“It’s hard for you, woman!” suddenly escaped somehow quite unrestrainably from Mitya.
“Let me go,” she whispered, “I’ll come again, it’s hard now...!”
She got up from her place, but suddenly gave a loud cry and drew back. All at once, though very quietly, Grushenka came into the room. No one was expecting her. Katya stepped swiftly towards the door, but, coming up with Grushenka, she suddenly stopped, turned white as chalk, and softly, almost in a whisper, moaned to her:
“Forgive me!”
The other woman stared her in the face and, pausing for a moment, answered in a venomous voice, poisoned with wickedness:
“We are wicked, sister, you and I! We’re both wicked! It’s not for us to forgive! Save him, and I’ll pray to you all my life.”
“You don’t want to forgive!” Mitya cried to Grushenka with wild reproach.
“Don’t worry, I’ll save him for you!” Katya whispered quickly, and she ran out of the room.
“But how could you not forgive her, after she herself said ‘Forgive me’ to you?” Mitya again exclaimed bitterly.
“Mitya, do not dare to reproach her, you have no right!” Alyosha shouted hotly at his brother.
“It was her proud lips speaking, not her heart,” Grushenka said with a sort of loathing. “If she delivers you—I’ll forgive everything...”
She fell silent, as if she had quelled something in her soul. She still could not recover herself. She had come in, as it turned out later, quite by chance, suspecting nothing, and not at all expecting to meet what she met.
“Alyosha, run after her!” Mitya turned swiftly to his brother, “tell her ... I don’t know what ... don’t let her go away like that!”
“I’ll come to you before evening!” cried Alyosha, and he ran after Katya. He caught up with her outside the hospital gate. She was walking briskly, hurrying, but as soon as Alyosha caught up with her, she quickly said to him:
“No, I cannot punish myself before that one! I said ‘forgive me’ to her because I wanted to punish myself to the end. She did not forgive ... I love her for that!” Katya added in a distorted voice, and her eyes flashed with savage wickedness.
“My brother did not expect her at all,” Alyosha began muttering, “he was sure she would not come ...”
“No doubt. Let’s drop it,” she cut him short. “Listen: I can’t go with you to the funeral now. I sent them flowers for the coffin. They still have money, I think. If need be, tell them that in the future I shall never abandon them ... Well, leave me now, please leave me. You’re late going there as it is, they’re already ringing for the late service ... Leave me, please!”
Chapter 3: Ilyushechka’s Funeral. The Speech at the Stone
Indeed, he was late. They had waited for him and even decided finally to carry the pretty little coffin, all decked with flowers, to the church without him. It was the coffin of the poor little boy Ilyushechka. He had died two days after Mitya was sentenced. At the gate of the house Alyosha was met by the shouts of the boys, Ilyusha’s comrades. They had been waiting impatiently for him and were glad that he had come at last. There were about twelve boys altogether, all with their satchels and shoulder bags. “Papa will cry, be with papa,” was Ilyusha’s dying wish, and the boys remembered it. At their head was Kolya Krasotkin.
“I’m so glad you’ve come, Karamazov!” he exclaimed, holding out his hand to Alyosha. “It’s terrible here. Really, it’s hard to watch. Snegiryov is not drunk, we know for certain he’s had nothing to drink today, but it’s as if he were drunk ... I’m a strong man, but this is terrible. Karamazov, if I’m not keeping you, one more question, may I, before you go in?”
“What is it, Kolya?” Alyosha stopped for a moment.
“Is your brother innocent or guilty? Was it he who killed your father, or was it the lackey? As you say, so it will be. I’ve lost four nights’ sleep over this idea.”
“The lackey killed him, my brother is innocent,” Alyosha replied.
“That’s just what I say!” the boy Smurov suddenly cried.
“Thus he will perish an innocent victim for truth!” exclaimed Kolya.”But though he perish, he is happy! I am ready to envy him!”
“What do you mean? How can you be? And why?” exclaimed the surprised Alyosha.
“Oh, if only I, too, could some day offer myself as a sacrifice for truth!” Kolya said with enthusiasm.
“But not for such a cause, not with such disgrace, not with such horror!” said Alyosha. “Of course ... I should like to die for all mankind, and as for disgrace, it makes no difference: let our names perish. I respect your brother!”
“And so do I!” another boy suddenly and quite unexpectedly called out from the crowd, the same boy who had once announced that he knew who had founded Troy, and, just as he had done then, having called it out, he blushed up to his ears like a peony.
Alyosha went into the room. In a blue coffin decorated with white lace, his hands folded and his eyes closed, lay Ilyusha. The features of his emaciated face were hardly changed at all, and, strangely, there was almost no smell from the corpse. The expression of his face was serious and, as it were, pensive. His hands, folded crosswise, were especially beautiful, as if carved from marble. Flowers had been placed in his hands, and the whole coffin was adorned inside and out with flowers, sent at daybreak from Liza Khokhlakov. But flowers had also come from Katerina Ivanovna, and, as Alyosha opened the door, the captain, with a bunch of flowers in his trembling hands, was again strewing them over his dear boy. He barely glanced at Alyosha when he came in, nor did he want to look at anyone, not even at his mad, weeping wife, his “mama,” who kept trying to stand up on her bad legs and have a closer look at her dead boy. But Ninochka had been picked up in her chair by the children and moved close to the coffin. She was sitting with her head pressed to it, and must also have been quietly weeping. Snegiryov’s face looked animated but, as it were, bewildered, and at the same time embittered. There was something half crazed in his gestures, in the words that kept bursting from him. “Dear fellow, dear old fellow!” he exclaimed every moment, looking at Ilyusha. He had had the habit, when Ilyusha was still alive, of calling him tenderly: “Dear fellow, dear old fellow!”
“Papa, give me flowers, too, take one from his hands, that white one, and give it to me!” the mad “mama” asked, sobbing. Either she liked the little white rose in Ilyusha’s hand very much, or else she wanted to take a flower from his hands as a keepsake, for she began tossing about, reaching out for the flower.
“I’m not giving anything, not to anybody!” Snegiryov exclaimed hard-heartedly. “They’re his flowers, not yours. It’s all his, nothing’s yours!”
“Papa, give mother the flower!” Ninochka suddenly raised her face, wet with tears.
“I won’t give anything, to her least of all! She didn’t love him. She took his little cannon away from him that time, and he ... gave it to her,” the captain suddenly sobbed loudly, remembering how Ilyusha had let his mother have the little cannon. The poor, mad woman simply dissolved in quiet tears, covering her face with her hands. Finally, seeing that the father would not let the coffin go from him, but that it was time to carry it out, the boys suddenly crowded around the coffin and began to lift it up.
“I don’t want him buried in the churchyard!” Snegiryov suddenly cried out. “I’ll bury him by the stone, by our stone! Ilyusha told me to! I won’t let you take him!”
Previously, too, over the past three days, he had been saying that he would bury him by the stone; but Alyosha, Krasotkin, the landlady, her sister, all the boys intervened.
“What an idea, to bury him by some heathenish stone, like some hanged man,” the old landlady said sternly. “The ground in the churchyard has the cross on it. They’ll pray for him there. You can hear singing from the church there, and the deacon is so clean-spoken and literal when he reads, it will all reach him every time, as if they were reading right over his grave.”
The captain finally waved his hands as if to say: “Take him wherever you like!” The children picked up the coffin, but as they carried it past his mother, they stopped in front of her for a moment and set it down, so that she could say her farewells to Ilyusha. But, suddenly looking so closely at that dear little face, which for the past three days she had only seen from a distance, she began suddenly shaking all over, wagging her gray head back and forth hysterically above the coffin.