“Ha, ha, ha! You didn’t expect me? I wondered where to wait for you. Near her house? There are three roads from there, and I might have missed you. Finally I decided, I’ll wait here, because he’ll have to pass here, there’s no other way to the monastery. Well, give me the truth, crush me like a cockroach ... Why, what’s the matter?” “Nothing, brother ... Just that you startled me. Oh, Dmitri! Father’s blood today ...” Alyosha began to cry. He had been wanting to cry for a long time, and now it was as if something suddenly snapped in his soul. “You all but killed him ... you cursed him ... and now ... here ... you’re making jokes ... ‘Your money or your life!’”
“Well, what of it? Improper, eh? Doesn’t fit my position?”
“No ... I just. . .”
“Wait. Look at the night: see what a gloomy night it is, what clouds, how the wind is rising! I hid myself here, under the willow, waiting for you, and suddenly thought (as God is my witness): why languish any longer, why wait? Here is the willow, there is a handkerchief, a shirt, I can make a rope right now, plus suspenders, and—no longer burden the earth, or dishonor it with my vile presence! And then I heard you coming—Lord, just as if something suddenly flew down on me: ah, so there is a man that I love, here he is, here is that man, my dear little brother, whom I love more than anyone in the world, and who is the only one I love! And I loved you so, I loved you so at that moment that I thought: I’ll throw myself on his neck! But then a foolish thought came to me: ‘I’ll amuse him, I’ll give him a scare.’ So I yelled: ‘Your money!’ like a fool. Forgive my foolishness—it’s only nonsense, and in my soul ... it’s also fitting ... Well, damn it, tell me what happened! What did she say? Crush me, strike me down, don’t spare me! Was she furious?”
“No,notthat ... It wasn’t like that at all, Mitya. It was ... I found the two of them there together.”
“What two?”
“Grushenka and Katerina Ivanovna.”
Dmitri Fyodorovich was dumbstruck.
“Impossible!” he cried. “You’re raving! Grushenka with her?”
Alyosha told him everything that had happened to him from the very moment he entered Katerina Ivanovna’s house. He spoke for about ten minutes, one would not say fluently or coherently, but he seemed to convey it clearly, grasping the main words, the main gestures, and vividly conveying his own feelings, often with a single stroke. His brother Dmitri listened silently, staring point blank at him with horrible fixity, but it was clear to Alyosha that he already understood everything and comprehended the whole fact. But his face, as the story went on, became not merely grim but menacing, as it were. He glowered, clenched his teeth, his fixed stare seemed to become still more fixed, more intent, more terrible ... Which made it all the more unexpected when, with inconceivable swiftness, his face, until then angry and ferocious, suddenly changed all at once, his compressed lips parted, and Dmitri Fyodorovich suddenly dissolved in the most irrepressible, the most genuine laughter. He literally dissolved in laughter, and for a long time could not even speak for laughing.
“She just didn’t kiss her hand! She just didn’t, she just ran away!” he exclaimed with some sort of morbid delight—one might have called it insolent delight had it not been so artless. “And the other one shouted that she was a tiger! A tiger she is! And that she deserves the scaffold! Yes, yes, so she does, she does, I agree, she deserves it, she has long deserved it! Let’s have that scaffold, brother, but let me recover first. I can see that queen of insolence, the whole of her is there, that hand expresses the whole of her! Infernal woman! She’s the queen of all infernal women the world can imagine! Delightful in a way! So she ran home? Then I ... eh ... will run to her! Alyoshka, don’t blame me, I do agree that throttling’s too good for her ...”
“And Katerina Ivanovna!” Alyosha exclaimed sadly.
