IV. В темноте

It was obvious: "And where could she be, if not at Fyodor Pavlovitch's?

Straight from Samsonov's she had run to him—that much was clear now.

The whole intrigue, the whole deception, was now plain to see…"

All of this went whirling through his head like a gust of wind.

Into Marya Kondratyevna's yard he did not run: "Not there, on no account there… not the slightest alarm must be raised… they would report me at once and betray me… Marya Kondratyevna is plainly in on the plot, and Smerdyakov too, yes, him too—they have all been bought!"

He had formed another plan: he ran a wide loop, by way of a side lane, around Fyodor Pavlovitch's house, ran the length of Dmitrovsky Street, crossed the little footbridge after that, and came out straight onto a secluded alley behind the houses—empty and uninhabited, fenced on one side by the wattle hedge of a neighbour's kitchen garden, and on the other by the stout, high fence that ran all the way around Fyodor Pavlovitch's garden.

Here he chose a spot—the very one, it seemed, where, by a tale he knew, Stinking Lizaveta had once climbed over the fence.

"If she could get over it—" the thought flashed through his head, God knows why, "—then how should I fail to climb it?"

And in fact he sprang up and in an instant managed to grip the top of the fence with his hand, then with a vigorous heave pulled himself up, swung over all at once, and sat astride the fence.

Close by in the garden stood the little bathhouse, but from the fence the lit windows of the house were visible as well.

"So it is—there's a light in the old man's bedroom, she's in there!"—and he dropped down off the fence into the garden.

Though he knew that Grigory was ill, and that Smerdyakov too might really be ill, and that there was no one to hear him, all the same he instinctively held still, froze where he stood, and began to listen.

But everywhere there was a deathly silence and, as if on purpose, a perfect stillness, not the faintest breath of wind.

"„And only the stillness whispers,“—that scrap of verse flashed through his head for some reason—"if only no one heard me clamber over; it seems not."

Having stood a minute, he went softly across the garden, over the grass; skirting the trees and bushes, he walked a long while, stealing each step, listening himself to every step he took.

It took him some five minutes to reach the lit window.

He remembered that right there, under the windows themselves, stood several large, tall, dense bushes of elder and guelder-rose.

The door leading from the house into the garden, on the left side of the façade, was locked, and he had checked this deliberately and carefully as he passed.

At last he reached the bushes and hid himself behind them.

He did not breathe.

"I must wait it out now," he thought, "so that, if they heard my steps and are listening now, they'll be reassured… if only I don't cough, don't sneeze…"

He waited some two minutes, but his heart was pounding terribly, and at moments he was almost gasping for breath.

"No, this pounding of the heart won't pass," he thought, "I can't wait any longer."

He stood behind the bush in shadow; the near half of the bush was lit from the window.

"The guelder-rose, the berries, how red they are!"—he whispered, not knowing why.

Quietly, with measured, noiseless steps, he came up to the window and rose onto the tips of his toes.

The whole of Fyodor Pavlovitch's little bedroom stood before him as if on the palm of his hand.

It was a small room, divided crosswise by red folding screens, "Chinese," as Fyodor Pavlovitch called them.

"Chinese," it shot through Mitya's mind, "and behind the screens is Grushenka."

He began to study Fyodor Pavlovitch.

The old man was wearing his new striped silk dressing gown, one Mitya had never yet seen on him, belted with a silken cord that ended in tassels.

From under the collar of the gown peeped clean, dandyish linen, a fine Holland shirt with gold studs.

On Fyodor Pavlovitch's head was that same red bandage Alyosha had seen on him.

"All dressed up," thought Mitya.

Fyodor Pavlovitch was standing near the window, apparently lost in thought; suddenly he jerked up his head, listened a moment, and, hearing nothing, went to the table, poured half a small glass of brandy from the decanter, and drank it.

Then he heaved a sigh with his whole chest, stood awhile again, walked absently to the mirror in the pier between the windows, lifted the red bandage a little off his forehead with his right hand, and began examining his bruises and sores, which had not yet healed.

"He's alone," thought Mitya, "by all appearances, alone."

Fyodor Pavlovitch stepped back from the mirror, suddenly turned to the window, and looked out of it.

In an instant Mitya darted back into the shadow.

"She may be with him behind the screens, may already be asleep,"—it stung him to the heart.

Fyodor Pavlovitch stepped away from the window.

"He was watching for her at the window, which means she's not here: why else would he stare into the dark?.. so impatience is eating at him…"

Mitya at once sprang up and again began to peer into the window.

The old man was already sitting before the little table, evidently in low spirits.

At last he leaned on his elbow and pressed his right palm to his cheek.

Mitya gazed greedily.

"Alone, alone!" he kept repeating. "If she were here, his face would be different."

A strange thing: there suddenly boiled up in his heart some senseless and peculiar vexation that she was not there.

"Not that she isn't here," Mitya reasoned, and answered himself at once, "but that there's simply no way I can know for certain whether she's in there or not."

Mitya recalled afterwards himself that his mind was at that moment extraordinarily clear and took in everything down to the last detail, seizing on every smallest trait.

But the toska—the toska of not knowing and not deciding—was mounting in his heart with an immeasurable swiftness.

"Is she here, in the end, or not?"—it boiled up spitefully in his heart.

And he suddenly made up his mind, stretched out his hand, and softly tapped on the window frame.

He tapped out the old man's signal agreed upon with Smerdyakov: the first two times more softly, and then three times more quickly—tap-tap-tap—the signal that meant "Grushenka has come."

The old man started, jerked up his head, leaped up quickly, and rushed to the window.

Mitya darted back into the shadow.

Fyodor Pavlovitch unlatched the window and thrust out his whole head.

"Grushenka, is that you? Is it you?" he said in a kind of trembling half-whisper. "Where are you, little mother, little angel, where are you?" He was in dreadful agitation, gasping for breath.

"Alone!" Mitya decided.

"Well, where are you?" the old man cried again, thrusting his head out farther still, thrusting it out shoulders and all, looking about on every side, to the right and to the left. "Come here; I've got a little present ready for you, come, I'll show you!.."

"He means the packet with the three thousand," flashed through Mitya's mind.

"But where are you?.. At the door, perhaps? I'll open it at once…"

And the old man all but climbed out of the window, peering to the right, toward where the door into the garden was, straining to make something out in the dark.

In another second he would certainly have run to unlock the door, without waiting for Grushenka's answer.

Mitya watched from the side and did not stir.

The old man's profile, so loathsome to him, his whole sagging Adam's apple, his hooked nose, smiling in sweet anticipation, his very lips—all of it was brightly lit by the lamp's slanting light from the room on the left.

A dreadful, frenzied hatred suddenly boiled up in Mitya's heart: "There he is, his rival, his tormentor, the tormentor of his life!"

It was a surge of that very sudden, vengeful, frenzied hatred which, as though he had foreseen it, he had foretold to Alyosha in their talk in the arbour four days before, when he answered Alyosha's question: "How can you say you'll kill your father?"

"I don't know, I don't know," he had said then, "maybe I won't kill him, and maybe I will.

I'm afraid he'll suddenly become hateful to me ''by his very face, at that very moment.''

I hate that Adam's apple of his, his nose, his eyes, his shameless sneer.

I feel a personal disgust.

That is what I'm afraid of—that I won't be able to hold myself back…"

The personal disgust was growing unbearable.

Mitya was no longer himself, and suddenly he snatched the brass pestle out of his pocket…

"God," as Mitya himself put it afterwards, "was watching over me then": at that very moment Grigory Vasilyevitch, who lay ill on his bed, woke up.

Toward evening of that same day he had carried out on himself the well-known treatment Smerdyakov had described to Ivan Fyodorovitch—that is, with his wife's help he had rubbed his whole body with vodka steeped in some secret, exceedingly strong infusion, drunk what was left with "a certain prayer" that his wife whispered over him, and lain down to sleep.

Marfa Ignatyevna had partaken too, and, being a non-drinker, had fallen asleep beside her husband in a dead sleep.

But then, quite unexpectedly, Grigory suddenly woke in the night, considered for a moment, and, though he at once felt again the burning pain in the small of his back, raised himself on the bed.

Then he turned something over in his mind again, got up, and dressed in haste.

Perhaps a pang of conscience stung him for sleeping while the house was without a watchman "at such a dangerous time."