III. Связался со школьниками

Alyosha felt with a pang that overnight the combatants had gathered fresh strength, and that with the coming of day their hearts had hardened to stone again: "Father is irritated and spiteful; he has thought something up and dug himself in; and what of Dmitri?

He too has braced himself overnight, he too, no doubt, is irritated and spiteful, and he too has certainly hit upon some scheme… Oh, today, without fail, I must manage to track him down whatever it costs…"

But Alyosha was not allowed to think for long: along the way something suddenly happened to him that seemed, on the face of it, not very important, yet struck him deeply.

As soon as he had crossed the square and turned into the lane that leads to Mikhailovskaya Street — which runs parallel to the Bolshaya and is divided from it only by a little ditch (our whole town is laced with such ditches) — he caught sight, down below by a small bridge, of a little knot of schoolboys, all of them small children, between nine and twelve years old, no more.

They were going home from school, some with little satchels on their backs, others with leather pouches slung on straps across the shoulder, some in short jackets, others in little overcoats, and a few even in tall boots with folds wrinkled down the legs — the kind that small children, spoiled by well-off fathers, are especially fond of showing off.

The whole group was talking something over with animation, apparently holding a council.

Alyosha could never walk past little children indifferently — it had been so with him in Moscow too — and although he loved three-year-olds best of all, or thereabouts, he was also very fond of schoolboys of ten or eleven.

And so, preoccupied as he now was, he suddenly felt a wish to turn aside to them and strike up a conversation.

As he came up, he looked into their ruddy, animated little faces, and suddenly saw that every one of the boys had a stone in his hand, and some of them two.

Across the ditch, about thirty paces from the group, another boy was standing by a fence, also a schoolboy, also with a little pouch at his side, by his height about ten years old, no more, or even younger — a pale, sickly child, with flashing black eyes.

He was watching the group of six schoolboys attentively and warily — evidently his own classmates, who had just come out of school with him, but with whom he was plainly at war.

Alyosha went up and, turning to one curly-headed, fair, ruddy-cheeked boy in a black jacket, remarked, after looking him over:

"When I carried a pouch like yours, we used to wear it on the left side, so we could get at it at once with the right hand; but you've got your pouch on the right side, so it's awkward for you to reach."

Alyosha began straight off with this practical remark, without any premeditated cunning; and indeed a grown-up cannot begin otherwise if he wants to enter directly into the confidence of a child, and especially of a whole group of children.

One has to begin precisely in a serious, businesslike way, and so as to be altogether on an equal footing; Alyosha understood this by instinct.

"But he's left-handed," another boy answered at once, a sturdy, dashing fellow of about eleven.

All the other five boys fixed their eyes on Alyosha.

"He throws stones left-handed too," remarked a third boy.

At that very moment a stone came flying into the group, grazing the left-handed boy slightly but sailing past him, though it had been thrown deftly and with force. It was the boy across the ditch who had let it fly.

"Let him have it, get him, Smurov!" they all shouted.

But Smurov (the left-hander) needed no urging and paid him back at once: he flung a stone at the boy across the ditch, but missed — the stone struck the ground.

The boy across the ditch instantly hurled another stone into the group, this time straight at Alyosha, and struck him on the shoulder rather painfully. The little fellow across the ditch had a whole pocketful of stones already laid in. You could tell from thirty paces off by the bulging pockets of his little overcoat.

"That was meant for you, for you — he aimed at you on purpose.

You're Karamazov, aren't you, Karamazov?" the boys shouted, laughing. "Come on, all together now, let him have it, fire!"

And six stones flew out of the group at once.

One struck the boy on the head, and he fell, but in a flash he was up again and began furiously firing stones back at the group.

From both sides an unbroken volley began; many in the group too turned out to have stones laid up in their pockets.

"What are you doing! Aren't you ashamed, gentlemen! Six against one — you'll kill him!" cried Alyosha.

He sprang forward and stood facing the flying stones, to shield the boy across the ditch with his own body.

Three or four of them held off for a moment.

"He started it himself!" cried a boy in a red shirt, in an irritated, childish little voice. "He's a scoundrel — he stabbed Krasotkin with a penknife in class just now, drew blood.

Krasotkin just didn't want to tell tales, but this one ought to be thrashed…"

"But why? Surely you're the ones who tease him?"

"There — he's sent another stone into your back. He knows who you are," the children shouted. "It's you he's pelting now, not us. Come on, all of you, at him again, don't miss, Smurov!"

And the volley started up again, this time a very vicious one.

A stone struck the boy across the ditch in the chest; he cried out, burst into tears, and ran off uphill toward Mikhailovskaya Street.

In the group they set up a clamor: "Aha, he's funked it, he's running, you wisp of tow!"

"You don't yet know, Karamazov, what a vile creature he is — killing's too good for him," said the boy in the jacket again, his little eyes blazing, the eldest of them all by the look of it.

"But what is he?" asked Alyosha. "A tattletale, is that it?"

The boys glanced at one another as if with a smirk.

"You're going that way too, toward Mikhailovskaya?" the same boy went on. "Well then, catch up with him… Look there, you can see he's stopped again, he's waiting and watching you."

"He's watching you, he's watching you!" the boys chimed in.

"Then just ask him whether he likes a bathhouse wisp, a frayed one. Do you hear — go on and ask him that."

A general burst of laughter went up.

Alyosha looked at them, and they at him.

"Don't go — he'll hurt you," Smurov called out warningly.

"Gentlemen, I won't ask him about the wisp, because you've surely been teasing him with it somehow, but I will find out from him why you hate him so…"

"Go on, find out, find out," the boys laughed.

Alyosha crossed the little bridge and went up the slope along the fence, straight toward the outcast boy.

"Watch out," they called warningly after him, "he won't be afraid of you, he'll stab you all at once, on the sly… like he did Krasotkin."

The boy waited for him without budging from the spot.

Coming right up to him, Alyosha saw before him a child of no more than nine, one of the frail and undersized sort, with a pale, thin, longish little face and large dark eyes that looked at him with malice.

He was dressed in a rather worn, shabby little overcoat that he had outgrown grotesquely.

His bare arms stuck out of the sleeves.

On the right knee of his trousers was a big patch, and on the right boot, at the toe, over the big toe, was a big hole, plainly daubed over thickly with ink.

Both bulging little pockets of his overcoat were stuffed with stones.

Alyosha stopped two paces in front of him, looking at him questioningly.

The boy, guessing at once from Alyosha's eyes that he did not mean to beat him, lost some of his bravado and even spoke first himself.

"I'm one and there are six of them… I'll thrash the lot of them single-handed," he said suddenly, his eyes flashing.

"One of those stones must have hit you very painfully," remarked Alyosha.

"But I got Smurov on the head!" the boy cried out.

"They told me back there that you know me and threw a stone at me for some reason — is that so?" Alyosha asked.

The boy looked at him gloomily.

"I don't know you. Do you really know me?" Alyosha pressed.

"Leave me alone!" the boy suddenly cried out in irritation, yet without moving from the spot, as though all the while waiting for something, his little eyes flashing with malice again.

"Very well, I'll go," said Alyosha, "only I don't know you and I'm not teasing you. They told me what they call you to tease you, but I have no wish to tease you — goodbye!"

"Monk in silk trousers!" the boy shouted, following Alyosha with the same malicious, defiant glare, and squaring up into a stance besides, reckoning that Alyosha would surely fling himself at him now; but Alyosha turned, looked at him, and walked away.

But he had not taken three steps before the biggest cobblestone the boy had in his pocket struck him painfully in the back.