II. Тревога

He had come to us only three years before, yet had already earned everyone's goodwill, chiefly because he "knew how to bring society together."

Guests never stopped coming to his house, and it seemed that without them he simply could not have lived.

Without fail someone dined with him every single day — two guests, or at least one, but they never sat down to the table without guests.

There were formal dinners as well, on every sort of pretext, sometimes even unexpected ones.

The food, though hardly refined, was abundant; the kulebyakas came out splendid, and the wines, though they did not shine in quality, made up for it in quantity.

In the entrance room stood a billiard table furnished quite respectably — that is, even with framed prints of English racehorses on the walls, which, as everyone knows, are the indispensable adornment of any bachelor's billiard room.

Every evening there was a card game, if only at a single little table.

But very often the whole of our town's best society gathered there as well, mothers and young ladies and all, to dance.

Though Mikhail Makarovich was a widower, he lived a family life, keeping with him his long-since-widowed daughter, who was herself the mother of two girls, Mikhail Makarovich's granddaughters.

The girls were already grown and had finished their schooling; of not unpleasant appearance and cheerful disposition, and though everyone knew there would be no dowry behind them, they nonetheless drew the fashionable young men of our town into their grandfather's house.

In matters of business Mikhail Makarovich was not exactly quick, yet he discharged his office no worse than many another.

To speak plainly, he was a rather uneducated man, and even careless about any clear grasp of the limits of his administrative authority.

Certain reforms of the present reign he could not so much fully comprehend as understand only with certain, sometimes quite glaring, errors — and this not from any special incapacity of his own, but simply from the carelessness of his character, because he never had time to look into anything.

"My soul, gentlemen, is more military than civilian," was how he put it about himself.

Even of the precise foundations of the peasant reform he had still somehow failed to acquire a settled and firm notion, learning of them, so to speak, year by year, building up his knowledge practically and involuntarily — and yet he was himself a landowner.

Pyotr Ilyich knew for certain that this evening he would, without fail, meet some guest or other at Mikhail Makarovich's, only he did not know exactly whom.

And as it happened, at that very moment there sat with him over a game of yeralash the prosecutor and our district doctor Varvinsky, a young man only just arrived among us from Petersburg, one of the brilliant graduates of the Petersburg Medical Academy.

The prosecutor — that is, the deputy prosecutor, though everyone among us called him simply the prosecutor — Ippolit Kirillovich, was a man of a singular sort, not old, only some thirty-five, but strongly inclined to consumption, and married withal to a very stout, childless lady; vain and irritable, yet possessed of a thoroughly solid mind and even a kind heart.

It seems the whole misfortune of his character lay in this: that he thought of himself somewhat more highly than his true merits warranted.

And that is just why he always seemed restless.

He had, besides, certain higher and even artistic pretensions — for instance, to psychological insight, to a special knowledge of the human soul, to a special gift for divining the criminal and his crime.

In that respect he reckoned himself somewhat wronged and passed over in his career, and was forever convinced that up there, in the higher spheres, they had failed to value him, and that he had enemies.

In his blacker moments he would even threaten to go over to the defense bar in criminal cases.

The unexpected Karamazov affair, this parricide, seemed to shake him to the core: "A case of such a kind that all Russia might come to hear of it."

But here I am already getting ahead of myself.

In the next room, with the young ladies, sat our young examining magistrate as well, Nikolai Parfenovich Nelyudov, who had come to us from Petersburg only two months before.

Afterward people among us talked, and even marveled, that all these persons had gathered together, as if on purpose, on the evening of "the crime," in the house of the executive authority.

And yet the thing was far simpler and came about quite naturally: Ippolit Kirillovich's wife had had a toothache for the second day running, and he simply had to flee somewhere from her groans; while the doctor, by his very nature, could be nowhere of an evening but at cards.

As for Nikolai Parfenovich Nelyudov, three whole days before he had been planning to turn up that evening at Mikhail Makarovich's, casually, so to speak, in order to startle, suddenly and slyly, the elder of the girls, Olga Mikhailovna, with the fact that he knew her secret — that he knew today was her birthday, and that she had deliberately tried to hide it from our society so as not to summon the whole town to a dance.

There would be much laughter ahead, and teasing about her years — that she was, as it were, afraid to reveal them; that now, since he held the key to her secret, he would tell everyone tomorrow, and so on, and so on.

The dear young fellow was a great tease in such matters; the ladies among us had nicknamed him "the rascal," and it seems he rather liked it.

He was, for all that, of very good society, of a good family, of a good upbringing and good feelings, and though a pleasure-seeker, a very harmless one and always proper.

In appearance he was small of stature, of a frail and delicate build.

On his thin, pale little fingers there always glittered several extraordinarily large rings.

But when he was carrying out his duties, he would take on an extraordinary air of importance, as though he grasped the meaning of his role and his obligations to the point of holiness.

He had a particular knack for disconcerting murderers and other malefactors of the common people under interrogation, and really did rouse in them, if not respect for himself, then at least a certain wonder.

Pyotr Ilyich, on entering the police captain's, was simply dumbfounded: he saw at once that everyone there already knew.

Indeed, the cards had been thrown down, everyone was standing and debating, and even Nikolai Parfenovich had run in from the young ladies, with the most warlike and impetuous air.

Pyotr Ilyich was met by the staggering news that old Fyodor Pavlovich had really and truly been killed that very evening in his own house — killed and robbed.

It had come to light only just now, in the following way.

Marfa Ignatyevna, the wife of Grigory who lay struck down by the fence, though she was sleeping soundly in her bed and might have gone on sleeping so until morning, suddenly, all the same, woke up.

What brought it about was the terrible epileptic shriek of Smerdyakov, who lay senseless in the little room next door — that shriek with which his fits of the falling sickness always began, and which all her life had always frightened Marfa Ignatyevna dreadfully and worked on her like an illness.

She could never get used to them.

Half-asleep, she sprang up and rushed almost out of her wits into Smerdyakov's little cubbyhole.

But it was dark in there; she could hear only that the sick man had begun to snore and thrash about horribly.

At this Marfa Ignatyevna cried out herself and was about to call her husband, when suddenly it dawned on her that Grigory had not, it seemed, been in the bed when she got up.

She ran to the bed and felt over it again, but the bed was indeed empty.

So he had gone out, but where?

She ran out onto the little porch and timidly called him from the steps.

She got no answer, of course, but instead, amid the silence of the night, she caught from somewhere — as if far off, from the garden — a kind of groaning.

She listened; the groans came again, and it became clear that they were indeed coming from the garden.

"Lord, it's just like the time of Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya!" flashed through her distraught head.

Timidly she came down from the steps and made out that the garden gate stood open.

"He must be there, the poor dear," she thought, and went up to the gate, when suddenly she distinctly heard Grigory calling her, crying out, "Marfa, Marfa!" in a weak, moaning, dreadful voice.

"Lord, keep us from harm," Marfa Ignatyevna whispered, and rushed toward the call — and that was how she came upon Grigory.

But she found him not by the fence, not on the spot where he had been struck down, but already some twenty paces from the fence.

It came out afterward that, on coming to, he had crawled — and probably crawled a long while, losing consciousness several times and sinking again into oblivion.

She noticed at once that he was all covered in blood, and then she screamed at the top of her lungs.