He woke up terribly late. It was already approximately nine o’clock in the morning. The sun was shining brightly through the two windows of the hut. The curly-headed peasant of the night before was sitting on a bench, already dressed in his long-waisted coat. Before him stood a fresh samovar and a fresh quart bottle. The old one from the day before was empty, and the new one was more than half gone. Mitya jumped up and instantly realized that the cursed peasant was drunk again, deeply and irretrievably drunk. He stared wide-eyed at him for a moment. The peasant kept glancing at him silently and slyly, with a sort of offensive composure, even with a sort of derisive haughtiness, as Mitya fancied. He rushed up to him.
“Allow me, you see ... I ... you’ve probably heard from the forester there in the other room: I am Lieutenant Dmitri Karamazov, old Karamazov’s son, from whom you are buying a woodlot. . .”
“That’s a lie!” the peasant suddenly rapped out firmly and calmly.
“A lie? If you please, you do know Fyodor Pavlovich?”
“I don’t please to know any Fyodor Pavlovich of yours,” the peasant said, moving his tongue somehow heavily.
“A woodlot, you’re buying a woodlot from him; wake up, come to your senses! Father Pavel llyinsky brought me here ... You wrote to Samsonov, and he sent me to you ... ,” Mitya spoke breathlessly.
“A l-lie!” Lyagavy again rapped out.
Mitya’s legs went cold.
“For pity’s sake, this isn’t a joke! You’re a bit drunk, perhaps. But anyway you can speak, you can understand ... otherwise ... otherwise I don’t understand anything!”
“You’re a dyer!”
“For pity’s sake, I’m Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov, I have an offer to make you ... a profitable offer ... quite profitable ... about that same wood-lot.”
The peasant was stroking his beard solemnly.
“No, you contracted for the job and turned out to be a cheat. You’re a cheat!”
“You’re mistaken, I assure you!” Mitya was wringing his hands in despair. The peasant kept stroking his beard and suddenly narrowed his eyes slyly.
“No, you show me one thing: show me where there’s a law that allows people to play dirty tricks, do you hear? You’re a cheat, understand?”
Mitya glumly stepped back, and suddenly it was as though “something hit him on the head,” as he himself put it later. In an instant a sort of illumination came to him, “a light shone and I perceived everything.” He stood dumbfounded, wondering how he, an intelligent man after all, could have given in to such foolishness, could have been sucked into such an adventure, and kept on with it all for nearly a whole day and night, worrying over this Lyagavy, wetting his head ... “Well, the man is drunk, drunk out of his mind, and he’ll go on drinking for another week—what is there to wait for? And what if Samsonov sent me here on purpose? And what if she ... Oh, God, what have I done . . .!”
The peasant sat watching him and chuckled. On another occasion Mitya might have killed the fool in a rage, but now he himself became weak as a child. He quietly walked over to the bench, took his coat, silently put it on, and went out of the room. He did not find the forester in the other room; no one was there. He took fifty kopecks in change from his pocket and put it on the table, for the night’s lodging, the candle, and the trouble. Stepping out of the hut, he saw nothing but forest all around. He walked at random, not even remembering whether to turn right or left from the hut; hurrying there with the priest the night before, he had not noticed the way. There was no vengeance in his soul for anyone, not even Samsonov. He strode along a narrow forest path, senselessly, lost, with his “lost idea,” not caring where he was going. A passing child might have knocked him down, so strengthless had he suddenly become in soul and body. Somehow he nevertheless got out of the forest: suddenly before him spread a boundless expanse of bare, harvested fields. “What despair, what death all around!” he kept saying as he strode on and on.
