“I beg your pardon, madame, so you did not give him any money? You firmly recall that you did not give him any?”
“I did not! I did not! I refused him because he was unable to appreciate it. He walked out furious and stamped his feet. He rushed at me, but I jumped aside ... And I shall also tell you, as a man from whom I now have no intention of concealing anything, that he even spat at me, can you imagine it? But why are you standing? Ah, do sit down ... Forgive me, I ... Or, no, run, run, you must run and save the unfortunate old man from a horrible death!”
“But if he has already killed him?”
“Ah, my God, of course! What are we going to do now? What do you think we should do now?”
Meanwhile she sat Pyotr Ilyich down, and sat down herself facing him. Pyotr Ilyich gave her a brief but rather clear account of the affair, at least that part of the affair he himself had witnessed earlier; he also told her of his visit to Fenya, and mentioned the news of the pestle. All these details struck the agitated lady no end, so that she kept crying out and covering her eyes with her hands . . .
“Imagine, I foresaw it all! I am endowed with this property: whatever I imagine always happens. How often, how often have I looked at that terrible man and thought: here is a man who will end up by murdering me. And now it’s happened ... That is, if he hasn’t killed me now, but only his father, it is most likely because the hand of God is obviously protecting me, and, besides, he was ashamed to murder me because I myself, here on this very spot, put an icon around his neck with a relic of the great martyr Varvara ... How close I was to death at that moment! I went up to him, quite close, and he stretched out his neck to me! You know, Pyotr Ilyich (forgive me, you did say your name was Pyotr Ilyich?) ... you know, I do not believe in miracles, but this icon and this obvious miracle with me now—it astounds me, and I’m beginning to believe in anything again. Have you heard about the elder Zosima ... ? Ah, anyway, I don’t know what I’m saying ... And imagine, even with the icon on his neck, he still spat at me ... Of course, he only spat, he didn’t murder me, and ... and ... so that’s where he galloped off to! But what of us, where shall we go now, what do you think?”
Pyotr Ilyich stood up and announced that he would now go directly to the police commissioner and tell him everything, and let him do as he thinks best.
“Ah, he is a wonderful, wonderful man, I know Mikhail Makarovich. Of course, go precisely to him. How resourceful you are, Pyotr Ilyich, and what a good idea you’ve come up with; you know, in your place I’d never have been able to come up with that!”
“All the more so in that I, too, am well acquainted with the commissioner,” observed Pyotr Ilyich, still standing and evidently wishing somehow to tear himself away from the impetuous lady, who would not let him say good-bye to her and leave.
“And you know, you know,” she went on prattling, “you must come back and tell me what you see and learn ... and what they find out ... and what they will decide about him, and where they will condemn him to. Tell me, we don’t have capital punishment, do we? But you must come, even if it’s three o’clock in the morning, even if it’s four, even half past four ... Tell them to wake me up, to shake me if I don’t get up ... Oh, God, but I’ll never be able to fall asleep. You know, why don’t I go with you myself?”
“N-no, madame, but if you would now write three lines with your own hand, just in case, saying that you did not give Dmitri Fyodorovich any money, it might not be amiss ... just in case...”
“Certainly!” the delighted Madame Khokhlakov leaped to her bureau. “And you know, you amaze me, you simply astound me with your resourcefulness and your skill in these matters ... Are you in service here? I’m so pleased to know you’re in service here...”
And while she spoke, she quickly inscribed the following three lines in a large hand on a half sheet of writing paper:
Never in my life did I lend the unfortunate Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov (for he is unfortunate now, in any case) the sum of three thousand roubles today, or any other money, never, never! I swear to it by all that is holy in our world.
Khokhlakov
“Here is the note!” she turned quickly to Pyotr Ilyich. “Go now and save. It is a great deed on your part.”
And she crossed him three times. She even ran out to see him to the front hall.
“How grateful I am to you! You wouldn’t believe how grateful I am to you now, for having come to me first. How is it we’ve never met? I shall be flattered to receive you in my house in the future. And how pleased I am to know that you’re in service here ... and with your precision, your resourcefulness ... They must appreciate you, they must finally understand you, and whatever I can do for you, believe me ... Oh, I love young people so! I am in love with young people. Young people—they are the foundation for all of today’s suffering Russia, her only hope ... Oh, go, go...!”
But Pyotr Ilyich had already run out, otherwise she would not have let him go so soon. All the same, Madame Khokhlakov made quite a pleasant impression on him, which even somewhat softened his alarm at getting involved in such a bad affair. Tastes are extremely divergent, that is a known fact. “She’s not as old as all that,” he thought with pleasure. “On the contrary, I might have taken her for her own daughter.”
As for Madame Khokhlakov, she was simply enchanted with the young man. “Such skill, such exactitude, and in so young a man, in our time, and all that with such manners and appearance! And yet they say our modern young men cannot do anything, but here’s an example for you,” and so on and so forth. So that she simply forgot all about the “terrible incident,” and only on the point of going to bed did she suddenly recall again “how close she had been to death.” “Ah,” she said, “it’s terrible, terrible!” and at once fell into a sound and sweet sleep. By the way, I would not go into such petty and incidental details if the eccentric encounter I have just described, between a young official and a widow not all that old, had not afterwards served as the foundation for the whole life’s career of that precise and accurate young man, which is still recalled with astonishment in our town, and of which we, too, shall perhaps have a special word to say, once we have concluded our long story of the Karamazov brothers.
Chapter 2: The Alarm
Our district commissioner of police, Mikhail Makarovich Makarov, a retired lieutenant colonel, redesignated a state councillor,[270] was a widower and a good man. He had come to us only three years earlier, but had already won general sympathy, mainly because he “knew how to bring society together.” His house was never without guests, and it seemed he would have been unable to live without them. He had to have guests to dinner every day, even if only two, even if only one, but without guests he would not sit down to eat. He gave formal dinners, too, under all sorts of pretexts, sometimes even the most unexpected. The food he served, though not refined, was abundant, the cabbage pies were excellent, and the wines made up in quantity for what they lacked in quality. In the front room stood a billiard table, surrounded by quite decent furnishings; that is, there were even paintings of English racehorses in black frames on the walls, which, as everyone knows, constitute a necessary adornment of any billiard room in a bachelor’s house. Every evening there was a card game, even if only at one table. But quite often all the best society of our town, including mamas and young girls, would get together there for a dance. Mikhail Makarovich, though a widower, lived as a family man. with his already long-widowed daughter, who in turn was the mother of two girls, Mikhail Makarovich’s granddaughters. The girls were grown up by then and had finished their education; they were of not-unattractive appearance, of cheerful character, and though everyone knew that they would bring no dowries, they still drew our young men of society to their grandfather’s house. In his official capacity, Mikhail Makarovich was none too bright, but he did his job no worse than many others. To tell the truth, he was rather an uneducated man, and even a bit carefree with respect to a clear understanding of the limits of his administrative power. Not that he did not fully comprehend some of the reforms of the present reign, but he understood them with certain, sometimes quite conspicuous, mistakes, and not at all because he was somehow especially incapable, but simply because of his carefree nature, because he never got around to looking into them. “I have the soul of a military man, not a civilian,” he said of himself. He still did not seem to have acquired a firm and definite idea even of the exact principles of the peasant reform, and learned of them, so to speak, from year to year, increasing his knowledge practically and unwittingly, though, by the way, he himself was a landowner. Pyotr Ilyich knew with certainty that he was sure to meet some guests at Mikhail Makarovich’s that evening, only he did not know exactly whom. Meanwhile, at that very moment, the prosecutor and our district doctor Varvinsky, a young man who had just come to us from Petersburg, after brilliantly completing his studies at the Petersburg Medical Academy, were sitting there playing whist. The prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich—the deputy prosecutor, that is, but we all called him the prosecutor—was a special man among us, not old, still only about thirty-five, but much inclined to consumption, and married, besides, to a rather fat and childless lady; he was proud and irritable, and yet of quite considerable intelligence, and even a kind soul. It appeared the whole trouble with his character was that he had a somewhat higher opinion of himself than his real virtues warranted. And that was why he constantly seemed restless. Besides, there were in him certain lofty and even artistic pretensions—for example, to psychologism, to a special knowledge of the human soul, to a special gift of comprehending the criminal and his crime. In this sense he considered himself somewhat ill treated and passed over in his service, and was forever persuaded that they were unable to appreciate him in higher spheres and that he had enemies. In his gloomier moments he even threatened to desert to the defense side of criminal law. The unexpected case of the Karamazov parricide thoroughly shook him, as it were: “A case like this could become known all over Russia.” But I am getting ahead of myself.