The carriage started and raced off. All was vague in the traveler’s soul, but he greedily looked around him at the fields, the hills, the trees, a flock of geese flying high above him in the clear sky. Suddenly he felt so well. He tried to strike up a conversation with the coachman, and found something in the peasant’s reply terribly interesting, but a moment later he realized that it had all flown over his head and, in fact, he had not understood what the peasant had replied. He fell silent; it was good just as it was: clean, fresh, cool air; a clear sky. The images of Alyosha and Katerina Ivanovna flashed through his mind; but he gently smiled and gently blew at the dear shadows, and they flew away: “Their time will come,” he thought. They covered the distance to the next station quickly, changed horses, and raced on to Volovya. “Why is it interesting to talk with an intelligent man? What did he mean by that?” the thought suddenly took his breath away. “And why did I report to him that I was going to Chermashnya?” They pulled up at the Volovya station. Ivan Fyodorovich got out of the carriage and was surrounded by coachmen. They haggled over the ride to Chermashnya, eight miles by country road, in a hired carriage. He told them to harness up. He went into the station house, looked around, glanced at the stationmaster’s wife, and suddenly walked back out on the porch.
“Forget about Chermashnya, brothers. Am I too late to get to the railway by seven o’clock?”
“We’ll just make it. Shall we harness up?”
“At once. Will one of you be in town tomorrow?”
“Yes, sure, Mitri here will be.”
“Can you do me a favor, Mitri? Stop and see my father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, and tell him that I didn’t go to Chermashnya. Can you do that?”
“Why not? I’ll stop by. I’ve known Fyodor Pavlovich for a long time.”
“Here’s a tip for you; I don’t suppose you’ll get anything from him ... ,” Ivan Fyodorovich laughed gaily.
“True enough, I won’t,” Mitri laughed, too. “Thank you, sir, I’ll be sure to do it...”
At seven o’clock in the evening Ivan Fyodorovich boarded the train and flew towards Moscow. “Away with all the past, I’m through with the old world forever, and may I never hear another word or echo from it; to the new world, to new places, and no looking back!” But instead of delight, such darkness suddenly descended on his soul, and such grief gnawed at his heart, as he had never known before in the whole of his life. He sat thinking all night; the train flew on, and only at daybreak, entering Moscow, did he suddenly come to, as it were.
“I am a scoundrel,” he whispered to himself.
And Fyodor Pavlovich, having seen his boy off, was left feeling very pleased. For all of two hours he felt almost happy and sat sipping cognac; but suddenly there occurred a most annoying and unpleasant circumstance for everyone in the house, which instantly plunged Fyodor Pavlovich into great confusion: Smerdyakov went to the cellar for something and fell in from the top step. Fortunately, Marfa Ignatievna happened to be in the yard at the moment and heard it in time. She did not see the fall, but she did hear the cry, a special, strange cry, long familiar to her—the cry of an epileptic falling into a fit. Whether the fit had come on him as he was going down the stairs, so that of course he would have fallen unconscious at once, or whether, on the contrary, the fall and concussion had caused the fit in Smerdyakov, who was a known epileptic, was impossible to figure out; but he was found in the cellar, in cramps and convulsions, writhing and foaming at the mouth. At first they thought he must have broken something, an arm or a leg, and injured himself, but “God preserved him,” as Marfa Ignatievna put it: nothing of the sort had happened, and the only difficulty lay in getting him up and out of the cellar into the daylight. But they asked for help from some neighbors and somehow managed to accomplish it. Fyodor Pavlovich was present at this ceremony and lent a hand, obviously frightened and lost, as it were. The sick man, however, did not regain consciousness: the fits would let up for a time, but they kept coming back, and everyone concluded that the same thing would happen as the year before when he had accidentally fallen from the attic. They remembered that then they had applied ice to his head. Some ice was found in the cellar and Marfa Ignatievna arranged things, and towards evening Fyodor Pavlovich sent for Dr. Herzenstube, which doctor arrived at once. Having examined the patient thoroughly (he was the most thorough and attentive doctor in the whole district, an elderly and most venerable man), he concluded that the fit was an extraordinary one and “might threaten a danger,” and that meanwhile he, Herzenstube, does not fully understand it yet, but if by tomorrow morning the present remedies have not helped, he will venture to try others. The sick man was put to bed in the cottage, in a small room next to the quarters of Grigory and Marfa Ignatievna. For the rest of the day, Fyodor Pavlovich suffered one disaster after another: Marfa Ignatievna cooked dinner, and the soup, compared with Smerdyakov’s cooking, came out “like swill,” while the chicken was so dry that teeth could not chew it. In reply to the bitter, though just, reproaches of her master, Marfa Ignatievna objected that the chicken was a very old one to begin with, and that she had never been to cooking school. Towards evening another care cropped up: it was reported to Fyodor Pavlovich that Grigory, who had fallen ill two days before, was now almost completely bedridden with his lower back out. Fyodor Pavlovich finished tea as early as possible and locked himself up alone in the house. He was in terrible and anxious expectation. It so happened that he expected Grushenka’s arrival almost certainly that very evening; at least he had gotten from Smerdyakov, still early that morning, almost an assurance that “she has now undoubtedly promised to arrive, sir.” The irrepressible old man’s heart was beating anxiously; he paced his empty rooms and listened. He had to be on the alert: Dmitri Fyodorovich could be watching out for her somewhere, and when she knocked at the window (Smerdyakov had assured Fyodor Pavlovich two days before that he had told her where and how to knock), he would have to open the door as quickly as possible and by no means keep her waiting in the entryway even for a second, or else, God forbid, she might become frightened and run away. It was bothersome for Fyodor Pavlovich, but never had his heart bathed in sweeter hopes: for it was possible to say almost for certain that this time she would surely come ... !
BOOK VI: THE RUSSIAN MONK
Chapter 1: The Elder Zosima and His Visitors
When Alyosha, with anxiety and pain in his heart, entered the elder’s cell, he stopped almost in amazement: instead of a dying sick man, perhaps already unconscious, as he had feared to find him, he suddenly saw him sitting in an armchair, his face, though worn out from weakness, cheerful and gay, surrounded by visitors and engaging with them in quiet and bright conversation. However, he had gotten up from bed not more than a quarter of an hour before Alyosha arrived; his visitors had gathered in his cell earlier and waited for him to wake, trusting in the firm assurance of Father Paissy that “the teacher will undoubtedly get up, in order to converse once more with those dear to his heart, as he himself said, and as he himself promised in the morning.” Father Paissy believed firmly in this promise, and in every word of the departing elder, so much so that if he had seen him already quite unconscious and even no longer breathing, but had his promise that he would arise once more and say farewell to him, he would perhaps not have believed even death itself and would have kept expecting the dying man to come to and fulfill what had been promised. And that morning, as he was falling asleep, the elder Zosima had said positively to him: “I shall not die before I have once more drunk deeply of conversation with you, beloved of my heart, before I have looked upon your dear faces and poured out my soul to you once more.” Those who gathered for this, probably the last of the elder’s talks, were his most faithful friends from long ago. There were four of them: the hieromonks Father Iosif and Father Paissy, the hieromonk Father Mikhail, superior of the hermitage, not yet a very old man, far from very learned, of humble origin, but firm in spirit, with inviolable and simple faith, of stern appearance, but pervaded by a deep tenderness of heart, though he obviously concealed his tenderness even to the point of some sort of shame. The fourth visitor was quite old, a simple little monk from the poorest peasantry, Brother Anfim, all but illiterate, quiet and taciturn, rarely speaking to anyone, the humblest of the humble, who had the look of a man who has been permanently frightened by something great and awesome that was more than his mind could sustain. The elder Zosima very much loved this, as it were, trembling man, and throughout his life treated him with unusual respect, though throughout his life he had perhaps said fewer words to him than to anyone else, despite the fact that he had once spent many years traveling with him all over holy Russia. That was now very long ago, about forty years before, when the elder Zosima first began his monastic effort in a poor, little-known monastery in Kostroma, and when, soon after that, he went to accompany Father Anfim on his journeys collecting donations for their poor Kostroma monastery. Host and visitors all settled in the elder’s second room, where his bed stood, a very small room, as was pointed out earlier, so that the four of them (not counting the novice Porfiry, who remained standing) had barely enough room to place themselves around the elder’s armchair on chairs brought from the first room. Dusk was falling; the room was lighted by oil-lamps and wax candles before the icons. When he saw Alyosha, who became embarrassed as he entered and stopped in the doorway, the elder joyfully smiled to him and held out his hand: