But that would only be in the case of the first, happy solution to the question. There was another solution; he imagined a different and terrible ending. She suddenly says to him: “Go, I’ve just reached an agreement with Fyodor Pavlovich and shall marry him, you’re no longer needed”—and then ... but then ... Incidentally, Mitya did not know what would happen then, until the very last hour he did not know, we must clear him of that. He had no definite intentions, the crime had not been thought out. He just watched, spied, and suffered, while preparing himself only for the first, happy ending to his fate. He even drove away all other thoughts. But here quite a different torment began, here arose a quite new and unrelated, but equally fatal and insoluble, circumstance.
Namely, if she should say to him: “I’m yours, take me away,” how was he to take her away? Where would he get the means, the money to do it? Just at that time he had exhausted all his income from Fyodor Pavlovich’s handouts, which until then had continued nonstop for so many years. Of course Grushenka had money, but on this point Mitya suddenly turned out to be terribly proud: he wanted to take her away himself, to start the new life with her on his own money, not on hers; he could not even imagine himself taking money from her and suffered at the thought to the point of painful revulsion. I will not enlarge upon this fact, or analyze it, I will only note that such was the cast of his soul at the moment. All of this might well have proceeded indirectly and unwittingly, as it were, from the secret suffering of his conscience over Katerina Ivanovna’s money, which he had thievishly appropriated: “I am a scoundrel before one woman, and I’ll prove at once to be a scoundrel before the other,” he thought then, as he himself confessed later, “and Grushenka, if she finds out, will not want such a scoundrel.” And so, where to find the means, where to find this fatal money? Otherwise all was lost, and nothing would happen, “for the sole reason that there wasn’t enough money—oh, shame!”
To anticipate: the thing was that he perhaps knew where to get the money, he perhaps knew where it lay. I will not go into details just now, as it will all become clear later; but what his main trouble consisted of, I will say, albeit vaguely: in order to take this money that was lying somewhere, in order to have the right to take it, it was necessary beforehand to return the three thousand to Katerina Ivanovna—otherwise, “I am a pickpocket, I am a scoundrel, and I do not want to begin a new life as a scoundrel,” Mitya decided, and therefore he decided to turn the whole world upside down, if need be, but to be sure to return the three thousand to Katerina Ivanovna at all costs and before all else. The final working out of this decision took place in him, so to speak, in the last hours of his life—that is, starting from his last meeting with Alyosha, two days before, in the evening, on the road, after Grushenka had insulted Katerina Ivanovna, and Mitya, having listened to Alyosha’s account of it, admitted that he was a scoundrel and asked that Katerina Ivanovna be told so “if it’s any comfort to her.” Right then, that night, after parting with his brother, he had felt in his frenzy that it would be better even “to kill and rob someone, but repay his debt to Katya.” “Better to stand as a murderer and a thief before that robbed and murdered man and before everyone, and go to Siberia, than that Katya should have the right to say I betrayed her and then stole money from her, and with that money ran away with Grushenka to start a virtuous life! That I cannot do!” Thus spoke Mitya, gnashing his teeth, and he might well have imagined at times that he would end up with brain fever. But meanwhile he went on struggling . . .
