The Brothers Karamazov | Page 4

from his father. Fyodor Pavlovitch remarked for the first time then (this,
too, should be noted) that Mitya had a vague and exaggerated idea of
his property. Fyodor Pavlovitch was very well satisfied with this, as it
fell in with his own designs. He gathered only that the young man was
frivolous, unruly, of violent passions, impatient, and dissipated, and
that if he could only obtain ready money he would be satisfied,
although only, of course, a short time. So Fyodor Pavlovitch began to
take advantage of this fact, sending him from time to time small doles,
instalments. In the end, when four years later, Mitya, losing patience,
came a second time to our little town to settle up once for all with his
father, it turned out to his amazement that he had nothing, that it was
difficult to get an account even, that he had received the whole value of
his property in sums of money from Fyodor Pavlovitch, and was
perhaps even in debt to him, that by various agreements into which he
had, of his own desire, entered at various previous dates, he had no
right to expect anything more, and so on, and so on. The young man
was overwhelmed, suspected deceit and cheating, and was almost
beside himself. And, indeed, this circumstance led to the catastrophe,
the account of which forms the subject of my first introductory story, or
rather the external side of it. But before I pass to that story I must say a
little of Fyodor Pavlovitch's other two sons, and of their origin.

Chapter 3
The Second Marriage and the Second Family
VERY shortly after getting his four-year-old Mitya off his hands
Fyodor Pavlovitch married a second time. His second marriage lasted
eight years. He took this second wife, Sofya Ivanovna, also a very
young girl, from another province, where he had gone upon some small
piece of business in company with a Jew. Though Fyodor Pavlovitch
was a drunkard and a vicious debauchee he never neglected investing
his capital, and managed his business affairs very successfully, though,
no doubt, not over-scrupulously. Sofya Ivanovna was the daughter of
an obscure deacon, and was left from childhood an orphan without
relations. She grew up in the house of a general's widow, a wealthy old
lady of good position, who was at once her benefactress and tormentor.
I do not know the details, but I have only heard that the orphan girl, a
meek and gentle creature, was once cut down from a halter in which
she was hanging from a nail in the loft, so terrible were her sufferings
from the caprice and everlasting nagging of this old woman, who was
apparently not bad-hearted but had become an insufferable tyrant
through idleness.
Fyodor Pavlovitch made her an offer; inquiries were made about him
and he was refused. But again, as in his first marriage, he proposed an
elopement to the orphan girl. There is very little doubt that she would
not on any account have married him if she had known a little more
about him in time. But she lived in another province; besides, what
could a little girl of sixteen know about it, except that she would be
better at the bottom of the river than remaining with her benefactress.
So the poor child exchanged a benefactress for a benefactor. Fyodor
Pavlovitch did not get a penny this time, for the general's widow was
furious. She gave them nothing and cursed them both. But he had not
reckoned on a dowry; what allured him was the remarkable beauty of
the innocent girl, above all her innocent appearance, which had a
peculiar attraction for a vicious profligate, who had hitherto admired
only the coarser types of feminine beauty.

"Those innocent eyes slit my soul up like a razor," he used to say
afterwards, with his loathsome snigger. In a man so depraved this
might, of course, mean no more than sensual attraction. As he had
received no dowry with his wife, and had, so to speak, taken her "from
the halter," he did not stand on ceremony with her. Making her feel that
she had "wronged" him, he took advantage of her phenomenal
meekness and submissiveness to trample on the elementary decencies
of marriage. He gathered loose women into his house, and carried on
orgies of debauchery in his wife's presence. To show what a pass things
had come to, I may mention that Grigory, the gloomy, stupid, obstinate,
argumentative servant, who had always hated his first mistress,
Adelaida Ivanovna, took the side of his new mistress. He championed
her cause, abusing Fyodor Pavlovitch in a manner little befitting a
servant, and on one occasion broke up the revels and drove all the
disorderly women out of the house. In the end