“Let’s go now,” he said.
“Go where? No, wait ... So you’re thinking about putting it into your brain, the bullet, I mean ... ?” Pyotr Ilyich asked uneasily.
“The bullet? Nonsense! I want to live, I love life! Believe me. I love golden-haired Phoebus and his hot light ... My dear Pyotr Ilyich, do you know how to remove yourself?”
“What do you mean, remove myself?”
“To make way. To make way for one you hold dear, and for one you hate. And so that the one you hate becomes dear to you—to make way like that! And to say to them: God be with you, go, pass by, while I...”
“While you ... ?”
“Enough. Let’s go.”
“By God, I’ll tell someone,” Pyotr Ilyich looked at him, “to keep you from going there. Why do you need to go to Mokroye now?”
“There’s a woman there, a woman, and let that be enough for you, Pyotr Ilyich, drop it!”
“Listen, even though you’re a savage, somehow I’ve always liked you ... That’s why I worry.”
“Thank you, brother. I’m a savage, you say. Savages, savages! That’s something I keep repeating: savages! Ah, yes, here’s Misha, I forgot about him.”
Misha came in, puffing, with a wad of small bills, and reported that “they all got a move on” at Plotnikov’s and were running around with bottles, and fish, and tea—everything would be ready shortly. Mitya snatched a ten-rouble note and gave it to Pyotr Ilyich, and he tossed another ten-rouble note to Misha.
“Don’t you dare!” Pyotr Ilyich cried. “Not in my house. Anyway, it’s a harmful indulgence. Hide your money away, put it here, why throw it around? Tomorrow you’ll need it, and it’s me you’ll come to asking for ten roubles. Why do you keep stuffing it into your side pocket? You’re going to lose it!”
“Listen, my dear fellow, let’s go to Mokroye together!”
“Why should I go?”
“Listen, let’s open a bottle now, and we’ll drink to life! I want to have a drink, and I want above all to have a drink with you. I’ve never drunk with you, have I?”
“Fine, let’s go to the tavern, I’m on my way there myself.”
“No time for the tavern, better at Plotnikov’s shop, in the back room. Now, do you want me to ask you a riddle?”
“Ask.”
Mitya took the piece of paper from his waistcoat pocket, unfolded it, and held it up. There was written on it in his large, clear hand:
“For my whole life I punish myself, I punish my whole life!”
“Really, I’m going to tell someone, I will go now and tell someone,” Pyotr Ilyich said, having read the paper.
“You won’t have time, my dear, let’s have a drink, come on!”
Plotnikov’s shop was only about two doors away from Pyotr Ilyich, at the corner of the street. It was the main grocery store in our town, owned by wealthy merchants, and in fact not bad at all. They had everything any store in the capital would have, all kinds of groceries: wines “bottled by Eliseyev brothers,” fruit, cigars, tea, sugar, coffee, and so on. There were always three clerks on duty, and two boys to run around with deliveries. Though things had gone poorly in our parts, landowners had left, trade had slackened, yet the grocery business flourished as before, and even got better and better every year: purchasers for such goods were never lacking. Mitya was awaited with impatience at the shop. They remembered only too well how three or four weeks earlier he had bought in the same way, all at once, all kinds of goods and wines, for several hundred roubles in cash (they would not, of course, have given him anything on credit); they remembered that he had a whole wad of money sticking out of his hand, just as now, and was throwing it around for nothing, without bargaining, without thinking and without wishing to think why he needed such a quantity of goods, wines, and so forth. Afterwards the whole town was saying that he had driven off to Mokroye with Grushenka then, “squandered three thousand at once in a night and a day, and came back from the spree without a kopeck, naked as the day he was born.” He had roused a whole camp of gypsies that time (they were in our neighborhood then), who in two days, while he was drunk, relieved him of an untold amount of money and drank an untold quantity of expensive wine. They said, laughing at Mitya, that in Mokroye he had drowned the cloddish peasants in champagne and stuffed their women and girls with candies and Strasbourg pâté. They also laughed, especially in the tavern, over Mitya’s own frank and public confession (of course, they did not laugh in his face; it was rather dangerous to laugh in his face) that all he got from Grushenka for the whole “escapade” was that “she let him kiss her little foot, and would not let him go any further.”
When Mitya and Pyotr Ilyich arrived at the shop, they found a cart ready at the door, covered with a rug, harnessed to a troika with bells and chimes, and the coachman Andrei awaiting Mitya. In the shop they had nearly finished “putting up” one box of goods and were only waiting for Mitya’s appearance to nail it shut and load it on the cart. Pyotr Ilyich was surprised.
“How did you manage to get a troika?” he asked Mitya.
“I met him, Andrei, as I was running to your place, and told him to drive straight here to the shop. Why waste time! Last time I went with Timofei, but now Timofei said bye-bye and went off ahead of me with a certain enchantress. Will we be very late, Andrei?”
“They’ll get there only an hour before us, if that, just an hour before!” Andrei hastily responded.”I harnessed Timofei up, I know how he drives. His driving’s not our driving, Dmitri Fyodorovich, not by a long shot. They won’t make it even an hour before us!” Andrei, a lean fellow with reddish hair, not yet old, dressed in a long peasant coat and with a caftan over his arm, added enthusiastically.
“I’ll give you fifty roubles for vodka if you’re only an hour behind them.”
“I guarantee you an hour, Dmitri Fyodorovich. An hour, hah! They won’t even be half an hour ahead of us!”
Though Mitya began bustling about, making arrangements, he spoke and gave commands somehow strangely, at random and out of order. He began one thing and forgot to finish it. Pyotr Ilyich found it necessary to step in and help matters along.
“It should come to four hundred roubles, not less than four hundred roubles, just like the other time,” Mitya commanded. “Four dozen bottles of champagne, not a bottle less.”
“Why do you need so much? What for? Stop!” Pyotr Ilyich yelled. “What’s this box? What’s in it? Four hundred roubles’ worth?” The bustling shop clerks explained to him at once, in sugary tones, that this first box contained only a half dozen bottles of champagne and “all sorts of indispensable starters,” such as appetizers, candies, fruit-drops, and so on. And that the main “provision” would be packed and sent separately that same hour, just as the other time, in a special cart, also drawn by a troika, and would get there in good time, “perhaps only an hour behind Dmitri Fyodorovich.”
“No more than an hour, no more than an hour, and put in as much candy and toffee as you can—the girls there love it,” Mitya hotly insisted.
“Toffee is one thing, but four dozen bottles—why do you need so much? One dozen is enough,” Pyotr Ilyich was almost angry now. He started bargaining, demanded to see the bill, would not be silenced. He saved, however, only a hundred roubles. They settled on delivering three hundred roubles’ worth of goods.
“Ah, devil take you!” Pyotr Ilyich cried, as if suddenly thinking better of it. “What do I care? Throw your money away, since you got it for nothing!”
“Come along, my economist, come along, don’t be angry,” Mitya dragged him into the back room of the shop. “They’re going to bring us a bottle here, we’ll have a sip. Eh, Pyotr Ilyich, let’s go together, because you’re a dear man, just the sort I like.”