VI. Надрыв в избе

He had blundered in, had "made a fool of himself" — and in what, of all things: in matters of love!

"What do I understand of any of this, what can I make out in such matters? — he repeated to himself for the hundredth time, flushing — oh, the shame would be nothing, shame is only the punishment I deserve — the trouble is that now, beyond doubt, I shall be the cause of fresh misfortunes… And the elder sent me to reconcile and to join them together. Is this how one joins people together?"

Here he suddenly remembered again how he had "joined their hands", and once more a terrible shame came over him.

"Even if I did it all sincerely, I must be wiser from now on" — he concluded abruptly, and did not even smile at his own conclusion.

Katerina Ivanovna's errand was directed to Lake Street, and his brother Dmitri happened to live right along the way, not far from Lake Street, in a side lane.

Alyosha decided to call on him in any case before going to the captain, though he had a feeling he would not find his brother in.

He suspected that the man might somehow be deliberately hiding from him now, but he had to track him down whatever it took.

Time, meanwhile, was slipping away: the thought of the dying elder had not left him for a single minute, not for a single second, from the very hour he had walked out of the monastery.

In Katerina Ivanovna's errand one detail had flashed by that interested him exceedingly as well: when Katerina Ivanovna had mentioned the little boy, a schoolboy, the son of that captain who had run alongside his father weeping aloud, the thought had already darted into Alyosha's mind even then that this boy was, surely, the very schoolboy from earlier who had bitten his finger when he, Alyosha, had been asking how he had wronged him.

By now Alyosha was almost certain of it, without himself yet knowing why.

In this way, caught up in extraneous considerations, he distracted himself and resolved not to "think" about the "harm" he had just done, not to torment himself with remorse, but to get on with the task at hand — and whatever came of it, would come.

On this thought he was finally heartened.

By the way, having turned into the lane toward his brother Dmitri and feeling hungry, he drew from his pocket the roll he had taken at his father's and ate it on the way.

It restored his strength.

Dmitri turned out not to be at home.

The owners of the little house — an old carpenter, his son, and his old wife — even eyed Alyosha with suspicion.

"It's the third day now he hasn't slept here; maybe he's gone off somewhere" — the old man answered Alyosha's insistent questions.

Alyosha understood that the man was answering according to instructions he had been given.

At his question — "Isn't he at Grushenka's, isn't he hiding again at Foma's?" (Alyosha deliberately threw out these confidences) — all the owners even looked at him with alarm.

"They love him, then, they stand by him — thought Alyosha — that's good."

At last, on Lake Street, he found the house of the townswoman Kalmykova, a decrepit little house, lopsided, with only three windows giving onto the street, and a dirty yard in the middle of which a cow stood all alone.

The entrance was from the yard into a passageway; to the left off the passage lived the old landlady with her aged daughter, and both, it seemed, were deaf.

To his question about the captain, repeated several times, one of them, grasping at last that he was asking after the lodgers, poked her finger across the passage, pointing to a door into the clean part of the cottage.

The captain's lodgings did indeed prove to be nothing but a plain peasant room.

Alyosha had just laid his hand on the iron latch to open the door when suddenly an extraordinary stillness behind it struck him.

He knew, however, from Katerina Ivanovna's account, that the retired captain was a family man: "Either they are all asleep, or perhaps they have heard me come and are waiting for me to open; better that I knock again" — and he knocked.

An answer came, but not at once — perhaps even some ten seconds later.

— Who's there? — someone shouted in a loud and forcedly angry voice.

Alyosha then opened the door and stepped over the threshold.

He found himself in a cottage room which, though fairly spacious, was extraordinarily cluttered, both with people and with every kind of household belonging.

On the left stood a big Russian stove.

From the stove to the left-hand window, across the whole room, a rope had been stretched, on which various rags hung drying.

Against both walls, left and right, stood a bed apiece, covered with knitted blankets.

On one of them, the left, a little tower had been raised of four chintz pillows, each smaller than the last.

On the other bed, to the right, only a single, very small pillow could be seen.

Beyond, in the front corner, there was a small space partitioned off by a curtain or a sheet, likewise thrown over a rope strung across the corner.

Behind this curtain one could also make out, off to the side, a bed laid out on a bench and on a chair drawn up against it.

A plain wooden, four-cornered peasant table had been shoved out of the front corner toward the middle window.

All three windows, each made of four small, green, mildewed panes, were very dim and shut fast, so that the room was rather close and not very light.

On the table stood a frying pan with the remains of a fried egg, a gnawed crust of bread lay beside it, and, on top of that, there was a half-bottle with the meager dregs of earthly goods left only at the very bottom.

Beside the left-hand bed, on a chair, sat a woman who looked like a lady, dressed in a chintz gown.

Her face was very thin, yellow; her exceedingly sunken cheeks bore witness at the first glance to her sickly condition.

But what struck Alyosha most of all was the gaze of the poor lady — a gaze exceedingly questioning and at the same time terribly haughty.

And until the lady herself spoke, and while Alyosha was explaining himself to the master of the house, she kept turning her large brown eyes from one speaker to the other, just as haughtily and questioningly.

Beside this lady, by the left-hand window, stood a young girl with a rather plain face, with thin reddish hair, poorly though very neatly dressed.

She surveyed the newly entered Alyosha with disgust.

To the right, also by the bed, sat yet another female creature.

It was a very pitiful being, also a young girl, about twenty, but hunchbacked and legless, with withered legs, as Alyosha was told afterward.

Her crutches stood nearby, in the corner, between the bed and the wall.

The poor girl's remarkably beautiful and kind eyes looked at Alyosha with a certain quiet gentleness.

At the table, finishing the fried egg, sat a gentleman of about forty-five, short of stature, lean, of feeble build, sandy-haired, with a thin little reddish beard very much like a bedraggled wisp of bast (this comparison, and especially the word "wisp", somehow flashed into Alyosha's mind at the first glance — he recalled it afterward).

Evidently it was this very gentleman who had shouted from behind the door, "Who's there", since there was no other man in the room.

But when Alyosha came in, he seemed to tear himself from the bench on which he had been sitting at the table, and, hastily wiping himself with a tattered napkin, darted up to Alyosha.

— A monk begging for the monastery; he knew whose door to come to! — the girl standing in the left corner said loudly in the meantime.

But the gentleman who had run up to Alyosha spun round on his heels to her at once and answered her in an agitated, breaking sort of voice:

— No, sir, Varvara Nikolavna, that's not it, sir, you've guessed wrong, sir!

Allow me to ask in my turn — he suddenly turned back to Alyosha — what has prompted you, sir, to visit… these depths, sir?

Alyosha looked at him attentively; he was seeing this man for the first time.

There was something angular about him, hurried and irritable.

Though he had evidently just had a drink, he was not drunk.

His face wore a kind of extreme insolence and, at the same time — strange as it was — a visible cowardice.

He looked like a man who had long submitted and endured much, but who might suddenly leap up and want to assert himself.

Or, better still, like a man who would dearly love to strike you, but who is dreadfully afraid that you will strike him.

In his speech and in the intonation of his rather shrill voice there was a kind of crackpot humor, now spiteful, now timid, unable to hold its pitch and breaking off.

He put the question about the "depths" as though trembling all over, his eyes bulging, having sprung up so close, right in Alyosha's face, that the latter mechanically took a step back.

This gentleman was dressed in a dark, very poor sort of nankeen overcoat, darned and stained.

His trousers were of some extraordinarily light color, the kind no one had worn for ages, checked and of some very thin material, crumpled at the bottom and rucked up because of it, as if he, like a little boy, had outgrown them.