The Brothers Karamazov (133 page)

“Well, the question of why he jumped down must be answered precisely as the accused answered it—namely, that he was sorry for the old servant he thought he had killed, and that is why, angry with himself, he tossed away the pestle, cursing in disgust, for otherwise, why would he have thrown it away so violently? And if we have here a man who feels so sorry for having killed someone, that man certainly could not have killed his father. For if he had killed his father, he would not have felt any pity for his second victim. He would have had other things on his mind. He would have been too preoccupied with self-preservation, and there is absolutely no doubt about that. Indeed, the murderer would have made sure that the old man’s skull was smashed and certainly would not have spent five whole minutes fussing over him. But as it is, there was room in him for pity and kindness, because my client’s conscience was quite clear.

“And now we have a different conclusion based on psychology. But I want you to understand, gentlemen of the jury, that the only reason I have dabbled in psychology here is to demonstrate to you that you can use it to arrive at whatever conclusions suit you best. It all depends on who uses it. Psychology tempts even the most responsible and serious people to create fictions, and they cannot really be blamed for that. Actually I am talking about the extravagant use of psychology, gentlemen of the jury, of its misuse, to be precise.”

Again there was approving laughter in the audience, obviously at the expense of the prosecutor.

I shall not reproduce here the entire speech of the counsel for the defense, but shall quote only certain passages, in which he made his most important points.

Chapter 11: There Was No Money And No Robbery

ONE POINT in the defense counsel’s speech surprised everyone, and that was his categorical denial of the very existence of the fatal three thousand rubles, and hence of the possibility of their having been stolen.

“Any unprejudiced outsider,” Fetyukovich started his argument, “will be struck by the fact that, besides murder, the accused in this case is also charged with robbery, although it could never be proved exactly what was stolen. It has been said that money was stolen, namely, three thousand rubles, but no one knows for a fact that the money actually existed. Just consider the following. In the first place, how did we find out that there was three thousand rubles there, and who saw the money? Smerdyakov was the only one who claimed to have seen it being placed in an envelope and, before the crime, he told the accused and his brother Ivan about it. The other person informed of the existence of the three thousand rubles was Miss Svetlov. But none of the latter three had ever laid eyes on the money. So, again, Smerdyakov was the only one who had seen it. But we may ask this now: Assuming that the money did exist and that Smerdyakov had seen it, when did he last see it? What if his master had taken the envelope from under his bedding and put it back in his money-box without telling Smerdyakov? Mind you, according to Smerdyakov, the money was under the mattress, and the accused is supposed to have pulled it out from under the mattress. But the bed was not disturbed in any way, a fact that was carefully recorded. How could the accused have managed to leave the bed quite undisturbed, especially since his hands were covered with blood at the time? Why weren’t there any bloodstains on the fine, white linen sheets that had been specially changed that day? You may object: ‘But what about the torn envelope that was found on the floor?’ Well, I believe it would be worth our while to discuss that envelope for a few minutes. I must say I was rather surprised when the highly talented prosecutor, having brought up that envelope, suddenly and of his own accord—I repeat, of his own accord—declared, in the very passage of his speech in which he dismissed as preposterous the suggestion that Smerdyakov could be the murderer, that, 
if that envelope had not been left lying on the floor as a clue, if the thief had taken it with him, no one in the whole world would have known that there had been an envelope with money in it and that the money had been stolen by the accused.
 And so now we find out, by the admission of the prosecutor himself, that the entire accusation of robbery against my client is based on that torn envelope with its inscription, because, as he said himself, 
without it no one would have even known of the existence of the money, let alone that it had been stolen.
 But if you come to think of it, is a torn piece of paper lying on the floor really proof that there once was money in it and that the money was stolen? ‘But Smerdyakov saw that money inside the envelope!’ some will answer. Fine, but what I want to know is, when was the last time he saw it? I asked Smerdyakov that question and he told me it was two days before the murder. But what is there to prevent me from imagining, for instance, that, while sitting locked up inside his house, waiting nervously and anxiously for his beloved to come, old Fyodor Karamazov might, just to while away the time, have torn open the envelope, reasoning thus: ‘She may not believe me if I just tell her what this envelope contains; it might be better to show her a bundle of thirty rainbow-colored, hundred-ruble bills in my hand; that would certainly impress her very much more! I bet her mouth would even begin to water!’ And so he tore open the envelope, took out the money, and then tossed the torn envelope on the floor, because he was the master of the house and certainly did not have to worry about leaving clues. What, gentlemen of the jury, could be more plausible than that? Why couldn’t it have actually happened? And if this, or something of the sort, could have happened, doesn’t that make the whole charge of theft quite unfounded? For, if there was no money there in the first place, there could not be any theft either. And if the discarded envelope was lying on the floor, why can’t we come to just the opposite conclusion—namely, that the fact that the torn envelope was found on the floor shows that its owner had thrown it away after removing the money from it? ‘But what happened to the money then,’ you may ask me, ‘since no money was found when the house was searched later?’ First of all, some money was found in his cash-box and, in the second place, he could have opened the envelope that morning or even the previous day, disposed of the money in some other way, paid it out, sent it away, or he could have changed his mind and modified his plan of action altogether, without feeling that he had to keep Smerdyakov informed of his latest intentions. And as long as there is the barest possibility that any of these alternatives may be true, how can anyone assert categorically that robbery was the motive for the murder, or even that robbery was involved at all? In insisting on it, we are crossing into the realm of fiction. For, in order to assert that something has been stolen, that something must first be identified, or it must at least be proven that it existed. And in our case, nobody has even seen it.

“Recently, a young street-hawker—he was only eighteen—entered a Petersburg money-changer’s shop in broad daylight and, with a boldness typical of youth, killed the owner with an axe he had brought with him, and left with fifteen hundred rubles in cash. He was arrested four or five hours later and they found all the money on him, except for fifteen rubles that he had managed to spend in the meantime. Moreover, the shop-assistant, who had been out of the shop during the murder, not only told the police the exact sum missing, but also described the bills and the coins, that is, the number of rainbow-colored bills, blue, ten-ruble bills, red, five-ruble bills, how many gold coins and of what denominations. And the bills and coins found on the murderer corresponded very closely to that description. On top of all that, the youth confessed that he had killed the shop owner and that the money he now had on him had been stolen from the shop. Well, that is what I would describe as incriminating evidence, gentlemen of the jury! In that case, I could see and touch the money, and I could not deny its existence, which is very different from the case at hand.

“But I must remind you that, here too, you are faced with a matter of life and death for a man! ‘Right,’ you may say, ‘but he was having a wild time the night he was arrested and they found fifteen hundred rubles on him too, and where can he have got that fifteen hundred rubles?’ To that I answer that precisely the fact that, with what they found on him, they could only account for fifteen hundred rubles, not for the three thousand he was supposed to have stolen, suggests that the money had come from somewhere else, that it had never been sealed in that envelope. According to the most rigorous schedule of the accused’s movements, established during the preliminary investigation, we know that, after leaving Miss Svetlov’s maid, he went straight to Mr. Perkhotin’s without stopping at home, or anywhere else for that matter, and that, after that, he was never alone, so he never had an opportunity to count off half of three thousand rubles and hide it somewhere in town. And it was just this fact that caused the prosecutor to assume that the money must be hidden in some crevice in Mokroye. But why not in a dungeon of the Castle of Udolpho while we’re at it? Isn’t such an assumption a flight of pure imagination straight from a Gothic novel? And I want you to note that, since the whole thing is based on the one assumption that the money is hidden in Mokroye, the moment that that assumption is discarded, the whole accusation of murder motivated by robbery dissolves into thin air, for then we still do not know whether the allegedly missing fifteen hundred rubles ever really existed. By what miracle can it have vanished, since it is established that the accused was never anywhere else where he could have hidden it? And with such fictions we are willing to ruin a human life! Again, some may object that he is unable to explain convincingly where he had got the fifteen hundred rubles that he did have, when everybody in town knew he didn’t have any money until that night. My answer to that is: ‘Who were the people who knew he didn’t have any money?’ Besides, the accused accounted clearly and without equivocation for the origin of that money, and his explanation, I submit, is very much in keeping with the accused’s personality and character. The prosecutor seemed to be very satisfied with his own piece of fiction about the accused being a weak-willed man who so shamefully accepted the three thousand rubles offered him, under such humiliating circumstances, by his fiancée, a man too spineless to keep the money sewn in that little bag of his, a man who, even if he had sewn the money up in that bag originally, would have been unsewing it every second day to fish out one hundred-ruble bill after another, until after a month or so, he had gone through the whole sum. And, if you remember, we were told all this in a tone that brooked no dissent.

“But what if, in reality, things were entirely different, and what if the accused is not at all like the character in the novel made up by the prosecutor? And that is just what is wrong with his novel—he has created a character who bears no resemblance to the accused whatsoever.

“Of course, there are witnesses who will tell you that he had spent all of the three thousand rubles he had taken from Miss Verkhovtsev a month before, spent all of it like a kopek, and that he therefore could not possibly have tucked away half that sum. Fine, but who are those witnesses? Their doubtful credibility was exposed during the cross-examination in court here. Besides, as we all know, a bundle of bills in someone else’s hand always seems bigger than it really is! And none of those witnesses ever counted that money; each one gave an estimate based on the size of the bundle. Why, didn’t witness Maximov estimate the bundle in the accused’s hand to be worth twenty thousand rubles? And now, gentlemen of the jury, since you have understood that psychology is a blade that cuts both ways, allow me to do a little cutting of my own with the other edge of it, and let’s see what we get.

“About a month before the disaster, Miss Verkhovtsev gave the accused three thousand rubles to mail for her. But is it correct to suggest that she entrusted that money to him in the humiliating and insulting manner implied here? In Miss Verkhovtsev’s first testimony, this hardly seemed to have been the case. As to her second appearance on the stand, we all heard her voice shrill with resentment, spite, and hatred. Besides, the assumption that the witness lied under oath in her first testimony creates a serious possibility that she lied under oath again in her second testimony. The prosecutor said he did not ‘wish’ or ‘dare’—those are his own words—to touch upon that romance. All right, I won’t go into it either, but I will allow myself to remark that if a person as respectable and honorable as Miss Verkhovtsev suddenly decides to change her testimony, as she did with the obvious intention of ruining the accused, she cannot be considered a cool, impartial, and detached witness. Will they really maintain that I have no right to suggest that a woman in such a vengeful mood might exaggerate? Yes, exaggerate the shame and the humiliation that accepting the money inflicted upon the accused. I say that, on the contrary, the way she succeeded in making him take that money was precisely the likeliest way an unthinking and irresponsible man like him would accept it. Moreover, at the time, he reckoned that he would soon get from his father the three thousand that he considered was owed to him. Of course, his assurance was quite unfounded and irresponsible, but it was because of this thoughtlessness and irresponsibility that he felt sure his father would pay him the money and then he would be able to refund the sum to Miss Verkhovtsev by mailing the three thousand rubles to her relatives. But the prosecutor categorically rejects the possibility that the accused could, on that day, have set aside half the money and sewn it up in a rag, because, he says, ‘This is not the sort of man Karamazov is, and he cannot possibly feel that way about things.’ I wonder why he says that, though, for he himself earlier declaimed about the wide range of feelings contained simultaneously in Karamazov’s nature, including even, he said, two abysses. Well, precisely, with such a wide-ranging nature, that covers two abysses, Karamazov is capable of stopping dead in the middle of the wildest revelry, if the vision of that opposite abyss occurs to him. And I submit that that opposite abyss was, in this instance, his love, a love that flared up like gunpowder; it was for this love that he had to have money, had to have it for more important things even than spending it all on a wild spree with his new love. Why, if she said to him: ‘I want nothing to do with your father. I am yours. Take me away from here!’ he would take her away at once . . . That is, if he had the money to take her away with. And that, of course, was more important than spending the money on wild parties; Karamazov certainly felt that, knew it. Why, he was worrying himself sick about not having any money for such an eventuality! So what is so extraordinary about his dividing the money and putting half of it aside for that purpose?