“You’re lying,” roared Mitya. “I can see by how scared you are, you know where she is...!”
He dashed out. The frightened Fenya was glad to have gotten off so easily, but she knew very well that he simply had no time, otherwise it would have gone badly for her. But as he ran out, he still surprised both Fenya and old Matryona by a most unexpected act: on the table stood a brass mortar with a pestle in it, a small brass pestle, only seven inches long. As he was running out, having already opened the door with one hand, Mitya suddenly, without stopping, snatched the pestle from the mortar with his other hand, shoved it into his side pocket, and made off with it.
“Oh, Lord,” Fenya clasped her hands, “he’ll kill somebody!”
Chapter 4:
Where did he run to? But of course: “Where could she be if not with Fyodor Pavlovich? She ran straight to him from Samsonov’s, it’s all clear now. The whole intrigue, the whole deception is obvious now . . .” All this flew like a whirlwind through his head. He did not even run over to Maria Kondratievna’s yard: “No need to go there, no need at all ... mustn’t cause any alarm ... they’ll all play and betray at once ... Maria Kondratievna is obviously in on the conspiracy, Smerdyakov, too, they’ve all been bought!” A different plan took shape in him: he ran down a lane, making a long detour around Fyodor Pavlovich’s house, ran along Dmitrovsky Street, then ran across the footbridge, and came straight to the solitary back lane, empty and uninhabited, bordered on one side by the wattle fence of the neighbor’s garden, and on the other by the strong, high fence surrounding Fyodor Pavlovich’s garden. There he chose a spot that seemed, according to the story he had heard, to be the same spot where Stinking Lizaveta had once climbed over the fence. “If she could climb over,” the thought flashed, God knows why, through his head, “surely I can climb over.” He jumped, and indeed managed at once to grasp the top of the fence with his hands, then he pulled himself up energetically, climbed right to the top, and sat astride the fence. There was a little bathhouse nearby in the garden, but from the fence the lighted windows of the house could also be seen. “Just as I thought, there’s a light in the old man’s bedroom—she’s there!” and he jumped down from the fence into the garden. Though he knew that Grigory was sick, and that Smerdyakov, perhaps, was indeed sick as well, and that there was no one to hear him, he instinctively hid himself, stood stock still, and began listening. But there was dead silence and, as if on purpose, complete stillness, not a breath of wind.
“And naught but the silence whispers,”[240] the little verse for some reason flashed through his head, “that is, if no one heard me jump over; and it seems no one did.” Having paused for a minute, he quietly walked across the garden, over the grass; he walked for a long time, skirting the trees and bushes, concealing each step, listening himself to each of his own steps. It took him about five minutes to reach the lighted window. He remembered that there, right under the window, there were several large, high, thick bushes of elder and snowball. The door from the house into the garden on the left side of the house was locked—he purposely and carefully checked it as he passed by. At last he reached the bushes and hid behind them. He held his breath. “I must wait now,” he thought, “till they reassure themselves, in case they heard my footsteps and are listening ... if only I don’t cough, or sneeze...”
