The Brothers Karamazov

“That is all a lie! Outwardly it’s true, but inwardly it’s a lie!” Dmitri Fyodorovich was trembling all over with rage. “My dear papa! I do not justify my actions. Yes, I acknowledge publicly that I behaved like a beast with that captain, and now I’m sorry and loathe myself for my beastly rage, but this captain of yours, your agent, went to that very lady whom you yourself have described as a seductress, and began suggesting to her on your behalf that she should take over my promissory notes that are in your possession, and sue me in order to have me locked up with the help of those notes, in case I pestered you too much for an account of my property. And now you reproach me with having a weakness for this lady, when you yourself were teaching her how to ensnare me! She told me so to my face, she told me herself, and she laughed at you! And you want me locked up only because you’re jealous of me, because you yourself have begun approaching this woman with your love, and that, too, I know all about, and she laughed again—do you hear?—she laughed at you as she told me. Here, holy people, is a man for you, a father reproaching his profligate son! Gentlemen witnesses, forgive my wrath, but I anticipated that this perfidious old man had gathered you all here for a scandal. I came intending to forgive, if he held out his hand to me, to forgive and to ask forgiveness! But since he has just now insulted not only me but that most noble girl, whose very name I do not dare to utter in vain out of reverence for her, I am resolved to give away his whole game in public, though he is my father . . .!”

He could not go on. His eyes flashed, he was breathing hard. Everyone else in the cell was excited, too. They all rose anxiously from their chairs, except for the elder. The hieromonks looked stern, but waited, however, to know the elder’s will. He sat looking quite pale now, not from excitement but from sickly weakness. An imploring smile shone on his lips; every once in a while he raised his hand as if wishing to stop the two raging men; and, of course, one gesture from him would have been sufficient to end the scene; yet he himself seemed to be waiting for something, and watched intently, as if still trying to understand something, as if still not comprehending something. At last, Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov finally felt himself humiliated and disgraced.

“We are all to blame for this scandal!” he said hotly. “But all the same, I did not anticipate, on my way here, though I knew whom I was dealing with ... This must be stopped at once! Your reverence, believe me, I did not know exactly all the details that have just been revealed here, I did not want to believe them, and have only now learned for the first time ... The father is jealous of his son over a woman of bad behavior, and himself arranges with this creature to lock the son up in prison ... And this is the company in which I’ve been forced to come here ... I have been deceived, I declare to you all that I have been deceived no less than the others ...”

“Dmitri Fyodorovich!” Fyodor Pavlovich suddenly screamed in a voice not his own, “if only you weren’t my son, I would challenge you to a duel this very moment ... with pistols, at three paces ... across a handkerchief! across a handkerchief!” he ended, stamping with both feet.^[56]

Old liars who have been play-acting all their lives have moments when they get so carried away by their posing that they indeed tremble and weep from excitement, even though at that same moment (or just a second later) they might whisper to themselves: “You’re lying, you shameless old man, you’re acting even now, despite all your ‘holy’ wrath and ‘holy’ moment of wrath.”

Dmitri Fyodorovich frowned horribly and looked at his father with inexpressible contempt.

“I thought ... I thought,” he said somehow softly and restrainedly, “that I would come to my birthplace with the angel of my soul, my fiancée, to cherish him in his old age, and all I find is a depraved sensualist and despicable comedian!” “To a duel!” the old fool screamed again, breathless and spraying saliva with each word. “And you, Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov, let it be known to you, sir, that in all the generations of your family there is not and maybe never has been a woman loftier or more honorable—more honorable, do you hear?—than this creature, as you have just dared to call her! And you, Dmitri Fyodorovich, traded your fiancée for this very ‘creature,’ so you yourself have judged that your fiancée isn’t worthy to lick her boots—that’s the kind of creature she is!”

“Shame!” suddenly escaped from Father Iosif.

“A shame and a disgrace!” Kalganov, who had been silent all the while, suddenly cried in his adolescent voice, trembling with excitement and blushing all over.