The Brothers Karamazovover him and say: ‘I could kill you, but I forgive you, so
there!‘ You see what the workings of his little mind have
been during these two days; he must have been planning
that vengeance all day, and raving about it at night.
‘But he began to come home from school badly beaten,
I found out about it the day before yesterday, and you are
right, I won’t send him to that school any more. I heard that
he was standing up against all the class alone and defying
them all, that his heart was full of resentment, of bitterness
— I was alarmed about him. We went for another walk. ‘Fa-
ther,’ he asked, ‘are the rich people stronger than anyone
else on earth?’ ‘Yes, Ilusha,’ I said, ‘there are no people on
earth stronger than the rich.’ ‘Father,’ he said, ‘I will get rich,
I will become an officer and conquer everybody. The Tsar
will reward me, I will come back here and then no one will
dare — ‘ Then he was silent and his lips still kept trembling.
‘Father,’ he said, ‘what a horrid town this is.’ ‘Yes, Ilusha,’ I
said, ‘it isn’t a very nice town.’ ‘Father, let us move into an-
other town, a nice one,’ he said, ‘where people don’t know
about us.’ ‘We will move, we will, Ilusha,’ said I, ‘only I must
save up for it.’ I was glad to be able to turn his mind from
painful thoughts, and we began to dream of how we would
move to another town, how we would buy a horse and cart.
‘We will put mamma and your sisters inside, we will cover
them up and we’ll walk, you shall have a lift now and then,
and I’ll walk beside, for we must take care of our horse, we
can’t all ride. That’s how we’ll go.’ He was enchanted at that,
most of all at the thought of having a horse and driving him.
For of course a Russian boy is born among horses. We chat-