P.S.- I write my curse, but I adore you! I hear it in my heart. One string is left, and it vibrates. Better tear my heart in two! I shall kill myself, but first of all that cur. I shall tear three thousand from him and fling it to you. Though I’ve been a scoundrel to you, I am not a thief! You can expect three thousand. The cur keeps it under his mattress, in pink ribbon. I am not a thief, but I’ll murder my thief. Katya, don’t look disdainful. Dmitri is not a thief! but a murderer! He has murdered his father and ruined himself to hold his ground, rather than endure your pride. And he doesn’t love you.
P.P.S.- I kiss your feet, farewel!
P.P.P.S.- Katya, pray to God that someone’ll give me the money. Then I shall not be steeped in gore, and if no one does- I shall! Kill me!
Your slave and enemy, D. KARAMAZOV
When Ivan read this «document» he was convinced. So then it was his brother, not Smerdyakov. And if not Smerdyakov, then not he, Ivan. This letter at once assumed in his eyes the aspect of a logical proof. There could be no longer the slightest doubt of Mitya’s guilt. The suspicion never occurred to Ivan, by the way, that Mitya might have committed
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the murder in conjunction with Smerdyakov, and, indeed, such a theory did not fit in with the facts. Ivan was completely reassured. The next morning he only thought of Smerdyakov and his gibes with contempt. A few days later he positively wondered how he could have been so horribly distressed at his suspicions. He resolved to dismiss him with contempt and forget him. So passed a month. He made no further inquiry about Smerdyakov, but twice he happened to hear that he was very ill and out of his mind.
«He’ll end in madness,» the young doctor Varvinsky observed about him, and Ivan re-membered this. During the last week of that month Ivan himself began to feel very ill. He went to consult the Moscow doctor who had been sent for by Katerina Ivanovna just before the trial. And just at that time his relations with Katerina Ivanovna became acutely strained. They were like two enemies in love with one another. Katerina Ivanovna’s «returns» to Mitya, that is, her brief but violent revulsions of feeling in his favour, drove Ivan to perfect frenzy. Strange to say, until that last scene described above, when Alyosha came from Mitya to Katerina Ivanovna, Ivan had never once, during that month, heard her express a doubt of Mitya’s guilt, in spite of those «returns» that were so hateful to him. It is remarkable, too, that while he felt that he hated Mitya more and more every day, he realised that it was not on account of Katya’s «returns» that he hated him, but just because he was the murderer of his father. He was conscious of this and fully recognised it to himself
Nevertheless, he went to see Mitya ten days before the trial and proposed to him a plan of escape- a plan he had obviously thought over a long time. He was partly impelled to do this by a sore place still left in his heart from a phrase of Smerdyakov’s, that it was to his, Ivan’s, advantage that his brother should be convicted, as that would increase his inheritance and Alyosha’s from forty to sixty thousand roubles. He determined to sacrifice thirty thousand on arranging Mitya’s escape. On his return from seeing him, he was very mournful and dispirited; he suddenly began to feel that he was anxious for Mitya’s escape, not only to heal that sore place by sacrificing thirty thousand, but for another reason. «Is it because I am as much a murderer at heart?» he asked himself. Something very deep down seemed burning and rankling in his soul. His pride above all suffered cruelly all that month. But of that later….
When, after his conversation with Alyosha, Ivan suddenly decided with his hand on the bell of his lodging to go to Smerdyakov, he obeyed a sudden and peculiar impulse of indig-nation. He suddenly remembered how Katerina Ivanovna had only just cried out to him in Alyosha’s presence: «It was you, you, persuaded me of his» (that is, Mitya’s) «guilt!» Ivan was thunderstruck when he recalled it. He had never once tried to persuade her that Mitya was the murderer; on the contrary, he had suspected himself in her presence, that time when he came back from Smerdyakov. It was she, she, who had produced that «document» and proved his brother’s guilt. And now she suddenly exclaimed: «I’ve been at Smerdyakov’s myself!» When had she been there? Ivan had known nothing of it. So she was not at all so sure of
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Mitya’s guilt! And what could Smerdyakov have told her? What, what, had he said to her? His heart burned with violent anger. He could not understand how he could, half an hour before, have let those words pass and not have cried out at the moment. He let go of the bell and rushed off to Smerdyakov. «I shall kill him, perhaps, this time,» he thought on the way.
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WHEN he was half-way there, the keen dry wind that had been blowing early that morning rose again, and a fine dry snow began falling thickly. It did not lie on the ground, but was whirled about by the wind, and soon there was a regular snowstorm. There were scarcely any lamp-posts in the part of the town where Smerdyakov lived. Ivan strode alone in the darkness, unconscious of the storm, instinctively picking out his way. His head ached and there was a painful throbbing in his temples. He felt that his hands were twitching convulsively. Not far from Marya Kondratyevna’s cottage, Ivan suddenly came upon a sol-itary drunken little peasant. He was wearing a coarse and patched coat, and was walking in zigzags, grumbling and swearing to himself. Then suddenly he would begin singing in a husky drunken voice:
Ach, Vanka’s gone to Petersburg; I won’t wait till he comes back.
But he broke off every time at the second line and began swearing again; then he would begin the same song again. Ivan felt an intense hatred for him before he had thought about him at all. Suddenly he realised his presence and felt an irresistible impulse to knock him down. At that moment they met, and the peasant with a violent lurch fell full tilt against Ivan, who pushed him back furiously. The peasant went flying backwards and fell like a log on the frozen ground. He uttered one plaintive «O- oh!» and then was silent. Ivan stepped up to him. He was lying on his back, without movement or consciousness. «He will be frozen,» thought Ivan, and he went on his way to Smerdyakov’s.
In the passage, Marya Kondratyevna, who ran out to open the door with a candle in her hand, whispered that Smerdyakov was very ill; «It’s not that he’s laid up, but he seems not himself, and he even told us to take the tea away; he wouldn’t have any.»
«Why, does he make a row?» asked Ivan coarsely.
«Oh dear no, quite the contrary, he’s very quiet. Only please don’t talk to him too long,» Marya Kondratyevna begged him. Ivan opened the door and stepped into the room.
It was over-heated as before, but there were changes in the room. One of the benches at the side had been removed, and in its place had been put a large old mahogany leather sofa, on which a bed had been made up, with fairly clean white pillows. Smerdyakov was sitting on the sofa, wearing the same dressing-gown. The table had been brought out in front of the sofa, so that there was hardly room to move. On the table lay a thick book in yellow cover, but Smerdyakov was not reading it. He seemed to be sitting doing nothing. He met Ivan with a slow silent gaze, and was apparently not at all surprised at his coming. There was a great change in his face; he was much thinner and sallower. His eyes were sunken and there were blue marks under them.
«Why, you really are ill?» Ivan stopped short. «I won’t keep you long, I wont even take off my coat. Where can one sit down?»
He went to the other end of the table, moved up a chair and sat down on it.
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«Why do you look at me without speaking? We only come with one question, and I swear I won’t go without an answer. Has the young lady, Katerina Ivanovna, been with you?» Smerdyakov still remained silent, looking quietly at Ivan as before. Suddenly, with a
motion of
