“You’re so smart about everything! How did you ever amount to all that?” the female voice was growing more and more caressing.
“I could have done even better, miss, and I’d know a lot more, if it wasn’t for my destiny ever since childhood. I’d have killed a man in a duel with a pistol for calling me low-born, because I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they were shoving that in my face in Moscow, it spread there thanks to Grigory Vasilievich. Grigory Vasilievich reproaches me for rebelling against my nativity: ‘You opened her matrix,’ he says.[123] I don’t know about her matrix, but I’d have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all, miss. They used to say in the market, and your mama, too, started telling me, with her great indelicacy, that she went around with her hair in a Polish plait and was
“If you were a military cadet or a fine young hussar, you wouldn’t talk that way, you’d draw your sword and start defending all of Russia.”
“I not only have no wish to be a fine military hussar, Maria Kondratievna, but I wish, on the contrary, for the abolition of all soldiers.”
“And when the enemy comes, who will defend us?”
“But there’s no need to at all, miss. In the year twelve there was a great invasion by the emperor Napoleon of France, the first, the father of the present one,[124] and it would have been good if we had been subjected then by those same Frenchmen: an intelligent nation would have subjected a very stupid one, miss, and joined it to itself. There would be quite a different order of things then, miss.”
“Why, as if theirs are so much better than ours! I wouldn’t trade a certain gallant I know for three of the youngest Englishmen,” Maria Kondratievna said tenderly, no doubt accompanying her words at that moment with a most languid look.
“Folks have their preferences, miss.”
“And you yourself are just like a foreigner, just like a real noble foreigner, I’ll tell you so for all that I’m blushing.”
“When it comes to depravity, if you want to know, theirs and ours are no different. They’re all rogues, only theirs walks around in patent leather boots, and our swine stinks in his poverty and sees nothing wrong with it. The Russian people need thrashing, miss, as Fyodor Pavlovich rightly said yesterday, though he’s a madman, he and all his children, miss.”
“But you respect Ivan Fyodorovich, you said so yourself.”
“And he made reference to me that I’m a stinking lackey. He considers me as maybe rebelling, but he’s mistaken, miss. If I had just so much in my pocket, I’d have left long ago. Dmitri Fyodorovich is worse than any lackey, in his behavior, and in his intelligence, and in his poverty, miss, and he’s not fit for anything, but, on the contrary, he gets honor from everybody. I may be only a broth-maker, but if I’m lucky I can open a café-restaurant in Moscow, on the Petrovka.[125] Because I cook
“I think duels are so nice,” Maria Kondratievna suddenly remarked.
“How so, miss?” “It’s so scary and brave, especially when fine young officers with pistols in their hands are shooting at each other because of some lady friend. Just like a picture. Oh, if only they let girls watch, I’d like terribly to see one.”
“It’s fine when he’s doing the aiming, but when it’s his mug that’s being aimed at, there’s the stupidest feeling, miss. You’d run away from the place, Maria Kondratievna.”
“Do you mean you would run away?”
But Smerdyakov did not deign to answer. After a moment’s silence there came another strum, and the falsetto poured out the last verse:
I don’t care what you say
For I’m going away,
I’ll be happy and free In the big citee! And I won’t grieve, No, I’ll never grieve,I don’t plan ever to grieve.
