The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (reading an ebook TXT) 📗

At Grushenka’s

ALYOSHA went towards the cathedral square to the widow Morozov’s

house to see Grushenka, who had sent Fenya to him early in the morning

with an urgent message begging him to come. Questioning Fenya, Alyosha

learned that her mistress had been particularly distressed since the

previous day. During the two months that had passed since Mitya’s

arrest, Alyosha had called frequently at the widow Morozov’s house,

both from his own inclination and to take messages for Mitya. Three

days after Mitya’s arrest, Grushenka was taken very ill and was ill

for nearly five weeks. For one whole week she was unconscious. She was

very much changed-thinner and a little sallow, though she had for the

past fortnight been well enough to go out. But to Alyosha her face was

even more attractive than before, and he liked to meet her eyes when

he went in to her. A look of firmness and intelligent purpose had

developed in her face. There were signs of a spiritual

transformation in her, and a steadfast, fine and humble

determination that nothing could shake could be discerned in her.

There was a small vertical line between her brows which gave her

charming face a look of concentrated thought, almost austere at the

first glance. There was scarcely a trace of her former frivolity.

It seemed strange to Alyosha, too, that in spite of the calamity

that had overtaken the poor girl, betrothed to a man who had been

arrested for a terrible crime, almost at the instant of their

betrothal, in spite of her illness and the almost inevitable

sentence hanging over Mitya, Grushenka had not yet lost her youthful

cheerfulness. There was a soft light in the once proud eyes, though at

times they gleamed with the old vindictive fire when she was visited

by one disturbing thought stronger than ever in her heart. The

object of that uneasiness was the same as ever-Katerina Ivanovna,

of whom Grushenka had even raved when she lay in delirium. Alyosha

knew that she was fearfully jealous of her. Yet Katerina Ivanovna

had not once visited Mitya in his prison, though she might have done

it whenever she liked. All this made a difficult problem for

Alyosha, for he was the only person to whom Grushenka opened her heart

and from whom she was continually asking advice. Sometimes he was

unable to say anything.

Full of anxiety he entered her lodging. She was at home. She had

returned from seeing Mitya half an hour before, and from the rapid

movement with which she leapt up from her chair to meet him he saw

that she had been expecting him with great impatience. A pack of cards

dealt for a game of “fools” lay on the table. A bed had been made up

on the leather sofa on the other side and Maximov lay, half reclining,

on it. He wore a dressing-gown and a cotton nightcap, and was

evidently ill and weak, though he was smiling blissfully. When the

homeless old man returned with Grushenka from Mokroe two months

before, he had simply stayed on and was still staying with her. He

arrived with her in rain and sleet, sat down on the sofa, drenched and

scared, and gazed mutely at her with a timid, appealing smile.

Grushenka, who was in terrible grief and in the first stage of

fever, almost forgot his existence in all she had to do the first half

hour after her arrival. Suddenly she chanced to look at him

intently: he laughed a pitiful, helpless little laugh. She called

Fenya and told her to give him something to eat. All that day he sat

in the same place, almost without stirring. When it got dark and the

shutters were closed, Fenya asked her mistress:

“Is the gentleman going to stay the night, mistress?”

“Yes; make him a bed on the sofa,” answered Grushenka.

Questioning him more in detail, Grushenka learned from him that he

had literally nowhere to go, and that “Mr. Kalganov, my benefactor,

told me straight that he wouldn’t receive me again and gave me five

roubles.”

“Well, God bless you, you’d better stay, then,” Grushenka

decided in her grief, smiling compassionately at him. Her smile

wrung the old man’s heart and his lips twitched with grateful tears.

And so the destitute wanderer had stayed with her ever since. He did

not leave the house even when she was ill. Fenya and her

grandmother, the cook, did not turn him out, but went on serving him

meals and making up his bed on the sofa. Grushenka had grown used to

him, and coming back from seeing Mitya (whom she had begun to visit in

prison before she was really well) she would sit down and begin

talking to “Maximushka” about trifling matters, to keep her from

thinking of her sorrow. The old man turned out to be a good

storyteller on occasions, so that at last he became necessary to her.

Grushenka saw scarcely anyone else beside Alyosha, who did not come

every day and never stayed long. Her old merchant lay seriously ill at

this time, “at his last gasp” as they said in the town, and he did, in

fact, die a week after Mitya’s trial. Three weeks before his death,

feeling the end approaching, he made his sons, their wives and

children, come upstairs to him at last and bade them not leave him

again. From that moment he gave strict orders to his servants not to

admit Grushenka and to tell her if she came, “The master wishes you

long life and happiness and tells you to forget him.” But Grushenka

sent almost every day to inquire after him.

“You’ve come at last!” she cried, flinging down the cards and

joyfully greeting Alyosha, “and Maximushka’s been scaring me that

perhaps you wouldn’t come. Ah, how I need you! Sit down to the

table. What will you have coffee?”

“Yes, please,” said Alyosha, sitting down at the table. “I am very

hungry.”

“That’s right. Fenya, Fenya, coffee,” cried Grushenka. “It’s

been made a long time ready for you. And bring some little pies, and

mind they are hot. Do you know, we’ve had a storm over those pies

to-day. I took them to the prison for him, and would you believe it,

he threw them back to me: he would not eat them. He flung one of

them on the floor and stamped on it. So I said to him: ‘I shall

leave them with the warder; if you don’t eat them before evening, it

will be that your venomous spite is enough for you!’ With that I

went away. We quarrelled again, would you believe it? Whenever I go we

quarrel.”

Grushenka said all this in one breath in her agitation. Maximov,

feeling nervous, at once smiled and looked on the floor.

“What did you quarrel about this time?” asked Alyosha.

“I didn’t expect it in the least. Only fancy, he is jealous of the

Pole. ‘Why are you keeping him?’ he said. ‘So you’ve begun keeping

him.’ He is jealous, jealous of me all the time, jealous eating and

sleeping! He even took into his