The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky [children's books read aloud TXT] 📗

may still find some way out,

oh, there’s still time to make some plan of defence, and now, now-she

is so fascinating!’

 

“His soul was full of confusion and dread, but he managed,

however, to put aside half his money and hide it somewhere-I cannot

otherwise explain the disappearance of quite half of the three

thousand he had just taken from his father’s pillow. He had been in

Mokroe more than once before, he had caroused there for two days

together already, he knew the old big house with all its passages

and outbuildings. I imagine that part of the money was hidden in

that house, not long before the arrest, in some crevice, under some

floor, in some corner, under the roof. With what object? I shall be

asked. Why, the catastrophe may take place at once, of course; he

hadn’t yet considered how to meet it, he hadn’t the time, his head was

throbbing and his heart was with her, but money-money was

indispensable in any case! With money a man is always a man. Perhaps

such foresight at such a moment may strike you as unnatural? But he

assures us himself that a month before, at a critical and exciting

moment, he had halved his money and sewn it up in a little bag. And

though that was not true, as we shall prove directly, it shows the

idea was a familiar one to Karamazov, he had contemplated it. What’s

more, when he declared at the inquiry that he had put fifteen

hundred roubles in a bag (which never existed) he may have invented

that little bag on the inspiration of the moment, because he had two

hours before divided his money and hidden half of it at Mokroe till

morning, in case of emergency, simply not to have it on himself. Two

extremes, gentlemen of the jury, remember that Karamazov can

contemplate two extremes and both at once.

 

“We have looked in the house, but we haven’t found the money. It

may still be there or it may have disappeared next day and be in the

prisoner’s hands now. In any case he was at her side, on his knees

before her, she was lying on the bed, he had his hands stretched out

to her and he had so entirely forgotten everything that he did not

even hear the men coming to arrest him. He hadn’t time to prepare

any line of defence in his mind. He was caught unawares and confronted

with his judges, the arbiters of his destiny.

 

“Gentlemen of the jury, there are moments in the execution of

our duties when it is terrible for us to face a man, terrible on his

account, too! The moments of contemplating that animal fear, when

the criminal sees that all is lost, but still struggles, still means

to struggle, the moments when every instinct of self-preservation

rises up in him at once and he looks at you with questioning and

suffering eyes, studies you, your face, your thoughts, uncertain on

which side you will strike, and his distracted mind frames thousands

of plans in an instant, but he is still afraid to speak, afraid of

giving himself away! This purgatory of the spirit, this animal

thirst for self-preservation, these humiliating moments of the human

soul, are awful, and sometimes arouse horror and compassion for the

criminal even in the lawyer. And this was what we all witnessed then.

 

“At first he was thunderstruck and in his terror dropped some very

compromising phrases. ‘Blood! I’ve deserved it!’ But he quickly

restrained himself. He had not prepared what he was to say, what

answer he was to make, he had nothing but a bare denial ready. ‘I am

not guilty of my father’s death.’ That was his fence for the moment

and behind it he hoped to throw up a barricade of some sort. His first

compromising exclamations he hastened to explain by declaring that

he was responsible for the death of the servant Grigory only. ‘Of that

bloodshed I am guilty, but who has killed my father, gentlemen, who

has killed him? Who can have killed him, if not I?’ Do you hear, he

asked us that, us, who had come to ask him that question! Do you

hear that uttered with such premature haste- ‘if not I’- the animal

cunning, the naivete the Karamazov impatience of it? ‘I didn’t kill

him and you mustn’t think I did! I wanted to kill him, gentlemen, I

wanted to kill him,’ he hastens to admit (he was in a hurry, in a

terrible hurry), ‘but still I am not guilty, it is not I murdered

him.’ He concedes to us that he wanted to murder him, as though to

say, you can see for yourselves how truthful I am, so you’ll believe

all the sooner that I didn’t murder him. Oh, in such cases the

criminal is often amazingly shallow and credulous.

 

“At that point one of the lawyers asked him, as it were

incidentally, the most simple question, ‘Wasn’t it Smerdyakov killed

him?’ Then, as we expected, he was horribly angry at our having

anticipated him and caught him unawares, before he had time to pave

the way to choose and snatch the moment when it would be most

natural to bring in Smerdyakov’s name. He rushed at once to the

other extreme, as he always does, and began to assure us that

Smerdyakov could not have killed him, was not capable of it. But don’t

believe him, that was only his cunning; he didn’t really give up the

idea of Smerdyakov; on the contrary, he meant to bring him forward

again; for, indeed, he had no one else to bring forward, but he

would do that later, because for the moment that line was spoiled

for him. He would bring him forward perhaps next day, or even a few

days later, choosing an opportunity to cry out to us, ‘You know I

was more sceptical about Smerdyakov than you, you remember that

yourselves, but now I am convinced. He killed him, he must have done!’

And for the present he falls back upon a gloomy and irritable

denial. Impatience and anger prompted him, however, to the most

inept and incredible explanation of how he looked into his father’s

window and how he respectfully withdrew. The worst of it was that he

was unaware of the position of affairs, of the evidence given by

Grigory.

 

“We proceeded to search him. The search angered, but encouraged

him, the whole three thousand had not been found on him, only half

of it. And no doubt only at that moment of angry silence, the

fiction of the little bag first occurred to him. No doubt he was

conscious himself of the improbability of the story and strove

painfully to make it sound more likely, to weave it into a romance

that would sound plausible. In such cases the first duty, the chief

task of the investigating lawyers, is to prevent the criminal being

prepared, to pounce upon him unexpectedly so that he may blurt out his

cherished ideas in all their simplicity, improbability and

inconsistency. The criminal can only be made to speak by the sudden

and apparently incidental communication of some new fact, of some

circumstance of great importance in the case, of which he had no

previous idea and could not have foreseen. We had such a fact in

readiness-that was Grigory’s evidence about the open door through

which the prisoner had run out. He had completely forgotten about that

door and had not even suspected that Grigory could have seen it.

 

“The effect of it was amazing. He leapt up and shouted to us,

‘Then Smerdyakov murdered him, it was Smerdyakov!’ and so betrayed the

basis of the defence he was keeping back, and betrayed it in its

most improbable shape, for Smerdyakov could only have committed the

murder after he had knocked Grigory down and run away. When we told

him that Grigory saw the door was open before he fell down, and had

heard Smerdyakov behind the screen as he came out of his bedroom-Karamazov was positively crushed. My esteemed and witty colleague,

Nikolay Parfenovitch, told me afterwards that he was almost moved to

tears at the sight of him. And to improve matters, the prisoner

hastened to tell us about the much-talked-of little bag-so be it, you

shall hear this romance!

 

“Gentlemen of the jury, I have told you already why I consider

this romance not only an absurdity, but the most improbable

invention that could have been brought forward in the circumstances.

If one tried for a bet to invent the most unlikely story, one could

hardly find anything more incredible. The worst of such stories is

that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and

crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which

these unhappy and involuntary storytellers neglect as insignificant

trifles. Oh, they have no thought to spare for such details, their

minds are concentrated on their grand invention as a whole, and

fancy anyone daring to pull them up for a trifle! But that’s how

they are caught. The prisoner was asked the question, ‘Where did you

get the stuff for your little bag and who made it for you?’ ‘I made it

myself.’ ‘And where did you get the linen?’ The prisoner was

positively offended, he thought it almost insulting to ask him such

a trivial question, and would you believe it, his resentment was

genuine! But they are all like that. ‘I tore it off my shirt. “Then we

shall find that shirt among your linen to-morrow, with a piece torn

off.’ And only fancy, gentlemen of the jury, if we really had found

that torn shirt (and how could we have failed to find it in his

chest of drawers or trunk?) that would have been a fact, a material

fact in support of his statement! But he was incapable of that

reflection. ‘I don’t remember, it may not have been off my shirt, I

sewed it up in one of my landlady’s caps.’ ‘What sort of a cap?’ ‘It

was an old cotton rag of hers lying about.’ ‘And do you remember

that clearly?’ ‘No, I don’t.’ And he was angry, very angry, and yet

imagine not remembering it! At the most terrible moments of man’s

life, for instance when he is being led to execution, he remembers

just such trifles. He will forget anything but some green roof that

has flashed past him on the road, or a jackdaw on a cross-that he

will remember. He concealed the making of that little bag from his

household, he must have remembered his humiliating fear that someone

might come in and find him needle in hand, how at the slightest

sound he slipped behind the screen (there is a screen in his

lodgings).

 

“But, gentlemen of the jury, why do I tell you all this, all these

details, trifles?” cried Ippolit Kirillovitch suddenly. “Just

because the prisoner still persists in these absurdities to this

moment. He has not explained anything since that fatal night two

months ago, he has not added one actual illuminating fact to his

former fantastic statements; all those are trivialities. ‘You must

believe it on my honour.’ Oh, we are glad to believe it, we are

eager to believe it, even if only on his word of honour! Are we

jackals thirsting for human blood? Show us a single fact in the

prisoner’s favour and we shall rejoice; but let it be a substantial,

real fact, and not a conclusion drawn from the prisoner’s expression

by his own brother, or that when he beat himself on the breast he must

have meant to point to the little bag, in the darkness, too. We

shall rejoice at the new fact, we shall be the first to