Page 1217 - the-brothers-karamazov

and he looks at you with questioning and suffering eyes,
studies you, your face, your thoughts, uncertain on which
side you will strike, and his distracted mind frames thou-
sands of plans in an instant, but he is still afraid to speak,
afraid of giving himself away! This purgatory of the spirit,
this animal thirst for self-preservation, these humiliating
moments of the human soul, are awful, and sometimes
arouse horror and compassion for the criminal even in the
lawyer. And this was what we all witnessed then.
‘At first he was thunderstruck and in his terror dropped
some very compromising phrases. ‘Blood! I’ve deserved
it!’ But he quickly restrained himself. He had not prepared
what he was to say, what answer he was to make, he had
nothing but a bare denial ready. ‘I am not guilty of my fa-
ther’s death.’ That was his fence for the moment and behind
it he hoped to throw up a barricade of some sort. His first
compromising exclamations he hastened to explain by de-
claring that he was responsible for the death of the servant
Grigory only. ‘Of that bloodshed I am guilty, but who has
killed my father, gentlemen, who has killed him? Who can
have killed him, if not I?’ Do you hear, he asked us that,
us, who had come to ask him that question! Do you hear
that uttered with such premature haste — ‘if not I’ — the
animal cunning, the naivete the Karamazov impatience of
it? ‘I didn’t kill him and you mustn’t think I did! I wanted
to kill him, gentlemen, I wanted to kill him,’ he hastens to
admit (he was in a hurry, in a terrible hurry), ‘but still I am
not guilty, it is not I murdered him.’ He concedes to us that
he wanted to murder him, as though to say, you can see for

1 1 The Brothers Karamazov