Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 10 ‘He’ll end in madness,’ the young doctor Varvinsky ob-
served about him, and Ivan remembered this. During the
last week of that month Ivan himself began to feel very ill.
He went to consult the Moscow doctor who had been sent
for by Katerina Ivanovna just before the trial. And just at
that time his relations with Katerina Ivanovna became
acutely strained. They were like two enemies in love with
one another. Katerina Ivanovna’s ‘returns’ to Mitya, that
is, her brief but violent revulsions of feeling in his favour,
drove Ivan to perfect frenzy. Strange to say, until that last
scene described above, when Alyosha came from Mitya to
Katerina Ivanovna, Ivan had never once, during that month,
heard her express a doubt of Mitya’s guilt, in spite of those
‘returns’ that were so hateful to him. It is remarkable, too,
that while he felt that he hated Mitya more and more every
day, he realised that it was not on account of Katya’s ‘returns’
that he hated him, but just because he was the murderer of
his father. He was conscious of this and fully recognised it
to himself
Nevertheless, he went to see Mitya ten days before the
trial and proposed to him a plan of escape — a plan he had
obviously thought over a long time. He was partly impelled
to do this by a sore place still left in his heart from a phrase
of Smerdyakov’s, that it was to his, Ivan’s, advantage that
his brother should be convicted, as that would increase
his inheritance and Alyosha’s from forty to sixty thousand
roubles. He determined to sacrifice thirty thousand on ar-
ranging Mitya’s escape. On his return from seeing him, he
was very mournful and dispirited; he suddenly began to feel