1 0 The Brothers Karamazovshirt, I sewed it up in one of my landlady’s caps.’ ‘What sort
of a cap?’ ‘It was an old cotton rag of hers lying about.’ ‘And
do you remember that clearly?’ ‘No, I don’t.’ And he was
angry, very angry, and yet imagine not remembering it! At
the most terrible moments of man’s life, for instance when
he is being led to execution, he remembers just such trifles.
He will forget anything but some green roof that has flashed
past him on the road, or a jackdaw on a cross — that he
will remember. He concealed the making of that little bag
from his household, he must have remembered his humili-
ating fear that someone might come in and find him needle
in hand, how at the slightest sound he slipped behind the
screen (there is a screen in his lodgings).
‘But, gentlemen of the jury, why do I tell you all this, all
these details, trifles?’ cried Ippolit Kirillovitch suddenly.
‘Just because the prisoner still persists in these absurdities
to this moment. He has not explained anything since that
fatal night two months ago, he has not added one actual il-
luminating fact to his former fantastic statements; all those
are trivialities. ‘You must believe it on my honour.’ Oh, we
are glad to believe it, we are eager to believe it, even if only
on his word of honour! Are we jackals thirsting for human
blood? Show us a single fact in the prisoner’s favour and
we shall rejoice; but let it be a substantial, real fact, and not
a conclusion drawn from the prisoner’s expression by his
own brother, or that when he beat himself on the breast he
must have meant to point to the little bag, in the darkness,
too. We shall rejoice at the new fact, we shall be the first to
repudiate our charge, we shall hasten to repudiate it. But