“What’s with him?” he quickly asked Smerdyakov, who came in after Ivan Fyodorovich.

“He’s angry about something, sir, who knows what,” the servant muttered evasively.

“Ah, the devil! Let him be angry! Bring the samovar and clear out. Hurry up! Anything new?”

Then came all kinds of questions of the sort Smerdyakov had just complained of to Ivan Fyodorovich—that is, all to do with the expected lady visitor, which questions we shall omit here. Half an hour later the house was locked up and the crazy old fool was wandering through his rooms alone, in trembling expectation every moment of the five prearranged knocks, glancing from time to time at the dark windows and seeing nothing in them but night.

It was already very late, but Ivan Fyodorovich was still awake and pondering. That night he went to bed late, at about two. But we will not relate the whole train of his thought, nor is it time yet for us to enter into this soul—this soul will have its turn. And even if we should try to relate something, it would be very hard to do, because there were no thoughts, but something very indefinite, and, above all, too excited. He himself felt that he had lost his bearings. He was also tormented by various strange and almost entirely unexpected desires; for example, already after midnight, he suddenly felt an insistent and unbearable urge to go downstairs, unlock the door, go out to the servants’ cottage, and give Smerdyakov a beating; but if you had asked him why, he would have been decidedly unable to give even one precise reason, save perhaps that this lackey had become hateful to him, as if he had offended him more gravely than anyone else in the world. On the other hand, more than once during the night his soul was seized by some inexplicable and humiliating timidity, which—he could feel it—even suddenly robbed him, as it were, of his physical strength. His head ached and he was giddy. Something hateful was gnawing his soul, as if he were about to take revenge on someone. He even hated Alyosha, recalling that day’s conversation; at moments he hated himself very much as well. He almost forgot to think of Katerina Ivanovna, and afterwards was greatly surprised at that, the more so as he distinctly remembered how, just the morning before, when he had boasted so sweepingly at Katerina Ivanovna’s that he was leaving the next day for Moscow, at the same moment in his soul he had whispered to himself: “That’s nonsense, you won’t go, it won’t be so easy to tear yourself away as you’re bragging now.” Remembering this night long afterwards, Ivan Fyodorovich recalled with particular disgust how he suddenly would get up from the sofa and quietly, as though terribly afraid of being seen, open the door, go out to the head of the stairs, and listen to Fyodor Pavlovich moving around below, wandering through the downstairs rooms—he would listen for a long time, five minutes at a stretch, with a sort of strange curiosity, holding his breath, his heart pounding—and why he was doing all that, what he was listening for, he, of course, did not know himself. All his life afterwards he referred to this “action” as “loathsome,” and all his life, deep in himself, in the inmost part of his soul, he considered it the basest action of his whole life. For Fyodor Pavlovich himself he did not even feel any hatred during those minutes, but was simply overwhelmingly curious about how he was wandering around down there, what approximately he could be doing now in his rooms, guessing and pondering how he might glance at the dark windows down there and suddenly stop in the middle of the room, waiting, waiting to hear if anyone knocked. Perhaps twice Ivan Fyodorovich went out to the stairs in this pursuit. When all became quiet and Fyodor Pavlovich had gone to bed, at about two o’clock, Ivan Fyodorovich, too, went to bed with a firm desire to fall asleep quickly, for he felt terribly exhausted. And indeed he suddenly fell fast asleep and slept dreamlessly, but he woke up early, at about seven o’clock, when it was already light. On opening his eyes, to his amazement, he suddenly felt in himself the surge of some remarkable energy; he jumped up quickly, dressed quickly, took out his suitcase, and without a pause hurriedly began packing it. He had gotten his linen back from the washerwoman just the previous morning. Ivan Fyodorovich even smiled at the thought that it had all worked out so well, that there was nothing to delay his sudden departure. And the departure indeed turned out to be sudden. Though Ivan Fyodorovich had said the day before (to Katerina Ivanovna, Alyosha, and then Smerdyakov) that he would be leaving the next day, by the time he went to bed he remembered very well that he was not even thinking about his departure, at least he never imagined that his first impulse, on waking up in the morning, would be to rush and pack his suitcase. At last the suitcase and bag were ready. It was about nine o’clock when Marfa Ignatievna came upstairs to him with her usual daily question: “Will you be pleased to have tea in your room, or will you come downstairs?” Ivan Fyodorovich came downstairs, looking almost gay, though there was in him, in his words and gestures, something scattered and hasty, as it were. He greeted his father affably and even inquired especially about his health, and then, without waiting for his father to finish his reply, at once announced that he was leaving for Moscow in an hour, for good, and asked that the horses be sent for. The old man listened to the announcement with no sign of surprise, and quite indecently forgot to feel any grief at his boy’s departure; instead he suddenly got into a great flutter, having just incidentally remembered some urgent business of his own.

“Ah, you! What a fellow! Couldn’t have told me yesterday ... well, no matter, we’ll settle it now. Do me a great favor, old man, stop off at Chermashnya. You just have to turn left at the Volovya station, just eight short miles and you’re in Chermashnya.”

“I can’t, for pity’s sake! It’s fifty miles to the railway, and the train leaves for Moscow at seven in the evening—I barely have time to make it.”

“You’ll make it tomorrow, or the day after, but turn off to Chermashnya today. What will it cost you to placate your father! If I hadn’t been kept here, I’d have shot over there and back myself long ago, because the deal there is an urgent and special one, but now isn’t the right time for me ... You see, I have a woodlot there, two parcels, in Begichev and Dyachkina, on waste lands. The Maslovs, the old man and his son, merchants, are offering only eight thousand for it, to cut the timber, and just last year a buyer turned up who offered twelve thousand, but he wasn’t local, that’s the catch. Because there’s no dealing among the locals now: the Maslovs—father and son, worth a hundred thousand—have got everybody in their fist: you take whatever they offer, and none of the locals dares to compete with them. And suddenly the priest at Ilyinskoye wrote me last Thursday that Gorstkin has come along, another little merchant, I know him, but the precious thing is that he’s not a local, he comes from Pogrebovo, which means he’s not afraid of the Maslovs, because he isn’t local. Eleven thousand he says he’ll give for the lot, do you hear? But the priest writes that he’ll only be staying on for another week. So suppose you go and settle it with him ...” “Write to the priest; he’ll settle it with him.”

“He can’t do it, that’s the thing. This priest has no eye for business. He’s pure gold, I’d hand him twenty thousand right now for safekeeping, without a receipt, but he has no eye at all, as if he weren’t even a man, a crow could trick him. And he’s a learned man, just think of it! This Gorstkin looks like a peasant, wears a blue coat, only in character he’s a complete scoundrel, that’s the trouble for us: he lies, there’s the catch. Sometimes he lies so much that you wonder, why is he doing it? Two years ago he lied that his wife was dead and that he’d already married another one, and, imagine, not a word of it was true: his wife never died, she’s still alive and beats him once every three days. So we’ve got to find out whether he’s lying now, too, or really wants to buy and is offering eleven thousand.”