The Brothers Karamazov (74 page)

“Nonsense,” Dmitry said.

“What’s nonsense?”

“Forget it,” Mitya said, suddenly smiling. “I just ran down an old woman on the square, that’s all.”

“You ran down an old woman?”

“An old man, it was!” Mitya shouted very loudly, as if Perkhotin were deaf, looking straight into his face and laughing unrestrainedly.

“What the hell are you talking about? Old woman, old man . . . Have you killed someone by any chance?”

“No, we made it up. We had a fight and then made it up. We parted good friends. He was a fool . . . he forgave me . . . yes, I’m sure he’s forgiven me now . . . If he’d gotten up, though, he wouldn’t have forgiven me!” Mitya said with a sly, incongruous wink.“But the hell with him. I don’t want to hear about him now, not just now, at least, do you understand?” Dmitry declared determinedly.

“What I’m trying to say is that you so often get involved with all kinds of people, like that other time, with that captain . . . You get yourself into a fight and then you go off on a spree. That’s the kind of man you are. So it’s three dozen bottles of champagne now—what will you do with all that?”

“Bravo! Just let me have my pistols now. You know, I’d love to stay and have a long chat with you, my friend, but I’m afraid I haven’t got a minute to spare. Besides, it’s too late for that now. But where’s the money? Where did I put it?” and Mitya began rummaging through his pockets in a panic.

“You put your money on the table. It’s over there, see? You forgot, didn’t you? You treat money as if it were garbage or water. Here are your guns. It’s pretty strange, though. You pawned them sometime between five and six o’clock for just ten rubles and now I don’t know how many thousands you have. I bet there must be two or three thousand rubles here?”

“Three, I guess,” Mitya said, laughing, as he stuffed the wad into the side pocket of his coat.

“Be careful, you’ll lose it that way. But then, I suppose you have a gold mine or something.”

“Gold mines, gold mines, that’s right!” Mitya shouted at the top of his voice, roaring with laughter. “Tell me, Perkhotin, would you be interested in gold mining? Because there’s a lady here who will let you have three thousand without batting an eye the moment you agree to go gold mining. She gave it to me because that’s how much she loves those gold mines! Tell me, have you met Mrs. Khokhlakov?”

“No, I haven’t been introduced to her, but I’ve heard of her and I’ve seen her. So she was the one, then, who gave you the three thousand rubles? She counted them off, just like that, and gave them to you?” Perkhotin asked incredulously.

“Why, you can check for yourself first thing tomorrow morning, as soon as young Phoebus the sun arises. Just praise the glory of God and go to Mrs. Khokhlakov and ask her whether she did or did not peel off three thousand rubles and give them to me. Go and find out.”

“I have no idea of your relations with her, but since you tell me so positively that she gave you the money, she must have given it to you . . . And now I see that, instead of leaving for the Siberian gold mines, you’re trying very hard to get rid of it right here . . . But tell me, where are you really off to now?”

“Mokroye.”

“Mokroye! At this late hour?”

“From riches to rags!” Mitya said suddenly.

“What do you mean to rags? With all that money?”

“I’m not talking of the thousands—the hell with them! I’m speaking of the ways of women. ‘Gullible, fickle, corrupt is the heart of a woman,’ Ulysses said, and I fully agree with him.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you.”

“Why, do I sound drunk to you?”

“No, not drunk—worse.”

“I’m drunk in spirit, Perkhotin, drunk in spirit . . . But enough of this . . .”

“Why are you loading that pistol?”

“Just loading it.”

Mitya had opened the pistol case, untied the powder horn, carefully poured out some powder, rammed the charge into the pistol, picked up a bullet, and, before inserting it, was holding it between his thumb and finger, examining it in the light of the candle.

“Why are you examining the bullet like that?” Perkhotin asked, curious and worried at the same time.

“For no special reason. I’m just trying to imagine what it would be like . . . Suppose you decided to fire this bullet into your brain, wouldn’t you have a good look at it first while loading your gun?”

“What would be the use of looking at it?”

“Well, since it will be lodged in my brain, I’m rather curious to see what it’s really like . . . No, that’s really all nonsense, just a crazy notion that lasted a moment only! All right, so that’s done now,” he announced, putting the bullet in and ramming some tow stuffing on top of it. “Yes, Perkhotin, my dear fellow, that’s all nonsense. Everything is nonsense, such nonsense you can’t even imagine! And now, please give me a scrap of paper.”

“There’s a scrap of paper.”

“No, I mean a clean sheet of paper, to write on. That’s good enough, fine!”

Mitya grabbed a pen from Perkhotin’s desk, quickly scrawled two lines, folded the paper in four, and thrust it into his waistcoat pocket. Then he replaced the pistols in the case, locked the case with a little key, and picked it up. Then he gave Perkhotin a long, dreamy look, smiling at him.

“And now let’s go,” he said.

“Go where?” Perkhotin said, sounding really worried now. “You’d better wait a minute . . . You may have really decided to put that bullet into your brain . . .”

“The bullet? What nonsense! I love life and I want to live! I want you to know this: I love golden-haired Phoebus and his warm world! Tell me, Perkhotin, my dear friend, tell me, do you know how one gets out of people’s way?”

“What do you mean, get out of the way?”

“I mean to yield the way—yield the way to the creature you love and to the creature you hate. And to do it so that you come to love the hated one as well? That’s what I mean by getting out of the way . . . And I’ll say to them, God bless you, go ahead, don’t worry about me, because I . . .”

“Because you what?”

“That’s enough now. Let’s get going.”

“I swear I’ll have to have you stopped—you must be prevented from going there,” Perkhotin said, looking intently at Dmitry. “Why do you have to go to Mokroye now?”

“The woman, the woman is there, see. But that’s enough for you, Perkhotin. That’s all you’ll get out of me. That’s enough.”

“Listen, I know you’re a wild man, but—and I really don’t know why—I’ve always liked you, and that’s why I’m worried for you now.”

“Thank you, brother . . . So I’m a wild man, am I? Ah, savages, savages! Yes, that’s what I’ve been saying all along—there’s nothing but wild savages . . . Ah, here’s Misha coming back. I’d almost forgotten him!”

Misha came in with his hands full of change and reported that “everybody was rushing around” now at Plotnikov’s store, that they were getting the bottles and fish and everything ready. Mitya picked out two ten-ruble bills. He gave one to Perkhotin and handed the other to Misha.

“Don’t do that! Not in my house. I don’t believe in spoiling them that way. Put away your money. Here, put it in this pocket. You’ve no need to be in such a rush to get rid of it all. It may still be useful to you tomorrow, and you’ll be coming here again to ask me to lend you another ten rubles. Why do you keep stuffing your money into your side pocket? That’s the best way to lose it, you know.”

“Listen, dear fellow, what about coming to Mokroye with me?”

“What would I do there?”

“Look, shall I open a bottle right now, to drink to life? I’m longing to have a drink, especially to have a drink with you. I don’t think we’ve ever drunk together, have we?”

“I suppose we can have a drink at the inn. I was going there anyway when you came in.”

“No, there won’t be enough time for us to go to the inn, but we’ll drink a bottle at Plotnikov’s. But let me ask you a riddle first, all right?”

“Go ahead.”

Mitya took the piece of paper out of his waistcoat pocket, unfolded it, and showed it to Perkhotin. In a large, legible hand he had written on it: “I condemn myself for my past life and I sentence myself to suffer for the rest of my life.”

“I really must go and report you. You must be stopped,” Perkhotin said.

“You won’t have time, now, my friend. So let’s go ahead and have that drink. Forward march!”

The Plotnikov store was only two houses away from Perkhotin’s, right on the corner of the block. It was the largest grocery store in our town and belonged to a wealthy merchant family, a pretty good store by any standard. It had just about everything that could be found in a large store in the capital, all sorts of delicacies, all the wines “bottled by Yeliseyev Brothers & Co.”; it carried all kinds of fruit, cigars, and, of course, tea, coffee, sugar, and such things. There were always three attendants at the counters and a couple of messenger boys constantly dashing about. And, although our part of the country was not as prosperous as it had been, and many of the rich local landowners had left, and trade was a bit slack, the grocery business was flourishing as before, in fact, more and more so with every year, for there was no shortage of buyers for such goods.

They had been waiting eagerly for Mitya in the store. They remembered very well that three or four weeks before he had ordered at one time, as now, a quantity of wines and delicacies, for which he had paid several hundred rubles in cash (they would never, of course, have given it to him on credit), and they remembered, also, that on that other occasion he had held in his hand a whole wad of hundred-ruble bills, just as now; that he had thrown the bills about without bothering to count them, never even trying to figure out how much wine or food he really wanted. Afterward everyone in town said that, when he had gone to Mokroye with Grushenka that time, he had managed, in one night and the following day, to go through the whole of the three thousand rubles he had had and that he had come back “as naked as the day he was born.” He had picked up a whole gypsy camp that was in the vicinity and for two days had treated them to the most expensive wines, while they kept stealing bills out of his pockets when he was drunk. People said, making fun of Mitya, that during his Mokroye spree he had made illiterate laborers drunk on champagne and had gorged peasant women on Strasbourg pies and delicate bonbons. And at the inn people also laughed at him (of course, not to his face; that would have been much too dangerous) when he admitted simple-heartedly that all he had got for his extravagance was Grushenka’s permission to kiss her foot, and nothing more.

When Dmitry and Perkhotin reached the store, they saw a cart harnessed with three horses standing at the entrance. The cart was covered with a rug and there were bells on the horses’ harnesses. Andrei, the coachman, was waiting there for Mitya. And in the store almost everything had been packed in a crate and they only needed Mitya’s final approval before they put the crate into the cart. Perkhotin was very surprised.

“How did you manage to get this cart ready so quickly?” he asked Mitya.

“I met Andrei on my way to your house and I told him to drive here to the store and wait for me. There was no time to waste, you know. The last time, it was Timofei who took me to Mokroye, but this time he’s gone there with the enchantress . . . Tell me, Andrei, will we get there much after them?”

“One hour, sir. They won’t get there more than an hour before us. I helped Timofei harness and I know which way he went. And they can’t go as fast as we can, sir, nowhere near. So they won’t be there even an hour before us,” Andrei, a lean, youngish, red-haired man, assured Dmitry eagerly. The coachman wore a long-skirted peasant’s coat and had a heavy overcoat rolled up over his left shoulder.

“You’ll earn yourself a fifty-ruble tip if we get there no more than an hour behind them.”

“I can swear to that, Mr. Karamazov, sir. Perhaps they won’t beat us to Mokroye by even as much as half an hour!”

Although Mitya took care of everything and saw to all the arrangements, he gave his orders in a strange, disconnected way, starting on one thing, leaving it unfinished, and skipping to something else. Finally Perkhotin felt he had to interfere.

“I want it to come to four hundred rubles—it must be four hundred, make no mistake about that—just like the other time,” Mitya ordered. “Four dozen bottles of champagne—not one less.”

“What do you need so much for? Hey, stop!” Perkhotin shouted. “What’s in this crate? Is there really four hundred rubles worth of goods there?”

The bustling shop attendants hurriedly reassured him in sugary tones that the crate in question contained only half a dozen bottles of champagne and “a few items of immediate necessity,” such as cold snacks and pastry, as well as some sweets, candy, etc. But that the main supply would be packed and sent off in a special cart as soon as it was ready, just as on the other occasion. It would also go in a fast cart drawn by three horses and it would reach its destination no more than an hour after Mr. Karamazov.

“No more than one hour, no more, and put in as much toffee as possible—the girls love it,” Mitya demanded insistently.

“All right, get all the toffee you want, but why must you absolutely have four dozen bottles of champagne? I say one dozen will be plenty!” Perkhotin said angrily. He demanded a bill of an attendant, disputed some of the figures, but managed to save no more than a hundred rubles. It was finally agreed that the supplies to be sent to Mokroye would come to only three hundred rubles.

“Ah, to hell with it after all!” Perkhotin cried, suddenly sick of it all. “If you want to throw your money away, go ahead. Why should I worry about it?”

“Come here, come here, my money-saving friend! Don’t be angry with me,” Mitya said, dragging Perkhotin off with him into the back room of the store. “Let’s drink that bottle here. They’ll serve it to us. Ah, Perkhotin, you must come with me to Mokroye. I like fellows like you!”

Mitya sat down on a wicker chair at a tiny table which was covered with a stained cloth. Perkhotin installed himself on the chair opposite him and the champagne was on the table in no time.

An attendant appeared and asked them whether they would also like to have some oysters, “the very best, from the latest shipment.”