Page 1241 - the-brothers-karamazov

strikes him on the other side. And on the other side is love
that new love which had flamed up in his heart, and for that
love he needed money; oh, far more than for carousing with
his mistress. If she were to say to him, ‘I am yours, I won’t
have Fyodor Pavlovitch,’ then he must have money to take
her away. That was more important than carousing. Could a
Karamazov fail to understand it? That anxiety was just what
he was suffering from — what is there improbable in his
laying aside that money and concealing it in case of emer-
gency?
‘But time passed, and Fyodor Pavlovitch did not give the
prisoner the expected three thousand; on the contrary, the
latter heard that he meant to use this sum to seduce the
woman he, the prisoner, loved. ‘If Fyodor Pavlovitch doesn’t
give the money,’ he thought, ‘I shall be put in the position
of a thief before Katerina Ivanovna.’ And then the idea pre-
sented itself to him that he would go to Katerina Ivanovna,
lay before her the fifteen hundred roubles he still carried
round his neck, and say, ‘I am a scoundrel, but not a thief.’
So here we have already a twofold reason why he should
guard that sum of money as the apple of his eye, why he
shouldn’t unpick the little bag, and spend it a hundred at a
time. Why should you deny the prisoner a sense of honour?
Yes, he has a sense of honour, granted that it’s misplaced,
granted it’s often mistaken, yet it exists and amounts to a
passion, and he has proved that.
‘But now the affair becomes even more complex; his jeal-
ous torments reach a climax, and those same two questions
torture his fevered brain more and more: ‘If I repay Kat-

1 0 The Brothers Karamazov