“Lise, for God’s sake, don’t shout, don’t destroy me. You are still too young to know everything that grown-ups know. I’ll run and tell you everything you ought to know. Oh, my God! I must run, run ... Hysterics! It’s a good sign, Alexei Fyodorovich, it’s excellent that she’s in hysterics. It’s precisely as it should be. In such cases I am always against the women, against all these hysterics and women’s tears. Yulia, run and tell her I’m flying. And it’s her own fault that Ivan Fyodorovich walked out like that. But he won’t go away. Lise, for God’s sake, stop shouting! Oh, yes, you’re not shouting, it’s I who am shouting, forgive your mama, but I’m in ecstasy, ecstasy, ecstasy! And did you notice, Alexei Fyodorovich, what youthfulness came out in Ivan Fyodorovich just now, he said it all and walked out! I thought he was such a scholar, an academician, and he suddenly spoke so ardently—ardently, openly, and youthfully, naively and youthfully, and it was all so beautiful, beautiful, just like you ... And he recited that little German verse, just like you! But I must run, run. Hurry, Alexei Fyodorovich, do that errand for her quickly and come back soon. Lise, do you need anything? For God’s sake don’t keep Alexei Fyodorovich for a minute, he will come back to you right away ...”
Madame Khokhlakov finally ran off. Alyosha, before leaving, was about to open the door to Lise’s room.
“No you don’t!” Lise cried out. “Not now you don’t! Speak like that, through the door. How did you get to be an angel? That’s all I want to know.”
“For my terrible foolishness, Lise! Good-bye.”
“Don’t you dare go like that!” cried Lise.
“Lise, I am in real grief! I’ll come back right away, but I am in great, great grief!”
And he ran out of the room.
Chapter 6:
He was indeed in real grief, of a kind he had seldom experienced before. He had gone and “put his foot in it”—and in what? An affair of the heart!”But what do I know of that, what kind of judge am I in such matters?” he repeated to himself for the hundredth time, blushing. “Oh, shame would be nothing, shame would be only the punishment I deserve—the trouble is that now I will undoubtedly be the cause of new misfortunes ... And the elder sent me to reconcile and unite. Is this any way to unite?” Here again he recalled how he had “united” their hands, and again he felt terribly ashamed. “Though I did it all sincerely, I must be smarter in the future,” he suddenly concluded, and did not even smile at his conclusion.
For Katerina Ivanovna’s errand he had to go to Lake Street, and his brother Dmitri lived just on the way there, not far from Lake Street, in a lane. Alyosha decided to stop at his place in any case, before going to the captain’s, though he had a premonition that he would not find him at home. He suspected that his brother would perhaps somehow be deliberately hiding from him now, but he had to find him at all costs. Time was passing: the thought of the dying elder had never left him, not for a minute, not for a second, from the moment he left the monastery.
There was one fleeting detail in Katerina Ivanovna’s errand that also interested him greatly: when Katerina Ivanovna mentioned that a little boy, a schoolboy, the captain’s son, had run beside his father, crying loudly, the thought flashed through Alyosha’s mind even then that this boy must be the same schoolboy who had bitten his finger when he, Alyosha, asked him how he had offended him. Now Alyosha was almost sure of it, though he did not know why. Thus, drawn to other thoughts, he became distracted and decided not to “think” about the “disaster” he had just caused, not to torment himself with remorse, but to go about his business, and let be what came. With that thought, he finally cheered up. Incidentally, as he turned into the lane where his brother Dmitri lived, he felt hungry, pulled from his pocket the loaf he had taken from his father, and ate it as he walked. This fortified him.
Dmitri was not at home. The owners of the little house—an old cabinetmaker, his son, and an old woman, his wife—even looked at Alyosha with suspicion. “It’s three days now since he’s slept here, maybe he’s vacated somewhere,” the old man replied to Alyosha’s urgent inquiries. Alyosha realized that he was answering on instructions. When he asked whether he might be at Grushenka’s, or hiding at Foma’s again (Alyosha used these confidences deliberately), the owners all even looked at him with alarm. “So they love him, they’re on his side,” thought Alyosha, “that’s good.”
