The Brothers Karamazov (83 page)

“I 
am
 most awfully grateful to you! You cannot imagine how much I appreciate the fact that you came to me first! How is it we never met before? I’ll be delighted to receive you in my house in the future and I’m so glad to hear that this town has a civil servant like you, with your resourcefulness and clear thinking . . . But I feel they ought to understand you; in the end they should appreciate your exceptional qualifications . . . Believe me, I would be only too glad to do anything I can . . . Oh, I love young people. I am in love with youth! Young people are the mainstay of our suffering Russia, her only hope . . . Oh, go, go! . . .”

But Perkhotin had already dashed out of the house, for she would not have let him get away so quickly of her own free will. All in all though, she made a rather pleasant impression on him, which somewhat made up for his misgivings about becoming involved in an unsavory affair. As is well known, there is tremendous diversity in tastes, and Perkhotin thought pleasantly, “She’s not at all middle-aged really! In fact, I could have taken her for her own daughter.”

As to Mrs. Khokhlakov, she had been utterly charmed by the young man. “What amazing competence and clear thinking in such a young man, especially these days! And combined with such a charming manner and such good looks! When I think of those detractors who claim that today’s young men cannot do anything properly—well, there’s an example for them! . . .” And her thoughts followed these lines, so that she quite forgot about “the dreadful tragedy,” and it was only when she was going to bed that she remembered “how close to death” she had been earlier that day and mumbled: “Ah, how dreadful, dreadful! . . .” But this did not prevent her from sliding at once into the sweetest and soundest sleep.

I would not have dwelt at such length on such a trivial episode had that peculiar meeting between the young civil servant and the by-no-means elderly widow not become the foundation of the whole future career of this meticulous and methodical young man, a fact which is still remembered with amazement in our town and of which we may yet have a few words to say in the sequel to our long novel about the brothers Karamazov.

Chapter 2: Alarm

MIKHAIL MAKAROVICH Makarov was a former army lieutenant colonel who had transferred to the civil service with the rank of court counselor and had been appointed police inspector in our town. Although this worthy widower had arrived here only three years before, he had already gained general approval, because he was “one of those men who know how to rally the public behind them.” His house was always full of visitors and it seemed he could not live if he did not have people around him constantly. He had guests to dinner every evening, if only one or two, for he never dined alone. He also gave many formal dinner parties under all kinds of pretexts, often quite unusual ones. The food he served, although none too refined, was always plentiful; his meat pies were excellent; and his wine, which was not of a particularly good vintage, made up in quantity for what it lacked in quality. He had a large billiard room with all the proper furnishings, that is, even with black-framed pictures of English race-horses hanging on the walls, the type always found in the billiard room of a single man. Every evening there was a game of cards, for there were always enough card players to fill at least one table. Also, from time to time, the town’s high society would gather at Mr. Makarov’s house for a dance, the mothers chaperoning their unmarried daughters. Although a widower, the inspector led the life of a family man; his house was run by his widowed daughter, herself the mother of two grown-up daughters, Makarov’s granddaughters. They were gay, pretty girls who had recently completed their education, and although it was common knowledge in town that they would have no dowries, their grandfather’s house still attracted the young men of our society.

Makarov was not a particularly perspicacious civil servant, but he carried out his duties as well as anyone. To put it bluntly, there were considerable gaps in his education and he had an extremely vague understanding of the range and limitations of his administrative powers. It was not that he was completely incapable of understanding the reforms carried out under the present tsar, but he usually misinterpreted them, sometimes rather grossly, not necessarily out of sheer stupidity, but mostly out of an inherent reluctance to fully think things out, a process he found painful and time consuming. “I’m still more of a soldier at heart than a civilian,” he liked to say of himself. He had not even grasped the fundamental ideas underlying the agrarian reforms; he only found out about them gradually as he went along, a little each year, acquiring knowledge willy-nilly, just because he was faced by the hard facts of life—all of which was particularly surprising in view of the fact that he was a landowner himself.

As he walked toward Inspector Makarov’s house, Perkhotin was sure he would find guests there and wondered who they would be. They turned out to be the assistant district prosecutor and Dr. Varvinsky, who had quite recently graduated with high honors from the Petersburg Medical Academy and had been sent to our town. Ippolit Kirillovich, the assistant district prosecutor, whom everyone in town called simply the prosecutor, was a rather peculiar man. He was still relatively young, about thirty-five, apparently had a predisposition to consumption, and was married to a very big, childless woman. He was extremely touchy and irritable but at the same time had a good solid brain and, deep down, was a kind man. Perhaps his main fault was his somewhat exaggerated idea of his own abilities. This may explain his constant restlessness. He even claimed to have a certain special intuition, a sort of artistic insight, into the criminal mind, that provided him with a psychological explanation of crimes. Because of his belief in these special talents of his, he felt that his remote superiors had failed to appreciate him fully, that his career had been hampered by secret enemies. He even had moments of depression during which he threatened to resign his post and become a defense counsel. But now the unexpected Karamazov parricide case brought him new hopes for his career: “With a case like this, my name could become famous all over Russia,” he thought. But I am anticipating.

Nikolai Nelyudov, the very young examining magistrate who had been assigned to our town only two months previously, was being entertained by the young ladies in another room of Makarov’s house.

Later, people in town were to say that it was really amazing that all these people should have been gathered by sheer chance in the police inspector’s house on the night of the crime. Actually, though, there were quite simple—we might say, natural—explanations for this. The prosecutor’s wife had been suffering from a bad toothache for two days and he had to go somewhere to escape her moaning. The doctor was a man who, by nature, could not imagine spending an evening anywhere but at a card table. The youthful examining magistrate had for three days been planning to pay a surprise visit to the inspector’s on that particular night in order to “astound” Makarov’s eldest granddaughter Olga with his knowledge that it was her birthday, a fact she had wanted to conceal so as not to have to invite all the people of the town society to a birthday party. He had been looking forward to the opportunity of teasing her about being afraid that people would know she was a year older, and saying that, since he had discovered the secret, he would now tell everybody, and so on and so forth. This nice young man was a naughty tease. As a matter of fact, that is how the ladies often referred to him, as “the naughty tease,” and this seemed to delight him. He came from a rather good family and had nice manners, and, although he liked to have a good time, his pleasures were usually quite harmless and highly proper. He was a small, delicate young man, on whose thin fingers two or three rather large rings always glittered. When he acted in his official capacity, however, he immediately became extremely grave as if, at that moment, he considered his duties and his person sacred. He was particularly good, during interrogations, at catching murderers and other criminals off their guard, the uneducated ones especially; and even if this ability did not really instill respect for him in the suspects, it often quite surprised them.

When he entered the police inspector’s house, Perkhotin was completely dumbfounded to find that everybody already knew all about it. They had abandoned the card table and Nelyudov, the young investigating magistrate, had come dashing in at a gallop from the other room, where he had been with the young ladies, and now wore a most determined and bellicose expression. Perkhotin was met with the stunning news that Fyodor Karamazov had really been murdered and robbed that night in his house. They themselves had learned about the crime just before Perkhotin’s arrival.

Although she had been deep in her drugged sleep and appeared likely to continue sleeping like that until morning, Gregory’s wife Martha suddenly awoke. She had been woken by Smerdyakov’s bloodcurdling epileptic scream. He lay unconscious in his little room next to hers. His epileptic fits always began with such a scream. Martha had never been able to get used to them; they always horrified her and gave her a sickening feeling. She jumped up from her bed and, still almost unconscious, rushed to Smerdyakov’s room. The room was completely dark and she could only hear the epileptic hoarsely gasping for breath and writhing about. Martha started to scream herself and to call her husband, when it suddenly occurred to her that, when she had awakened, Gregory had not been there in bed beside her. She went back to the bed and felt for him with her hands in the dark, until she was convinced that the bed was really empty. Where could he be, she wondered. She went out on the porch and called him worriedly. There was no answer. But then, in the silence of the night, she suddenly heard distant groans coming from the direction of the garden. She listened intently: the groans came again. Yes, they were coming from the garden, she was sure now. “Good Lord, it’s just like that time with Reeking Lizaveta,” the thought flashed through her distraught mind. Full of fear, she stepped out into the yard and saw that the gate leading into the garden was open. “He must be there,” she decided and went to the gate. When she reached it, she clearly heard Gregory calling her, “Martha, Martha . . .” in a weak, halting, frightening voice. “God save us from trouble,” she mumbled and hurried forward into the darkness. And that was how she found him.

She did not find him, however, by the garden fence where he had been struck, but about twenty yards away. Later it turned out that he had tried to crawl back to the house. It must have taken him a long time to get even that far, for he had certainly fainted several times as he crawled, then had regained consciousness and crawled further. Martha realized at once that he was covered with blood and started yelling for help at the top of her voice. Gregory, however, kept mumbling in a weak, hardly audible voice: “He . . . he’s killed his father . . . Stop screaming, you fool . . . run and get help . . .” But Martha would not stop screaming. Suddenly noticing the light in Mr. Karamazov’s window, she ran over there to call the master. But when she glanced inside, a horrible sight met her eyes. The master lay motionless on his back. His light-colored dressing gown and his white shirt were soaked with blood. In the light of a candle that was burning on the table, she could clearly see the blood and the mask-like face. By now Martha had reached rock bottom in horror. She rushed away from the window, ran to the back gate, which gave onto a backstreet, unbolted it, and ran headlong to Maria Kondratiev’s house next door.

Both Maria Kondratiev and her daughter were asleep, but they were awakened soon enough by Martha’s shouting and desperate pounding, and opened their shutters. In shrill, almost incoherent screams, Martha managed to give them an idea of what had happened and to ask them for help. Foma happened to be spending the night in the room he had in their house, so he was at once routed out of bed and all three rushed to the scene of the crime. On the way, Maria Kondratiev suddenly remembered that some time between eight and nine in the evening she had heard a terrible, piercing cry from the garden. That, of course, was Gregory’s shout, “Father-killer!” as he caught Dmitry’s dangling foot, when Dmitry was already sitting astride the fence. “Someone started screaming and then suddenly stopped,” she told her companions as they ran.

When they reached Gregory in the garden, the two women and Foma carried him to the cottage. They lighted a candle and saw that Smerdyakov was still writhing in convulsions, his eyes rolled back and frothing at the mouth . . . They washed Gregory’s head with water and vinegar, and this brought him back to his senses. The first question he asked was: “Has the master been killed?”

The two women and Foma went to the big house. As they approached it from the garden, they saw that not only the window of Mr. Karamazov’s bedroom but also the door leading into the garden was wide open, although they were well aware that for at least a week Mr. Karamazov had locked himself in every night and had forbidden even Gregory to knock on his door for any reason whatever. Seeing the door open now, Foma and the two women were reluctant to go into the house, for, “Who knows what complications it might make later.” When they returned to Gregory, he told them to run at once to the police inspector’s house and inform him of what had happened. Whereupon Maria Kondratiev hurried to Inspector Makarov’s house and alerted everyone there. As a matter of fact, she had arrived only five minutes before Perkhotin, so that, to the officials, he appeared not with just guesses and theories, but as an important witness, whose story corroborated their common assumption as to the murderer’s identity. Deep down, however, Perkhotin himself had refused to believe it up to the very last moment.

They decided to act at once and the town’s assistant police inspector was dispatched to gather four qualified witnesses with whom to enter Fyodor Karamazov’s house in order to draw up an official report according to the legally established procedures, which I shall not describe here. Dr. Varvinsky, the recently appointed district medical officer, was zealous enough and young enough to insist on accompanying the police inspector, the public prosecutor, and the examining magistrate.