She slowly raised this hand to her lips, though with the rather strange purpose of “getting even” in kisses. Katerina Ivanovna did not withdraw her hand: with a timid hope, she listened to Grushenka’s last, also rather strangely expressed, promise to please her “like a slave”; she looked tensely into her eyes: she saw in those eyes the same openhearted, trusting expression, the same serene gaiety ... “Perhaps she is so naive!” a hope flashed in Katerina Ivanovna’s heart. Meanwhile Grushenka, as if admiring the “dear little hand,” was slowly raising it to her lips. But with the hand just at her lips, she suddenly hesitated for two, maybe three seconds, as if thinking something over.
“Do you know, my angel,”she suddenly drawled in the most tender, sugary voice, “do you know? I’m just not going to kiss your hand.” And she laughed a gleeful little laugh. “As you wish ... What’s the matter?” Katerina Ivanovna suddenly started.
“And you can keep this as a memory—that you kissed my hand, and I did not kiss yours.” Something suddenly flashed in her eyes. She looked with terrible fixity at Katerina Ivanovna.
“Insolent!” Katerina Ivanovna said suddenly, as if suddenly understanding something. She blushed all over and jumped up from her place. Grushenka, too, got up, without haste.
“So I’ll go right now and tell Mitya that you kissed my hand, and I didn’t kiss yours at all. How he’ll laugh!”
“You slut! Get out!”
“Ah, shame on you, young lady, shame on you! It’s really quite indecent for you to use such words, dear young lady.”
“Get out, bought woman!” screamed Katerina Ivanovna. Every muscle trembled in her completely distorted face.
“Bought, am I? You yourself as a young girl used to go to your gentlemen at dusk to get money, offering your beauty for sale, and I know it.”
Katerina Ivanovna made a cry and was about to leap at her, but Alyosha held her back with all his strength.
“Not a step, not a word! Don’t speak, don’t answer anything—she’ll leave, she’ll leave right now!”
At that moment both of Katerina Ivanovna’s aunts, having heard her cry, ran into the room; the maid ran in, too. They all rushed to her.
“That I will,” said Grushenka, picking up her mantilla from the sofa. “Alyosha, dear, come with me!”
“Go, go quickly,” Alyosha pleaded, clasping his hands before her.
“Alyoshenka, dear, come with me! I have something very, very nice to tell you on the way. I performed this scene for you, Alyoshenka. Come with me, darling, you’ll be glad you did.”
Alyosha turned away, wringing his hands. Grushenka, with a peal of laughter, ran out of the house.
Katerina Ivanovna had a fit. She sobbed, she choked with spasms. Everyone fussed around her.
“I warned you,” the elder of the aunts was saying, “I tried to keep you from taking this step ... You are too passionate ... How could you think of taking such a step! You do not know these creatures, and this one, they say, is worse than all of them ... No, you are too willful!”
“She’s a tiger!” screamed Katerina Ivanovna. “Why did you hold me back, Alexei Fyodorovich! I’d have beaten her, beaten her!”
She could not restrain herself in front of Alyosha, and perhaps did not want to restrain herself. “She should be flogged, on a scaffold, by an executioner, with everyone watching!”
Alyosha backed towards the door.
“But, my God!” Katerina Ivanovna suddenly cried out, clasping her hands. “And he! He could be so dishonest, so inhuman! He told this creature what happened then, on that fatal, eternally accursed, accursed day! ‘You came to sell your beauty, dear young lady!’ She knows! Your brother is a scoundrel, Alexei Fyodorovich!”
Alyosha wanted to say something, but he could not find a single word. His heart ached within him.
“Go away, Alexei Fyodorovich! It’s so shameful, so terrible! Tomorrow ... I beg you on my knees, come tomorrow. Do not condemn me. Forgive me. I don’t know what I’ll still do to myself!”
Alyosha went outside, staggering, as it were. He, too, felt like crying as she had. Suddenly a maid caught up with him.
“The young lady forgot to give you this letter from Madame Khokhlakov. She’s had it since dinnertime.”
Alyosha mechanically took the small pink envelope and almost unconsciously put it in his pocket.
Chapter 11: One More Ruined Reputation
From town to the monastery was not more than half a mile or so. Alyosha hurried along the road, which was deserted at that hour. It was already almost night; it was difficult to make out objects thirty paces ahead. There was a crossroads halfway. At the crossroads, under a solitary willow, a figure came into view. Alyosha had just reached the crossroads when the figure tore itself from its place, leaped out at him, and shouted in a wild voice:
“Your money or your life!”
“Ah, it’s you, Mitya!” Alyosha, though badly startled, said in surprise.
“Ha, ha, ha! You didn’t expect me? I wondered where to wait for you. Near her house? There are three roads from there, and I might have missed you. Finally I decided, I’ll wait here, because he’ll have to pass here, there’s no other way to the monastery. Well, give me the truth, crush me like a cockroach ... Why, what’s the matter?” “Nothing, brother ... Just that you startled me. Oh, Dmitri! Father’s blood today ...” Alyosha began to cry. He had been wanting to cry for a long time, and now it was as if something suddenly snapped in his soul. “You all but killed him ... you cursed him ... and now ... here ... you’re making jokes ... ‘Your money or your life!’”
“Well, what of it? Improper, eh? Doesn’t fit my position?”
“No ... I just. . .”
“Wait. Look at the night: see what a gloomy night it is, what clouds, how the wind is rising! I hid myself here, under the willow, waiting for you, and suddenly thought (as God is my witness): why languish any longer, why wait? Here is the willow, there is a handkerchief, a shirt, I can make a rope right now, plus suspenders, and—no longer burden the earth, or dishonor it with my vile presence! And then I heard you coming—Lord, just as if something suddenly flew down on me: ah, so there is a man that I love, here he is, here is that man, my dear little brother, whom I love more than anyone in the world, and who is the only one I love! And I loved you so, I loved you so at that moment that I thought: I’ll throw myself on his neck! But then a foolish thought came to me: ‘I’ll amuse him, I’ll give him a scare.’ So I yelled: ‘Your money!’ like a fool. Forgive my foolishness—it’s only nonsense, and in my soul ... it’s also fitting ... Well, damn it, tell me what happened! What did she say? Crush me, strike me down, don’t spare me! Was she furious?”
“No,notthat ... It wasn’t like that at all, Mitya. It was ... I found the two of them there together.”
“What two?”
“Grushenka and Katerina Ivanovna.”
Dmitri Fyodorovich was dumbstruck.
“Impossible!” he cried. “You’re raving! Grushenka with her?”
Alyosha told him everything that had happened to him from the very moment he entered Katerina Ivanovna’s house. He spoke for about ten minutes, one would not say fluently or coherently, but he seemed to convey it clearly, grasping the main words, the main gestures, and vividly conveying his own feelings, often with a single stroke. His brother Dmitri listened silently, staring point blank at him with horrible fixity, but it was clear to Alyosha that he already understood everything and comprehended the whole fact. But his face, as the story went on, became not merely grim but menacing, as it were. He glowered, clenched his teeth, his fixed stare seemed to become still more fixed, more intent, more terrible ... Which made it all the more unexpected when, with inconceivable swiftness, his face, until then angry and ferocious, suddenly changed all at once, his compressed lips parted, and Dmitri Fyodorovich suddenly dissolved in the most irrepressible, the most genuine laughter. He literally dissolved in laughter, and for a long time could not even speak for laughing.
“She just didn’t kiss her hand! She just didn’t, she just ran away!” he exclaimed with some sort of morbid delight—one might have called it insolent delight had it not been so artless. “And the other one shouted that she was a tiger! A tiger she is! And that she deserves the scaffold! Yes, yes, so she does, she does, I agree, she deserves it, she has long deserved it! Let’s have that scaffold, brother, but let me recover first. I can see that queen of insolence, the whole of her is there, that hand expresses the whole of her! Infernal woman! She’s the queen of all infernal women the world can imagine! Delightful in a way! So she ran home? Then I ... eh ... will run to her! Alyoshka, don’t blame me, I do agree that throttling’s too good for her ...”