10 The Brothers Karamazovthat he was anxious for Mitya’s escape, not only to heal that
sore place by sacrificing thirty thousand, but for another
reason. ‘Is it because I am as much a murderer at heart?’ he
asked himself. Something very deep down seemed burning
and rankling in his soul. His pride above all suffered cruelly
all that month. But of that later....
When, after his conversation with Alyosha, Ivan sudden-
ly decided with his hand on the bell of his lodging to go to
Smerdyakov, he obeyed a sudden and peculiar impulse of
indignation. He suddenly remembered how Katerina Iva-
novna had only just cried out to him in Alyosha’s presence:
‘It was you, you, persuaded me of his’ (that is, Mitya’s) ‘guilt!’
Ivan was thunderstruck when he recalled it. He had never
once tried to persuade her that Mitya was the murderer; on
the contrary, he had suspected himself in her presence, that
time when he came back from Smerdyakov. It was she, she,
who had produced that ‘document’ and proved his broth-
er’s guilt. And now she suddenly exclaimed: ‘I’ve been at
Smerdyakov’s myself!’ When had she been there? Ivan had
known nothing of it. So she was not at all so sure of Mitya’s
guilt! And what could Smerdyakov have told her? What,
what, had he said to her? His heart burned with violent an-
ger. He could not understand how he could, half an hour
before, have let those words pass and not have cried out at
the moment. He let go of the bell and rushed off to Smerdya-
kov. ‘I shall kill him, perhaps, this time,’ he thought on the
way.