The Brothers Karamazov

“And you know, you know,” she went on prattling, “you must come back and tell me what you see and learn ... and what they find out ... and what they will decide about him, and where they will condemn him to. Tell me, we don’t have capital punishment, do we? But you must come, even if it’s three o’clock in the morning, even if it’s four, even half past four ... Tell them to wake me up, to shake me if I don’t get up ... Oh, God, but I’ll never be able to fall asleep. You know, why don’t I go with you myself?”

“N-no, madame, but if you would now write three lines with your own hand, just in case, saying that you did not give Dmitri Fyodorovich any money, it might not be amiss ... just in case...”

“Certainly!” the delighted Madame Khokhlakov leaped to her bureau. “And you know, you amaze me, you simply astound me with your resourcefulness and your skill in these matters ... Are you in service here? I’m so pleased to know you’re in service here...”

And while she spoke, she quickly inscribed the following three lines in a large hand on a half sheet of writing paper:

Never in my life did I lend the unfortunate Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov (for he is unfortunate now, in any case) the sum of three thousand roubles today, or any other money, never, never! I swear to it by all that is holy in our world.

Khokhlakov

“Here is the note!” she turned quickly to Pyotr Ilyich. “Go now and save. It is a great deed on your part.”

And she crossed him three times. She even ran out to see him to the front hall.

“How grateful I am to you! You wouldn’t believe how grateful I am to you now, for having come to me first. How is it we’ve never met? I shall be flattered to receive you in my house in the future. And how pleased I am to know that you’re in service here ... and with your precision, your resourcefulness ... They must appreciate you, they must finally understand you, and whatever I can do for you, believe me ... Oh, I love young people so! I am in love with young people. Young people—they are the foundation for all of today’s suffering Russia, her only hope ... Oh, go, go...!”

But Pyotr Ilyich had already run out, otherwise she would not have let him go so soon. All the same, Madame Khokhlakov made quite a pleasant impression on him, which even somewhat softened his alarm at getting involved in such a bad affair. Tastes are extremely divergent, that is a known fact. “She’s not as old as all that,” he thought with pleasure. “On the contrary, I might have taken her for her own daughter.”

As for Madame Khokhlakov, she was simply enchanted with the young man. “Such skill, such exactitude, and in so young a man, in our time, and all that with such manners and appearance! And yet they say our modern young men cannot do anything, but here’s an example for you,” and so on and so forth. So that she simply forgot all about the “terrible incident,” and only on the point of going to bed did she suddenly recall again “how close she had been to death.” “Ah,” she said, “it’s terrible, terrible!” and at once fell into a sound and sweet sleep. By the way, I would not go into such petty and incidental details if the eccentric encounter I have just described, between a young official and a widow not all that old, had not afterwards served as the foundation for the whole life’s career of that precise and accurate young man, which is still recalled with astonishment in our town, and of which we, too, shall perhaps have a special word to say, once we have concluded our long story of the Karamazov brothers.

Chapter 2: The Alarm