The Brothers Karamazov

“Yes, it is necessary just now ... May I trouble you to sit down here for now, you can take a blanket from the bed and wrap yourself, and I ... I’ll see to everything.”

All the articles were shown to the witnesses, the report of the examination was drawn up, and Nikolai Parfenovich finally went out, and the clothes were taken out after him. Ippolit Kirillovich also went out. Only the peasants remained with Mitya, and stood silently, not taking their eyes off him. Mitya wrapped himself in a blanket; he was cold. His bare feet stuck out, and he kept trying unsuccessfully to pull the blanket over them so as to cover them. Nikolai Parfenovich did not come back for a long time, “painfully long.” “He treats me like a pup,” Mitya ground his teeth. “That rotten prosecutor left, too, must be from contempt, he got disgusted looking at a naked man.” Mitya still supposed that his clothes would be examined elsewhere and then brought back. How great was his indignation when Nikolai Parfenovich suddenly returned with quite different clothes, brought in after him by a peasant.

“Well, here are some clothes for you,” he said casually, apparently quite pleased with the success of his expedition. “Mr. Kalganov has donated them for this curious occasion, as well as a clean shirt for you. Fortunately, he happened to have it all in his suitcase. You may keep your own underwear and socks.” Mitya boiled over.

“I don’t want other people’s clothes!” he thundered. “Give me mine!”

“Impossible.”

“Give me mine! Devil take Kalganov, him and his clothes!”

They reasoned with him for a long time. Anyway, they somehow calmed him down. They convinced him that his own clothes, being stained with blood, must “join the collection of material evidence,” and to leave them on him “no longer even fell within their rights ... in view of how the case might end.” Mitya somehow finally understood this. He lapsed into a gloomy silence and began hurriedly getting dressed. He merely observed, as he was putting the clothes on, that they were more costly than his old ones, and that he did not want “to gain by it.” And besides, “they’re embarrassingly tight. Shall I play the buffoon in them ... for your pleasure?”

Again he was convinced that here, too, he was exaggerating, that Mr. Kalganov, though taller than he, was only slightly taller, so that only the trousers might be a trifle long. But the coat did turn out to be narrow in the shoulders.

“Devil take it, I can hardly even button it,” Mitya growled again. “Do me a favor, please tell Mr. Kalganov right now that I did not ask him for his clothes, and that I’ve been gotten up like a buffoon.”

“He understands that very well, and he is sorry ... not sorry about his clothes, that is, but, as a matter of fact, about this whole case ... ,” Nikolai Parfenovich mumbled.

“I spit on his ‘sorry’! Well, where to now? Or do I go on sitting here?”

He was asked to go back to “that room.” He went back, sullen with anger, trying not to look at anyone. He felt himself utterly disgraced in another man’s clothes, even before those peasants and Trifon Borisovich, whose face lor some reason flashed in the doorway and disappeared. “He came to have a look at the mummer,” thought Mitya. He sat down on his former chair. He had the illusion of something nightmarish and absurd; it seemed to him he was not in his right mind.

“Well, what now, do you start flogging me with a birch, or what? There’s nothing else left,” he gnashed out, addressing the prosecutor. He no longer wanted even to turn towards Nikolai Parfenovich, as though he did not deign to speak with him. “He examined my socks too closely, and had them turned inside out, the scoundrel—he did it on purpose, to show everyone how dirty my underwear is!”

“Well, now we’ll have to proceed to the interrogation of the witnesses,” said Nikolai Parfenovich, as if in answer to Dmitri Fyodorovich’s question.

“Yes,” the prosecutor said thoughtfully, as if he, too, was pondering something. “We have done all we could in your interest, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” Nikolai Parfenovich continued, “but having received such a radical refusal on your part to give us any explanation concerning the sources of the sum found in your possession, we, at this point...”

“What’s the stone in that ring?” Mitya suddenly interrupted, as if coming out of some sort of reverie, pointing to one of the three large rings that adorned Nikolai Parfenovich’s right hand.

“Ring?” Nikolai Parfenovich repeated in surprise.

“Yes, that one ... with the little veins in it, on your middle finger—what stone is that?” Mitya insisted somehow irritably, like a stubborn child.

“It’s a smoky topaz,” Nikolai Parfenovich smiled, “would you like to look at it? I’ll take it off...”