“Yes, you are the guilty one! You are the chief criminal! You are violent, you are depraved, you are the guilty one, you most of all,” screamed the commissioner, shaking his finger at her, but this time he was quickly and resolutely suppressed. The prosecutor even seized him with both arms.
“This is entirely out of order, Mikhail Makarovich,” he cried, “you are positively hindering the investigation ... ruining the whole thing ... ,”he was all but choking.
“Measures, measures, we must take measures!” Nikolai Parfenovich, too, began seething terribly, “otherwise it’s positively impossible...!”
“Judge us together!” Grushenka went on exclaiming frenziedly, still on her knees. “Punish us together, I’ll go with him now even to execution!”
“Grusha, my life, my blood, my holy one!” Mitya threw himself on his knees beside her and caught her tightly in his arms. “Don’t believe her,” he shouted, “she’s not guilty of anything, of any blood, or anything!”
He remembered afterwards that several men pulled him away from her by force, that she was suddenly taken out, and that when he came to his senses he was already sitting at the table. Beside him and behind him stood people with badges. On the sofa across the table from him, Nikolai Parfenovich, the district attorney, sat trying to persuade him to sip some water from a glass that stood on the table: “It will refresh you, it will calm you down, you needn’t be afraid, you needn’t worry,” he kept adding with extreme politeness. And Mitya, as he remembered, suddenly became terribly interested in his big rings, one with an amethyst, and another with a bright yellow stone, transparent and of a most wonderful brilliance. And for a long time afterwards he recalled with surprise how these rings irresistibly drew his eye even through all those terrible hours of interrogation, so that for some reason he was unable to tear himself away and forget them as something quite unsuitable in his position. On the left, at Mitya’s side, where Maximov had been sitting at the start of the evening, the prosecutor now sat down, and to Mitya’s right, where Grushenka had been, a pink-cheeked young man settled himself, dressed in a rather threadbare sort of hunting jacket, and in front of him appeared an inkstand and some paper. He turned out to be the district attorney’s clerk, who had come with him. The police commissioner now stood near the window, at the other end of the room, next to Kalganov, who was sitting in a chair by the same window.
“Drink some water!” the district attorney gently repeated for the tenth time.
“I drank some, gentlemen, I drank some ... but ... come, gentlemen, crush me, punish me, decide my fate!” Mitya exclaimed, staring with horribly fixed, bulging eyes at the district attorney.
“So you positively assert that you are not guilty of the death of your father, Fyodor Pavlovich?” the district attorney asked gently but insistently.
“Not guilty! I’m guilty of other blood, of another old man’s blood, but not of my father’s. And I weep for it! I killed, I killed the old man, killed him and struck him down ... But it’s hard to have to answer for that blood with this other blood, this terrible blood, which I’m not guilty of ... A terrible accusation, gentlemen, as if you’d stunned me on the head! But who killed my father, who killed him? Who could have killed him if not me? It’s a wonder, an absurdity, an impossibility . . .!”
“Yes, who could have killed him ... ,” the district attorney began, but the prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich (the deputy prosecutor, but for the sake of brevity we, too, shall call him the prosecutor), exchanging glances with the district attorney, said, turning to Mitya:
“You needn’t worry about the old servant, Grigory Vasiliev. I can tell you that he is alive, he has recovered, and despite the severe beating inflicted by you, according to his and now to your own evidence, it seems he will undoubtedly live, at least in the doctor’s opinion.”
“Alive? So he’s alive!” Mitya suddenly shouted, clasping his hands. His whole face lit up. “Lord, I thank you for this greatest miracle, which you have done for me, a sinner and evildoer, according to my prayer! Yes, yes, it’s according to my prayer, I was praying all night!” And he crossed himself three times. He was nearly breathless.
“And it is from this same Grigory that we have received such significant evidence regarding you, that ... ,” the prosecutor went on, but Mitya suddenly jumped up from his chair.
“One moment, gentlemen, for God’s sake, just one moment; I’ll run to her...”
“Sorry! Right now it’s quite impossible!” Nikolai Parfenovich almost shrieked, and he, too, jumped to his feet. The men with badges laid hold of Mitya; however, he sat down on the chair himself . . .
“What a pity, gentlemen! I wanted to see her for just one moment ... I wanted to announce to her that this blood that was gnawing at my heart all night has been washed away, has disappeared, and I am no longer a murderer! She is my fiancée, gentlemen!” he suddenly spoke ecstatically and reverently, looking around at them all. “Oh, thank you, gentlemen! Oh, how you’ve restored, how you’ve resurrected me in a moment ... ‘.That old man—he carried me in his arms, gentlemen, he washed me in a tub when I was a three-year-old child and abandoned by everyone, he was my own father . . .!”
“And so you ... ,” the district attorney began.
“Sorry, gentlemen, sorry, just one more minute,” Mitya interrupted, putting both elbows on the table and covering his face with his hands, “let me collect myself a little, let me catch my breath, gentlemen. It’s all terribly shocking, terribly—a man is not a drumskin, gentlemen!”
“Have some more water,” muttered Nikolai Parfenovich.
Mitya took his hands away from his face and laughed. His look was cheerful; he had quite changed, as it were, in a moment. And his whole tone was changed: here now sat a man once again the equal of all these men, of all these previous acquaintances of his, exactly as if they had all come together the day before, when nothing had happened yet, somewhere at a social gathering. Let us note, incidentally, that when he first came to our town, Mitya was warmly received at the commissioner’s house, but later, especially during the last month, Mitya hardly ever visited him, and the commissioner, meeting him in the street, for example, frowned deeply and bowed to him only out of politeness, which circumstance Mitya noted very well. His acquaintance with the prosecutor was even more distant, but to the prosecutor’s wife, a nervous and fantastic lady, he sometimes paid visits, most respectful visits, by the way, himself not even quite knowing why he was calling on her, and she always received him kindly, taking an interest in him for some reason, until quite recently. He had not yet had time to make the acquaintance of the district attorney, though he had met him and even spoken with him once or twice, both times about the female sex.
“You, Nikolai Parfenovich, are, I can see, a most skillful investigator,” Mitya suddenly laughed gaily, “but now I will help you myself. Oh, gentlemen, I am resurrected ... and do not take it amiss that I address you so casually and directly. Besides, I’m a little drunk, that I will frankly admit. I believe I had the honor ... the honor and the pleasure of meeting you, Nikolai Parfenovich, at the home of my relation, Miusov ... Gentlemen, gentlemen, I do not claim to be equal, I quite understand who I am now, as I sit here before you. A horrible suspicion hangs over me ... if Grigory has given evidence regardingme ... then of course, oh, of course it hangs over me! Horrible, horrible—I quite understand! But—to business, gentlemen, I’m ready, and now we’ll make short work of it, because, listen, listen, gentlemen. You see, if I know I am not guilty, then of course we can make short work of it! Can’t we? Can’t we?”
Mitya spoke much and quickly, nervously and expansively, and as if he decidedly took his listeners for his best friends.