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The President began by informing him that he was a wit-
ness not on oath, that he might answer or refuse to answer,
but that, of course, he must bear witness according to his
conscience, and so on, and so on. Ivan listened and looked
at him blankly, but his face gradually relaxed into a smile,
and as soon as the President, looking at him in astonish-
ment, finished, he laughed outright.
‘Well, and what else?’ he asked in a loud voice.
There was a hush in the court; there was a feeling of some-
thing strange. The President showed signs of uneasiness.
‘You... are perhaps still unwell?’ he began, looking every-
where for the usher.
‘Don’t trouble yourself, your excellency, I am well enough
and can tell you something interesting,’ Ivan answered with
sudden calmness and respectfulness.
‘You have some special communication to make?’ the
President went on, still mistrustfully.
Ivan looked down, waited a few seconds and, raising his
head, answered, almost stammering:
‘No... I haven’t. I have nothing particular.’
They began asking him questions. He answered, as
it were, reluctantly, with extreme brevity, with a sort of
disgust which grew more and more marked, though he an-
swered rationally. To many questions he answered that he
did not know. He knew nothing of his father’s money re-
lations with Dmitri. ‘I wasn’t interested in the subject,’ he
added. Threats to murder his father he had heard from the
prisoner. Of the money in the envelope he had heard from
Smerdyakov.