“Mustn’t forget my things,” he muttered, just to say something.

“Don’t forget anyone else’s things either!” Mitya joked, and promptly guffawed at his own joke. Rakitin instantly flared up.

“Tell that to your Karamazovs, your serf-owning spawn, not to Rakitin!” he cried suddenly, beginning to shake with anger.

“What’s the matter? I was joking!” cried Mitya. “Pah, the devil! They’re all like that,” he turned to Alyosha, nodding towards the quickly departing Rakitin. “He was sitting here laughing, feeling fine, and now suddenly he boils over! He didn’t even nod to you, have you really quarreled or something? And why so late? I wasn’t only expecting you, I’ve been thirsting for you all morning. But never mind! We’ll make up for it!”

“Why has he taken to coming so often? Are you friends with him now, or what?” Alyosha asked, also nodding towards the door through which Rakitin had cleared out.

“Me, friends with Mikhail? No, not really. Why would I be, the swine! He considers me ... a scoundrel. And he doesn’t understand jokes—that’s the main trouble with them. They never understand jokes. Their souls are dry, flat and dry, like the prison walls when I was looking at them as I drove up that day. But he’s an intelligent man, intelligent. Well, Alexei, my head will roll now!”

He sat down on the bench and sat Alyosha down next to him.

“Yes, tomorrow is the trial. You mean you really have no hope at all, brother?” Alyosha said with a timid feeling.

“What are you talking about?” Mitya looked at him somehow indefinitely. “Ah, yes, the trial! Devil take it! Up to now we’ve been talking about trifles, about this trial and all, and I haven’t said a word to you about the most important thing. Yes, tomorrow is the trial, but I didn’t say my head would roll because of the trial. It’s not my head that will roll, but what was in my head.Why are you looking at me with such criticism on your face?”

“What are you talking about, Mitya?”

“Ideas, ideas, that’s what! Ethics. What is ethics?”

“Ethics?” Alyosha said in surprise.

“Yes, what is it, some sort of science?”

“Yes, there is such a science ... only ... I must confess I can’t explain to you what sort of science it is.”

“Rakitin knows. Rakitin knows a lot, devil take him! He won’t become a monk. He’s going to go to Petersburg. There, he says, he’ll get into the department of criticism, but with a noble tendency. Why not? He can be useful and make a career. Oof, how good they are at making careers! Devil take ethics! But I am lost, Alexei, I’m lost, you man of God! I love you more than anyone. My heart trembles at you, that’s what. Who is this Carl Bernard?”

“Carl Bernard?” Again Alyosha was surprised.

“No, not Carl, wait, I’ve got it wrong: Claude Bernard.^[293] What is it? Chemistry or something?”

“He must be a scientist,” Alyosha replied, “only I confess I’m not able to say much about him either. I’ve just heard he’s a scientist, but what kind I don’t know.”

“Well, devil take him, I don’t know either,” Mitya swore. “Some scoundrel, most likely. They’re all scoundrels. But Rakitin will squeeze himself in, he’ll squeeze himself through some crack—another Bernard. Oof, these Bernards! How they breed!”

“But what’s the matter with you?” Alyosha asked insistently.

“He wants to write an article about me, about my case, and begin his role in literature that way, that’s why he keeps coming, he explained it to me himself. He wants something with a tendency: ‘It was impossible for him not to kill, he was a victim of his environment,’ and so on, he explained it to me. It will have a tinge of socialism, he says. So, devil take him, let it have a tinge, it’s all the same to me. He doesn’t like brother Ivan, he hates him, you’re not in favor with him either. Well, and I don’t throw him out because he’s an intelligent man. He puts on airs too much, however. I was telling him just now: ‘The Karamazovs are not scoundrels, but philosophers, because all real Russians are philosophers, and you, even though you’ve studied, are not a philosopher, you’re a stinking churl.’ He laughed, maliciously. And I said to him: de thoughtibus non est disputandum^[294]—a good joke? At least I, too, have joined classicism,” Mitya suddenly guffawed.

“But why are you lost? What were you just saying?” Alyosha interrupted.

“Why am I lost? Hm! The fact is ... on the whole ... I’m sorry for God, that’s why!” “What do you mean, sorry for God?”

“Imagine: it’s all there in the nerves, in the head, there are these nerves in the brain (devil take them!) ... there are little sorts of tails, these nerves have little tails, well, and when they start trembling there ... that is, you see, I look at something with my eyes, like this, and they start trembling, these little tails ... and when they tremble, an image appears, not at once, but in a moment, it takes a second, and then a certain moment appears, as it were, that is, not a moment—devil take the moment—but an image, that is, an object or an event, well, devil take it—and that’s why I contemplate, and then think ... because of the little tails, and not at all because I have a soul or am some sort of image and likeness,^[295] that’s all foolishness. Mikhail explained it to me, brother, just yesterday, and it was as if I got burnt. It’s magnificent, Alyosha, this science! The new man will come, I quite understand that ... And yet, I’m sorry for God!”

“Well, that’s good enough,” said Alyosha.

“That I’m sorry for God? Chemistry, brother, chemistry! Move over a little, Your Reverence, there’s no help for it, chemistry’s coming! And Rakitin doesn’t like God, oof, how he doesn’t! That’s the sore spot in all of them! But they conceal it. They lie. They pretend. ‘What, are you going to push for that in the department of criticism?’ I asked. ‘Well, they won’t let me do it openly,’ he said, and laughed. ‘But,’ I asked, ‘how will man be after that? Without God and the future life? It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?’ ‘Didn’t you know?’ he said. And he laughed. ‘Everything is permitted to the intelligent man,’ he said. ‘The intelligent man knows how to catch crayfish, but you killed and fouled it up,’ he said, ‘and now you’re rotting in prison!’ He said that to me. A natural-born swine! I once used to throw the likes of him out—well, and now I listen to them. He does talk a lot of sense, after all. He writes intelligently, too. About a week ago he started reading me an article, I wrote down three lines of it on purpose; wait, here it is.”

Mitya hurriedly pulled a piece of paper from his waistcoat pocket and read:

“‘In order to resolve this question it is necessary, first of all, to put one’s person in conflict with one’s actuality.’ Do you understand that?”

“No, I don’t,” said Alyosha.

He was watching Mitya and listened to him with curiosity.

“I don’t understand it either. Obscure and vague, but intelligent. ‘Everybody writes like that now,’he says,’because it’s that sort of environment . . .’ They’re afraid of the environment. He also writes verses, the scoundrel, he celebrated Khokhlakov’s little foot, ha, ha, ha!”

“So I’ve heard,” said Alyosha.

“You have? And have you heard the jingle itself?”

“No.” “I have it; here, I’ll read it to you. You don’t know, I never told you, but there’s a whole story here. The swindler! Three weeks ago he decided to tease me: ‘You fouled it up, like a fool,’ he said, ‘for the sake of three thousand, but I’ll grab a hundred and fifty thousand, marry a certain widow, and buy a stone house in Petersburg.’ And he told me he was offering his attentions to Khokhlakov, and that she, who wasn’t very smart to begin with, had lost her mind altogether by the age of forty. ‘But she’s very sentimental,’ he said, ‘so that’s how I’ll bring it off with her. I’ll marry her, take her to Petersburg, and start a newspaper there. ‘ And he had such nasty, sensual drool on his lips—drooling not over Khokhlakov, but over the hundred and fifty thousand. And he convinced me, he convinced me; he kept coming to see me every day; she’s weakening, he said. He was beaming with joy. And then suddenly he was turned out: Perkhotin, Pyotr Ilyich, got the upper hand, good fellow! I mean, I really could kiss the foolish woman for turning him out! So it was while he was coming to see me that he also wrote this jingle. ‘For the first time in my life,’ he said, ‘I’ve dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction—that is, for the sake of a useful cause. If I get the capital away from the foolish woman, then I can be of civic use.’ Because they have a civic excuse for every abomination! ‘And anyway,’ he said, ‘I’ve done a better job of writing than your Pushkin, because I managed to stick civic woes even into a foolish jingle.’ What he says about Pushkin I quite understand. After all, maybe he really was a capable man, but all he wrote about was little feet! And how proud he was of his little jingles! Such vanity they have, such vanity! ‘For the Recovery of My Object’s Ailing Little Foot’—that’s the title he came up with—a nimble fellow!