The Brothers Karamazov

lans For Mitya’s Escape

Very early, at nine o’clock in the morning, five days after the trial,
Alyosha went to Katerina Ivanovna’s to talk over a matter of great
importance to both of them, and to give her a message. She sat and
talked to him in the very room in which she had once received
Grushenka. In the next room Ivan Fyodorovitch lay unconscious in a high
fever. Katerina Ivanovna had immediately after the scene at the trial
ordered the sick and unconscious man to be carried to her house,
disregarding the inevitable gossip and general disapproval of the
public. One of the two relations who lived with her had departed to
Moscow immediately after the scene in court, the other remained. But if
both had gone away, Katerina Ivanovna would have adhered to her
resolution, and would have gone on nursing the sick man and sitting by
him day and night. Varvinsky and Herzenstube were attending him. The
famous doctor had gone back to Moscow, refusing to give an opinion as
to the probable end of the illness. Though the doctors encouraged
Katerina Ivanovna and Alyosha, it was evident that they could not yet
give them positive hopes of recovery.

Alyosha came to see his sick brother twice a day. But this time he had
specially urgent business, and he foresaw how difficult it would be to
approach the subject, yet he was in great haste. He had another
engagement that could not be put off for that same morning, and there
was need of haste.

They had been talking for a quarter of an hour. Katerina Ivanovna was
pale and terribly fatigued, yet at the same time in a state of
hysterical excitement. She had a presentiment of the reason why Alyosha
had come to her.

“Don’t worry about his decision,” she said, with confident emphasis to
Alyosha. “One way or another he is bound to come to it. He must escape.
That unhappy man, that hero of honor and principle—not he, not Dmitri
Fyodorovitch, but the man lying the other side of that door, who has
sacrificed himself for his brother,” Katya added, with flashing
eyes—“told me the whole plan of escape long ago. You know he has
already entered into negotiations.... I’ve told you something
already.... You see, it will probably come off at the third étape
from here, when the party of prisoners is being taken to Siberia. Oh,
it’s a long way off yet. Ivan Fyodorovitch has already visited the
superintendent of the third étape. But we don’t know yet who will be
in charge of the party, and it’s impossible to find that out so long
beforehand. To‐morrow perhaps I will show you in detail the whole plan
which Ivan Fyodorovitch left me on the eve of the trial in case of
need.... That was when—do you remember?—you found us quarreling. He had
just gone down‐stairs, but seeing you I made him come back; do you
remember? Do you know what we were quarreling about then?”

“No, I don’t,” said Alyosha.

“Of course he did not tell you. It was about that plan of escape. He
had told me the main idea three days before, and we began quarreling
about it at once and quarreled for three days. We quarreled because,
when he told me that if Dmitri Fyodorovitch were convicted he would
escape abroad with that creature, I felt furious at once—I can’t tell
you why, I don’t know myself why.... Oh, of course, I was furious then
about that creature, and that she, too, should go abroad with Dmitri!”
Katerina Ivanovna exclaimed suddenly, her lips quivering with anger.
“As soon as Ivan Fyodorovitch saw that I was furious about that woman,
he instantly imagined I was jealous of Dmitri and that I still loved
Dmitri. That is how our first quarrel began. I would not give an
explanation, I could not ask forgiveness. I could not bear to think
that such a man could suspect me of still loving that ... and when I
myself had told him long before that I did not love Dmitri, that I
loved no one but him! It was only resentment against that creature that
made me angry with him. Three days later, on the evening you came, he
brought me a sealed envelope, which I was to open at once, if anything
happened to him. Oh, he foresaw his illness! He told me that the
envelope contained the details of the escape, and that if he died or
was taken dangerously ill, I was to save Mitya alone. Then he left me
money, nearly ten thousand—those notes to which the prosecutor referred
in his speech, having learnt from some one that he had sent them to be
changed. I was tremendously impressed to find that Ivan Fyodorovitch
had not given up his idea of saving his brother, and was confiding this
plan of escape to me, though he was still jealous of me and still
convinced that I loved Mitya. Oh, that was a sacrifice! No, you cannot
understand the greatness of such self‐sacrifice, Alexey Fyodorovitch. I
wanted to fall at his feet in reverence, but I thought at once that he
would take it only for my joy at the thought of Mitya’s being saved
(and he certainly would have imagined that!), and I was so exasperated
at the mere possibility of such an unjust thought on his part that I
lost my temper again, and instead of kissing his feet, flew into a fury
again! Oh, I am unhappy! It’s my character, my awful, unhappy
character! Oh, you will see, I shall end by driving him, too, to
abandon me for another with whom he can get on better, like Dmitri. But
... no, I could not bear it, I should kill myself. And when you came in
then, and when I called to you and told him to come back, I was so
enraged by the look of contempt and hatred he turned on me that—do you
remember?—I cried out to you that it was he, he alone who had persuaded
me that his brother Dmitri was a murderer! I said that malicious thing
on purpose to wound him again. He had never, never persuaded me that
his brother was a murderer. On the contrary, it was I who persuaded
him! Oh, my vile temper was the cause of everything! I paved the way to
that hideous scene at the trial. He wanted to show me that he was an
honorable man, and that, even if I loved his brother, he would not ruin
him for revenge or jealousy. So he came to the court ... I am the cause
of it all, I alone am to blame!”

Katya never had made such confessions to Alyosha before, and he felt
that she was now at that stage of unbearable suffering when even the
proudest heart painfully crushes its pride and falls vanquished by
grief. Oh, Alyosha knew another terrible reason of her present misery,
though she had carefully concealed it from him during those days since
the trial; but it would have been for some reason too painful to him if
she had been brought so low as to speak to him now about that. She was
suffering for her “treachery” at the trial, and Alyosha felt that her
conscience was impelling her to confess it to him, to him, Alyosha,
with tears and cries and hysterical writhings on the floor. But he
dreaded that moment and longed to spare her. It made the commission on
which he had come even more difficult. He spoke of Mitya again.

“It’s all right, it’s all right, don’t be anxious about him!” she began
again, sharply and stubbornly. “All that is only momentary, I know him,
I know his heart only too well. You may be sure he will consent to
escape. It’s not as though it would be immediately; he will have time
to make up his mind to it. Ivan Fyodorovitch will be well by that time
and will manage it all himself, so that I shall have nothing to do with
it. Don’t be anxious; he will consent to run away. He has agreed
already: do you suppose he would give up that creature? And they won’t
let her go to him, so he is bound to escape. It’s you he’s most afraid
of, he is afraid you won’t approve of his escape on moral grounds. But
you must generously allow it, if your sanction is so necessary,”
Katya added viciously. She paused and smiled.

“He talks about some hymn,” she went on again, “some cross he has to
bear, some duty; I remember Ivan Fyodorovitch told me a great deal
about it, and if you knew how he talked!” Katya cried suddenly, with
feeling she could not repress, “if you knew how he loved that wretched
man at the moment he told me, and how he hated him, perhaps, at the
same moment. And I heard his story and his tears with sneering disdain.
Brute! Yes, I am a brute. I am responsible for his fever. But that man
in prison is incapable of suffering,” Katya concluded irritably. “Can
such a man suffer? Men like him never suffer!”

There was a note of hatred and contemptuous repulsion in her words. And
yet it was she who had betrayed him. “Perhaps because she feels how
she’s wronged him she hates him at moments,” Alyosha thought to
himself. He hoped that it was only “at moments.” In Katya’s last words
he detected a challenging note, but he did not take it up.

“I sent for you this morning to make you promise to persuade him
yourself. Or do you, too, consider that to escape would be
dishonorable, cowardly, or something ... unchristian, perhaps?” Katya
added, even more defiantly.

“Oh, no. I’ll tell him everything,” muttered Alyosha. “He asks you to
come and see him to‐day,” he blurted out suddenly, looking her steadily
in the face. She started, and drew back a little from him on the sofa.

“Me? Can that be?” she faltered, turning pale.

“It can and ought to be!” Alyosha began emphatically, growing more
animated. “He needs you particularly just now. I would not have opened
the subject and worried you, if it were not necessary. He is ill, he is
beside himself, he keeps asking for you. It is not to be reconciled
with you that he wants you, but only that you would go and show
yourself at his door. So much has happened to him since that day. He
realizes that he has injured you beyond all reckoning. He does not ask
your forgiveness—‘It’s impossible to forgive me,’ he says himself—but
only that you would show yourself in his doorway.”

“It’s so sudden....” faltered Katya. “I’ve had a presentiment all these
days that you would come with that message. I knew he would ask me to
come. It’s impossible!”

“Let it be impossible, but do it. Only think, he realizes for the first
time how he has wounded you, the first time in his life; he had never
grasped it before so fully. He said, ‘If she refuses to come I shall be
unhappy all my life.’ Do you hear? though he is condemned to penal
servitude for twenty years, he is still planning to be happy—is not
that piteous? Think—you must visit him; though he is ruined, he is
innocent,” broke like a challenge from Alyosha. “His hands are clean,
there is no blood on them! For the sake of his infinite sufferings in
the future visit him now. Go, greet him on his way into the
darkness—stand at his door, that is all.... You ought to do it, you
ought to!” Alyosha concluded, laying immense stress on the word
“ought.”

“I ought to ... but I cannot....” Katya moaned. “He will look at me....
I can’t.”

“Your eyes ought to meet. How will you live all your life, if you don’t
make up your mind to do it now?”

“Better suffer all my life.”

“You ought to go, you ought to go,” Alyosha repeated with merciless
emphasis.

“But why to‐day, why at once?... I can’t leave our patient—”

“You can for a moment. It will only be a moment. If you don’t come, he
will be in delirium by to‐night. I would not tell you a lie; have pity
on him!”

“Have pity on me!” Katya said, with bitter reproach, and she burst
into tears.

“Then you will come,” said Alyosha firmly, seeing her tears. “I’ll go
and tell him you will come directly.”

“No, don’t tell him so on any account,” cried Katya in alarm. “I will
come, but don’t tell him beforehand, for perhaps I may go, but not go
in.... I don’t know yet—”

Her voice failed her. She gasped for breath. Alyosha got up to go.

“And what if I meet any one?” she said suddenly, in a low voice,
turning white again.

“That’s just why you must go now, to avoid meeting any one. There will
be no one there, I can tell you that for certain. We will expect you,”
he concluded emphatically, and went out of the room.