“But, madame, this three thousand, which you have so generously promised to lend me...”

“You will get it, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” Madame Khokhlakov at once cut him short, “you may consider it as good as in your pocket, and not three thousand, but three million, Dmitri Fyodorovich, and in no time! I shall tell you your idea: you will discover mines, make millions, return and become an active figure, and you will stir us, too, leading us towards the good. Should everything be left to the Jews? You’ll build buildings, start various enterprises. You will help the poor, and they will bless you. This is the age of railroads, Dmitri Fyodorovich. You will become known and indispensable to the Ministry of Finance, which is in such need now. The decline of the paper rouble allows me no sleep, Dmitri Fyodorovich, few know this side of me...”

“Madame, madame!” Dmitri Fyodorovich again interrupted with a certain uneasy foreboding. “Perhaps I will really and truly follow your advice, your sound advice, and go there, perhaps ... to these mines ... we can talk more about it ... I’ll come again ... even many times ... but about this three thousand, which you have so generously ... Oh, it would set me free, today if possible ... That is, you see, I don’t have any time now, not a moment...”

“Enough, Dmitri Fyodorovich, enough!” Madame Khokhlakov interrupted insistently. “The question is: are you going to the mines or not? Have you fully decided? Answer mathematically.”

“I will go, madame, later ... I’ll go wherever you like, madame, but now...”

“Wait, then!” cried Madame Khokhlakov, and, jumping up, she rushed to her magnificent bureau with numerous little drawers and began pulling out one drawer after another, looking for something and in a terrible hurry.

“The three thousand!” Mitya’s heart froze, “and just like that, without any papers, without any deed ... oh, but how gentlemanly! A splendid woman, if only she weren’t so talkative...”

“Here!” Madame Khokhlakov cried joyfully, coming back to Mitya. “Here is what I was looking for!”

It was a tiny silver icon on a string, of the kind sometimes worn around the neck together with a cross.

“It’s from Kiev, Dmitri Fyodorovich,” she continued reverently, “from the relics of the great martyr Varvara.^[238] Allow me personally to put it around your neck and thereby bless you for a new life and new deeds.”

And she indeed put the icon around his neck and began tucking it in. Mitya, in great embarrassment, leaned forward and tried to help her, and finally got the icon past his tie and collar and onto his chest.

“Now you can go!” Madame Khokhlakov uttered, solemnly resuming her seat.

“Madame, I am so touched ... I don’t know how to thank ... for such kindness, but ... if you knew how precious time is to me now...! That sum, which I am so much expecting from your generosity ... Oh, madame, since you are so kind, so touchingly generous to me,” Mitya suddenly exclaimed inspiredly, “allow me to reveal to you ... what you, however, have long known ... that I love a certain person here ... I’ve betrayed Katya ... Katerina Ivanovna, I mean. Oh, I was inhuman and dishonorable towards her, but here I’ve come to love another ... a woman you perhaps despise, madame, for you already know everything, but whom I absolutely cannot part with, absolutely, and therefore, now, this three thousand...”

“Part with everything, Dmitri Fyodorovich!” Madame Khokhlakov interrupted him in the most determined tone. “Everything, women especially. Your goal is the mines, and there’s no need to take women there. Later, when you return in wealth and glory, you will find a companion for your heart in the highest society. She will be a modern girl, educated and without prejudices. By then the women’s question, which is just beginning now, will have ripened, and a new woman will appear ...”

“Madame, that’s not it, not it ... ,” Dmitri Fyodorovich clasped his hands imploringly.

“That is it, Dmitri Fyodorovich, that is precisely what you need, what you thirst for, without knowing it. I am no stranger to the present women’s question, Dmitri Fyodorovich. The development of women and even a political role for women in the nearest future—that is my ideal. I myself have a daughter, Dmitri Fyodorovich, and few know this side of me. I wrote in this regard to the writer Shchedrin. This writer has shown me so much, so much about the woman’s vocation, that last year I sent him an anonymous letter of two lines: ‘I embrace you and kiss you, my writer, for the contemporary woman: carry on.’ And I signed it: A mother.’ I almost wrote ‘a contemporary mother,’ but I hesitated, and then decided just to be a mother: it has more moral beauty, Dmitri Fyodorovich, and besides, the word contemporary’ would have reminded him of TheContemporary—a bitter recollection for him, owing to our censorship . . .^[239] Oh, my God, what’s the matter with you?”

“Madame,” Mitya jumped up at last, clasping his hands in helpless supplication, “you will make me weep, madame, if you keep putting off what you have so generously...”

“Weep, Dmitri Fyodorovich, weep! Such feelings are beautiful ... and with such a path before you! Tears will ease you, afterwards you will return and rejoice. You will come galloping to me on purpose from Siberia, to rejoice with me ...”

“But allow me, too,” Mitya suddenly yelled, “for the last time I implore you, tell me, am I to have this promised sum from you today? And if not, precisely when should I come for it?”

“What sum, Dmitri Fyodorovich?” “The three thousand you promised ... which you so generously ...”

“Three thousand? You mean roubles? Oh, no, I haven’t got three thousand,” Madame Khokhlakov spoke with a sort of quiet surprise. Mitya was stupefied . . .

“Then why ... just ... you said ... you even said it was as good as in my pocket...”

“Oh, no, you misunderstood me, Dmitri Fyodorovich. In that case, you misunderstood me. I was talking about the mines ... It’s true I promised you more, infinitely more than three thousand, I recall it all now, but I was only thinking about the mines.”

“And the money? The three thousand?” Dmitri Fyodorovich exclaimed absurdly.

“Oh, if you meant money, I don’t have it. I don’t have any money at all now, Dmitri Fyodorovich, just now I’m fighting with my manager, and the other day I myself borrowed five hundred roubles from Miusov. No, no, I have no money. And you know, Dmitri Fyodorovich, even if I had, I would not give it to you. First, I never lend to anyone. Lending means quarreling. But to you, to you especially I would not give anything, out of love for you I would not give anything, in order to save you I would not give anything, because you need only one thing: mines, mines, mines...!”

“Ah, devil take . . .!” Mitya suddenly roared, and banged his fist on the table with all his might.

“Aiee!” Khokhlakov cried in fear and flew to the other end of the drawing room.

Mitya spat and with quick steps walked out of the room, out of the house, into the street, into the darkness! He walked like a madman, beating himself on the chest, on that very place on his chest where he had beaten himself two days before, with Alyosha, when he had seen him for the last time, in the evening, in the darkness, on the road. What this beating on the chest, on that spot, meant, and what he intended to signify by it—so far was a secret that no one else in the world knew, which he had not revealed then even to Alyosha, but for him that secret concealed more than shame, it concealed ruin and suicide, for so he had determined if he were unable to obtain the three thousand to pay back Katerina Ivanovna and thereby lift from his chest, “from that place on his chest,” the shame he carried there, which weighed so heavily on his conscience. All this will be perfectly well explained to the reader later on, but now, after his last hope had disappeared, this man, physically so strong, having gone a few steps from Madame Khokhlakov’s house, suddenly dissolved in tears like a little child. He walked on, unconsciously wiping his tears away with his fist. Thus he came out into the square and suddenly felt that he had bumped into something with his full weight. He heard the squeaking howlof some little old woman whom he had almost knocked over.