“Ah, you caught that little remark yesterday, which offended Miusov so much ... and that brother Dmitri so naively popped up and rephrased?” he grinned crookedly. “Yes, perhaps ‘everything is permitted,’ since the word has already been spoken. I do not renounce it. And Mitenka’s version is not so bad.”
Alyosha was looking at him silently.
“I thought, brother, that when I left here I’d have you, at least, in all the world,” Ivan suddenly spoke with unexpected feeling, “but now I see that in your heart, too, there is no room for me, my dear hermit. The formula, ‘everything is permitted,’ I will not renounce, and what then? Will you renounce me for that? Will you?”
Alyosha stood up, went over to him in silence, and gently kissed him on the lips.
“Literary theft!” Ivan cried, suddenly going into some kind of rapture. “You stole that from my poem! Thank you, however. Get up, Alyosha, let’s go, it’s time we both did.”
They went out, but stopped on the porch of the tavern.
“So, Alyosha,” Ivan spoke in a firm voice, “if, indeed, I hold out for the sticky little leaves, I shall love them only remembering you. It’s enough for me that you are here somewhere, and I shall not stop wanting to live. Is that enough for you? If you wish, you can take it as a declaration of love. And now you go right, I’ll go left—and enough, you hear, enough.[182] I mean, even if I don’t go away tomorrow (but it seems I certainly shall), and we somehow meet again, not another word to me on any of these subjects. An urgent request. And with regard to brother Dmitri, too, I ask you particularly, do not ever even mention him to me again,” he suddenly added irritably. “It’s all exhausted, it’s all talked out, isn’t it? And in return for that, I will also make you a promise: when I’m thirty and want ‘to smash the cup on the floor,’ then, wherever you may be, I will still come to talk things over with you once more ... even from America, I assure you. I will make a point of it. It will also be very interesting to have a look at you by then, to see what’s become of you. Rather a solemn promise, you see. And indeed, perhaps we’re saying goodbye for some seven or ten years. Well, go now to your Pater Seraphicus;[183] he’s dying, and if he dies without you, you may be angry with me for having kept you. Good-bye, kiss me once more—so—and now go...”
Ivan turned suddenly and went his way without looking back. It was similar to the way his brother Dmitri had left Alyosha the day before, though the day before it was something quite different. This strange little observation flashed like an arrow through the sad mind of Alyosha, sad and sorrowful at that moment. He waited a little, looking after his brother. For some reason he suddenly noticed that his brother Ivan somehow swayed as he walked, and that his right shoulder, seen from behind, appeared lower than his left. He had never noticed it before. But suddenly he, too, turned and almost ran to the monastery. It was already getting quite dark, and he felt almost frightened; something new was growing in him, which he would have been unable to explain. The wind rose again as it had yesterday, and the centuries-old pine trees rustled gloomily around him as he entered the hermitage woods. He was almost running. “Pater Seraphicus—he got that name from somewhere—but where?” flashed through Alyosha’s mind. “Ivan, poor Ivan, when shall I see you again ... ? Lord, here’s the hermitage! Yes, yes, that’s him, Pater Seraphicus, he will save me ... from him, and forever!”
Several times, later in his life, in great perplexity, he wondered how he could suddenly, after parting with his brother Ivan, so completely forget about his brother Dmitri, when he had resolved that morning, only a few hours earlier, that he must find him, and would not leave until he did, even if it meant not returning to the monastery that night.
Chapter 6:
