XII. Да и убийства не было

We have heard how the prosecution itself testified that until the very last day, until today, until the day of the trial, it hesitated to charge the accused with a full and complete premeditation of the murder — hesitated right up to that fateful 'drunken' letter laid before the court today.

'It came to pass exactly as it was written!'

But again I repeat: he ran to her, after her, solely and only to find out where she was.

This, after all, is an incontrovertible fact.

Had she happened to be at home, he would not have run off anywhere, but would have stayed with her and would not have made good on what he promised in the letter.

He ran off by accident and on a sudden impulse, and as for his 'drunken' letter, he very likely did not even remember it at the time.

'He snatched up the pestle, you see' — and you recall how out of that one pestle alone they spun us a whole psychology: why, supposedly, he had to take that pestle for a weapon, seize it as a weapon, and so on, and so on.

Here a most ordinary thought comes into my head: well, what if this pestle had not been lying in plain view, not on the shelf from which the accused snatched it, but had been tidied away into a cupboard? — then surely it would not have caught the accused's eye at that moment, and he would have run off without a weapon, empty-handed, and so, perhaps, he would then have killed no one at all.

By what reasoning, then, can I take the pestle as proof of his having armed himself and of premeditation?

Yes, but he shouted in the taverns that he would kill his father — and yet two days before, on the very evening when he wrote his drunken letter, he was quiet and quarreled in the tavern with only a single merchant's clerk, 'because, supposedly, a Karamazov could not help quarreling.'

And to this I answer that if a man had indeed plotted such a murder, and by a plan at that, in writing, then he most certainly would not have quarreled with the clerk, and perhaps would not even have set foot in the tavern at all, for a soul that has conceived such a deed seeks quiet and concealment, seeks to vanish, so as not to be seen, not to be heard: 'Forget me, if you can,' it says — and this is not by calculation alone, but by instinct.

Gentlemen of the jury, psychology cuts both ways, and we too know how to understand psychology.

As for all these tavern outcries throughout this whole month — why, how many times do children or drunken revelers, coming out of the alehouses and quarreling with one another, shout 'I'll kill you!' — yet they do not actually kill.

And this fateful letter itself — well, is it not a drunken outburst too, is it not the cry of a man coming out of the alehouse: I'll kill, you hear, I'll kill the lot of you!

Why not so? Why could it not have been so?

Why is this letter fateful — why, on the contrary, is it not laughable?

Precisely because the murdered father's body was found, because a witness saw the accused in the garden, armed and fleeing, and was himself struck down by him — and so it follows that everything came to pass just as it was written, and therefore the letter is not laughable but fateful.

Thank God, we have come to the crux of it: 'if he was in the garden, then he must be the one who killed.'

On these two little words — if he was, then it inevitably means — everything rests, the whole prosecution: 'he was there, so it follows.'

And what if it does not follow, even though he was there?

Oh, I grant that the sum of the facts, the convergence of the facts, really is quite eloquent.

But examine, however, all these facts separately, without letting yourselves be swayed by their accumulation: why, for instance, will the prosecution on no account allow the truthfulness of the accused's own testimony that he fled from his father's window?

Recall even the sarcasms in which the prosecution here indulges concerning the filial respect and 'devout' feelings that supposedly seized the murderer all at once.

And what if there really was something of the sort here — that is, if not respectful feeling, then at least devout feeling?

'My mother must have been praying for me at that moment,' the accused states in the preliminary inquiry — and there it is, he ran off the instant he grew sure that Svetlova was not in his father's house.

'But he could not have made sure through the window,' the prosecution objects to us.

And why could he not?

After all, the window did open in answer to the signals the accused gave.

Some single word or other might have been uttered there by Fyodor Pavlovich, some such cry might have broken from him — and the accused might suddenly have made certain that Svetlova was not there.

Why must we necessarily suppose it to be as we imagine, as we have presumed to imagine it?

In reality a thousand things may flash by that would slip past the observation of even the most subtle novelist.

'Yes, but Grigory saw the door standing open, and so the accused was certainly in the house, and so he killed.'

About that door, gentlemen of the jury… You see, only a single person testifies to this open door — a person who at that very time was himself in such a state that… But let it pass, let it pass; let the door have been open, let the accused deny it, let him have lied out of a feeling of self-defense so understandable in his position — let it be, let it be that he got into the house, was in the house — well, and what of it? Why must it necessarily follow that if he was there, then he killed?

He might have burst in, run through the rooms, might have shoved his father aside, might even have struck his father — but, having made certain that Svetlova was not with him, he ran off, rejoicing that she was not there and that he had run off without killing his father.

And precisely for that reason, perhaps, a minute later he jumped down from the fence to Grigory, whom he had knocked down in his frenzy — because he was in a state to feel a pure feeling, a feeling of compassion and pity, because he had fled from the temptation to kill his father, because he felt within himself a pure heart and a joy that he had not killed his father.

With a terrible eloquence the prosecutor describes for us the dreadful state of the accused in the village of Mokroye, when love opened itself to him anew, calling him to a new life, and when he could no longer love, because behind him lay his father's bloodied corpse, and beyond the corpse, the scaffold.

And yet the prosecutor nonetheless conceded the love, which he explained after his own psychology: 'A drunken state, you see; the criminal is being carried off to execution, there is still a long time to wait, and so on, and so on.'

But have you not invented another person, Mr. Prosecutor — I ask you yet again?

Is the accused really so coarse and so soulless that at that moment he could still think of love and of wriggling out before the court, if his father's blood had truly been on him?

No, no, and no!

No sooner had it come out that she loved him, was calling him to her side, promising him a new happiness — oh, I swear, he must then have felt a double, a triple need to kill himself, and he would most certainly have killed himself, if his father's corpse had been lying behind him!

Oh no, he would not have forgotten where his pistols lay!

I know the accused: the wild, wooden heartlessness laid to his charge by the prosecution is incompatible with his character.

He would have killed himself, of that I am sure; he did not kill himself precisely because 'his mother was praying for him,' and his heart was guiltless of his father's blood.

He suffered, he grieved that night in Mokroye only over the stricken old Grigory, and prayed to God within himself that the old man might rise and come round, that his blow might not be mortal and the punishment for it might pass him by.

Why not accept such a reading of the events?

What firm proof do we have that the accused is lying to us?

Ah, but there is the father's corpse, they will at once point out to us again: he ran off, he did not kill — well then, who did kill the old man?

I repeat, here is the whole logic of the prosecution: who else killed him, if not he?

There is no one, they say, to put in his place.

Gentlemen of the jury, is that so?

Is it truly, is it really so utterly impossible to put anyone in his place?

We have heard the prosecution count off on its fingers everyone who was, and everyone who came and went, in that house on that night.

Five people were found.

Three of them, I grant, are entirely beyond suspicion: the murdered man himself, old Grigory, and his wife.

There remain, then, the accused and Smerdyakov, and here the prosecutor exclaims with pathos that the accused points to Smerdyakov only because there is no one else for him to point to — that were there some sixth person here, even the phantom of some sixth person, the accused would himself at once stop accusing Smerdyakov, ashamed to do so, and would point instead to this sixth man.

But, gentlemen of the jury, why could I not conclude exactly the opposite?

Two men stand here: the accused and Smerdyakov — why may I not say that you accuse my client solely because you have no one else to accuse?

And you have no one else only because you have, with complete prejudice, excluded Smerdyakov in advance from any suspicion whatever.