menacing, as it were. He glowered, clenched his teeth, his fixed stare seemed to become still more fixed, more intent, more terrible ... Which made it all the more unexpected when, with inconceivable swiftness, his face, until then angry and ferocious, suddenly changed all at once, his compressed lips parted, and Dmitri Fyodorovich suddenly dissolved in the most irrepressible, the most genuine laughter. He literally dissolved in laughter, and for a long time could not even speak for laughing.

“She just didn’t kiss her hand! She just didn’t, she just ran away!” he exclaimed with some sort of morbid delight—one might have called it insolent delight had it not been so artless. “And the other one shouted that she was a tiger! A tiger she is! And that she deserves the scaffold! Yes, yes, so she does, she does, I agree, she deserves it, she has long deserved it! Let’s have that scaffold, brother, but let me recover first. I can see that queen of insolence, the whole of her is there, that hand expresses the whole of her! Infernal woman! She’s the queen of all infernal women the world can imagine! Delightful in a way! So she ran home? Then I ... eh ... will run to her! Alyoshka, don’t blame me, I do agree that throttling’s too good for her ...”

“And Katerina Ivanovna!” Alyosha exclaimed sadly.

“I see her, too, right through her, I see her, I see her better than ever before! It’s quite a discovery—all four cardinal points—all five, I mean.^[106] What a thing to do! It’s the same Katenka, the institute girl, who wasn’t afraid to run to an absurd brute of an officer with the generous idea of saving her father, at the risk of being horribly insulted! But what pride, what recklessness, what defiance of fate, what infinite defiance! You say the aunt tried to stop her? That aunt, you know, is a despot herself, she’s the sister of the Moscow general’s widow, she used to put on even more airs than the other one, but her husband was convicted of embezzlement, lost everything, his estate and everything, and his proud spouse had to pull her head in, and never stuck it out again. So she was holding Katya back, and Katya didn’t listen. ‘I can conquer all, all is in my power; I can bewitch Grushenka, too, if I like’—and she did believe herself, she was showing off to herself, so whose fault is it? Do you think she first kissed Grushenka’s hand with some purpose, out of cunning calculation? No, she really and truly fell in love with Grushenka—that is, not with Grushenka but with her own dream, her own delusion—because it was her dream, her delusion! My dear Alyosha, how did you manage to save yourself from them, from those women? You must have hitched up your cassock and run! Ha, ha, ha!”

“But Mitya, you don’t seem to have noticed how you offended Katerina Ivanovna by telling Grushenka about that day. And she immediately threw it in her face, that she ‘went secretly to her gentlemen to sell her beauty’! Could any offense be greater than that, brother?” Alyosha was most tormented by the thought that his brother seemed pleased at Katerina Ivanovna’s humiliation, though of course it could not be so.

“Bah!” Dmitri Fyodorovich frowned horribly all of a sudden and slapped himself on the forehead. Only now did he notice it, though Alyosha had just told him both about the offense and about Katerina Ivanovna’s cry: “Yourbrother is a scoundrel!”

“Yes, maybe I really did tell Grushenka about that ‘fatal day,’ as Katya calls it. Yes, I did, I did tell her, I remember! It was that time in Mokroye, I was drunk, the gypsy women were singing ... But I was weeping, I myself was weeping, I was on my knees, praying before Katya’s image, and Grushenka understood. She understood everything then. I remember, she wept herself ... Ah, the devil! But it couldn’t be otherwise! Then she wept, and now ... now ‘a dagger in the heart.’ That’s how it is with women.”

He looked down and thought for a moment.

“Yes, I am a scoundrel! An unquestionable scoundrel!” he said suddenly in a gloomy voice. “No matter whether I wept or not, I’m still a scoundrel! Tell her I accept the title, if it’s any comfort. But enough, farewell, there’s no use talking. It’s not amusing. You take your road and I’ll take mine. And I don’t want to see you any more until some last moment. Farewell, Alexei!” He gripped Alyosha’s hand, and still looking down, without raising his head, as though tearing himself away, he quickly strode off towards town. Alyosha looked after him, not believing that he was quite so suddenly gone.

“Wait, Alexei, one more confession, to you alone!” Dmitri Fyodorovich suddenly turned back. “Look at me, look closely: right here, do you see, right here a horrible dishonor is being prepared.” (As he said “right here,” Dmitri Fyodorovich struck himself on the chest with his fist, and with such a strange look as though the dishonor was lying and being kept precisely there on his chest, in some actual place, maybe in a pocket, or sewn up and hanging around his neck.) “You know me by now: a scoundrel, an avowed scoundrel! But know that whatever I have done before or now or may do later—nothing, nothing can compare in baseness with the dishonor I am carrying, precisely now, precisely at this moment, here on my chest, here, right here, which is being enacted and carried out, and which it is fully in my power to stop, I can stop it or carry it out, make a note of that! And know, then, that I will carry it out and will not stop it. I just told you everything, but this I did not tell you, because even I am not so brazen! I could still stop; if I stopped, tomorrow I could recover fully half of my lost honor; but I will not stop, I will carry out my base design, and in the future you can be my witness that I told you beforehand and with aforethought! Darkness and ruin! There’s nothing to explain, you’ll learn it all in due time. A stinking back lane and an infernal woman! Farewell. Don’t pray for me, I’m not worthy of it, and it’s unnecessary, quite unnecessary ... I don’t need it at all! Away!”