The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky [children's books read aloud TXT] 📗
- Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Performer: 0140449248
Book online «The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky [children's books read aloud TXT] 📗». Author Fyodor Dostoyevsky
middle-aged peasant, with a very long face, flaxen curls, and a
long, thin, reddish beard, wearing a blue cotton shirt and a black
waistcoat, from the pocket of which peeped the chain of a silver
watch. Mitya looked at his face with intense hatred, and for some
unknown reason his curly hair particularly irritated him.
What was insufferably humiliating was that, after leaving things
of such importance and making such sacrifices, he, Mitya, utterly worn
out, should with business of such urgency be standing over this dolt
on whom his whole fate depended, while he snored as though there
were nothing the matter, as though he’d dropped from another planet.
“Oh, the irony of fate!” cried Mitya, and, quite losing his
head, he fell again to rousing the tipsy peasant. He roused him with a
sort of ferocity, pulled at him, pushed him, even beat him; but
after five minutes of vain exertions, he returned to his bench in
helpless despair, and sat down.
“Stupid! Stupid!” cried Mitya. “And how dishonourable it all
is!” something made him add. His head began to ache horribly.
“Should he fling it up and go away altogether?” he wondered. “No, wait
till to-morrow now. I’ll stay on purpose. What else did I come for?
Besides, I’ve no means of going. How am I to get away from here now?
Oh, the idiocy of it” But his head ached more and more. He sat without
moving, and unconsciously dozed off and fell asleep as he sat. He
seemed to have slept for two hours or more. He was waked up by his
head aching so unbearably that he could have screamed. There was a
hammering in his temples, and the top of his head ached. It was a long
time before he could wake up fully and understand what had happened to
him.
At last he realised that the room was full of charcoal fumes
from the stove, and that he might die of suffocation. And the
drunken peasant still lay snoring. The candle guttered and was about
to go out. Mitya cried out, and ran staggering across the passage into
the forester’s room. The forester waked up at once, but hearing that
the other room was full of fumes, to Mitya’s surprise and annoyance,
accepted the fact with strange unconcern, though he did go to see to
it.
“But he’s dead, he’s dead! and… what am I to do then?” cried
Mitya frantically.
They threw open the doors, opened a window and the chimney.
Mitya brought a pail of water from the passage. First he wetted his
own head, then, finding a rag of some sort, dipped it into the
water, and put it on Lyagavy’s head. The forester still treated the
matter contemptuously, and when he opened the window said grumpily:
“It’ll be all right, now.”
He went back to sleep, leaving Mitya a lighted lantern. Mitya
fussed about the drunken peasant for half an hour, wetting his head,
and gravely resolved not to sleep all night. But he was so worn out
that when he sat down for a moment to take breath, he closed his eyes,
unconsciously stretched himself full length on the bench and slept
like the dead.
It was dreadfully late when he waked. It was somewhere about
nine o’clock. The sun was shining brightly in the two little windows
of the hut. The curly-headed peasant was sitting on the bench and
had his coat on. He had another samovar and another bottle in front of
him. Yesterday’s bottle had already been finished, and the new one was
more than half empty. Mitya jumped up and saw at once that the
cursed peasant was drunk again, hopelessly and incurably. He stared at
him for a moment with wide opened eyes. The peasant was silently and
slyly watching him, with insulting composure, and even a sort of
contemptuous condescension, so Mitya fancied. He rushed up to him.
“Excuse me, you see… I… you’ve most likely heard from the
forester here in the hut. I’m Lieutenant Dmitri Karamazov, the son
of the old Karamazov whose copse you are buying.”
“That’s a lie!” said the peasant, calmly and confidently.
“A lie? You know Fyodor Pavlovitch?”
“I don’t know any of your Fyodor Pavlovitches,” said the
peasant, speaking thickly.
“You’re bargaining with him for the copse, for the copse. Do
wake up, and collect yourself. Father Pavel of Ilyinskoe brought me
here. You wrote to Samsonov, and he has sent me to you,” Mitya
gasped breathlessly.
“You’re lying!” Lyagavy blurted out again. Mitya’s legs went cold.
“For mercy’s sake! It isn’t a joke! You’re drunk, perhaps. Yet you
can speak and understand… or else… I understand nothing!”
“You’re a painter!”
“For mercy’s sake! I’m Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov. I have an
offer to make you, an advantageous offer… very advantageous offer,
concerning the copse!”
The peasant stroked his beard importantly.
“No, you’ve contracted for the job and turned out a scamp.
You’re a scoundrel!”
“I assure you you’re mistaken,” cried Mitya, wringing his hands in
despair. The peasant still stroked his beard, and suddenly screwed
up his eyes cunningly.
“No, you show me this: you tell me the law that allows roguery.
D’you hear? You’re a scoundrel! Do you understand that?”
Mitya stepped back gloomily, and suddenly “something seemed to hit
him on the head,” as he said afterwards. In an instant a light
seemed to dawn in his mind, “a light was kindled and I grasped it
all.” He stood, stupefied, wondering how he, after all a man of
intelligence, could have yielded to such folly, have been led into
such an adventure, and have kept it up for almost twenty-four hours,
fussing round this Lyagavy, wetting his head.
“Why, the man’s drunk, dead drunk, and he’ll go on drinking now
for a week; what’s the use of waiting here? And what if Samsonov
sent me here on purpose? What if she- ? Oh God, what have I done?”
The peasant sat watching him and grinning. Another time Mitya
might have killed the fool in a fury, but now he felt as weak as a
child. He went quietly to the bench, took up his overcoat, put it on
without a word, and went out of the hut. He did not find the
forester in the next room; there was no one there. He took fifty
copecks in small change out of his pocket and put them on the table
for his night’s lodging, the candle, and the trouble he had given.
Coming out of the hut he saw nothing but forest all round. He walked
at hazard, not knowing which way to turn out of the hut, to the
right or to the left. Hurrying there the evening before with the
priest, he had not noticed the road. He had no revengeful feeling
for anybody, even for Samsonov, in his heart. He strode along a narrow
forest path, aimless, dazed, without heeding where he was going. A
child could have knocked him down, so weak was he in body and soul. He
got out of the forest somehow, however, and a vista of fields, bare
after the harvest, stretched as far as the eye could see.
“What despair! What death all round!” he repeated, striding on and
on.
He was saved by meeting an old merchant who was being driven
across country in a hired trap. When he overtook him, Mitya asked
the way and it turned out that the old merchant, too, was going to
Volovya. After some discussion Mitya got into the trap. Three hours
later they arrived. At Volovya, Mitya at once ordered posting-horses
to drive to the town, and suddenly realised that he was appallingly
hungry. While the horses were being harnessed, an omelette was
prepared for him. He ate it all in an instant, ate a huge hunk of
bread, ate a sausage, and swallowed three glasses of vodka. After
eating, his spirits and his heart grew lighter. He flew towards the
town, urged on the driver, and suddenly made a new and “unalterable”
plan to procure that “accursed money” before evening. “And to think,
only to think that a man’s life should be ruined for the sake of
that paltry three thousand!” he cried, contemptuously. “I’ll settle it
to-day.” And if it had not been for the thought of Grushenka and of
what might have happened to her, which never left him, he would
perhaps have become quite cheerful again…. But the thought of her
was stabbing him to the heart every moment, like a sharp knife.
At last they arrived, and Mitya at once ran to Grushenka.
Gold Mines
THIS was the visit of Mitya of which Grushenka had spoken to
Rakitin with such horror. She was just then expecting the “message,”
and was much relieved that Mitya had not been to see her that day or
the day before. She hoped that “please God he won’t come till I’m gone
away,” and he suddenly burst in on her. The rest we know already. To
get him off her hands she suggested at once that he should walk with
her to Samsonov’s, where she said she absolutely must go “to settle
his accounts,” and when Mitya accompanied her at once, she said
good-bye to him at the gate, making him promise to come at twelve
o’clock to take her home again. Mitya, too, was delighted at this
arrangement. If she was sitting at Samsonov’s she could not be going
to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s, “if only she’s not lying,” he added at once.
But he thought she was not lying from what he saw.
He was that sort of jealous man who, in the absence of the beloved
woman, at once invents all sorts of awful fancies of what may be
happening to her, and how she may be betraying him, but, when
shaken, heartbroken, convinced of her faithlessness, he runs back to
her, at the first glance at her face, her gay, laughing,
affectionate face, he revives at once, lays aside all suspicion and
with joyful shame abuses himself for his jealousy.
After leaving Grushenka at the gate he rushed home. Oh, he had
so much still to do that day! But a load had been lifted from his
heart, anyway.
“Now I must only make haste and find out from Smerdyakov whether
anything happened there last night, whether, by any chance, she went
to Fyodor Pavlovitch; ough!” floated through his mind.
Before he had time to reach his lodging, jealousy had surged up
again in his restless heart.
Jealousy! “Othello was not jealous, he was trustful,” observed
Pushkin. And that remark alone is enough to show the deep insight of
our great poet. Othello’s soul was shattered and his whole outlook
clouded simply because his ideal was destroyed. But Othello did not
begin hiding, spying, peeping. He was trustful, on the contrary. He
had to be led up, pushed on, excited with great difficulty before he
could entertain the idea of deceit. The truly jealous man is not
like that. It is impossible to picture to oneself the shame and
moral degradation to which the jealous man can descend without a qualm
of conscience. And yet it’s not as though the jealous were all
vulgar and base souls. On the contrary, a man of lofty feelings, whose
love is pure and full of self-sacrifice, may yet hide under tables,
bribe the vilest people, and be familiar with the lowest ignominy of
spying and eavesdropping.
Othello was incapable of making up his mind to faithlessness-not incapable of forgiving it, but of making up his mind to it-though
his soul was as innocent and free from malice as a babe’s. It is not
so with
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