The Brothers Karamazov (69 page)

To start with, it took him much longer to get to the village from the Volovya station than he had expected, for, instead of eight miles of narrow country road, it turned out to be a good twelve miles. Then, when he finally got to Ilyinskoye, he found that the priest was away—he had gone off to another village. Mitya had to drive on to that village with the same tired horses, and by the time he succeeded in finding the priest, it was almost night. The priest, a shy and apparently kindly little man, told Mitya that, although the Hound had at first stayed at his house, he was now staying at the forester’s hut in the Sukhoi settlement, because he sold lumber there too. Mitya started to plead with the priest to accompany him and help him get hold of the Hound—“You’ll save my life if you will, Father”—and, after some hesitation, the priest finally agreed to go with Mitya to Sukhoi, probably because he was curious about the whole business. Unfortunately, though, he suggested they go on foot, for, he assured Mitya, it was only a mile’s walk “or just a wee bit more.” Mitya readily agreed and set out with his long, fast strides, so that the poor priest had to almost trot behind him. On the way, Mitya told him, too, about his plans, speaking heatedly and nervously and asking him for advice about how to handle the Hound. The priest, who was not yet an old man, turned out to be very cautious and answered Mitya’s questions with “I wouldn’t know really,” “I’m sorry, I’m not sure about that,” and other such evasive answers. And when Mitya brought up his disputes with his father, the priest actually became frightened, for he was in some way or other in a position of dependence on Mr. Karamazov. He asked with unconcealed surprise why Mitya kept referring to the man in question as the Hound, explaining that, although the Hound was indeed the fellow’s nickname, he resented it very much. He advised Mitya to be sure to call him by his proper name—Gorstkin—otherwise “he won’t make that deal with you. In fact, he won’t even want to listen to you.” Mitya was surprised in his turn and told the priest that that was how Samsonov had referred to the man. When he heard that, the priest changed the subject, though it might have been kinder of him to have imparted to Dmitry his suspicion—namely, that if Samsonov had recommended the man to him only as the Hound, either he must have done so as a joke or there must be something wrong somewhere. But Mitya had no time to stop and examine such “details.” He was in a hurry, walking fast with his long strides, and it was only when they finally got to Sukhoi that it occurred to him that they had not walked just one mile, nor even a mile and a half, but a good two miles. The realization angered him, but he controlled himself and they entered the hut.

The forester, whom the priest knew, had allowed Gorstkin to occupy the better of the two rooms in his hut. They entered this room and lighted a tallow candle. The room was overheated. On a pine table in the middle of it was a samovar with the flame beneath it out, a tray with some cups, an empty rum bottle, a not quite empty bottle of vodka, and the remains of a loaf of white bread. Gorstkin himself lay stretched out on the bench, with his coat rolled up under his head for a pillow, snoring heavily. Mitya stood there for a moment, perplexed.

“Of course, I must wake him up,” he said worriedly. “My business is too important. I was in a great hurry to get here and ought to be on my way back as soon as possible . . .”

The priest and the forester would not express an opinion; they just stood there in silence and waited.

Mitya walked over to the sleeping man and started to shake him, but the fellow just would not wake up.

“My God, he’s dead drunk. What shall I do?”

Now, losing patience, Mitya pulled the man violently by the arms and legs, lifted his head, picked him up, sat him on the bench, and finally, after long and stubborn efforts, succeeded in getting the drunken man to produce an inarticulate bovine lowing, which was followed by slurred cursing.

“I suppose you’d be better off if you waited a bit,” the priest finally decided to advise him. “He doesn’t seem to be in much of a state to discuss business right now.”

“He’s been drinking all day,” the forester put in.

“Oh God!” Mitya cried dejectedly. “If only you people knew how important it is to me—I’m really getting desperate!”

“I would still advise you to wait until morning,” the priest said.

“Until morning! But don’t you understand that that’s absolutely out of the question!” In his despair he was about to rush over to the drunken man and shake him some more, but he suddenly realized the futility of it.

The priest said nothing; the sleepy forester was gloomy.

“What terrible tragedies people suffer through realism!” Mitya said incongruously, overwhelmed by utter despair. Sweat was running down his face.

Taking advantage of the pause, the priest quickly and very reasonably called to his attention the fact that, even if he succeeded in waking Gorstkin up, he would still be too drunk even to talk, let alone to discuss “an important business matter such as you have in mind. No, sir, I really think you ought to postpone it until the morning now.”

Mitya, throwing up his hands in despair, decided to take his advice.

“I’ll stay here with the candle, Father,” Mitya said. “I’ll bide my time, and the moment he wakes up, I’ll start . . . I’ll pay you for the candle,” he said, turning to the forester, “and also for spending the night in your hut. Don’t worry, you won’t regret what you do for Dmitry Karamazov . . . But what about you, Father? Where could you make yourself comfortable, I wonder?”

“Oh, please don’t worry about me. I’ll be on my way home. He’ll lend me his mare,” the priest said, indicating the forester. “Well, good-night now, and I wish you every success.”

And that is how it was to be. The priest borrowed the mare and rode home, only too glad to be out of it all, though shaking his head worriedly and wondering whether he should not inform his benefactor, Mr. Karamazov, in the morning, for, “Who can tell—he may be furious at not being told and stop doing me all those little favors.” The forester scratched himself and silently departed to his half of the hut. And Mitya sat down on the bench next to the drunk “to bide his time,” as he had put it. A deep anguish enveloped his soul like a heavy fog, a deep, frightening anguish. He sat there sunk in thought, but he could not find an answer. The candle guttered. A cricket chirped. The overheated room was becoming unbearably stuffy. He suddenly visualized his father’s garden, the passageway in the back of it, the door of the house opening quietly and Grushenka dashing inside . . . He jumped up from the bench.

“What a tragedy . . .” he muttered, gnashing his teeth, and without knowing what he was doing, he went up to the sleeping man and stood there staring into his face. He was a middle-aged peasant, spare, with a longish face, curly, light-brown hair, and a long, sparse, reddish beard. He wore a blue cotton shirt and a black waistcoat with a silver watch sticking out of the pocket. Mitya examined the face with immense hatred. Somehow, it was the man’s curly hair that he found most revolting. What enraged him was that he, Mitya, who had such urgent business for the sake of which he had rushed here, leaving everything in a mess, now had to sit and wait while “this parasite, on whom my whole future now depends, is snoring as if nothing had happened, as if he’d just arrived from some other planet . . .”

“Oh, the irony of fate!” he shouted suddenly and, losing patience, again started shaking the drunken peasant. He shook him in a rage now, banged at him, pulled him, even hit him a few times, but, after he had been at it for five minutes, he realized the complete futility of it and sat down once more on the bench, feeling utterly hopeless.

“How stupid, how stupid,” he kept exclaiming. “How dishonorable!” he suddenly added for no apparent reason. He was getting a bad headache. “Shall I give up and leave?” the thought flashed through his head. “Oh no, since I’m here, I may as well stay until morning. Why should I have come all this way otherwise? Besides, where will I get the money to go back? Oh, the stupidity of it all!”

His headache was getting worse and worse. Now he sat motionless and he did not notice when he dozed off; then he fell asleep as he sat there. He must have slept like that for at least two hours before he was awakened by an unbearable headache—bad enough to make him moan. His temples were throbbing, the top of his head was terribly painful. After he woke up, it took him a long time to understand where he was and what was happening. Finally he realized that the overheated room was filled with charcoal fumes and that he could have been asphyxiated, poisoned. The drunken peasant was still lying there, snoring. The candle was guttering and was about to go out. Mitya let out a yell and ran into the forester’s room across the passage. The forester woke up quickly enough, but, when told that the other room was full of deadly fumes, took the news with such peculiar equanimity that Mitya felt both surprised and offended.

“But what if he dies?” Mitya cried. “What’ll happen if he dies? What will I do then?” he kept repeating frantically.

They opened the window and the flue. Mitya brought a bucket of water from the passage, first wet his own head, then picked up a rag, dipped it in the water, and put it on the Hound’s head. The forester still treated the whole thing almost with scorn and, after he had opened the window, he just mumbled sullenly, “It’s good enough like this,” and went back to sleep, leaving Mitya a lighted iron lantern. After he had left, Mitya kept working on the half-asphyxiated drunkard for half an hour, constantly wetting the man’s head, and he was quite determined to keep at it the rest of the night. But when he grew too tired and sat down for one minute to catch his breath, his eyes closed instantly and, without knowing it, he stretched out on the bench and slept like a log.

He awoke very late in the morning—nine o’clock or so. Sunshine was pouring in through the two little windows. Last night’s curly-haired, drunken peasant was sitting up with his coat on. A freshly lighted samovar and another bottle of vodka stood on the table before him. He had finished what was left of the bottle that had been there at night and had drunk more than half the new one. Mitya abruptly realized that the damned fellow was again utterly and irretrievably drunk. He leaped to his feet and stared at the peasant, his eyes almost popping out. The peasant, for his part, kept throwing sly glances at Mitya, appearing irritatingly unperturbed, even contemptuously insolent—or at least so it seemed to Mitya.

Mitya rushed up to him.

“Excuse me . . . you see, I’m . . . I suppose the forester must have told you—I’m Lieutenant Dmitry Karamazov, the son of old Fyodor Karamazov, whose wood you are interested in buying . . .”

“You’re lying there,” the peasant declared in an unexpectedly calm, firm voice.

“What do you mean, I’m lying? You do know Mr. Karamazov, don’t you?”

“I don’t know no Mr. Karamazov,” the peasant said, manipulating his heavy tongue with an effort.

“But you’re trying to buy the wood from him—the wood! Wake up, please, wake up! The Ilyinskoye priest, Father Pavel, brought me here . . . You wrote to Samsonov and it was he who sent me to you . . .” Mitya insisted breathlessly.

“It’s nothing but lies,” the Hound declared emphatically, and Mitya felt his legs go weak and cold under him.

“For God’s sake, man, this is no joke, understand! I know you’re a bit under the weather . . . But surely you can talk. You must understand what’s going on . . . or . . . or I don’t understand anything myself . . .”

“You’re that house painter!”

“What are you talking about? I’m Karamazov, Dmitry Karamazov, and I want to make you an offer—a profitable one—a great offer . . . It’s about that wood, you know.”

The peasant stroked his beard with a dignified air.

“No, you’re the one who contracted for that job, and you bungled it. You’re a son of a bitch!”

“I assure you, you’re mistaken!” Mitya cried, wringing his hands.

The peasant was still stroking his beard. Suddenly he screwed up his eyes and gave Mitya a crafty look.

“First of all,” he said, “I want you to show me what law allows you to play filthy tricks on people, do you hear? And I tell you—you’re a son of a bitch, understand?”

Mitya stepped back in despair. Then, as he explained afterward, “It was as if something had hit me on the head.” In the twinkling of an eye, the hopelessness of his position dawned on him. “A kind of light went on and I saw everything clearly,” he was to say later. He stood there dumb-founded: how could he, a supposedly intelligent man, have allowed himself to be sent on such a fool’s errand, to get entangled in all this poppycock and bother with this Hound man all night, wetting his head and all? “Well, the man is drunk, drunk as a pig, and he’ll go on drinking for another week maybe, so what good will it do me to wait? And, besides, what if Samsonov sent me here just to make a fool of me and in the meantime she . . . Oh, my God, what a mess I’ve got myself into!”

The Hound was looking at him and grinning. On another day Mitya might have killed the fool in a fit of rage, but now he felt as weak as a child. He went quietly to the bench, picked up his overcoat, put it on, and walked out of the room without saying a word. The other room across the passage was empty: the forester had left. He took fifty kopeks out of his pocket and put them on the table to pay for the night spent in the hut, for the candle, and for the trouble he’d caused.

He stepped outside. There was nothing but the forest all around him. He walked off at random, having no idea whether he should go right or left. He had been in such a hurry when he had come there with the priest the night before that he had paid no attention to the road. There was no anger in him now, not even against Samsonov. His mind was blank as he walked along the narrow forest trail, all hopes shattered; he no longer cared where he was going. A child, meeting him at that moment, could have attacked him with impunity, so weak did he feel in body and in spirit.

Somehow, though, he eventually got out of the forest and started across bare, harvested fields stretching all the way to the horizon. “Death and despair all around,” Mitya kept muttering in rhythm with his steps, as he walked on and on.