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

some quite irrelevant words with

him. And if the old servant were not angry, he felt comforted, and

if he were angry, he was more dejected. It happened even (very

rarely however) that Fyodor Pavlovitch went at night to the lodge to

wake Grigory and fetch him for a moment. When the old man came, Fyodor

Pavlovitch would begin talking about the most trivial matters, and

would soon let him go again, sometimes even with a jest. And after

he had gone, Fyodor Pavlovitch would get into bed with a curse and

sleep the sleep of the just. Something of the same sort had happened

to Fyodor Pavlovitch on Alyosha’s arrival. Alyosha “pierced his heart”

by “living with him, seeing everything and blaming nothing.” Moreover,

Alyosha brought with him something his father had never known

before: a complete absence of contempt for him and an invariable

kindness, a perfectly natural unaffected devotion to the old man who

deserved it so little. All this was a complete surprise to the old

profligate, who had dropped all family ties. It was a new and

surprising experience for him, who had till then loved nothing but

“evil.” When Alyosha had left him, he confessed to himself that he had

learnt something he had not till then been willing to learn.

 

I have mentioned already that Grigory had detested Adelaida

Ivanovna, the first wife of Fyodor Pavlovitch and the mother of

Dmitri, and that he had, on the contrary, protected Sofya Ivanovna,

the poor “crazy woman,” against his master and anyone who chanced to

speak ill or lightly of her. His sympathy for the unhappy wife had

become something sacred to him, so that even now, twenty years

after, he could not bear a slighting allusion to her from anyone,

and would at once check the offender. Externally, Grigory was cold,

dignified and taciturn, and spoke, weighing his words, without

frivolity. It was impossible to tell at first sight whether he loved

his meek, obedient wife; but he really did love her, and she knew it.

 

Marfa Ignatyevna was by no means foolish; she was probably,

indeed, cleverer than her husband, or, at least, more prudent than

he in worldly affairs, and yet she had given in to him in everything

without question or complaint ever since her marriage, and respected

him for his spiritual superiority. It was remarkable how little they

spoke to one another in the course of their lives, and only of the

most necessary daily affairs. The grave and dignified Grigory

thought over all his cares and duties alone, so that Marfa

Ignatyevna had long grown used to knowing that he did not need her

advice. She felt that her husband respected her silence, and took it

as a sign of her good sense. He had never beaten her but once, and

then only slightly. Once during the year after Fyodor Pavlovitch’s

marriage with Adelaida Ivanovna, the village girls and women-at

that time serfs-were called together before the house to sing and

dance. They were beginning “In the Green Meadows,” when Marfa, at that

time a young woman, skipped forward and danced “the Russian Dance,”

not in the village fashion, but as she had danced it when she was a

servant in the service of the rich Miusov family, in their private

theatre, where the actors were taught to dance by a dancing master

from Moscow. Grigory saw how his wife danced, and, an hour later, at

home in their cottage he gave her a lesson, pulling her hair a little.

But there it ended: the beating was never repeated, and Marfa

Ignatyevna gave up dancing.

 

God had not blessed them with children. One child was born but

it died. Grigory was fond of children, and was not ashamed of

showing it. When Adelaida Ivanovna had run away, Grigory took

Dmitri, then a child of three years old, combed his hair and washed

him in a tub with his own hands, and looked after him for almost a

year. Afterwards he had looked after Ivan and Alyosha, for which the

general’s widow had rewarded him with a slap in the face; but I have

already related all that. The only happiness his own child had brought

him had been in the anticipation of its birth. When it was born, he

was overwhelmed with grief and horror. The baby had six fingers.

Grigory was so crushed by this, that he was not only silent till the

day of the christening, but kept away in the garden. It was spring,

and he spent three days digging the kitchen garden. The third day

was fixed for christening the baby: meantime Grigory had reached a

conclusion. Going into the cottage where the clergy were assembled and

the visitors had arrived, including Fyodor Pavlovitch, who was to

stand godfather, he suddenly announced that the baby “ought not to

be christened at all.” He announced this quietly, briefly, forcing out

his words, and gazing with dull intentness at the priest.

 

“Why not?” asked the priest with good-humoured surprise.

 

“Because it’s a dragon,” muttered Grigory.

 

“A dragon? What dragon?”

 

Grigory did not speak for some time. “It’s a confusion of nature,”

he muttered vaguely, but firmly, and obviously unwilling to say more.

 

They laughed, and, of course, christened the poor baby. Grigory

prayed earnestly at the font, but his opinion of the newborn child

remained unchanged. Yet he did not interfere in any way. As long as

the sickly infant lived he scarcely looked at it, tried indeed not

to notice it, and for the most part kept out of the cottage. But when,

at the end of a fortnight, the baby died of thrush, he himself laid

the child in its little coffin, looked at it in profound grief, and

when they were filling up the shallow little grave he fell on his

knees and bowed down to the earth. He did not for years afterwards

mention his child, nor did Marfa speak of the baby before him, and,

even if Grigory were not present, she never spoke of it above a

whisper. Marfa observed that, from the day of the burial, he devoted

himself to “religion,” and took to reading the Lives of the Saints,

for the most part sitting alone and in silence, and always putting

on his big, round, silver-rimmed spectacles. He rarely read aloud,

only perhaps in Lent. He was fond of the Book of Job, and had

somehow got hold of a copy of the sayings and sermons of “the God

fearing Father Isaac the Syrian, which he read persistently for

years together, understanding very little of it, but perhaps prizing

and loving it the more for that. Of late he had begun to listen to the

doctrines of the sect of Flagellants settled in the neighbourhood.

He was evidently shaken by them, but judged it unfitting to go over to

the new faith. His habit of theological reading gave him an expression

of still greater gravity.

 

He was perhaps predisposed to mysticism. And the birth of his

deformed child, and its death, had, as though by special design,

been accompanied by another strange and marvellous event, which, as he

said later, had left a “stamp” upon his soul. It happened that, on the

very night after the burial of his child, Marfa was awakened by the

wail of a newborn baby. She was frightened and waked her husband.

He listened and said he thought it was more like someone groaning, “it

might be a woman.” He got up and dressed. It was a rather warm night

in May. As he went down the steps, he distinctly heard groans coming

from the garden. But the gate from the yard into the garden was locked

at night, and there was no other way of entering it, for it was

enclosed all round by a strong, high fence. Going back into the house,

Grigory lighted a lantern, took the garden key, and taking no notice

of the hysterical fears of his wife, who was still persuaded that

she heard a child crying, and that it was her own baby crying and

calling for her, went into the garden in silence. There he heard at

once that the groans came from the bathhouse that stood near the

garden gate, and that they were the groans of a woman. Opening the

door of the bathhouse, he saw a sight which petrified him. An idiot

girl, who wandered about the streets and was known to the whole town

by the nickname of Lizaveta Smerdyastchaya (Stinking Lizaveta), had

got into the bathhouse and had just given birth to a child. She lay

dying with the baby beside her. She said nothing, for she had never

been able to speak. But her story needs a chapter to itself.