Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11planned no crime. He was simply watching and spying in
agony, while he prepared himself for the first, happy solu-
tion of his destiny. He drove away any other idea, in fact.
But for that ending a quite different anxiety arose, a new,
incidental, but yet fatal and insoluble difficulty presented
itself.
If she were to say to him: ‘I’m yours; take me away,’ how
could he take her away? Where had he the means, the mon-
ey to do it? It was just at this time that all sources of revenue
from Fyodor Pavlovitch, doles which had gone on without
interruption for so many years, ceased. Grushenka had
money, of course, but with regard to this Mitya suddenly
evinced extraordinary pride; he wanted to carry her away
and begin the new life with her himself, at his own expense,
not at hers. He could not conceive of taking her money,
and the very idea caused him a pang of intense repulsion. I
won’t enlarge on this fact or analyse it here, but confine my-
self to remarking that this was his attitude at the moment.
All this may have arisen indirectly and unconsciously from
the secret stings of his conscience for the money of Katerina
Ivanovna that he had dishonestly appropriated. ‘I’ve been a
scoundrel to one of them, and I shall be a scoundrel again
to the other directly,’ was his feeling then, as he explained
after: ‘and when Grushenka knows, she won’t care for such
a scoundrel.’
Where then was he to get the means, where was he to get
the fateful money? Without it, all would be lost and noth-
ing could be done, ‘and only because I hadn’t the money.
Oh, the shame of it!’