VI. Смердяков

The table was laid, by long-standing custom, in the drawing room, even though the house had a proper dining room as well.

This drawing room was the largest room in the house, furnished with a certain old-fashioned pretension.

The furniture was extremely ancient, white, upholstered in a worn, reddish, half-silk fabric.

In the wall spaces between the windows hung mirrors in elaborate frames of old-fashioned carving, likewise white with gilding.

On the walls, papered in white paper already cracked in many places, two large portraits were displayed in places of honor — one of some prince who had been governor-general of the local region thirty years before, and one of some bishop, long since dead as well.

In the corner of honor stood several icons, before which a small oil lamp was lit at night… not so much out of reverence as so that the room would have some light through the night.

Fyodor Pavlovitch went to bed very late at night, around three or four in the morning, and until then he would keep walking about the room or sit in his armchair and think.

He had made it a habit.

He often spent the night entirely alone in the house, sending the servants off to the lodge, but for the most part the servant Smerdyakov stayed with him through the night, sleeping in the front hall on a bench-chest.

When Alyosha came in, the whole dinner was already over, but preserves and coffee had been served.

Fyodor Pavlovitch was fond of sweets with a little brandy after dinner.

Ivan Fyodorovitch was sitting right there at the table, also drinking coffee.

The servants Grigory and Smerdyakov stood by the table.

Masters and servants alike were in a visible and uncommonly merry animation.

Fyodor Pavlovitch was laughing loudly and roaring with mirth; from the entryway Alyosha already caught his shrill laugh, so familiar to him from before, and at once concluded, from the sound of it, that his father was still far from drunk and only for now in a genial mood.

"There he is, there he is!" cried Fyodor Pavlovitch, suddenly tremendously delighted at Alyosha.

"Join us, sit down, have some coffee — it's a Lenten dish, you know, Lenten, but hot, and splendid!

Brandy I won't offer you, you're a faster — but would you like some, would you?

No, I'd better give you some liqueur, it's a fine one! — Smerdyakov, go to the cabinet, second shelf on the right, here are the keys, be quick!"

Alyosha began to refuse the liqueur.

"It'll be brought out anyway — if not for you, then for us," beamed Fyodor Pavlovitch.

"But wait — have you dined or not?"

"I have," said Alyosha, who in truth had eaten no more than a hunk of bread and drunk a glass of kvass in the Father Superior's kitchen.

"But I'll gladly have some hot coffee."

"Dear boy! Good lad! He'll have some coffee.

Shall we warm it up?

No, no need, it's boiling as it is.

Splendid coffee, Smerdyakov's own.

At coffee and at fish pies Smerdyakov is an artist for me, and at fish soup too, that's the truth.

Come by sometime for the fish soup — let me know in advance…

But wait, wait — didn't I tell you only a little while ago to move in this very day, with your mattress and pillows?

Did you bring the mattress along? Heh-heh-heh!.."

"No, I didn't bring it," said Alyosha, smiling too.

"But you got frightened, you did get frightened just now, didn't you?

Ah, my dear fellow, as if I could ever bring myself to hurt you.

Listen, Ivan, I can't bear to see the way he looks me in the eye like that and smiles — I can't.

My whole insides begin to laugh at the sight of him — I love him!

Alyoshka, let me give you a father's blessing."

Alyosha rose, but Fyodor Pavlovitch had time to think better of it.

"No, no, for now I'll only make the sign of the cross over you, like so — sit down.

Well, now you're in for a treat, and on your very own subject too.

You'll laugh yourself silly.

Our Balaam's ass has begun to talk — and how it talks, how it talks!"

The Balaam's ass turned out to be the lackey Smerdyakov.

Still a young man, only about twenty-four years old, he was terribly unsociable and taciturn.

Not that he was shy or ashamed of anything — no, on the contrary, by temperament he was arrogant and seemed to despise everyone.

But there is no getting around saying at least a couple of words about him, and precisely now.

He was raised by Marfa Ignatyevna and Grigory Vasilyevitch, but the boy grew up "without any gratitude at all," as Grigory put it about him — a wild boy who looked out at the world from a corner.

As a child he was very fond of hanging cats and then burying them with ceremony.

For this he would put on a sheet, which served him as a kind of vestment, and he would sing and wave something over the dead cat as if he were swinging a censer.

All of this on the sly, in the deepest secrecy.

Grigory once caught him at this exercise and gave him a painful thrashing with a switch.

The boy withdrew into a corner and glowered from there for a week or so.

"He doesn't love you and me, this monster," Grigory said to Marfa Ignatyevna, "and he loves no one at all.

Are you even a human being?" he would say, turning suddenly straight to Smerdyakov. "You're no human being, you came from bathhouse mildew — that's what you are…"

Smerdyakov, as it turned out later, could never forgive him those words.

Grigory taught him to read and write, and when he turned about twelve, began to teach him sacred history.

But the matter came to nothing at once.

One day, at no more than the second or third lesson, the boy suddenly smirked.

"What's the matter with you?" asked Grigory, glaring at him menacingly from under his spectacles.

"Nothing, sir."

"The Lord God created light on the first day, and the sun, the moon, and the stars on the fourth day.

So where did the light shine from on the first day?"

Grigory was dumbfounded.

The boy looked at his teacher mockingly.

There was even something supercilious in his gaze.

Grigory could not contain himself.

"Here's where from!" he shouted, and gave his pupil a furious slap on the cheek.

The boy bore the blow without answering a single word, but again shut himself away in his corner for several days.

It so happened that a week later the falling sickness declared itself in him for the first time in his life, and it never left him afterward as long as he lived.

On learning of this, Fyodor Pavlovitch seemed suddenly to change his view of the boy.

Before, he had looked at him somehow indifferently, though he never scolded him and, on meeting him, always gave him a copeck.

In a genial mood he would sometimes send the boy something sweet from the table.

But now, on learning of the illness, he resolved decidedly to look after him, called in a doctor, set about treating him, but it turned out that there was no curing it.

On average the fits came about once a month, and at irregular intervals.

The fits also varied in severity — some mild, others very violent.

Fyodor Pavlovitch most strictly forbade Grigory to punish the boy bodily and began to let him come up to his own rooms.

For the time being he also forbade teaching him anything whatsoever.

But once, when the boy was already about fifteen, Fyodor Pavlovitch noticed that he was hanging about the bookcase and reading the titles of the books through the glass.

Fyodor Pavlovitch had a fair number of books — a hundred-odd volumes — but no one ever saw him himself with a book.

He at once handed Smerdyakov the key to the bookcase: "Well then, read — you'll be my librarian; better than loafing about the yard, sit down and read.

Here, read this one," and Fyodor Pavlovitch took out for him "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka."

The fellow read it, but came away dissatisfied, never once smiling — on the contrary, he finished with a frown.

"Well? Not funny?" asked Fyodor Pavlovitch.

Smerdyakov was silent.

"Answer, you fool."

"It's all written about things that aren't true," Smerdyakov mumbled with a smirk.

"Well then, go to the devil, you lackey soul.

Stop — here's Smaragdov's 'Universal History' for you; now it's all true, read that."

But Smerdyakov did not read even ten pages of Smaragdov — he found it dull.

And so the bookcase was shut again.

Soon afterward Marfa and Grigory reported to Fyodor Pavlovitch that a kind of dreadful fastidiousness had little by little come over Smerdyakov: he sits over his soup, takes up his spoon and hunts and hunts about in the soup, bends down, peers in, scoops up a spoonful and holds it to the light.

"A cockroach, is it?" Grigory would ask.

"A fly, maybe," Marfa would remark.

The fastidious youth never answered, but with the bread, too, and with the meat, and with every dish it was the same: he would lift, say, a morsel on his fork to the light, examine it as though under a microscope, deliberate a long while, and finally make up his mind to send it into his mouth.

"Just look what a fine little gentleman has turned up," Grigory would mutter, watching him.

Fyodor Pavlovitch, hearing of this new quality in Smerdyakov, decided at once that he should be a cook, and sent him off to Moscow to train.

He spent several years in training and came back greatly altered in the face.