The Brothers Karamazovis true he had not yet seen him.
‘Here there was no room for dispute: it was her right and
his; this was her first love which, after five years, she had
not forgotten; so she had loved him only for those five years,
and I, how do I come in? What right have I? Step aside,
Mitya, and make way! What am I now? Now everything is
over apart from the officer even if he had not appeared, ev-
erything would be over..’
These words would roughly have expressed his feelings,
if he had been capable of reasoning. But he could not reason
at that moment. His present plan of action had arisen with-
out reasoning. At Fenya’s first words, it had sprung from
feeling, and been adopted in a flash, with all its consequenc-
es. And yet, in spite of his resolution, there was confusion in
his soul, an agonising confusion: his resolution did not give
him peace. There was so much behind that tortured him.
And it seemed strange to him, at moments, to think that he
had written his own sentence of death with pen and paper:
‘I punish myself,’ and the paper was lying there in his pock-
et, ready; the pistol was loaded; he had already resolved how,
next morning, he would meet the first warm ray of ‘golden-
haired Phoebus.’
And yet he could not be quit of the past, of all that he had
left behind and that tortured him. He felt that miserably,
and the thought of it sank into his heart with despair. There
was one moment when he felt an impulse to stop Andrey,
to jump out of the cart, to pull out his loaded pistol, and to
make an end of everything without waiting for the dawn.
But that moment flew by like a spark. The horses galloped