Three days later he left the monastery, which was also in accordance with the words of his late elder, who had bidden him to “sojourn in the world.”
BOOK VIII: MITYA
Chapter 1: Kuzma Samsonov
But Dmitri Fyodorovich, to whom Grushenka, flying to her new life, had “ordered” her last farewell sent and whom she bade remember forever the one hour of her love, unaware as he was of what had happened with her, was at that moment also running around in terrible disarray. For the past two days he had been in such an unimaginable state that, as he himself said afterwards, he might well have come down with brain fever. Alyosha had been unable to find him the morning before, and that same day his brother Ivan had been unable to arrange a meeting with him in the tavern. The owners of the little apartment he lived in covered his traces, as he had ordered them to do. And he, in those two days, had literally been rushing in all directions, “struggling with his fate and trying to save himself,” as he put it afterwards, and had even flown out of town for a few hours on some urgent business, though he was afraid to leave Grushenka unwatched even for a moment. All of this was found out later in the most detailed and documented form, but here we shall outline only the most necessary facts from the history of those two terrible days of his life, which preceded the horrible catastrophe that broke so suddenly upon his fate.
Grushenka, though it was true that she had loved him genuinely and sincerely for one little hour, at the same time would torment him quite cruelly and mercilessly. The worst thing was that he could make out nothing of her intentions; it was impossible to coax them out of her either with tenderness or by force: she would not give in, and would only become angry and turn her back on him altogether—that he understood clearly at the time. He then suspected, quite correctly, that she herself was caught in some sort of struggle, in some sort of extraordinary indecision, trying to make up her mind and unable to make it up, and he therefore supposed with a sinking heart, and not groundlessly, that at moments she must simply hate him and his passion. Perhaps that was the case, but what precisely Grushenka was anguished about, he still did not understand. So far as he was concerned, the whole tormenting question formed itself into just two definitions: “Either him, Mitya, or Fyodor Pavlovich.” Here, incidentally, one firm fact must be noted: he was quite certain that Fyodor Pavlovich would be sure to offer Grushenka (if he had not offered her already) a lawful marriage, and did not believe for a moment that the old voluptuary hoped to get off for a mere three thousand. This Mitya deduced from his knowledge of Grushenka and her character. Which was why it could sometimes seem to him that all of Grushenka’s torment, and all her indecision, came simply from the fact that she did not know which of them to choose, and which of them would be the more profitable for her. Strangely enough, in those days he did not even think of thinking about the imminent return of “the officer”—that is, the fatal man in Grushenka’s life, whose arrival she awaited with such fear and agitation. True, in the past few days Grushenka had been quite silent with him on the subject. Nevertheless, he had been fully informed by her of the letter she had received a month earlier from her former seducer, and he had also been partly informed of the content of the letter. In a wicked moment, Grushenka had shown him the letter, but, to her surprise, he placed very little value on this letter. And it would be quite difficult to explain why: perhaps simply because he was so oppressed by all the ugliness and horror of his struggle with his own father for this woman that he could not even imagine anything more terrible or dangerous for himself, at least not at that time. He simply did not believe in this fiancé who had suddenly sprung from somewhere after a five-year disappearance, much less that he would soon arrive. And this first letter from “the officer,” which was shown to Mitenka, itself spoke quite uncertainly about the coming of this new rivaclass="underline" it was a very vague letter, very grandiloquent, and full of nothing but sentimentality. It should be noted that at the time Grushenka concealed from him the last lines of the letter, which spoke with more certainty about his return. Besides, Mitenka later recalled that at that moment he had detected, as it were, some involuntary and proud contempt for this missive from Siberia on the part of Grushenka herself. After that, Grushenka told Mitenka nothing about any of her subsequent dealings with this new rival. So it happened that little by little he even quite forgot about the officer. He thought only that whatever the outcome and whatever turn the affair might take, his impending final clash with Fyodor Pavlovich was too near and must be resolved before anything else. With a sinking soul he waited every moment for Grushenka’s decision and kept thinking that it would occur as if unexpectedly, by inspiration. Suddenly she would tell him: “Take me, I’m yours forever,” and it would all be over: he would snatch her up and take her to the end of the world at once. Oh, at once, take her far away, as far as possible, if not to the end of the world, then somewhere to the end of Russia, marry her there, and settle down with her incognito, so that no one would know anything about them, not here, not there, not anywhere. Then, oh, then a totally new life would begin at once! He dreamed of this other, this renewed and now “virtuous” life (“it must, it must be virtuous”) ceaselessly and feverishly. He thirsted for this resurrection and renewal. The vile bog he had gotten stuck in of his own will burdened him too much, and, like a great many men in such cases, he believed most of all in a change of place: if only it weren’t for these people, if only it weren’t for these circumstances, if only one could fly away from this cursed place—then everything would be reborn! That was what he believed in and what he longed for.
But that would only be in the case of the first, happy solution to the question. There was another solution; he imagined a different and terrible ending. She suddenly says to him: “Go, I’ve just reached an agreement with Fyodor Pavlovich and shall marry him, you’re no longer needed”—and then ... but then ... Incidentally, Mitya did not know what would happen then, until the very last hour he did not know, we must clear him of that. He had no definite intentions, the crime had not been thought out. He just watched, spied, and suffered, while preparing himself only for the first, happy ending to his fate. He even drove away all other thoughts. But here quite a different torment began, here arose a quite new and unrelated, but equally fatal and insoluble, circumstance.
Namely, if she should say to him: “I’m yours, take me away,” how was he to take her away? Where would he get the means, the money to do it? Just at that time he had exhausted all his income from Fyodor Pavlovich’s handouts, which until then had continued nonstop for so many years. Of course Grushenka had money, but on this point Mitya suddenly turned out to be terribly proud: he wanted to take her away himself, to start the new life with her on his own money, not on hers; he could not even imagine himself taking money from her and suffered at the thought to the point of painful revulsion. I will not enlarge upon this fact, or analyze it, I will only note that such was the cast of his soul at the moment. All of this might well have proceeded indirectly and unwittingly, as it were, from the secret suffering of his conscience over Katerina Ivanovna’s money, which he had thievishly appropriated: “I am a scoundrel before one woman, and I’ll prove at once to be a scoundrel before the other,” he thought then, as he himself confessed later, “and Grushenka, if she finds out, will not want such a scoundrel.” And so, where to find the means, where to find this fatal money? Otherwise all was lost, and nothing would happen, “for the sole reason that there wasn’t enough money—oh, shame!”