“Why won’t you go to Chermashnya, sir?” Smerdyakov suddenly glanced up and smiled familiarly. “And why I’m smiling, you yourself should understand, if you’re an intelligent man,” his squinting left eye seemed to say.
“Why should I go to Chermashnya?” Ivan Fyodorovich said in surprise.
Smerdyakov paused again.
“Even Fyodor Pavlovich himself has begged you so to do it, sir,” he said at last, unhurriedly and as if he attached no value to his answer: I’m getting off with a third-rate explanation, just so as to say something.
“What the devil do you want? Speak more clearly!” Ivan Fyodorovich cried at last angrily, passing from humility to rudeness.
Smerdyakov put his right foot together with his left, straightened up, but continued looking at him with the same calmness and the same little smile.
“Essentially nothing, sir ... just making conversation...”
There was another pause. They were silent for about a minute. Ivan Fyodorovich knew that now he ought to rise up and be angry, and Smerdyakov stood in front of him as if he were waiting: “Now we’ll see whether you get angry or not.” So at least it seemed to Ivan Fyodorovich. At last he swung forward in order to get up. Smerdyakov caught the moment precisely.
“My position, sir, is terrible, Ivan Fyodorovich, I don’t even know how to help myself,” he suddenly said firmly and distinctly, with a sigh on the last word. Ivan Fyodorovich at once sat down again.
“They’re both quite crazy, sir, they’ve both gone as far as childishness, sir,” Smerdyakov went on. “I mean your father and your brother, sir, Dmitri Fyodorovich. He’ll get up now, Fyodor Pavlovich will, and begin pestering me every minute: ‘Why hasn’t she come? How is it she hasn’t come? ‘ and it will go on until midnight, even past midnight. And if Agrafena Alexandrovna doesn’t come (because she may have no intention of ever coming at all, sir), then he’ll jump on me again tomorrow morning: ‘Why didn’t she come? Tell me why, and when will she come?’—just as if I stood to blame for that all before him. On the other hand, there’s this matter, sir, that just as soon as it turns dusk, and even before, your good brother arrives at our neighbors’, with a weapon in his hands. ‘Listen, you rogue, you broth-maker,’ he says, ‘if you miss her and don’t let me know when she comes—I’ll kill you first of all.’ The night goes by, and in the morning, he, too, like Fyodor Pavlovich, starts tormenting me with his torments: ‘Why didn’t she come? Will she be here soon?’ and again it’s as if I stood to blame before him, sir, because his lady didn’t come. And both of them, sir, keep getting angrier and angrier with every day and every hour, so that I sometimes think of taking my own life, sir, from fear. I can’t trust them, sir.”
“And why did you get mixed up in it? Why did you begin carrying tales to Dmitri Fyodorovich?” Ivan Fyodorovich said irritably.
“How could I not get mixed up in it, sir? And I didn’t get mixed up in it at all, if you want to know with complete exactitude, sir. I kept quiet from the very beginning, I was afraid to object, and the gentleman himself appointed me to be his servant Licharda.[185] And since then all he says to me is: ‘I’ll kill you, you rogue, if you miss her!’ I suppose for certain, sir, that a long attack of the falling sickness will come on me tomorrow.”
“What do you mean, a long attack?”
“A long sort of attack, sir, extremely long. Several hours, sir, maybe even a day or two. Once it went on for three days, I fell out of the attic that time. It would stop shaking me, and then it would start again; and for all three days I couldn’t get into my right mind. Fyodor Pavlovich sent for Herzenstube, the local doctor, sir, and he put ice on my head and used some other remedy. . . I could have died, sir.”
“But they say that with the falling sickness you can’t know beforehand that an attack will come at such and such a time. What makes you say you’ll have one tomorrow?” Ivan Fyodorovich inquired with peculiar and irritable curiosity.
“That’s right, sir, you can’t know beforehand.”
“Besides, you fell from the attic that time.”
“I climb up to the attic every day, sir. I could fall from the attic tomorrow, too. Or if not from the attic, then I might fall into the cellar, sir, I go to the cellar every day, too, with my duties, sir.”
Ivan Fyodorovich gave him a long look.
“I see, you’re just driveling, and I’m afraid I don’t understand you,” he said softly but somehow menacingly. “You mean you’re going to pretend to have a three-day attack of the falling sickness tomorrow, eh?”
Smerdyakov, who was staring at the ground and again playing with his right toe, moved his right foot back, put his left foot forward instead, raised his eyes, and, smirking, said:
