101 The Brothers Karamazovall relations with you from this moment and probably for
ever. I beg you to leave me at this turning. It’s the way to
your lodgings, too. You’d better be particularly careful not
to come to me to-day! Do you hear?’
He turned and walked on with a firm step, not looking
back.
‘Brother,’ Alyosha called after him, ‘if anything happens
to you to-day, turn to me before anyone!’
But Ivan made no reply. Alyosha stood under the lamp-
post at the cross roads, till Ivan had vanished into the
darkness. Then he turned and walked slowly homewards.
Both Alyosha and Ivan were living in lodgings; neither of
them was willing to live in Fyodor Pavlovitch’s empty house.
Alyosha had a furnished room in the house of some working
people. Ivan lived some distance from him. He had taken a
roomy and fairly comfortable lodge attached to a fine house
that belonged to a well-to-do lady, the widow of an official.
But his only attendant was a deaf and rheumatic old crone
who went to bed at six o’clock every evening and got up at
six in the morning. Ivan had become remarkably indiffer-
ent to his comforts of late, and very fond of being alone. He
did everything for himself in the one room he lived in, and
rarely entered any of the other rooms in his abode.
He reached the gate of the house and had his hand on
the bell, when he suddenly stopped. He felt that he was
trembling all over with anger. Suddenly he let go of the bell,
turned back with a curse, and walked with rapid steps in
the opposite direction. He walked a mile and a half to a
tiny, slanting, wooden house, almost a hut, where Marya