Chapter 2: The Alarm

Our district commissioner of police, Mikhail Makarovich Makarov, a retired lieutenant colonel, redesignated a state councillor,^[270] was a widower and a good man. He had come to us only three years earlier, but had already won general sympathy, mainly because he “knew how to bring society together.” His house was never without guests, and it seemed he would have been unable to live without them. He had to have guests to dinner every day, even if only two, even if only one, but without guests he would not sit down to eat. He gave formal dinners, too, under all sorts of pretexts, sometimes even the most unexpected. The food he served, though not refined, was abundant, the cabbage pies were excellent, and the wines made up in quantity for what they lacked in quality. In the front room stood a billiard table, surrounded by quite decent furnishings; that is, there were even paintings of English racehorses in black frames on the walls, which, as everyone knows, constitute a necessary adornment of any billiard room in a bachelor’s house. Every evening there was a card game, even if only at one table. But quite often all the best society of our town, including mamas and young girls, would get together there for a dance. Mikhail Makarovich, though a widower, lived as a family man. with his already long-widowed daughter, who in turn was the mother of two girls, Mikhail Makarovich’s granddaughters. The girls were grown up by then and had finished their education; they were of not-unattractive appearance, of cheerful character, and though everyone knew that they would bring no dowries, they still drew our young men of society to their grandfather’s house. In his official capacity, Mikhail Makarovich was none too bright, but he did his job no worse than many others. To tell the truth, he was rather an uneducated man, and even a bit carefree with respect to a clear understanding of the limits of his administrative power. Not that he did not fully comprehend some of the reforms of the present reign, but he understood them with certain, sometimes quite conspicuous, mistakes, and not at all because he was somehow especially incapable, but simply because of his carefree nature, because he never got around to looking into them. “I have the soul of a military man, not a civilian,” he said of himself. He still did not seem to have acquired a firm and definite idea even of the exact principles of the peasant reform, and learned of them, so to speak, from year to year, increasing his knowledge practically and unwittingly, though, by the way, he himself was a landowner. Pyotr Ilyich knew with certainty that he was sure to meet some guests at Mikhail Makarovich’s that evening, only he did not know exactly whom. Meanwhile, at that very moment, the prosecutor and our district doctor Varvinsky, a young man who had just come to us from Petersburg, after brilliantly completing his studies at the Petersburg Medical Academy, were sitting there playing whist. The prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich—the deputy prosecutor, that is, but we all called him the prosecutor—was a special man among us, not old, still only about thirty-five, but much inclined to consumption, and married, besides, to a rather fat and childless lady; he was proud and irritable, and yet of quite considerable intelligence, and even a kind soul. It appeared the whole trouble with his character was that he had a somewhat higher opinion of himself than his real virtues warranted. And that was why he constantly seemed restless. Besides, there were in him certain lofty and even artistic pretensions—for example, to psychologism, to a special knowledge of the human soul, to a special gift of comprehending the criminal and his crime. In this sense he considered himself somewhat ill treated and passed over in his service, and was forever persuaded that they were unable to appreciate him in higher spheres and that he had enemies. In his gloomier moments he even threatened to desert to the defense side of criminal law. The unexpected case of the Karamazov parricide thoroughly shook him, as it were: “A case like this could become known all over Russia.” But I am getting ahead of myself.

In the next room, with the girls, there also sat our young district attorney, Nikolai Parfenovich Nelyudov, who had come to our town from Petersburg only two months earlier. Afterwards everyone talked of it and even marveled that all these persons should have come together as if on purpose, on the evening of the “crime,” in the house of the executive authority. Yet it was a perfectly simple thing and happened quite naturally: it was the second day that Ippolit Kirillovich’s wife had had a toothache, and he absolutely had to flee somewhere from her groaning; as for the doctor, by his very nature he could do nothing of an evening but play cards. And Nikolai Parfenovich Nelyudov had already been planning for three days to visit Mikhail Makarovich that evening, inadvertently, so to speak, in order suddenly and perfidiously to startle the older girl, Olga Mikhailovna, with the fact that he knew her secret, that he knew it was her birthday and that she had decided purposely to conceal it from our society, so as not to have to invite people for dancing. Much laughter was in store, much hinting at her age, that she was supposedly afraid to reveal it, that he, now being in possession of her secret, would tell everyone tomorrow, and so on and so forth. The dear young man was very naughty in this respect; our ladies in fact called him a naughty boy, and he seemed to like it very much. However, he was of quite good society, good family, good upbringing, and good feelings, a bon vivant but quite an innocent one, and always proper. Physically, he was short and of weak, delicate constitution. Several extremely large rings always flashed on his thin and pale fingers. When performing his duties, he became remarkably solemn, as though he conceived of his significance and responsibility as sacred. He was especially good at throwing murderers and other low-class criminals off guard in interrogations, and actually aroused in them, if not respect for himself, at least a certain astonishment.

When Pyotr Ilyich entered the commissioner’s house, he was simply astounded: he suddenly saw that they knew everything already. Indeed, they had abandoned their cards, they all stood arguing, and even Nikolai Parfenovich came running from the young ladies with a most pugnacious and impetuous look on his face. Pyotr Ilyich was met with the astounding news that old Fyodor Pavlovich had really and truly been murdered in his house that evening, murdered and robbed. It had been learned just a moment before, in the following way.

Marfa Ignatievna—the wife of Grigory, who had been struck down at the fence—though she was fast asleep in her bed and might have gone on sleeping like that until morning, nevertheless suddenly woke up. Conducive to that end was a terrible epileptic scream from Smerdyakov, who lay unconscious in the next room—that scream with which his fits of falling sickness always began, and that always, all her life, frightened Marfa Ignatievna terribly and had a morbid effect on her. She simply never could get used to it. Half awake, she jumped up and, almost beside herself, rushed to Smerdyakov in his little room. It was dark there; she could only hear that the sick man had begun struggling and gasping horribly. Marfa Ignatievna screamed herself and began calling her husband, but suddenly realized that when she had gotten up Grigory seemed not to be in the bed. She ran back and felt in the bed again, but it was indeed empty. So he had gone out, but where? She ran to the porch and timidly called him. She got no answer, of course, but instead she heard, in the night’s silence, some groans, which seemed to be coming from somewhere far away in the garden. She listened; the groans were repeated, and it became clear that they were indeed coming from the garden. “Lord, just like with Stinking Lizaveta!” flashed through her distraught head. She went timidly down the steps and saw that the garden gate was open. “He must be there, the poor dear,” she thought, going up to the gate, and suddenly she clearly heard Grigory calling her, crying out: “Marfa, Marfa!” in a weak, wailing, woeful voice. “Lord, keep us from disaster,” Marfa Ignatievna whispered and rushed towards the voice, and in that way she found Grigory. But she found him not by the fence, not on the spot where he had been struck down, but about twenty paces away. Later it turned out that, having come to his senses, he had begun crawling, and probably crawled for a long while, losing consciousness and passing out several times more. She noticed at once that he was all covered with blood, and at that began screaming to high heaven. Grigory kept muttering softly and incoherently: “He killed ... father ... killed ... stop shouting, fool ... run, tell . . “But Marfa Ignatievna would not quiet down and went on screaming, and suddenly, seeing that the master’s window was open and there was light inside, she ran to it and began calling Fyodor Pavlovich. But, looking through the window, she saw a terrible sight: the master was lying on his back on the floor, not moving. The front of his light-colored dressing gown and his white shirt were soaked with blood. A candle on the table shed a bright light on the blood and on the motionless, dead face of Fyodor Pavlovich. Now horrified to the last degree, Marfa Ignatievna rushed away from the window, ran out of the garden, unlocked the gates, and ran like mad through the back lane to her neighbor, Maria Kondratievna. Both neighbors, mother and daughter, were asleep by then, but at Marfa Ignatievna’s urgent and frenzied shouting and knocking on the shutters, they woke up and jumped to the window. Marfa Ignatievna, shrieking and shouting, conveyed the essentials, however incoherently, and called for help. As it happened, that night the wandering Foma was staying with them. They roused him at once, and all three ran to the scene of the crime. On the way, Maria Kondratievna managed to recall that earlier, before nine o’clock, she had heard a terrible and piercing cry from their garden, which could be heard all over the neighborhood—and this certainly was precisely the cry of Grigory as he caught hold of the leg of Dmitri Fyodorovich, who was already sitting astride the fence, and cried out: “Parricide!” “Some one person shouted and suddenly stopped,” Maria Kondratievna testified as she ran. Having come to the place where Grigory lay, the two women, with the help of Foma, carried him to the cottage. They lighted a candle and saw that Smerdyakov had still not calmed down but was struggling in his little room, his eyes crossed and foam running from his lips. Grigory’s head was washed with water and vinegar; the water brought him back to his full senses, and he asked at once: “Has the master been killed?” The two women and Foma then went to the master’s and this time saw, as they entered the garden, that not only the window but the door to the garden was wide open, whereas for the whole past week the master had been locking himself up securely in the evening, every night, and would not allow even Grigory to knock for him under any circumstances. Seeing the door open, all of them, the two women and Foma, were afraid to go to the master’s room, “for fear something might come of it afterwards.” Grigory, when they came back, told them to run at once to the police commissioner himself. It was at this point that Maria Kondratievna ran and gave the alarm to everyone at the commissioner’s house. She preceded Pyotr Ilyich’s arrival by only five minutes, so that he came not just with his own guesses and conclusions, but as an obvious witness, whose story even further confirmed the general surmise as to the identity of the criminal (which he, by the way, in the bottom of his heart, till this last moment, still refused to believe).