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

Chapter 3

The Second Marriage and the Second Family

 

VERY shortly after getting his four-year-old Mitya off his hands

Fyodor Pavlovitch married a second time. His second marriage lasted

eight years. He took this second wife, Sofya Ivanovna, also a very

young girl, from another province, where he had gone upon some small

piece of business in company with a Jew. Though Fyodor Pavlovitch

was a drunkard and a vicious debauchee he never neglected investing

his capital, and managed his business affairs very successfully,

though, no doubt, not over-scrupulously. Sofya Ivanovna was the

daughter of an obscure deacon, and was left from childhood an orphan

without relations. She grew up in the house of a general’s widow, a

wealthy old lady of good position, who was at once her benefactress

and tormentor. I do not know the details, but I have only heard that

the orphan girl, a meek and gentle creature, was once cut down from

a halter in which she was hanging from a nail in the loft, so terrible

were her sufferings from the caprice and everlasting nagging of this

old woman, who was apparently not bad-hearted but had become an

insufferable tyrant through idleness.

 

Fyodor Pavlovitch made her an offer; inquiries were made about him

and he was refused. But again, as in his first marriage, he proposed

an elopement to the orphan girl. There is very little doubt that she

would not on any account have married him if she had known a little

more about him in time. But she lived in another province; besides,

what could a little girl of sixteen know about it, except that she

would be better at the bottom of the river than remaining with her

benefactress. So the poor child exchanged a benefactress for a

benefactor. Fyodor Pavlovitch did not get a penny this time, for the

general’s widow was furious. She gave them nothing and cursed them

both. But he had not reckoned on a dowry; what allured him was the

remarkable beauty of the innocent girl, above all her innocent

appearance, which had a peculiar attraction for a vicious

profligate, who had hitherto admired only the coarser types of

feminine beauty.

 

“Those innocent eyes slit my soul up like a razor,” he used to say

afterwards, with his loathsome snigger. In a man so depraved this

might, of course, mean no more than sensual attraction. As he had

received no dowry with his wife, and had, so to speak, taken her “from

the halter,” he did not stand on ceremony with her. Making her feel

that she had “wronged” him, he took advantage of her phenomenal

meekness and submissiveness to trample on the elementary decencies

of marriage. He gathered loose women into his house, and carried on

orgies of debauchery in his wife’s presence. To show what a pass

things had come to, I may mention that Grigory, the gloomy, stupid,

obstinate, argumentative servant, who had always hated his first

mistress, Adelaida Ivanovna, took the side of his new mistress. He

championed her cause, abusing Fyodor Pavlovitch in a manner little

befitting a servant, and on one occasion broke up the revels and drove

all the disorderly women out of the house. In the end this unhappy

young woman, kept in terror from her childhood, fell into that kind of

nervous disease which is most frequently found in peasant women who

are said to be “possessed by devils.” At times after terrible fits

of hysterics she even lost her reason. Yet she bore Fyodor

Pavlovitch two sons, Ivan and Alexey, the eldest in the first year

of marriage and the second three years later. When she died, little

Alexey was in his fourth year, and, strange as it seems, I know that

he remembered his mother all his life, like a dream, of course. At her

death almost exactly the same thing happened to the two little boys as

to their elder brother, Mitya. They were completely forgotten and

abandoned by their father. They were looked after by the same

Grigory and lived in his cottage, where they were found by the

tyrannical old lady who had brought up their mother. She was still

alive, and had not, all those eight years, forgotten the insult done

her. All that time she was obtaining exact information as to her

Sofya’s manner of life, and hearing of her illness and hideous

surroundings she declared aloud two or three times to her retainers:

 

“It serves her right. God has punished her for her ingratitude.”

 

Exactly three months after Sofya Ivanovna’s death the general’s

widow suddenly appeared in our town, and went straight to Fyodor

Pavlovitch’s house. She spent only half an hour in the town but she

did a great deal. It was evening. Fyodor Pavlovitch, whom she had

not seen for those eight years, came in to her drunk. The story is

that instantly upon seeing him, without any sort of explanation, she

gave him two good, resounding slaps on the face, seized him by a

tuft of hair, and shook him three times up and down. Then, without a

word, she went straight to the cottage to the two boys. Seeing, at the

first glance, that they were unwashed and in dirty linen, she promptly

gave Grigory, too, a box on the ear, and announcing that she would

carry off both the children she wrapped them just as they were in a

rug, put them in the carriage, and drove off to her own town.

Grigory accepted the blow like a devoted slave, without a word, and

when he escorted the old lady to her carriage he made her a low bow

and pronounced impressively that, “God would repay her for orphans.”

“You are a blockhead all the same,” the old lady shouted to him as she

drove away.

 

Fyodor Pavlovitch, thinking it over, decided that it was a good

thing, and did not refuse the general’s widow his formal consent to

any proposition in regard to his children’s education. As for the

slaps she had given him, he drove all over the town telling the story.

 

It happened that the old lady died soon after this, but she left

the boys in her will a thousand roubles each “for their instruction,

and so that all be spent on them exclusively, with the condition

that it be so portioned out as to last till they are twenty-one, for

it is more than adequate provision for such children. If other

people think fit to throw away their money, let them.” I have not read

the will myself, but I heard there was something queer of the sort,

very whimsically expressed. The principal heir, Yefim Petrovitch

Polenov, the Marshal of Nobility of the province, turned out, however,

to be an honest man. Writing to Fyodor Pavlovitch, and discerning at

once that he could extract nothing from him for his children’s

education (though the latter never directly refused but only

procrastinated as he always did in such cases, and was, indeed, at

times effusively sentimental), Yefim Petrovitch took a personal

interest in the orphans. He became especially fond of the younger,

Alexey, who lived for a long while as one of his family. I beg the

reader to note this from the beginning. And to Yefim Petrovitch, a man

of a generosity and humanity rarely to be met with, the young people