Jealousy!”Othello is not jealous, he is trustful,” Pushkin observed,[236] and this one observation already testifies to the remarkable depth of our great poet’s mind. Othello’s soul is simply shattered and his whole world view clouded because his ideal is destroyed. Othello will not hide, spy, peep: he is trustful. On the contrary, he had to be led, prompted, roused with great effort to make him even think of betrayal. A truly jealous man is not like that. It is impossible to imagine all the shame and moral degradation a jealous man can tolerate without the least remorse. And it is not that they are all trite and dirty souls. On the contrary, it is possible to have a lofty heart, to love purely, to be full of self-sacrifice, and at the same time to hide under tables, to bribe the meanest people, and live with the nastiest filth of spying and eavesdropping. Othello could in no way be reconciled with betrayal—not that he could not forgive, but he could not be reconciled—though his soul was gentle and innocent as a babe’s. Not so the truly jealous man: it is hard to imagine what some jealous men can tolerate and be reconciled to, and what they can forgive! Jealous men forgive sooner than anyone else, and all women know it. The jealous man (having first made a terrible scene, of course) can and will very promptly forgive, for example, a nearly proven betrayal, the embraces and kisses he has seen himself, if, for example, at the same time he can somehow be convinced that this was “the last time” and that his rival will disappear from that moment on, that he will go to the end of the earth, or that he himself will take her away somewhere, to some place where this terrible rival will never come. Of course, the reconciliation will only last an hour, because even if the rival has indeed disappeared, tomorrow he will invent another, a new one, and become jealous of this new one. And one may ask what is the good of a love that must constantly be spied on, and what is the worth of a love that needs to be guarded so intensely? But that is something the truly jealous will never understand, though at the same time there happen, indeed, to be lofty hearts among them. It is also remarkable that these same lofty-hearted men, while standing in some sort of closet, eavesdropping and spying, though they understand clearly “in their lofty hearts” all the shame they have gotten into of their own will, nevertheless, at least for that moment, while standing in that closet, will not feel any pangs of remorse. Mitya’s jealousy disappeared at the sight of Grushenka, and for a moment he became trustful and noble, and even despised himself for his bad feelings. But this meant only that his love for this woman consisted in something much higher than he himself supposed and not in passion alone, not merely in that “curve of the body” he had explained to Alyosha. But when Grushenka disappeared, Mitya at once began again to suspect in her all the baseness and perfidy of betrayal. And for that he felt no pangs of remorse.
And so jealousy was again seething in him. He had to hurry in any case. First of all he needed at least a little money to get by on. The previous day’s nine roubles had been almost entirely spent on the trip, and without money, as everyone knows, one cannot take a step. But that morning, in the wagon, along with his new plan, he had also thought of how to find some money to get by on. He had a pair of fine dueling pistols with cartridges, and if he had not pawned them yet, it was because he loved them more than anything else he owned. Some time before, in the “Metropolis,” he had struck up a slight acquaintance with a certain young official and had learned somehow, also in the tavern, that this official, a bachelor of no small means, had a passion for weapons, bought pistols, revolvers, daggers, hung them on the wall, showed them to his acquaintances, boasted of them, was expert at explaining the workings of the revolver, loading, firing, and so on. Without thinking twice, Mitya went straight to him and offered to pawn the pistols to him for ten roubles. The delighted official tried to persuade him to sell them outright, but Mitya would not agree, so the man handed him ten roubles, declaring that he would not think of accepting any interest. They parted friends. Mitya was in a hurry; he raced off to behind Fyodor Pavlovich’s, to his gazebo, in order to send quickly for Smerdyakov. In this way, again, the fact emerged that only three or four hours before a certain incident, of which I shall speak below, Mitya did not have a kopeck, and pawned his dearest possession for ten roubles, whereas three hours later he suddenly had thousands in his hands ... But I anticipate.
