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

Chapter 3

Ilusha’s Funeral. The Speech at the Stone

 

HE really was late. They had waited for him and had already

decided to bear the pretty flower-decked little coffin to the church

without him. It was the coffin of poor little Ilusha. He had died

two days after Mitya was sentenced. At the gate of the house Alyosha

was met by the shouts of the boys, Ilusha’s schoolfellows. They had

all been impatiently expecting him and were glad that he had come at

last. There were about twelve of them, they all had their

school-bags or satchels on their shoulders. “Father will cry, be

with father,” Ilusha had told them as he lay dying, and the boys

remembered it. Kolya Krassotkin was the foremost of them.

 

“How glad I am you’ve come, Karamazov!” he cried, holding out

his hand to Alyosha. “It’s awful here. It’s really horrible to see it.

Snegiryov is not drunk, we know for a fact he’s had nothing to drink

to-day, but he seems as if he were drunk… I am always manly, but

this is awful. Karamazov, if I am not keeping you, one question before

you go in?”

 

“What is it, Kolya?” said Alyosha.

 

“Is your brother innocent or guilty? Was it he killed your

father or was it the valet? As you say, so it will be. I haven’t slept

for the last four nights for thinking of it.”

 

“The valet killed him, my brother is innocent,” answered Alyosha.

 

“That’s what I said,” cried Smurov.

 

“So he will perish an innocent victim!” exclaimed Kolya; “though

he is ruined he is happy! I could envy him!”

 

“What do you mean? How can you? Why?” cried Alyosha surprised.

 

“Oh, if I, too, could sacrifice myself some day for truth!” said

Kolya with enthusiasm.

 

“But not in such a cause, not with such disgrace and such horrer!”

said Alyosha.

 

“Of course… I should like to die for all humanity, and as for

disgrace, I don’t care about that-our names may perish. I respect

your brother!”

 

“And so do I!” the boy, who had once declared that he knew who had

founded Troy, cried suddenly and unexpectedly, and he blushed up to

his ears like a peony as he had done on that occasion.

 

Alyosha went into the room. Ilusha lay with his hands folded and

his eyes closed in a blue coffin with a white frill round it. His thin

face was hardly changed at all, and strange to say there was no

smell of decay from the corpse. The expression of his face was serious

and, as it were, thoughtful. His hands, crossed over his breast,

looked particularly beautiful, as though chiselled in marble. There

were flowers in his hands and the coffin, with flowers, which had been

sent early in the morning by Lise Hohlakov. But there were flowers too

from Katerina Ivanovna, and when Alyosha opened the door, the

captain had a bunch in his trembling hands and was strewing them again

over his dear boy. He scarcely glanced at Alyosha when he came in, and

he would not look at anyone, even at his crazy weeping wife,

“mamma,” who kept trying to stand on her crippled legs to get a nearer

look at her dead boy. Nina had been pushed in her chair by the boys

close up to the coffin. She sat with her head pressed to it and she

too was no doubt quietly weeping. Snegiryov’s face looked eager, yet

bewildered and exasperated. There was something crazy about his

gestures and the words that broke from him. “Old man, dear old man!”

he exclaimed every minute, gazing at Ilusha. It was his habit to

call Ilusha “old man,” as a term of affection when he was alive.

 

“Father, give me a flower, too; take that white one out of his

hand and give it me,” the crazy mother begged, whimpering. Either

because the little white rose in Ilusha’s hand had caught her fancy or

that she wanted one from his hand to keep in memory of him, she

moved restlessly, stretching out her hands for the flower.

 

“I won’t give it to anyone, I won’t give you anything,”

Snegiryov cried callously. “They are his flowers, not yours!

Everything is his, nothing is yours!”

 

“Father, give mother a flower!” said Nina, lifting her face wet

with tears.

 

“I won’t give away anything and to her less than anyone! She

didn’t love Ilusha. She took away his little cannon and he gave it

to her,” the captain broke into loud sobs at the thought of how Ilusha

had given up his cannon to his mother. The poor, crazy creature was

bathed in noiseless tears, hiding her face in her hands.

 

The boys, seeing that the father would not leave the coffin and

that it was time to carry it out, stood round it in a close circle and

began to lift it up.

 

“I don’t want him to be buried in the churchyard,” Snegiryov

wailed suddenly; “I’ll bury him by the stone, by our stone! Ilusha

told me to. I won’t let him be carried out!” He had been saying for

the last three days that he would bury him by the stone, but

Alyosha, Krassotkin, the landlady, her sister and all the boys

interfered.

 

“What an idea, bury him by an unholy stone, as though he had

hanged himself!” the old landlady said sternly. “There in the

churchyard the ground has been crossed. He’ll be prayed for there. One

can hear the singing in church and the deacon reads so plainly and

verbally that it will reach him every time just as though it were read

over his grave.”

 

At last the captain made a gesture of despair as though to say,

“Take him where you will.” The boys raised the coffin, but as they

passed the mother, they stopped for a moment and lowered it that she

might say good-bye to Ilusha. But on seeing that precious little face,

which for the last three days she had only looked at from a

distance, she trembled all over and her grey head began twitching

spasmodically over the coffin.

 

“Mother, make the sign of the cross over him, give him your

blessing, kiss him,” Nina cried to her. But her head still twitched

like an automaton and with a face contorted with bitter grief she

began, without a word, beating her breast with her fist. They

carried the coffin past her. Nina pressed her lips to her brother’s

for the last time as they bore the coffin by her. As Alyosha went

out of the house he begged the landlady to look after those who were

left behind, but she interrupted him before he had finished.

 

“To be sure, I’ll stay with them, we are Christians, too.” The old

woman wept as she said it.

 

They had not far to carry the coffin to the church, not more

than three hundred paces. It was a still, clear day, with a slight

frost. The church bells were still ringing. Snegiryov ran fussing

and distracted after the coffin, in his short old summer overcoat,

with his head bare and his soft, old, wide-brimmed hat in his hand. He

seemed in a state of bewildered anxiety. At one minute he stretched

out his hand to support the head of the coffin and only hindered the

bearers, at another he ran alongside and tried to find a place for

himself there. A flower fell on the snow and he rushed to pick it up

as though everything in the world depended on the loss of that flower.

 

“And the crust of bread, we’ve forgotten the crust!” he cried

suddenly in dismay. But the boys reminded him at once that he had

taken the crust of bread already and that it was in his pocket. He

instantly pulled