“Speak!” Ivan exclaimed. “I want with all my strength to know what you thought then. I need it; the truth, the truth!” He was breathing heavily, already looking at Alyosha with some sort of malice beforehand.
“Forgive me, I did think that, too, at the time,” Alyosha whispered, and fell silent, without adding even a single “mitigating circumstance.”
“Thanks!” Ivan snapped, turned from Alyosha, and quickly went his way. Since then, Alyosha had noticed that his brother Ivan somehow abruptly began to shun him and even seemed to have begun to dislike him, so that later Alyosha himself stopped visiting him. But at that moment, just after that meeting with him, Ivan Fyodorovich, without going home, suddenly made his way to Smerdyakov again.
Chapter 7: The Second Visit to Smerdyakov
Smerdyakov had already been discharged from the hospital by then. Ivan Fyodorovich knew his new lodgings: precisely in that lopsided little log house with its two rooms separated by a hallway. Maria Kondratievna was living in one room with her mother, and Smerdyakov in the other by himself. God knows on what terms he lived with them: was he paying, or did he live there free? Later it was supposed that he had moved in with them as Maria Kondratievna’s fiance and meanwhile lived with them free. Both mother and daughter respected him greatly and looked upon him as a superior person compared with themselves. Having knocked until the door was opened to him, Ivan Fyodorovich went into the hallway and, on Maria Kondratievna’s directions, turned left and walked straight into the “good room” occupied by Smerdyakov. The stove in that room was a tiled one, and it was very well heated. The walls were adorned with blue wallpaper, all tattered, it is true, and behind it, in the cracks, cockroaches swarmed in terrible numbers, so that there was an incessant rustling. The furniture was negligible: two benches along the walls and two chairs by the table. But the table, though it was a simple wooden one, was nevertheless covered by a tablecloth with random pink designs. There was a pot of geraniums in each of the two little windows. In the corner was an icon stand with icons. On the table stood a small, badly dented copper samovar and a tray with two cups. But Smerdyakov was already finished with his tea and the samovar had gone out ... He himself was sitting at the table on a bench, looking into a notebook and writing something with a pen. A bottle of ink stood by him, as well as a low, cast-iron candlestick with, incidentally, a stearine candle. Ivan Fyodorovich concluded at once from Smerdyakov’s face that he had recovered completely from his illness. His face was fresher, fuller, his tuft was fluffed up, his side-whiskers were slicked down. He was sitting in a gaily colored quilted dressing gown, which, however, was rather worn and quite ragged. On his nose he had a pair of spectacles, which Ivan Fyodorovich had never seen on him before. This most trifling circumstance suddenly made Ivan Fyodorovich even doubly angry, as it were: “Such a creature, and in spectacles to boot!” Smerdyakov slowly raised his head and peered intently through the spectacles at his visitor; then he slowly removed them and raised himself a little from the bench, but somehow not altogether respectfully, somehow even lazily, with the sole purpose of observing only the most necessary courtesy, which it is almost impossible to do without. All of this instantly flashed through Ivan, and he at once grasped and noted it all, and most of all the look in Smerdyakov’s eyes, decidedly malicious, unfriendly, and even haughty: “Why are you hanging about here,” it seemed to say, “didn’t we already settle everything before? Why have you come again?” Ivan Fyodorovich could barely contain himself:
“It’s hot in here,” he said, still standing, and unbuttoned his coat.
“Take it off, sir,” Smerdyakov allowed.
Ivan Fyodorovich took his coat off and threw it on a bench, took a chair with his trembling hands, quickly moved it to the table, and sat down. Smerdyakov managed to sit down on his bench ahead of him.
“First of all, are we alone?” Ivan Fyodorovich asked sternly and abruptly. “Won’t they hear us in there?”
“No one will hear anything, sir. You saw yourself: there’s a hallway.”
“Listen, my friend, what was that remark you came out with as I was leaving you at the hospital, that if I said nothing about you being an expert at shamming the falling sickness, then you also would not tell the district attorney about the whole of our conversation at the gate that time? What whole? What could you mean by that? Were you threatening me or what? Have I entered into some league with you or what? Am I afraid of you or what?”
Ivan Fyodorovich uttered this quite in a rage, obviously and purposely letting it be known that he scorned all deviousness, all beating around the bush, and was playing an open hand. Smerdyakov’s eyes flashed maliciously, his left eye began winking, and at once, though, as was his custom, with measure and reserve, he gave his answer—as if to say, “You want us to come clean, here’s some cleanness for you.”
“This is what I meant then, and this is why I said it then: that you, having known beforehand about the murder of your own parent, left him then as a sacrifice; and so as people wouldn’t conclude anything bad about your feelings because of that, and maybe about various other things as well—that’s what I was promising not to tell the authorities.”
Though Smerdyakov spoke unhurriedly and was apparently in control of himself, all the same there was something hard and insistent, malicious and insolently defiant in his voice. He stared boldly at Ivan Fyodorovich, who was even dazed for the first moment.
“How? What? Are you out of your mind?”
“I’m perfectly in my mind, sir.”
“But did I know about the murder then?” Ivan Fyodorovich cried out at last, and brought his fist down hard on the table. “What is the meaning of ‘various other things’? Speak, scoundrel!”
Smerdyakov was silent and went on studying Ivan Fyodorovich with the same insolent look.
“Speak, you stinking scum, what ‘various other things’?” the latter screamed.
“And by ‘various other things’ just now, I meant that maybe you yourself were even wishing very much for your parent’s death then.”
Ivan Fyodorovich jumped up and hit him as hard as he could on the shoulder with his fist, so that he rocked back towards the wall. In an instant his whole face was flooded with tears, and saying, “Shame on you, sir, to strike a weak man!” he suddenly covered his eyes with his blue-checkered and completely sodden handkerchief and sank into quiet, tearful weeping. About a minute passed.
“Enough! Stop it!” Ivan Fyodorovich finally said peremptorily, sitting down on the chair again. “Don’t drive me out of all patience.”
Smerdyakov took the rag from his eyes. Every line on his puckered face spoke of the offense he had just endured.
“So, you scoundrel, you thought I was at one with Dmitri in wanting to kill father?”
“I didn’t know your thoughts then, sir,” Smerdyakov said in an injured voice, “and that was why I stopped you then, as you were coming in the gate, in order to test you on that same point, sir.”
“To test what? What?”
“Precisely that same circumstance: whether you did or did not want your parent to be killed soon.”
What aroused Ivan Fyodorovich’s indignation most of all was this insistent, insolent tone, which Smerdyakov stubbornly refused to give up.
“You killed him!” he exclaimed suddenly. Smerdyakov grinned contemptuously. “That I did not kill him, you yourself know for certain. And I’d have thought that for an intelligent man there was no more to be said about it.”
“But why, why did you have such a suspicion about me then?”
“From fear only, sir, as you already know. Because I was in such a state then, all shaking from fear, that I suspected everybody. And I decided to test you, sir, because I thought that if you, too, wanted the same thing as your brother, then it would be the end of the whole business, and I’d perish, too, like a fly.”