10 The Brothers Karamazov
smiled. Smerdyakov often waited at table towards the end
of dinner, and since Ivan’s arrival in our town he had done
so every day.
‘What are you grinning at?’ asked Fyodor Pavlovitch,
catching the smile instantly, and knowing that it referred
to Grigory.
‘Well, my opinion is,’ Smerdyakov began suddenly and
unexpectedly in a loud voice, ‘that if that laudable soldier’s
exploit was so very great there would have been, to my think-
ing, no sin in it if he had on such an emergency renounced,
so to speak, the name of Christ and his own christening, to
save by that same his life, for good deeds, by which, in the
course of years to expiate his cowardice.’
‘How could it not be a sin? You’re talking nonsense. For
that you’ll go straight to hell and be roasted there like mut-
ton,’ put in Fyodor Pavlovitch.
It was at this point that Alyosha came in, and Fyodor
Pavlovitch, as we have seen, was highly delighted at his ap-
pearance.
‘We’re on your subject, your subject,’ he chuckled glee-
fully, making Alyosha sit down to listen.
‘As for mutton, that’s not so, and there’ll be nothing there
for this, and there shouldn’t be either, if it’s according to jus-
tice,’ Smerdyakov maintained stoutly.
‘How do you mean ‘according to justice’?’ Fyodor Pavlov-
itch cried still more gaily, nudging Alyosha with his knee.
‘He’s a rascal, that’s what he is!’ burst from Grigory. He
looked Smerdyakov wrathfully in the face.
‘As for being a rascal, wait a little, Grigory Vassilyevitch,’