Fatal Katya! Tomorrow I will get money and give you back your three thousand, and farewell, woman of great wrath, but farewell, too, my love! Let us end it! Tomorrow I’ll try to get it from all people, and if I don’t get it from people, I give you my word of honor, I will go to my father and smash his head in and take it from under his pillow, if only Ivan goes away. I may go to hard labor, but I will give you back the three thousand. And—farewell to you. I bow to you, to the ground, for I am a scoundrel before you. Forgive me. No, better not forgive, it will be easier for me and for you! Better hard labor than your love, for I love another, and you’ve found out too much
. about her today to be able to forgive. I will kill my thief. I will go away from you all, to the East, so as not to know anyone. From her as well, for you are not my only tormentor, but she is, too. Farewell!
P.S. I am writing a curse, yet I adore you! I hear it in my heart. One string
is left, and it sings. Better to tear my heart asunder! I will kill myself, but that dog first. I’ll tear the three thousand from him and throw it to you. Though I’m a scoundrel before you, I am not a thief! Wait for the three thousand. Under the dog’s mattress, with a pink ribbon. I am not a thief, but I will kill
my thief. Katya, don’t look contemptuous: Dmitri is not a thief, he is a murderer! He’s killed his father and ruined himself in order to stand up and not have to endure your pride. And not to love you. P.P.S. I kiss your feet, farewell!
P.P.P.S. Katya, pray to God they give me the money. Then there won’t be blood on me, but otherwise—blood there will be! Kill me!
Your slave and enemy, D. Karamazov.
When Ivan finished reading the “document,” he stood up, convinced. So his brother was the murderer, and not Smerdyakov. Not Smerdyakov, and therefore not he, Ivan. This letter suddenly assumed a mathematical significance in his eyes. There could be no further doubt for him now of Mitya’s guilt. Incidentally, the suspicion never occurred to Ivan that Mitya might have done the murder together with Smerdyakov; besides, it did not fit the facts. Ivan was set completely at ease. The next morning he recalled Smerdyakov and his jeers merely with contempt. A few days later he was even surprised that he could have been so painfully offended by his suspicions. He resolved to despise him and forget him. And so a month passed. He no longer made any inquiries about Smerdyakov, but a couple of times he heard in passing that he was very ill and not in his right mind. “He’ll end in madness,” the young doctor, Varvinsky, once said of him, and Ivan remembered it. During the last week of that month, Ivan himself began to feel very bad. He had already gone to consult the doctor from Moscow, invited by Katerina Ivanovna, who arrived just before the trial. And precisely at the same time his relations with Katerina Ivanovna intensified to the utmost. The two were some sort of enemies in love with each other. Katerina Ivanovna’s reversions to Mitya, momentary but strong, now drove Ivan to perfect rage. It is strange that until the very last scene at Katerina Ivanovna’s, which we have already described, when Alyosha came to her from seeing Mitya, he, Ivan, had never once heard any doubts of Mitya’s guilt from her during that whole month, despite all her “reversions” to him, which he hated so much. It was also remarkable that, though he felt he hated Mitya more and more every day, he understood at the same time that he hated him not because of Katya’s “reversions” to him, but precisely because he had killed their father! He himself felt it and was fully aware of it. Nevertheless, some ten days before the trial, he went to Mitya and offered him a plan of escape—a plan apparently already conceived long ago. Here, apart from the main reason prompting him to take such a step, the cause also lay in a certain unhealing scratch left on his heart by one little remark of Smerdyakov’s, that it was supposedly in his, Ivan’s, interest that his brother be convicted, because then the amount of the inheritance for himself and Alyosha would go up from forty to sixty thousand. He decided to sacrifice thirty thousand from his own portion to arrange for Mitya’s escape. Coming back from seeing him then, he felt terribly sad and confused: he suddenly began to feel that he wanted this escape not only so as to sacrifice the thirty thousand to it, and thus heal the scratch, but also for some other reason. “Is it because in my soul I’m just as much a murderer?” he asked himself. Something remote, but burning, stung his soul. Above all, his pride suffered greatly all that month, but of that later ... When, after his conversation with Alyosha, he stood with his hand on the bell of his apartment and suddenly decided to go to Smerdyakov, Ivan Fyodorovich was obeying some peculiar indignation that suddenly boiled up in his breast. He suddenly recalled how Katerina Ivanovna had just exclaimed to him in Alyosha’s presence: “It was you, you alone, who convinced me that he” (that is, Mitya) “is the murderer!” Recalling it, Ivan was dumbfounded: never in his life had he assured her that Mitya was the murderer, on the contrary, he had actually suspected himself before her when he came to her from Smerdyakov. On the contrary, it was she, she who had then laid the “document” before him and proved his brother’s guilt! And suddenly it was she who exclaimed: “I myself went to see Smerdyakov!” Went when? Ivan knew nothing of it. So she was not so sure of Mitya’s guilt! And what could Smerdyakov have told her? What, what precisely did he tell her? Terrible wrath began burning in his heart. He did not understand how he could have missed those words of hers half an hour ago and not shouted right then. He let go of the bell and set out for Smerdyakov. “This time maybe I’ll kill him,” he thought on the way.
Chapter 8: The Third and Last Meeting with Smerdyakov
He was only halfway there when a sharp, dry wind arose, the same as early that morning, and fine, thick, dry snow began pouring down. It fell on the earth without sticking to it, the wind whirled it about, and soon a perfect blizzard arose. We have almost no streetlamps in the part of town where Smerdyakov was living. Ivan Fyodorovich strode through the darkness without noticing the blizzard, finding his way instinctively. His head ached and there was a painful throbbing in his temples. His hands were cramped, he could feel it. Some distance from Maria Kondratievna’s house, Ivan Fyodorovich suddenly met with a solitary drunk little peasant in a patched coat, who was walking in zigzags, grumbling and cursing, and then would suddenly stop cursing and begin to sing in a hoarse, drunken voice: