The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (best e book reader for android txt) 📖
- Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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oh, there’s still time to make some plan of defence, and now, now-she
is so fascinating!’
“His soul was full of confusion and dread, but he managed,
however, to put aside half his money and hide it somewhere-I cannot
otherwise explain the disappearance of quite half of the three
thousand he had just taken from his father’s pillow. He had been in
Mokroe more than once before, he had caroused there for two days
together already, he knew the old big house with all its passages
and outbuildings. I imagine that part of the money was hidden in
that house, not long before the arrest, in some crevice, under some
floor, in some corner, under the roof. With what object? I shall be
asked. Why, the catastrophe may take place at once, of course; he
hadn’t yet considered how to meet it, he hadn’t the time, his head was
throbbing and his heart was with her, but money-money was
indispensable in any case! With money a man is always a man. Perhaps
such foresight at such a moment may strike you as unnatural? But he
assures us himself that a month before, at a critical and exciting
moment, he had halved his money and sewn it up in a little bag. And
though that was not true, as we shall prove directly, it shows the
idea was a familiar one to Karamazov, he had contemplated it. What’s
more, when he declared at the inquiry that he had put fifteen
hundred roubles in a bag (which never existed) he may have invented
that little bag on the inspiration of the moment, because he had two
hours before divided his money and hidden half of it at Mokroe till
morning, in case of emergency, simply not to have it on himself. Two
extremes, gentlemen of the jury, remember that Karamazov can
contemplate two extremes and both at once.
“We have looked in the house, but we haven’t found the money. It
may still be there or it may have disappeared next day and be in the
prisoner’s hands now. In any case he was at her side, on his knees
before her, she was lying on the bed, he had his hands stretched out
to her and he had so entirely forgotten everything that he did not
even hear the men coming to arrest him. He hadn’t time to prepare
any line of defence in his mind. He was caught unawares and confronted
with his judges, the arbiters of his destiny.
“Gentlemen of the jury, there are moments in the execution of
our duties when it is terrible for us to face a man, terrible on his
account, too! The moments of contemplating that animal fear, when
the criminal sees that all is lost, but still struggles, still means
to struggle, the moments when every instinct of self-preservation
rises up in him at once and he looks at you with questioning and
suffering eyes, studies you, your face, your thoughts, uncertain on
which side you will strike, and his distracted mind frames thousands
of plans in an instant, but he is still afraid to speak, afraid of
giving himself away! This purgatory of the spirit, this animal
thirst for self-preservation, these humiliating moments of the human
soul, are awful, and sometimes arouse horror and compassion for the
criminal even in the lawyer. And this was what we all witnessed then.
“At first he was thunderstruck and in his terror dropped some very
compromising phrases. ‘Blood! I’ve deserved it!’ But he quickly
restrained himself. He had not prepared what he was to say, what
answer he was to make, he had nothing but a bare denial ready. ‘I am
not guilty of my father’s death.’ That was his fence for the moment
and behind it he hoped to throw up a barricade of some sort. His first
compromising exclamations he hastened to explain by declaring that
he was responsible for the death of the servant Grigory only. ‘Of that
bloodshed I am guilty, but who has killed my father, gentlemen, who
has killed him? Who can have killed him, if not I?’ Do you hear, he
asked us that, us, who had come to ask him that question! Do you
hear that uttered with such premature haste- ‘if not I’- the animal
cunning, the naivete the Karamazov impatience of it? ‘I didn’t kill
him and you mustn’t think I did! I wanted to kill him, gentlemen, I
wanted to kill him,’ he hastens to admit (he was in a hurry, in a
terrible hurry), ‘but still I am not guilty, it is not I murdered
him.’ He concedes to us that he wanted to murder him, as though to
say, you can see for yourselves how truthful I am, so you’ll believe
all the sooner that I didn’t murder him. Oh, in such cases the
criminal is often amazingly shallow and credulous.
“At that point one of the lawyers asked him, as it were
incidentally, the most simple question, ‘Wasn’t it Smerdyakov killed
him?’ Then, as we expected, he was horribly angry at our having
anticipated him and caught him unawares, before he had time to pave
the way to choose and snatch the moment when it would be most
natural to bring in Smerdyakov’s name. He rushed at once to the
other extreme, as he always does, and began to assure us that
Smerdyakov could not have killed him, was not capable of it. But don’t
believe him, that was only his cunning; he didn’t really give up the
idea of Smerdyakov; on the contrary, he meant to bring him forward
again; for, indeed, he had no one else to bring forward, but he
would do that later, because for the moment that line was spoiled
for him. He would bring him forward perhaps next day, or even a few
days later, choosing an opportunity to cry out to us, ‘You know I
was more sceptical about Smerdyakov than you, you remember that
yourselves, but now I am convinced. He killed him, he must have done!’
And for the present he falls back upon a gloomy and irritable
denial. Impatience and anger prompted him, however, to the most
inept and incredible explanation of how he looked into his father’s
window and how he respectfully withdrew. The worst of it was that he
was unaware of the position of affairs, of the evidence given by
Grigory.
“We proceeded to search him. The search angered, but encouraged
him, the whole three thousand had not been found on him, only half
of it. And no doubt only at that moment of angry silence, the
fiction of the little bag first occurred to him. No doubt he was
conscious himself of the improbability of the story and strove
painfully to make it sound more likely, to weave it into a romance
that would sound plausible. In such cases the first duty, the chief
task of the investigating lawyers, is to prevent the criminal being
prepared, to pounce upon him unexpectedly so that he may blurt out his
cherished ideas in all their simplicity, improbability and
inconsistency. The criminal can only be made to speak by the sudden
and apparently incidental communication of some new fact, of some
circumstance of great importance in the case, of which he had no
previous idea and could not have foreseen. We had such a fact in
readiness-that was Grigory’s evidence about the open door through
which the prisoner had run out. He had completely forgotten about that
door and had not even suspected that Grigory could have seen it.
“The effect of it was amazing. He leapt up and shouted to us,
‘Then Smerdyakov murdered him, it was Smerdyakov!’ and so betrayed the
basis of the defence he was keeping back, and betrayed it in its
most improbable shape, for Smerdyakov could only have committed the
murder after he had knocked Grigory down and run away. When we told
him that Grigory saw the door was open before he fell down, and had
heard Smerdyakov behind the screen as he came out of his bedroom-Karamazov was positively crushed. My esteemed and witty colleague,
Nikolay Parfenovitch, told me afterwards that he was almost moved to
tears at the sight of him. And to improve matters, the prisoner
hastened to tell us about the much-talked-of little bag-so be it, you
shall hear this romance!
“Gentlemen of the jury, I have told you already why I consider
this romance not only an absurdity, but the most improbable
invention that could have been brought forward in the circumstances.
If one tried for a bet to invent the most unlikely story, one could
hardly find anything more incredible. The worst of such stories is
that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and
crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which
these unhappy and involuntary storytellers neglect as insignificant
trifles. Oh, they have no thought to spare for such details, their
minds are concentrated on their grand invention as a whole, and
fancy anyone daring to pull them up for a trifle! But that’s how
they are caught. The prisoner was asked the question, ‘Where did you
get the stuff for your little bag and who made it for you?’ ‘I made it
myself.’ ‘And where did you get the linen?’ The prisoner was
positively offended, he thought it almost insulting to ask him such
a trivial question, and would you believe it, his resentment was
genuine! But they are all like that. ‘I tore it off my shirt. “Then we
shall find that shirt among your linen to-morrow, with a piece torn
off.’ And only fancy, gentlemen of the jury, if we really had found
that torn shirt (and how could we have failed to find it in his
chest of drawers or trunk?) that would have been a fact, a material
fact in support of his statement! But he was incapable of that
reflection. ‘I don’t remember, it may not have been off my shirt, I
sewed it up in one of my landlady’s caps.’ ‘What sort of a cap?’ ‘It
was an old cotton rag of hers lying about.’ ‘And do you remember
that clearly?’ ‘No, I don’t.’ And he was angry, very angry, and yet
imagine not remembering it! At the most terrible moments of man’s
life, for instance when he is being led to execution, he remembers
just such trifles. He will forget anything but some green roof that
has flashed past him on the road, or a jackdaw on a cross-that he
will remember. He concealed the making of that little bag from his
household, he must have remembered his humiliating fear that someone
might come in and find him needle in hand, how at the slightest
sound he slipped behind the screen (there is a screen in his
lodgings).
“But, gentlemen of the jury, why do I tell you all this, all these
details, trifles?” cried Ippolit Kirillovitch suddenly. “Just
because the prisoner still persists in these absurdities to this
moment. He has not explained anything since that fatal night two
months ago, he has not added one actual illuminating fact to his
former fantastic statements; all those are trivialities. ‘You must
believe it on my honour.’ Oh, we are glad to believe it, we are
eager to believe it, even if only on his word of honour! Are we
jackals thirsting for human blood? Show us a single fact in the
prisoner’s favour and we shall rejoice; but let it be a substantial,
real fact, and not a conclusion drawn from the prisoner’s expression
by his own brother, or that when he beat himself on the breast he must
have meant to point to the little bag, in the darkness, too. We
shall rejoice at the new fact, we shall be the first to
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