“What blood?” Grushenka repeated in bewilderment.
“Nothing!” Mitya growled. “Grusha, you want it to be honest, but I am a thief. I stole money from Katka ... What shame, what shame!”
“From Katka? You mean the young lady? No, you didn’t steal anything. Give it back to her, take it from me ... Why are you shouting? All that’s mine is yours now. What do we care about money? We’ll just throw it away on a spree ... It’s bound to be so with the likes of us. And you and I had better go work on the land. I want to scrape the earth with my hands. We must work, do you hear? Alyosha said so. I won’t be a mistress to you, I’ll be faithful, I’ll be your slave, I’ll work for you. We’ll both go to the young lady, we’ll bow to her and ask her forgiveness, and go away. And if she doesn’t forgive us, we’ll go away anyway. And you can give her back her money, and love me ... And not love her. Do not love her any more. If you love her, I’ll strangle her ... I’ll put out both her eyes with a needle ...”
“I love you, you alone, I’ll love you in Siberia...”
“Why in Siberia? But why not, I’ll go to Siberia if you like, it’s all the same ... we’ll work ... there’s snow in Siberia ... I like driving over snow ... and there should be a little sleigh bell ... Do you hear a bell ringing ... ? Where is that little bell ringing? People are driving ... now it’s stopped.”
She closed her eyes helplessly, and suddenly seemed to fall asleep for a moment. A bell had indeed been ringing somewhere far away, and suddenly stopped ringing. Mitya lowered his head onto her breast. He did not notice how the bell stopped ringing, nor did he notice how the singing suddenly stopped as well, and instead of songs and drunken racket, a dead silence fell suddenly, as it were, over the whole house. Grushenka opened her eyes.
“What, was I asleep? Yes ... the bell ... I fell asleep and had a dream that I was driving over the snow ... a bell was ringing, and I was dozing. It seemed I was driving with someone very dear to me—with you. Far, far away ... I was embracing you and kissing you, pressing close to you, as if I were cold, and the snow was glistening ... You know how snow glistens at night, and there’s a new moon, and you feel as if you’re not on earth ... I woke up, and my dear was beside me—how good...”
“Beside you,” Mitya murmured, kissing her dress, her breast, her hands. And suddenly a strange fancy struck him: he fancied that she was looking straight ahead, not at him, not into his eyes, but over his head, intently and with a strange fixity. Surprise, almost fear, suddenly showed on her face.
“Mitya, who is that looking at us from there?” she whispered suddenly. Mitya turned and saw that someone had indeed parted the curtains and was apparently trying to make them out. More than one person, it seemed. He jumped up and quickly went towards the intruder.
“Here, come out here, please,” someone’s voice said to him, not loudly, but firmly and insistently.
Mitya stepped from behind the curtain and stood still. The whole room was full of people, not those who had been there before, but quite new ones. A momentary shiver ran down his spine, and he drew back. He recognized all these people instantly. The tall, plump old man in a coat and a service cap with a cockade was the district police commissioner, Mikhail Makarich. And the trim, “consumptive” fop, “always in such well-polished boots,” was the deputy prosecutor. “He has a chronometer worth four hundred roubles, he showed it to me.” And the short young man in spectacles ... Mitya simply could not remember his last name, but he knew him, too, he had seen him: he was an attorney, a district attorney “from the Jurisprudence,”[269] recently arrived. And that one—the deputy commissioner, Mavriky Mavrikich—he knew him, he was an acquaintance. And the ones with badges, what were they doing here? And the other two, peasants ... And Kalganov and Trifon Borisich there in the doorway . . .
“Gentlemen ... What is it, gentlemen?” Mitya started to say, but suddenly, as if beside himself, as if not of himself at all, he exclaimed loudly, at the top of his lungs:
“I un-der-stand!”
The young man in spectacles suddenly came forward and, stepping up to Mitya, began in a dignified manner, though a little hurriedly, as it were:
“We must have ... in short, would you kindly come over here, to the sofa ... It is of the utmost necessity that we have a word with you.”
“The old man!” Mitya cried in a frenzy, “the old man and his blood...! I un-der-stand!”
And as if cut down, he fell more than sat on a chair standing nearby.
“You understand? He understands! Parricide and monster, your old father’s blood cries out against you!” the old district police commissioner suddenly roared, going up to Mitya. He was beside himself, turned purple, and was shaking all over.
“But this is impossible!” cried the short young man. “Mikhail Makarich, Mikhail Makarich! Not like that, not like that, sir...! I ask you to allow me to speak alone ... I would never have expected such an episode from you...”
“But this is delirium, gentlemen, delirium!” the police commissioner kept exclaiming. “Look at him: in the middle of the night, with a disreputable wench, covered with his father’s blood ... Delirium! Delirium!”
“I beg you as strongly as I can, dear Mikhail Makarich, to restrain your feelings for the moment,” the deputy prosecutor whispered rapidly to the old man, “otherwise I shall have to resort to...”
But the short attorney did not let him finish; he turned to Mitya and firmly, loudly, and gravely declared:
“Retired Lieutenant Karamazov, sir, it is my duty to inform you that you are charged with the murder of your father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, which took place this night ...”
He said something more, and the prosecutor, too, seemed to add something, but Mitya, though he listened, no longer understood them. With wild eyes he stared around at them all . . .
BOOK IX. THE PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION
Chapter 1: The Start of the Official Perkhotin’s Career
Pyotr Ilyich Perkhotin, whom we left knocking with all his might at the well-locked gates of the widow Morozov’s house, in the end, of course, was finally successful. Hearing such furious knocking at the gate, Fenya, who had been so frightened two hours before, and who was still too excited and “thinking” too much to dare go to bed, became frightened once more almost to the point of hysterics: she fancied that it was Dmitri Fyodorovich knocking again (though she herself had seen him drive off), because no one else but he would knock so ‘boldly.” She rushed to the awakened porter, who had heard the knocking and was already on his way to the gate, and began begging him not to open. But the porter made inquiries of the person who was knocking, and learning who he was, and that he wanted to see Fedosya Markovna on a very important matter, finally decided to open the gates for him. Going to the same kitchen with Fedosya Markovna—and she “on account of her doubts” prevailed upon Pyotr Ilyich to allow the porter to come with them—Pyotr Ilyich started questioning her and at once hit upon the most important fact: namely, that Dmitri Fyodorovich, as he ran off to look for Grushenka, had snatched the pestle from the mortar, and returned later without the pestle but with his hands covered with blood: “And the blood was still dripping, it kept dripping and dripping!” Fenya exclaimed, her distraught imagination apparently having invented this horrible detail. But Pyotr Ilyich had also seen those bloody hands himself, though the blood was not dripping, and had himself helped to wash them, and the question was not how soon the blood had dried, but where exactly Dmitri Fyodorovich had run with the pestle—that is, was it certain he had gone to Fyodor Pavlovich’s, and what might be the grounds for such a positive inference? Perkhotin thoroughly emphasized this point, and though he did not find out anything definite as a result, he still became almost convinced that Dmitri Fyodorovich could not have run anywhere else but to his parent’s house, and that, consequently, something must have happened there. “And when he came back,” Fenya added excitedly, “and I told him everything, I began asking him: ‘Dmitri Fyodorovich, my dear, why are your hands covered with blood?’ and he answered me that it was human blood, and that he had just killed a man—he simply admitted it, he simply confessed it all to me, and suddenly ran out like a madman. I sat down and started thinking: where has he run off to like a madman? He’ll go to Mokroye, I was thinking, and kill my mistress there. So I ran out to go to his place and beg him not to kill my mistress, but at Plotnikov’s shop I saw that he was already leaving and that his hands weren’t covered with blood anymore.” (Fenya had noticed this and remembered it.) The old woman, Fenya’s grandmother, confirmed all her granddaughter’s statements as far as she could. Having asked a few more questions, Pyotr Ilyich left the house even more troubled and worried than when he had entered it.