10 The Brothers Karamazov
when Smerdyakov could have committed his crime? Name
that moment, or you can’t accuse him.
‘But, perhaps, the fit was a real one, the sick man sud-
denly recovered, heard a shout, and went out. Well — what
then? He looked about him and said, ‘Why not go and kill
the master?’ And how did he know what had happened,
since he had been lying unconscious till that moment? But
there’s a limit to these flights of fancy.
‘Quite so,’ some astute people will tell me, ‘but what if
they were in agreement? What if they murdered him to-
gether and shared the money — what then?’ A weighty
question, truly! And the facts to confirm it are astounding.
One commits the murder and takes all the trouble while
his accomplice lies on one side shamming a fit, apparently
to arouse suspicion in everyone, alarm in his master and
alarm in Grigory. It would be interesting to know what mo-
tives could have induced the two accomplices to form such
an insane plan.
‘But perhaps it was not a case of active complicity on
Smerdyakov’s part, but only of passive acquiescence; per-
haps Smerdyakov was intimidated and agreed not to prevent
the murder, and foreseeing that he would be blamed for let-
ting his master be murdered, without screaming for help
or resisting, he may have obtained permission from Dmitri
Karamazov to get out of the way by shamming a fit — ‘you
may murder him as you like; it’s nothing to me.’ But as this
attack of Smerdyakov’s was bound to throw the household
into confusion, Dmitri Karamazov could never have agreed
to such a plan. I will waive that point however. Supposing