The Brothers Karamazov

Preoccupied, he entered her apartment. She was home by then; it was half an hour since she had come back from seeing Mitya, and by the quick movement with which she jumped up from the armchair at the table to greet him, he concluded that she had been waiting for him with great impatience. There were cards on the table, and a game of “fools” had been dealt out. On the leather sofa on the other side of the table a bed had been made up on which Maximov, obviously ill and weak, though smiling sweetly, reclined in a dressing gown and cotton nightcap. Having returned with Grushenka from Mokroye about two months before, the homeless old man had simply stayed on with her and by her and never left. When he arrived with her that day in the rain and slush, drenched and frightened, he sat down on the sofa and stared at her silently with a timid, imploring smile. Grushenka, who was in terrible grief and in the first stages of a fever, and was so taken up with various troubles that she almost forgot about him for the first half hour after her arrival— suddenly looked at him somehow attentively: he giggled at her in a pathetic and lost way. She called Fenya and told her to give him something to eat. All that day he sat in the same place almost without stirring; when it grew dark and the shutters were closed, Fenya asked her mistress: “Well, miss, is he going to stay the night?” “Yes, make up a bed for him on the sofa,” Grushenka replied. Questioning him in more detail, Grushenka learned that he indeed had nowhere at all to go just then, and that “my benefactor, Mr. Kalganov, announced to me straight out that he would no longer receive me, and gave me five roubles.” “Well, stay then, God help you,” Grushenka decided in anguish, giving him a compassionate smile. The old man cringed at her smile, and his lips trembled with grateful weeping. And so the wandering sponger had remained with her ever since. Even during her illness he did not leave. Fenya and her mother, Grushenka’s cook, did not turn him out, but continued to feed him and make up his bed on the sofa. Later, Grushenka even got used to him, and, coming back from seeing Mitya (whom, as soon as she felt a bit better, she at once began visiting, even before she was fully recovered), in order to kill her anguish she would sit down and start talking with “Maximushka” about all sorts of trifles, just so as not to think about her grief. It turned out that the old man could occasionally come up with some story or other, so that finally he even became necessary to her. Apart from Alyosha, who did not come every day, however, and never stayed long, Grushenka received almost no one. By then her old man, the merchant, was terribly ill, “on the way out,” as people said in town, and indeed he died only a week after Mitya’s trial. Three weeks before his death, feeling that the finale was near, he at last summoned his sons upstairs, with their wives and children, and told them not to leave him thereafter. As for Grushenka, from that same moment he gave strict orders not to admit her, and to tell her if she came: “He wishes you a long and happy life, and asks you to forget him completely. “ Grushenka sent almost every day, however, to inquire about his health.

“You’ve come at last!” she cried, throwing down the cards and joyfully greeting Alyosha, “and Maximushka’s been scaring me that you might not come after all. Ah, how I need you! Sit down at the table; well, what will you have, some coffee?”

“Why not?” said Alyosha, sitting down at the table. “I’m very hungry.”

“So there. Fenya, Fenya, some coffee!” cried Grushenka. “I’ve had it ready for a long time, waiting for you. Bring some pirozhki, too, and make sure they’re hot. No, listen, Alyosha, I had a big storm over those pirozhki today. I took them to the prison for him, and would you believe it, he threw them back at me and wouldn’t eat them. He even flung one on the floor and trampled on it. So I said: ‘I’ll leave them with the guard; if you don’t eat them by evening, it means you’re feeding on your own venomous wickedness! ‘ and with that I left. We really quarreled again, do you believe it? Each time I go, we quarrel.”

Grushenka poured it all out in her excitement. Maximov, having at once grown timid, smiled and dropped his eyes.

“But what did you quarrel about this time?” asked Alyosha.

“I didn’t even expect it! Imagine, he got jealous over my ‘former’ one: ‘Why are you keeping him?’ he said. ‘So you’ve started keeping him, have you?’ He gets jealous all the time, jealous over me! He gets jealous eating and sleeping. Once last week he even got jealous of Kuzma.”

“But he knew about the ‘former’ one, didn’t he?”