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

envelope, which I

was to open at once, if anything happened to him. Oh, he foresaw his

illness! He told me that the envelope contained the details of the

escape, and that if he died or was taken dangerously ill, I was to

save Mitya alone. Then he left me money, nearly ten thousand-those

notes to which the prosecutor referred in his speech, having learnt

from someone that he had sent them to be changed. I was tremendously

impressed to find that Ivan Fyodorovitch had not given up his idea

of saving his brother, and was confiding this plan of escape to me,

though he was still jealous of me and still convinced that I loved

Mitya. Oh, that was a sacrifice! No, you cannot understand the

greatness of such self-sacrifice, Alexey Fyodorovitch. I wanted to

fall at his feet in reverence, but I thought at once that he would

take it only for my joy at the thought of Mitya’s being saved (and

he certainly would have imagined that!), and I was so exasperated at

the mere possibility of such an unjust thought on his part that I lost

my temper again, and instead of kissing his feet, flew into a fury

again! Oh, I am unhappy! It’s my character, my awful, unhappy

character! Oh, you will see, I shall end by driving him, too, to

abandon me for another with whom he can get on better, like Dmitri.

But… no, I could not bear it, I should kill myself. And when you

came in then, and when I called to you and told him to come back, I

was so enraged by the look of contempt and hatred he turned on me that

do you remember?- I cried out to you that it was he, he alone who

had persuaded me that his brother Dmitri was a murderer! I said that

malicious thing on purpose to wound him again. He had never, never

persuaded me that his brother was a murderer. On the contrary, it

was I who persuaded him! Oh, my vile temper was the cause of

everything! I paved the way to that hideous scene at the trial. He

wanted to show me that he was an honourable man, and that, even if I

loved his brother, he would not ruin him for revenge or jealousy. So

he came to the court… I am the cause of it all, I alone am to

blame!”

 

Katya never had made such confessions to Alyosha before, and he

felt that she was now at that stage of unbearable suffering when

even the proudest heart painfully crushes its pride and falls

vanquished by grief. Oh, Alyosha knew another terrible reason of her

present misery, though she had carefully concealed it from him

during those days since the trial; but it would have been, for some

reason, too painful to him if she had been brought so low as to

speak to him now about that. She was suffering for her “treachery”

at the trial, and Alyosha felt that her conscience was impelling her

to confess it to him, to him, Alyosha, with tears and cries and

hysterical writhings on the floor. But he dreaded that moment and

longed to spare her. It made the commission on which he had come

even more difficult. He spoke of Mitya again.

 

“It’s all right, it’s all right, don’t be anxious about him! she

began again, sharply and stubbornly. “All that is only momentary, I

know him, I know his heart only too well. You may be sure he will

consent to escape. It’s not as though it would be immediately; he will

have time to make up his mind to it. Ivan Fyodorovitch will be well by

that time and will manage it all himself, so that I shall have nothing

to do with it. Don’t be anxious; he will consent to run away. He has

agreed already: do you suppose he would give up that creature? And

they won’t let her go to him, so he is bound to escape. It’s you

he’s most afraid of, he is afraid you won’t approve of his escape on

moral grounds. But you must generously allow it, if your sanction is

so necessary,” Katya added viciously. She paused and smiled.

 

“He talks about some hymn,” she went on again, “some cross he

has to bear, some duty; I remember Ivan Fyodorovitch told me a great

deal about it, and if you knew how he talked! Katya cried suddenly,

with feeling she could not repress, “If you knew how he loved that

wretched man at the moment he told me, and how he hated him,

perhaps, at the same moment. And I heard his story and his tears

with sneering disdain. Brute! Yes, I am a brute. I am responsible

for his fever. But that man in prison is incapable of suffering,”

Katya concluded irritably. “Can such a man suffer? Men like him

never suffer!” There was a note of hatred and contemptuous repulsion

in her words. And yet it was she who had betrayed him. “Perhaps

because she feels how she’s wronged him she hates him at moments,”

Alyosha thought to himself. He hoped that it was only “at moments.” In

Katya’s last words he detected a challenging note, but he did not take

it up.

 

“I sent for you this morning to make you promise to persuade him

yourself. Or do you, too, consider that to escape would be

dishonourable, cowardly, or something… unchristian, perhaps?”

Katya added, even more defiantly.

 

“Oh, no. I’ll tell him everything,” muttered Alyosha. “He asks you

to come and see him to-day,” he blurted out suddenly, looking her

steadily in the face. She started, and drew back a little from him

on the sofa.

 

“Me? Can that be?” She faltered, turning pale.

 

“It can and ought to be!” Alyosha began emphatically, growing more

animated. “He needs you particularly just now. I would not have opened

the subject and worried you, if it were not necessary. He is ill, he

is beside himself, he keeps asking for you. It is not to be reconciled

with you that he wants you, but only that you would go and show

yourself at his door. So much has happened to him since that day. He

realises that he has injured you beyond all reckoning. He does not ask

your forgiveness- ‘It’s impossible to forgive me,’ he says himself-but only that you would show yourself in his doorway.”

 

“It’s so sudden…” faltered Katya. “I’ve had a presentiment all

these days that you would come with that message. I knew he would

ask me to come. It’s impossible!”

 

“Let it be impossible, but do it. Only think, he realises for

the first time how he has wounded you, the first time in his life;

he had never grasped it before so fully. He said, ‘If she refuses to

come I shall be unhappy all my life.’ you hear? though he is condemned

to penal servitude for twenty years, he is still planning to be happy-is not that piteous? Think-you must visit him; though he is ruined,

he is innocent,” broke like a challenge from Alyosha. “His hands are

clean, there is no blood on them! For the sake of his infinite

sufferings in the future visit him now. Go, greet him on his way

into the darkness-stand at his door, that is all…. You ought to

do it, you ought to!” Alyosha concluded, laying immense stress on

the word “ought.”

 

“I ought to… but I cannot…” Katya moaned. “He will look at

me…. I can’t.”

 

“Your eyes ought to meet. How will you live all your life, if

you don’t make up your mind to do it now?”

 

“Better suffer all my life.”

 

“You ought to go, you ought to go,” Alyosha repeated with

merciless emphasis.

 

“But why to-day, why at once?… I can’t leave our patient-”

 

“You can for a moment. It will only be a moment. If you don’t

come, he will be in delirium by to-night. I would not tell you a

lie; have pity on him!”

 

“Have pity on me!” Katya said, with bitter reproach, and she burst

into tears.

 

“Then you will come,” said Alyosha firmly, seeing her tears. “I’ll

go and tell him you will come directly.”

 

“No, don’t tell him so on any account,” cried Katya in alarm. “I

will come, but don’t tell him beforehand, for perhaps I may go, but

not go in… I don’t know yet-”

 

Her voice failed her. She gasped for breath. Alyosha got up to go.

 

“And what if I meet anyone?” she said suddenly, in a low voice,

turning white again.

 

“That’s just why you must go now, to avoid meeting anyone. There

will be no one there, I can tell you that for certain. We will

expect you,” he concluded emphatically, and went out of the room.