“No, I’d better go back to my place, sir. I’ll take his mare and go,” he pointed to the forester. “And now, farewell, sir, I hope you get full satisfaction.”

So it was settled. The priest rode off on the mare, happy to have escaped at last, but still shaking his head in perplexity and wondering whether first thing next day he ought not to inform his benefactor Fyodor Pavlovich of this curious incident, “or else, worse luck, he may find out, get angry, and stop his favors.” The forester, having scratched himself, silently went back to his room, and Mitya sat on the bench, waiting, as he put it, to catch the right moment. Deep anguish, like a heavy fog, enveloped his soul. Deep, terrible anguish! He sat and thought, but could not think anything through. The candle flickered, a cricket chirped, it was becoming unbearably stuffy in the overheated room. He suddenly imagined a garden, a lane behind the garden, the door of his father’s house secretly opening, and Grushenka running in through the door ... He jumped up from the bench.

“A tragedy!” he said, grinding his teeth, and mechanically going over to the sleeping man, he began looking at his face. He was a lean man, not yet old, with a very oblong face, light brown curly hair, and a long, thin, reddish beard, wearing a cotton shirt and a black waistcoat, from the pocket of which the chain of a silver watch peeped out. Mitya examined his physiognomy with terrible hatred, and for some reason the most hateful thing was his curly hair. Above all it was unbearably vexing that he, Mitya, should be standing there over him with his urgent business, having sacrificed so much, having left so much behind, utterly exhausted, while this parasite, “on whom my entire fate now depends, goes on snoring as if nothing were wrong, as if he came from another planet.” “Oh, the irony of fate!” Mitya exclaimed, and suddenly losing his head altogether, he again tried frantically to rouse the drunken peasant. He began rousing him in a kind of rage, pulled him, pushed him, even beat him, but, having labored over him for about five minutes, again with no results, he went back to his bench in helpless despair and sat down.

“Stupid, stupid!”Mitya kept exclaiming, “and ... how dishonorable it all is!” he suddenly added for some reason. He was getting a terrible headache. “Why not drop it? Go away altogether?” flashed through his mind. “Oh, no, not before morning. On purpose, I’ll stay on purpose! Why did I come, after all? And I have no means of leaving, how can I leave here now? Oh, absurd!”

His head, however, was aching more and more. He sat without moving and had no recollection of how he dozed off and suddenly fell asleep sitting up. He must have slept for two hours or more. He was awakened by an unbearable pain in his head, so unbearable he could have screamed. It hammered at his temples, the top of his head throbbed; having come to, it was a long time before he was able to regain full consciousness and understand what had happened to him. He finally realized that the overheated room was full of fumes, and that he might even have died. And the drunken peasant still lay there and snored; the candle guttered and was about to go out. Mitya shouted and rushed staggering across the hallway to the forester’s room. The forester woke up quickly, but on hearing that the other room was full of fumes, though he went to take care of it, he accepted the fact with strange indifference, which sorely surprised Mitya.

“But he’s dead, he’s dead, and now ... what now?” Mitya kept shouting before him in a frenzy.

They opened the door, flung the windows wide, undamped the flue; Mitya brought a bucket of water from the hallway, wet his own head first, and then, finding some rag, dipped it in the water and put it to Lyagavy’s head. The forester continued to treat the whole event somehow even disdainfully, and after opening the window, said sullenly: “That’ll do,” and went back to bed, leaving Mitya with a lighted iron lantern. Mitya fussed over the fume-poisoned drunkard for about half an hour, kept wetting his head, and seriously intended not to sleep for the rest of the night, but he became exhausted, sat down for a moment to catch his breath, instantly closed his eyes, then unconsciously stretched out on the bench and fell at once into a dead sleep.

He woke up terribly late. It was already approximately nine o’clock in the morning. The sun was shining brightly through the two windows of the hut. The curly-headed peasant of the night before was sitting on a bench, already dressed in his long-waisted coat. Before him stood a fresh samovar and a fresh quart bottle. The old one from the day before was empty, and the new one was more than half gone. Mitya jumped up and instantly realized that the cursed peasant was drunk again, deeply and irretrievably drunk. He stared wide-eyed at him for a moment. The peasant kept glancing at him silently and slyly, with a sort of offensive composure, even with a sort of derisive haughtiness, as Mitya fancied. He rushed up to him.

“Allow me, you see ... I ... you’ve probably heard from the forester there in the other room: I am Lieutenant Dmitri Karamazov, old Karamazov’s son, from whom you are buying a woodlot. . .”

“That’s a lie!” the peasant suddenly rapped out firmly and calmly.

“A lie? If you please, you do know Fyodor Pavlovich?”

“I don’t please to know any Fyodor Pavlovich of yours,” the peasant said, moving his tongue somehow heavily.

“A woodlot, you’re buying a woodlot from him; wake up, come to your senses! Father Pavel llyinsky brought me here ... You wrote to Samsonov, and he sent me to you ... ,” Mitya spoke breathlessly.

“A l-lie!” Lyagavy again rapped out.

Mitya’s legs went cold.

“For pity’s sake, this isn’t a joke! You’re a bit drunk, perhaps. But anyway you can speak, you can understand ... otherwise ... otherwise I don’t understand anything!”

“You’re a dyer!”

“For pity’s sake, I’m Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov, I have an offer to make you ... a profitable offer ... quite profitable ... about that same wood-lot.”

The peasant was stroking his beard solemnly.

“No, you contracted for the job and turned out to be a cheat. You’re a cheat!”

“You’re mistaken, I assure you!” Mitya was wringing his hands in despair. The peasant kept stroking his beard and suddenly narrowed his eyes slyly.

“No, you show me one thing: show me where there’s a law that allows people to play dirty tricks, do you hear? You’re a cheat, understand?”

Mitya glumly stepped back, and suddenly it was as though “something hit him on the head,” as he himself put it later. In an instant a sort of illumination came to him, “a light shone and I perceived everything.” He stood dumbfounded, wondering how he, an intelligent man after all, could have given in to such foolishness, could have been sucked into such an adventure, and kept on with it all for nearly a whole day and night, worrying over this Lyagavy, wetting his head ... “Well, the man is drunk, drunk out of his mind, and he’ll go on drinking for another week—what is there to wait for? And what if Samsonov sent me hereon purpose? And what if she ... Oh, God, what have I done . . .!”

The peasant sat watching him and chuckled. On another occasion Mitya might have killed the fool in a rage, but now he himself became weak as a child. He quietly walked over to the bench, took his coat, silently put it on, and went out of the room. He did not find the forester in the other room; no one was there. He took fifty kopecks in change from his pocket and put it on the table, for the night’s lodging, the candle, and the trouble. Stepping out of the hut, he saw nothing but forest all around. He walked at random, not even remembering whether to turn right or left from the hut; hurrying there with the priest the night before, he had not noticed the way. There was no vengeance in his soul for anyone, not even Samsonov. He strode along a narrow forest path, senselessly, lost, with his “lost idea,” not caring where he was going. A passing child might have knocked him down, so strengthless had he suddenly become in soul and body. Somehow he nevertheless got out of the forest: suddenly before him spread a boundless expanse of bare, harvested fields. “What despair, what death all around!” he kept saying as he strode on and on.