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exchange some quite irrelevant words with him. And if the
old servant were not angry, he felt comforted, and if he were
angry, he was more dejected. It happened even (very rarely
however) that Fyodor Pavlovitch went at night to the lodge
to wake Grigory and fetch him for a moment. When the old
man came, Fyodor Pavlovitch would begin talking about
the most trivial matters, and would soon let him go again,
sometimes even with a jest. And after he had gone, Fyodor
Pavlovitch would get into bed with a curse and sleep the
sleep of the just. Something of the same sort had happened
to Fyodor Pavlovitch on Alyosha’s arrival. Alyosha ‘pierced
his heart’ by ‘living with him, seeing everything and
blaming nothing.’ Moreover, Alyosha brought with him
something his father had never known before: a complete
absence of contempt for him and an invariable kindness, a
perfectly natural unaffected devotion to the old man who
deserved it so little. All this was a complete surprise to the
old profligate, who had dropped all family ties. It was a new
and surprising experience for him, who had till then loved
nothing but ‘evil.’ When Alyosha had left him, he confessed
to himself that he had learnt something he had not till then
been willing to learn.
I have mentioned already that Grigory had detested Ad-
elaida Ivanovna, the first wife of Fyodor Pavlovitch and the
mother of Dmitri, and that he had, on the contrary, pro-
tected Sofya Ivanovna, the poor ‘crazy woman,’ against his
master and anyone who chanced to speak ill or lightly of
her. His sympathy for the unhappy wife had become some-
thing sacred to him, so that even now, twenty years after,