The Brothers Karamazov

Marfa Ignatievna—the wife of Grigory, who had been struck down at the fence—though she was fast asleep in her bed and might have gone on sleeping like that until morning, nevertheless suddenly woke up. Conducive to that end was a terrible epileptic scream from Smerdyakov, who lay unconscious in the next room—that scream with which his fits of falling sickness always began, and that always, all her life, frightened Marfa Ignatievna terribly and had a morbid effect on her. She simply never could get used to it. Half awake, she jumped up and, almost beside herself, rushed to Smerdyakov in his little room. It was dark there; she could only hear that the sick man had begun struggling and gasping horribly. Marfa Ignatievna screamed herself and began calling her husband, but suddenly realized that when she had gotten up Grigory seemed not to be in the bed. She ran back and felt in the bed again, but it was indeed empty. So he had gone out, but where? She ran to the porch and timidly called him. She got no answer, of course, but instead she heard, in the night’s silence, some groans, which seemed to be coming from somewhere far away in the garden. She listened; the groans were repeated, and it became clear that they were indeed coming from the garden. “Lord, just like with Stinking Lizaveta!” flashed through her distraught head. She went timidly down the steps and saw that the garden gate was open. “He must be there, the poor dear,” she thought, going up to the gate, and suddenly she clearly heard Grigory calling her, crying out: “Marfa, Marfa!” in a weak, wailing, woeful voice. “Lord, keep us from disaster,” Marfa Ignatievna whispered and rushed towards the voice, and in that way she found Grigory. But she found him not by the fence, not on the spot where he had been struck down, but about twenty paces away. Later it turned out that, having come to his senses, he had begun crawling, and probably crawled for a long while, losing consciousness and passing out several times more. She noticed at once that he was all covered with blood, and at that began screaming to high heaven. Grigory kept muttering softly and incoherently: “He killed ... father ... killed ... stop shouting, fool ... run, tell . . “But Marfa Ignatievna would not quiet down and went on screaming, and suddenly, seeing that the master’s window was open and there was light inside, she ran to it and began calling Fyodor Pavlovich. But, looking through the window, she saw a terrible sight: the master was lying on his back on the floor, not moving. The front of his light-colored dressing gown and his white shirt were soaked with blood. A candle on the table shed a bright light on the blood and on the motionless, dead face of Fyodor Pavlovich. Now horrified to the last degree, Marfa Ignatievna rushed away from the window, ran out of the garden, unlocked the gates, and ran like mad through the back lane to her neighbor, Maria Kondratievna. Both neighbors, mother and daughter, were asleep by then, but at Marfa Ignatievna’s urgent and frenzied shouting and knocking on the shutters, they woke up and jumped to the window. Marfa Ignatievna, shrieking and shouting, conveyed the essentials, however incoherently, and called for help. As it happened, that night the wandering Foma was staying with them. They roused him at once, and all three ran to the scene of the crime. On the way, Maria Kondratievna managed to recall that earlier, before nine o’clock, she had heard a terrible and piercing cry from their garden, which could be heard all over the neighborhood—and this certainly was precisely the cry of Grigory as he caught hold of the leg of Dmitri Fyodorovich, who was already sitting astride the fence, and cried out: “Parricide!” “Some one person shouted and suddenly stopped,” Maria Kondratievna testified as she ran. Having come to the place where Grigory lay, the two women, with the help of Foma, carried him to the cottage. They lighted a candle and saw that Smerdyakov had still not calmed down but was struggling in his little room, his eyes crossed and foam running from his lips. Grigory’s head was washed with water and vinegar; the water brought him back to his full senses, and he asked at once: “Has the master been killed?” The two women and Foma then went to the master’s and this time saw, as they entered the garden, that not only the window but the door to the garden was wide open, whereas for the whole past week the master had been locking himself up securely in the evening, every night, and would not allow even Grigory to knock for him under any circumstances. Seeing the door open, all of them, the two women and Foma, were afraid to go to the master’s room, “for fear something might come of it afterwards.” Grigory, when they came back, told them to run at once to the police commissioner himself. It was at this point that Maria Kondratievna ran and gave the alarm to everyone at the commissioner’s house. She preceded Pyotr Ilyich’s arrival by only five minutes, so that he came not just with his own guesses and conclusions, but as an obvious witness, whose story even further confirmed the general surmise as to the identity of the criminal (which he, by the way, in the bottom of his heart, till this last moment, still refused to believe).