The Brothers Karamazov (20 page)

Chapter 4: The Confession Of An Ardent Heart In Prose

I  LED A wild and drunken life,” Dmitry went on. “You heard father say this morning that I thought nothing of spending a few thousand rubles on seducing some innocent girl. That’s a disgusting lie, absolutely unfounded. Those things never required any money at all, anyway. To me money is only an accessory. It is a means to satisfy the impulses of the moment, to create the right atmosphere. Today, it may be a lady, but tomorrow a whore may take her place. And I want them each to have a great time, and so I throw money around by the handful. I want them to have music, glitter, gypsies, everything . . . And if I have to, I’ll give them money too, for some women take money and take it with passion too; I admit that pleases them and makes them thankful . . . But some ladies liked me too, not all of course, but some did . . . However, I preferred the little backstreets and dark alleys to the large lighted squares, because all kinds of unexpected things happen there, because in the filthy gutters I felt I could find natural human gems. Of course, I’m speaking figuratively. In reality there were no such alleys and gutters in that town, but there were moral gutters all right. If you were like me, you’d understand right away what I mean: I liked debauchery and I liked the shame it brought down on me. And I enjoyed cruelty. So am I not just a bedbug, a vicious insect? Well—I’m a Karamazov.

“Once, in winter, they had a big picnic outside town. All our society people drove out there in seven troikas. Sitting in a dark corner of a sleigh, I started pressing the hand of the girl who sat next to me and I forced her to accept my kisses. She was a sweet child, gentle and helpless, the daughter of a local official. She let me . . . let me do pretty much as I pleased in the darkness. The poor child imagined that I’d come to the house the next morning and propose to her (I was somehow considered an eligible bachelor). But, for five months after that, I never said one word to her. I noticed, though, at various dances—we had a lot of dancing parties—that her eyes would flash a look of helpless anger at me. That game aroused the insect sensuality that I was nurturing within me. Well, five months later she married a civil servant and left the town, still angry, perhaps still in love with me. Anyway, she’s happily married now.

“I want you to note, though, that I never mentioned it to anyone or did anything that could have injured her reputation because, beastly though I may be in my desires and much though I love to do vicious things, I am not dishonorable . . . I see you’re blushing and your eyes are flashing. I suppose you’ve had enough of listening to all this filth. But what you’ve heard so far is no more than Paul de Kock’s little flowers, although the nasty insect was already growing in my soul. I have a whole collection of such reminiscences, my boy, and may God bless them all. I’ve always wanted to stay on good terms with a woman after breaking off with her. I never betrayed any of them, never ruined a single reputation. But enough of that, because, as I suppose you imagine, I didn’t call you in here just to tell you all this nonsense. No, Alyosha, I’m about to tell you something much more interesting. Don’t be surprised, however, if you find me quite unashamed in telling you my story; indeed, I somehow enjoy telling it to you.”

“You’re saying that because I blushed?” Alyosha said suddenly. “But it was not anything you said or have done that made me blush—it was the fact that I’m just the same as you are.”

“What, you? Aren’t you going a bit far now?”

“No, not too far,” Alyosha said with an excitement which showed that the thought had been with him for quite a while already. “We’re on the same ladder. I’m on the bottom rung while you’re much higher up, perhaps on the thirteenth rung. That’s how I picture it. But it doesn’t make much difference, it’s the same sort of thing. And once a man has stepped onto the bottom rung, he is sure to climb to the top.”

“So it would be best not to step onto the ladder at all, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, certainly, if one could help it . . .”

“But can’t you help it?”

“It doesn’t look as if I can.”

“Be quiet, Alyosha, be quiet, my dear boy. I’m so moved I feel like kissing your hand. That bitch Grushenka, who understands so much about men, told me once that she’d eat you up one of these days . . . But I don’t want to go on about that. Let’s leave that field befouled by fly droppings and go on to my private tragedy, that is, back again to another field befouled by fly droppings. The trouble is, although our nasty old man lied about my way of seducing innocent girls, something of that sort did actually happen in my tragedy, but only once and even then it didn’t come off. The old man was telling that cockeyed tale about me, but he knows nothing about this. You’ll be the first person I’ve told it to, except, of course, for Ivan, for he knows everything and knew it all long before you. But Ivan is silent as the grave.”

“Ivan—silent as the grave?”

“Yes, he certainly is.”

Alyosha looked at Dmitry with great concentration.

“Although I held a second lieutenant’s rank in that battalion of the line regiment, I was under a sort of permanent surveillance, like a former convict or something. Yet the town received me very nicely. I threw money around, people thought I was rich, and I ended up believing it myself. There must have been something else about me that pleased them though and, even if they sometimes shook their heads, they liked me all right.

“Not so my commanding officer, an old lieutenant colonel. He had it in for me and kept trying to get me in trouble, but it wasn’t all that easy for him because I had some highly placed friends and, besides, the whole town was on my side. It was partly my own fault because I deliberately refused to treat him with proper respect—I was too proud to. That stubborn old fellow, who was really a kind, decent, generous man, had been married twice and both his wives had died. His first wife had been a woman of humble origin and had left him a daughter who looked rather common too. When I was there she was already old-maidish at twenty-four; she lived with her father and an aunt, her mother’s sister. The aunt was a common woman who never said a word, while the niece was a common woman full of words and fire. I like to say a kind word about people when I’m reminiscing about them, so let me tell you, my boy, I’ve never met a woman with a more charming character than this Agafia. She wasn’t bad-looking either, to the Russian taste: tall, strong, with a full figure and beautiful eyes, although her face was somewhat coarse. Two fellows had asked her hand in marriage, but she had turned them down and remained a spinster. Yet she was always gay and cheerful. We became good friends—no, not the way you may think. It was all clean this time and aboveboard, just friendly. Why, I’ve often been good friends with women without there being anything else to it. I would talk to her frankly about all kinds of shocking things, but it was all right with her—she just laughed. There are many women who like us to talk to them frankly—I want you to note that—but this one was still a virgin, and it amused me to see her listening to it all. And one more thing: it was somehow quite impossible to refer to her as a young lady. Perhaps it was partly because she and her aunt, although they lived in the house, did not behave like the members of the family they were, but rather like inferiors, as if they did not belong to our society. Everyone loved Agafia, though, and they needed her because she was a marvelous dressmaker. She had a real talent for it, and she would make dresses for the ladies just to help them out, never asking them for anything in exchange, although if they really insisted on giving her things or money as presents, she would accept them.

“But her father, the Lieutenant Colonel, was quite a different matter. He was one of the prominent personalities of our town. He lived on a grand scale, entertained lavishly, gave dinners and balls. When I joined his battalion, the whole town was talking about the imminent arrival of the Lieutenant Colonel’s second daughter, a staggering young beauty who had just graduated from one of the most elegant Petersburg boarding schools. This was Katerina, his daughter by his second wife. Unlike the first, the second wife came from an old and distinguished family and was the daughter of a general, although, as far as I know, she did not bring the Lieutenant Colonel any money either. So Katerina had nothing but a distinguished background to recommend her and, except for some vague possibility of inheriting something from some relative or other, she had no money to her name at all.

“Nevertheless, when she arrived—and she had just come to spend some time with her family, not to stay—our whole town seemed to come to life. Our most distinguished ladies—two of them the wives of generals and one of a full colonel—and all the others behind them at once displayed great eagerness to entertain her, vying with one another to invite her to balls and picnics; they even managed to organize a gala evening with 
tableaux vivants
 for the benefit of some distressed governesses, and always Katerina was the queen of the event.

“But that was none of my concern and I went right on drinking and having a wild time. In fact, just at that time, I pulled off something so wild that the whole town resounded with it. I remember I saw her for the first time at my battery commander’s one evening. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her looking me over, but I didn’t go over to introduce myself: ‘Let her know,’ I thought, ‘that there’s someone here who’s not interested in her.’ It was not until another party some time later that I actually spoke to her. And then, she hardly glanced at me and the corners of her mouth turned down in scorn. ‘So that’s how she feels,’ I thought. ‘All right, my girl, I’ll teach you a lesson.’ I often acted like a terrible heel at that time, and I was well aware of it myself. And I was also instinctively aware that this little Katya was no innocent schoolgirl but a person with a strong character, a truly honorable young lady, and, above all, someone with both a good education and an acute intelligence, whereas I had neither. You may think that I was about to propose to her, Alyosha, but I had no such intention—all I wanted was to make her pay for not properly appreciating the dashing young gentleman that I was. And in the meantime I went on drinking and painting the town red.

“Finally the Lieutenant Colonel put me under house arrest for three days. It was just then that I received six thousand rubles from father, after sending him an officially signed document renouncing all my rights and stating that I’d received everything that was due to me and that I would not ask him for anything anymore. The thing is, Alyosha, I understood nothing in my financial dealings with father at that time, or until very recently, perhaps even till today. But to hell with that—we’ll get to it later . . . The day I received the six thousand, I also received a letter from a friend of mine containing a very curious piece of information—namely, that my lieutenant colonel’s superiors were displeased with him. He was suspected of irregularities—in brief, his enemies were preparing a nice surprise for him. And sure enough, soon the general in charge of our division arrived and gave him hell. A little later the Lieutenant Colonel was asked to hand in his resignation. I won’t go into all the details here—how it came about, etc.—but his enemies in town certainly had something to do with it. In any case, people suddenly became very cool toward him and all the members of his family and even his friends turned their backs on him. And this was the moment I chose to play my first trick. I met Agafia, with whom I had remained on friendly terms. ‘I hear,’ I said to her, ‘that your papa is short four thousand five hundred rubles of government money.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ she said. ‘The General was just here and every ruble was there . . .’ ‘It was there then, but today it’s all gone.’ She looked terribly upset. ‘Don’t frighten me, please . . . Where did you hear that?’ ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her, ‘I won’t tell anyone. I’ll be as silent as the grave about it. What I actually want to tell you was that in case of—let’s call it an emergency—I mean when they ask your papa to produce those four-and-a-half thousand that he doesn’t have, well, rather than let him be court-martialed and demoted to the ranks in his old age, I suggest you secretly send me your learned little sister, because I’ve just received some money and I guess I could let her have, say, four thousand. And I promise to keep it secret.’ ‘You pig,’ she said, ‘you vicious, nasty pig! How dare you . . .’ Yes, that was what she called me—a pig—and she walked off in terrible indignation as I shouted after her once more not to worry, that I’d keep it all strictly confidential and secret.

“Those two women, that is, Agafia and her aunt, proved to be a couple of real angels. They adored Agafia’s little sister Katya, spoiled and proud as she was; in fact, they waited on her hand and foot as if they were her servants . . . Nevertheless, as I found out later, Agafia went straight to Katerina and repeated everything I had said. Which, of course, was exactly what I had hoped she would do.

“All of a sudden a new major arrived in town. He had come, it turned out, to take over our battalion. Just as suddenly, the old lieutenant colonel became very sick and was unable to leave the house for two days, so he couldn’t hand over the government funds. Our medical officer, Kravchenko, insisted that he really was ill. But there was something I knew confidentially from an unimpeachable source and, indeed, had known for a long time. Namely, that for four years, after the accounts had been checked by the army inspectors, the monies entrusted to the Colonel would disappear for a certain length of time. Our colonel would lend the money to a local merchant, Trifonov, a bearded widower who wore gold-rimmed glasses and was a most reliable man. Trifonov went off to the annual fair, made various financial transactions, and always returned the money to the Colonel, along with presents from the fair and interest on the capital. Only this time, when Trifonov came back from the fair, he had no money to pay back, as I found out accidentally from his slobbering son and heir, the most depraved youth the world has ever seen. The Colonel went dashing over to Trifonov’s, but the merchant cut him off: ‘I never received any money from you, nor could you possibly have given me any.’ That was all he had to say.