The Brothers Karamazov

She also came into the courtroom dressed all in black, with her beautiful black shawl over her shoulders. Smoothly, with her inaudible step, swaying slightly, as full-figured women sometimes walk, she approached the balustrade, looking steadily at the presiding judge, and never once glancing either right or left. In my opinion she was very good-looking at that moment, and not at all pale, as the ladies asserted afterwards. It was also asserted that she had a somehow concentrated and angry look. I simply think she was on edge and strongly sensible of the contemptuously curious eyes fixed upon her by our scandal-loving public. Hers was a proud character, which could not brook contempt—of the sort that, at the first suspicion of contempt from someone, at once flares up with wrath and the desire to strike back. With that, of course, there was also timidity, and an inner shame because of this timidity, so it was no wonder that she spoke unevenly—now angry, now contemptuous and overly rude, now suddenly with a sincere, heartfelt note of self-condemnation, self-accusation. But sometimes she spoke as if she were flying into some sort of abyss: “I don’t care what comes of it, I’ll say it anyway ...” Concerning her acquaintance with Fyodor Pavlovich, she observed sharply: “There was nothing to it—is it my fault that he hung onto me?” And then, a minute later, she added: “It was all my fault, I was laughing at both of them— at the old man and at him—and drove them both to it. It all happened because of me.” Somehow Samsonov came up: “That’s nobody’s business,” she snarled at once, with a sort of insolent defiance. “He was my benefactor, he took me in barefoot when my relations threw me out of the house.” The judge reminded her, quite courteously, by the way, that she should answer the questions directly, without getting into unnecessary details. Grushenka blushed, and her eyes flashed.

She had not seen the envelope with the money, and had only heard from “the villain” that Fyodor Pavlovich had some sort of envelope with three thousand in it. “Only it was all foolishness—I just laughed—I wouldn’t have gone there for anything ...”

“When you said ‘the villain’ just now, whom did you mean?” the prosecutor inquired.

“Why, the lackey, Smerdyakov, who killed his master and hanged himself last night.” Of course she was asked at once what grounds she had for such a definite accusation, but it turned out that she, too, had no grounds for it.

“Dmitri Fyodorovich told me so himself, and you can believe him. It was that man-stealer who ruined him, that’s what; she alone is the cause of everything, that’s what,” Grushenka added, all shuddering from hatred, as it were, and a malicious note rang in her voice.

Again she was asked whom she was hinting at.

“At the young lady, at this Katerina Ivanovna here. She sent for me once, treated me to chocolate, wanted to charm me. She has little true shame in her, that’s what ...”

Here the presiding judge stopped her, quite sternly now, asking her to moderate her language. But the jealous woman’s heart was already aflame and she was prepared even to hurl herself into the abyss . . .

“At the time of the arrest in the village of Mokroye,” the prosecutor asked, recalling, “everyone saw and heard how you ran out of the other room, crying: ‘I am guilty of it all, we’ll go to penal servitude together! ‘ Meaning that at that moment you were already certain he had killed his father?”

“I don’t remember what my feelings were then,” Grushenka replied. “Everyone was shouting that he had killed his father, so I felt that I was guilty, and that he had killed him because of me. But as soon as he said he was not guilty, I believed him at once, and I still believe him and shall always believe him: he’s not the sort of man who would lie.”

It was Fetyukovich’s turn to ask questions. Incidentally, I remember him asking about Rakitin and the twenty-five roubles “for bringing Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov to you.”

“And why is it so surprising that he took the money?” Grushenka grinned with contemptuous spite. “He was forever coming to wheedle money out of me, sometimes he’d take up to thirty roubles a month, mostly for his own pleasures: he had enough money to eat and drink without me.”

“And on what grounds were you so generous to Mr. Rakitin? “ Fetyukovich picked up, ignoring the fact that the judge was stirring uneasily.

“But he’s my cousin. My mother and his mother are sisters. Only he always begged me not to tell anyone here, because he was so ashamed of me.”