Page 1244 - the-brothers-karamazov

Chapter 12

And There Was No

Murder Either

LLOW me, gentlemen of the jury, to remind you that a
‘Aman’s life is at stake and that you must be careful. We
have heard the prosecutor himself admit that until to-day
he hesitated to accuse the prisoner of a full and conscious
premeditation of the crime; he hesitated till he saw that fa-
tal drunken letter which was produced in court to-day. ‘All
was done as written.’ But, I repeat again, he was running to
her, to seek her, solely to find out where she was. That’s a fact
that can’t be disputed. Had she been at home, he would not
have run away, but would have remained at her side, and so
would not have done what he promised in the letter. He ran
unexpectedly and accidentally, and by that time very likely
he did not even remember his drunken letter. ‘He snatched
up the pestle,’ they say, and you will remember how a whole
edifice of psychology was built on that pestle — why he was
bound to look at that pestle as a weapon, to snatch it up, and
so on, and so on. A very commonplace idea occurs to me at
this point: What if that pestle had not been in sight, had not

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