I. Начало карьеры чиновника Перхотина

Hearing such a frantic banging at the gate, Fenya — already so frightened a couple of hours before, and still too agitated and lost in her "brooding" to bring herself to go to bed — was now thrown into something close to hysterics: it came into her head that it was Dmitry Fyodorovich knocking again (despite the fact that she herself had seen him drive off), because no one but he could possibly knock so "insolently."

She rushed to the watchman, who had woken and was already going toward the gate at the sound, and began begging him not to let anyone in.

But the watchman questioned the man who was knocking and, on learning who he was and that he wished to see Fedosya Markovna on a most important matter, made up his mind at last to open to him.

Coming in to Fedosya Markovna in that same kitchen — where, "for safety's sake," she had begged Pyotr Ilyich to let the watchman come in too — Pyotr Ilyich began to question her and in an instant hit upon the very thing that mattered: that is, that Dmitry Fyodorovich, running off to look for Grushenka, had snatched up the pestle from the mortar, and had come back without the pestle but with his hands all bloody: "And the blood was still dripping, dripping right off them, dripping and dripping!" cried Fenya, who had plainly conjured up this dreadful detail herself in her overwrought imagination.

But the bloody hands had been seen by Pyotr Ilyich himself, even though nothing was dripping from them, and he himself had helped to wash them; and besides, the question was not how soon they had dried, but where exactly Dmitry Fyodorovich had run off to with the pestle — that is, whether it really was to Fyodor Pavlovich's, and on what grounds one could conclude so positively that it was.

On this point Pyotr Ilyich pressed her in detail, and although in the end he learned nothing for certain, he nevertheless came away almost convinced that Dmitry Fyodorovich could have run nowhere but to his father's house, and that, therefore, something must beyond all doubt have happened there.

"And when he came back," Fenya added in agitation, "and I had confessed everything to him, I began questioning him: why is it, my dear Dmitry Fyodorovich, that both your hands are covered in blood? — and he supposedly answered me outright that the blood was human blood and that he had only just that minute killed a man — "he confessed it straight out, owned up to it all to me right there, and then suddenly ran out like a madman.

I sat down and began to think: where has he run off to now, like a madman?

He'll drive to Mokroye, I thought, and kill the lady there.

So out I ran after him, to his lodgings, to beg him not to kill the lady, but at Plotnikov's shop I look and I see that he's already driving off and that his hands are no longer bloody" (Fenya had noticed this and remembered it).

The old woman, Fenya's grandmother, confirmed all her granddaughter's testimony as far as she was able.

Having questioned them about a few other things, Pyotr Ilyich left the house in even greater agitation and unease than when he had entered it.

It would seem that the most direct and natural thing for him to do now would be to go straight to Fyodor Pavlovich's house to find out whether anything had happened there, and, if it had, what exactly — and only then, once he had made absolutely sure, to go to the police captain, as Pyotr Ilyich had firmly resolved to do.

But the night was dark, the gate at Fyodor Pavlovich's was solid, he would have to knock all over again, and his acquaintance with Fyodor Pavlovich was a distant one — and there he would knock his way in, the gate would be opened to him, and suddenly it would turn out that nothing had happened at all, and the mocking Fyodor Pavlovich would go about town tomorrow telling everyone the anecdote of how at midnight some stranger of an official, Perhotin, had come battering at his door to find out whether somebody hadn't murdered him.

A scandal!

And of a scandal Pyotr Ilyich was more afraid than of anything else in the world.

Nevertheless the feeling that was carrying him along was so powerful that, after stamping his foot on the ground in fury and cursing himself once more, he set off at once on a new course — no longer toward Fyodor Pavlovich, however, but toward Madame Hohlakov's.

If she, he reasoned, would answer the question whether it was she who had given Dmitry Fyodorovich the three thousand a short while ago, at such-and-such an hour, then, in the event of a negative answer, he would go straight to the police captain without calling on Fyodor Pavlovich; but in the contrary case he would put everything off until tomorrow and go back home.

Here, of course, it is at once plain that in the young man's decision to go, by night, at nearly eleven o'clock, to the house of a fashionable lady wholly unknown to him, to rouse her perhaps from her bed, in order to put to her a question astonishing in its very circumstances — in this there lay, perhaps, even far more chance of producing a scandal than in going to Fyodor Pavlovich's.

But that is sometimes how it goes, especially in cases like the present one, even with the decisions of the most exact and phlegmatic of men.

And Pyotr Ilyich, at that moment, was no longer in the least phlegmatic!

All his life afterward he would recall how an irresistible disquiet, taking hold of him by degrees, had at last risen in him to the pitch of torment and was carrying him on even against his will.

Naturally, he scolded himself the whole way for going to call on this lady, but "I'll see it through, I'll see it through to the end!" he kept repeating for the tenth time, grinding his teeth, and he carried out his intention — he saw it through.

It was exactly eleven o'clock when he entered Madame Hohlakov's house.

He was let into the courtyard fairly quickly, but to the question of whether the lady had already retired or had not yet gone to bed, the watchman could give no exact answer, beyond the fact that at this hour people usually went to bed.

"Go up and have yourself announced; if they want to receive you, they'll receive you, and if they don't want to, they won't."

Pyotr Ilyich went upstairs, but here things grew rather more difficult.

The footman would not announce him, and finally called a maidservant.

Politely but insistently, Pyotr Ilyich asked her to inform the lady that a certain local official, Perhotin, had come on a particular matter, and that had it not been so important a matter he would never have dared to come — "those are the very words, the very words, you're to tell her," he urged the girl.

She went off.

He stayed behind to wait in the entrance hall.

Madame Hohlakov herself, though she had not yet settled down for the night, was already in her bedroom.

She had been upset ever since Mitya's visit earlier that day, and already had a presentiment that during the night she would not escape the migraine that came over her on such occasions.

Having heard the maid's report and being surprised by it, she nonetheless irritably ordered that the man be turned away, even though the unexpected visit at such an hour of a "local official" unknown to her had stirred her ladylike curiosity in the extreme.

But Pyotr Ilyich this time dug in his heels like a mule: hearing the refusal, he asked with extraordinary insistence that she be told once more, and that it be conveyed in "those very words," that he had come "on an extremely important matter, and that she might perhaps be sorry afterward if she would not receive him now."

"It was exactly as if I were tumbling down a mountain just then," he himself related afterward.

The maid, looking him over in astonishment, went to announce him a second time.

Madame Hohlakov was struck, considered, asked further questions about what he looked like, and learned that he was "very respectably dressed, sir, young, and ever so polite."

Let us note in passing, and by way of parenthesis, that Pyotr Ilyich was a rather good-looking young man, and knew it about himself.

Madame Hohlakov made up her mind to come out.

She was already in her house-robe and slippers, but she had thrown a black shawl over her shoulders.

The "official" was asked to come into the drawing room — the very one in which they had received Mitya earlier that day.

The mistress of the house came out to her guest with a sternly questioning air and, without inviting him to sit, began straight off with a question: "What is it you want?"

"I have made bold to trouble you, madam, on the matter of our mutual acquaintance Dmitry Fyodorovich Karamazov," Perhotin began — but no sooner had he uttered the name than the keenest exasperation showed itself in the lady's face.

She very nearly shrieked, and cut him off in a fury.

"How much longer, how much longer are people going to torment me with that dreadful man?" she cried, beside herself.

"How dared you, my dear sir, how could you bring yourself to trouble a lady unknown to you in her own house, and at such an hour... and to come to her to talk about a man who, right here, in this very drawing room, only three hours ago, came to murder me, stamped his feet, and went out as no one ever goes out of a respectable house.

Be advised, my dear sir, that I shall lodge a complaint against you, that I shall not let this pass — be so good as to leave me this very instant... I am a mother, I shall at once... I... I..."

"To murder! So he wanted to murder you as well?"

"Why, has he already murdered someone, then?" Madame Hohlakov asked impetuously.