And seizing Alyosha’s arm, he led him from the room and straight outside.

Chapter 7: And in the Fresh Air

“The air is fresh, sir, and in my castle it is indeed not clean, not in any sense. Let’s walk slowly, sir. I should very much like to enlist your interest, sir.”

“And I, too, have some extraordinary business with you ... .”Alyosha remarked, “only I don’t know how to begin.”

“Didn’t I know that you must have some business with me, sir? Without some business, you would never come to call on me. Unless you came, indeed, only to complain about the boy, sir? But that is improbable. By the way, about the boy, sir: I couldn’t explain everything in there, but here I will describe that scene to you. You see, the whiskbroom used to be thicker, sir, just a week ago—I’m referring to my beard, sir; my beard is nicknamed a whiskbroom, mostly by the schoolboys, sir. Well, and so, sir, your good brother, Dmitri Fyodorovich, dragged me by my beard that day, he dragged me out of the tavern to the square, and just then the schoolboys were getting out of school, and Ilyusha with them. When he saw me in such a state, sir, he rushed up to me: ‘Papa,’ he cried, ‘papa! ‘ He caught hold of me, hugged me, tried to pull me away, crying to my offender: ‘Let go, let go, it’s my papa, my papa, forgive him’—that was what he cried: ‘Forgive him!’ And he took hold of him, too, with his little hands, and kissed his hand, that very hand, sir ... I remember his face at that moment, I have not forgotten it, sir, and I will not forget it...!”

“I swear to you,” exclaimed Alyosha, “that my brother will express his repentance in the most sincere, the fullest manner, even if it means going down on his knees in that very square ... I will make him, or he is no brother of mine!”

“Aha, so it’s still in the planning stage! And proceeds not directly from him, but only from the nobility of your fervent heart. Why didn’t you say so, sir? No, in that case, allow me to finish telling you about the highly chivalrous and soldierly nobility of your good brother, for he showed it that time, sir. So he finished dragging me by my whiskbroom and set me free: ‘You,’ he said, ‘are an officer, and I am an officer; if you can find a second, a decent man, send him to me—I shall give you satisfaction, though you are a scoundrel! ‘ That is what he said, sir. Truly a chivalrous spirit! Ilyusha and I withdrew then, but this genealogical family picture forever imprinted itself in the memory of Ilyusha’s soul. No, it’s not for us to stay gentry, sir. And judge for yourself, sir, you were just so good as to visit my castle—what did you see, sir? Three ladies sitting there, sir, one crippled and feebleminded, another crippled and hunchbacked, the third not a cripple, but too smart, sir, a student, longing to go back to Petersburg and search for the rights of the Russian woman, there on the banks of the Neva. Not to mention Ilyusha, sir, he’s only nine years old, alone in the world, for if I were to die, what would become of those depths, that’s all I ask, sir. And so, if I challenge him to a duel, what if he kills me on the spot— well, what then? Then what will happen to them all, sir? Still worse, if he doesn’t kill me but just cripples me: work would be impossible, but there would still be a mouth to feed, and who will feed my mouth then, who will feed them all, sir? Or should I then send Ilyusha out daily to beg instead of going to school? So that’s what it means for me to challenge him to a duel, sir. It’s foolish talk, sir, and nothing else.”

“He will ask your forgiveness, he will bow at your feet in the middle of the square,” Alyosha again cried, his eyes glowing.

“I thought of taking him to court,” the captain went on, “but open our code of law, how much compensation would I get from the offender for a personal offense, sir? And then suddenly Agrafena Alexandrovna summoned me and shouted: ‘Don’t you dare think of it! If you take him to court, I’ll fix it so that the whole world will publicly know that he beat you for your own cheating, and you’ll wind up in the dock yourself.’ But the Lord knows who was the source of this cheating, sir, and on whose orders some small fry like me was acting—wasn’t it her own orders and Fyodor Pavlovich’s? And besides,’ she added, ‘I’ll turn you out forever, and you’ll never earn anything from me again. And I’ll tell my merchant, too’—that’s what she calls the old man: ‘my merchant’—’and he will turn you out as well.’ So I thought to myself, if even the merchant turns me out, then where will I earn any money? Because I only had the two of them left, since your father, Fyodor Pavlovich, not only stopped trusting me for some unrelated reason, sir, but even wants to drag me into court himself, on the strength of some receipts he has from me. As a result of all that, I’ve kept quiet, sir, and the depths, sir, you’ve seen for yourself. And now, allow me to ask: did he bite your finger badly, my Ilyusha? Inside my castle, in his presence, I didn’t dare go into such details.”

“Yes, very badly, and he was very angry. He took revenge for you upon me, as a Karamazov, it’s clear to me now. But if you had seen how he was fighting with his schoolmates, throwing stones! It’s very dangerous, they might kill him, they’re children, stupid, a stone goes flying and could break his head.”

“Yes, he got it, sir, not in the head but in the chest, over the heart, a stone hit him today, bruised him, he came home crying, groaning, and now he’s fallen sick.”

“And you know, he starts it himself, he attacks everyone, he’s bitter because of you; they say the other day he stabbed a boy, Krasotkin, in the side with a penknife ...”

“I heard about that, too, it’s dangerous, sir: Krasotkin is a local official, there could still be trouble ...”

“I would advise you,” Alyosha continued fervently, “not to send him to ‘ school at all for a while, until he calms down ... and this wrath in him passes ...”

“Wrath, sir!” the captain chimed in, “wrath indeed, sir! A small creature, but a great wrath, sir! You don’t know all of it. Allow me to explain the story more particularly. The thing is that after that event all the children at school began calling him whiskbroom. Schoolchildren are merciless people: separately they’re God’s angels, but together, especially in school, they’re quite often merciless. They began teasing him, and a noble spirit arose in Ilyusha. An ordinary boy, a weak son, would have given in, would have felt ashamed of his father, but this one stood up for his father, alone against everyone. For his father, and for the truth, sir, for justice, sir. Because what he suffered then, as he kissed your brother’s hand and cried to him: ‘Forgive my papa, forgive my papa’—that only God alone knows, and I, sir. And that is how our children—I mean, not yours but ours, sir, the children of the despised but noble poor—learn the truth on earth when they’re just nine years old, sir. The rich ones—what do they know? In their whole lives they never sound such depths, and my Ilyushka, at that very moment in the square, sir, when he kissed his hand, at that very moment he went through the whole truth, sir. This truth, sir, entered into him and crushed him forever,” the captain said fervently, again as if in a frenzy, hitting his left palm with his right fist, as if he wished to show physically how “the truth” had crushed his Ilyusha. “That same day he came down with a fever, he was delirious all night. All that day he hardly spoke to me, he was even quite silent, only I noticed him looking, looking at me from the corner, but he kept leaning more towards the window, pretending he was doing his homework, but I could see that he didn’t have homework on his mind. The next day I did some drinking, sir, and forgot a lot, I’m a sinful man, from grief, sir. Mama there also began crying—and I love mama very much, sir—well, from grief I had a drop on my last few kopecks. Don’t despise me, my good sir: in Russia, drunks are our kindest people. Our kindest people are also the most drunk. So I was lying there and I didn’t much remember Ilyusha that day, and it was precisely that day when the boys started jeering at him in school, that morning, sir: ‘Whiskbroom,’ they shouted at him, ‘your father was dragged out of the tavern by his whiskbroom, and you ran along asking forgiveness.’ On the third day he came home from school, and I saw that he looked pale, awful. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. Silence. Well, there was no talking about it in our castle, otherwise mama and the girls would immediately take part—and besides, the girls already knew all about it even on the first day. Varvara Nikolaevna was already grumbling: ‘Clowns, buffoons, can you never be reasonable?’ ‘Right,’ I said, ‘Varvara Nikolaevna, we can never be reasonable. ‘ I got off with that at the time. So, sir, towards evening I took my boy out for a walk. And you should know, sir, that even before that, every evening he and I used to take a walk, just the same way we’re going now, from our gate to that big stone over there, standing like an orphan in the road near the wattle fence, where the town common begins: the place is deserted and beautiful, sir. We were walking along, Ilyusha and I, his little hand in my hand, as usual; he has such a tiny hand, his little fingers are so thin and cold—my boy suffers from a weak chest. ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘papa! ‘ ‘What?’ I said to him, and I could see that his eyes were flashing. ‘Papa, the way he treated you, papa!’ ‘It can’t be helped, Ilyusha,’ I said. ‘Don’t make peace with him, papa, don’t make peace. The boys say he gave you ten roubles for it.’ ‘No, Ilyusha,’ I said, ‘I won’t take any money from him, not for anything.’ Then he started shaking all over, seized my hand in both his hands, and kissed it again. ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘papa, challenge him to a duel; they tease me at school, they say you’re a coward and won’t challenge him to a duel, but you’ll take his ten roubles.’ ‘It’s not possible for me to challenge him to a duel, Ilyusha,’ I answered, and explained to him briefly all that I just explained to you about that. He listened. ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘papa, even so, don’t make peace with him: I’ll grow up, I’ll challenge him myself, and I’ll kill him!’ And his eyes were flashing and shining. Well, I’m still his father for all that, I had to tell him the right thing. ‘It’s sinful to kill,’ I said, ‘even in a duel.’ ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘papa, I’ll throw him down when I’m big, I’ll knock the sword out of his hand with my sword, I’ll rush at him, throw him down, hold my sword over him and say: I could kill you now, but I forgive you, so there! ‘ You see, sir, you see what a process went on in his little head over those two days! Day and night he was thinking precisely about that revenge with the sword, and that must have been in his delirium at night, sir. Only he started coming home from school badly beaten up, I learned of it the day before yesterday, and you’re right, sir, I won’t send him to that school any more. When I learned that he was going alone against the whole class, and was challenging everyone, and that he was so bitter, that his heart was burning-—I was afraid for him. Again we went for a walk. ‘Papa,’ he asked, ‘papa, is it true that the rich are stronger than anybody in the world?’ ‘Yes, Ilyusha,’ I said, ‘no one in the world is stronger than the rich.’ ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘I’ll get rich, I’ll become an officer, and I’ll beat everybody, and the tsar will reward me. Then I’ll come back, and nobody will dare . . .’He was silent for a while, then he said, and his little lips were still trembling as before: ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘our town is not a good town, papa!”Yes, Ilyushechka,’ I said, ‘it’s really not a very good town.”Papa, let’s move to another town, a good one,’ he said, ‘a town where they don’t know about us.”We will,’ I said, ‘we will move, Ilyusha, as soon as I save some money.’ I was glad to be able to distract him from his dark thoughts, and so we began dreaming of how we’d move to another town, how we’d buy our own horse and cart. ‘We’ll sit mama and your sisters in the cart and cover them, and we ourselves will walk beside it, and from time to time you’ll get in and ride and I’ll walk beside, because we must spare our horse, we shouldn’t all ride, and so we’ll set off.’ He was delighted with that, most of all because we’d have our own horse and he could ride it. Everyone knows that a Russian boy is born with a horse. We chattered for a long time: thank God, I thought, I’ve diverted him, comforted him. That was two days ago, in the evening, but by yesterday evening it all turned out differently. That morning he went to school again and came back gloomy, much too gloomy. In the evening I took him by the hand, we went for a walk; he was silent, he didn’t speak. The breeze picked up, the sun clouded over, there was autumn in the air, and dusk was already coming—we walked along, both feeling sad. ‘Well, my boy,’ I said, ‘how are we going to get ourselves ready for the road?’—thinking to bring him around to our conversation of the day before. Silence. But I could feel his little fingers trembling in my hand. Eh, I thought, that’s bad, there’s something new. We came to this very stone, just as we are now, I sat on the stone, and in the sky there were kites humming and flapping on their strings, about thirty of them. It’s the season for kites, sir. ‘Look, Ilyusha,’ I said, ‘it’s time we flew our kite from last year. I’ll mend it. Where do you keep it?’ My boy was silent, he looked away, turned aside from me. And suddenly the wind whistled and blew up some sand ... He rushed to me suddenly, threw his little arms around my neck, and hugged me. You know, when children are silent and proud, and have been holding back their tears for a long time, when they suddenly burst out, if a great grief comes, the tears don’t just flow, sir, they pour out in streams. With these warm streams he suddenly wet my whole face. He suddenly sobbed as if he were in convulsions, and began shaking and pressing me to him as I sat there on the stone. ‘Papa,’ he cried, ‘papa, dear papa, how he humiliated you! ‘Then I began weeping, too, sir. We were sitting, holding each other, and sobbing. ‘Papa,’ he said, ‘dear papa! ‘ ‘Ilyusha,’ I said, ‘dear Ilyusha! ‘ No one saw us then, sir, only God saw us—let’s hope he’ll enter it into my record, sir. Thank your good brother, Alexei Fyodorovich. No, sir, I will not whip my boy for your satisfaction, sir!”