All this was explained afterwards in detail, and confirmed by documentary evidence; but for the present we will only note the most essential incidents of those two terrible days immediately preceding the awful catastrophe that broke so suddenly upon him.
Though Grushenka had, it is true, loved him for an hour, genuinely and sincerely, yet she tortured him sometimes cruelly and mercilessly.
The worst of it was that he could never tell what she meant to do. To prevail upon her by force or kindness was also impossible: she would yield to nothing. She would only have become angry and turned away from him altogether, he knew that well already.
He suspected, quite correctly, that she, too, was passing through an inward struggle, and was in a state of extraordinary indecision, that she was making up her mind to something, and unable to determine upon it. And so, not without good reason, he divined, with a sinking heart, that at moments she must simply hate him and his passion.
And so, perhaps, it was, but what was distressing Grushenka he did not understand.
For him the whole tormenting question lay between him and Fyodor Pavlovitch.
Here, we must note, by the way, one certain fact: he was firmly persuaded that Fyodor Pavlovitch would offer, or perhaps had offered, Grushenka lawful wedlock, and did not for a moment believe that the old voluptuary hoped to gain his object for three thousand roubles.
Mitya had reached this conclusion from his knowledge of Grushenka and her character.
That was how it was that he could believe at times that all Grushenka's uneasiness rose from not knowing which of them to choose, which was most to her advantage.
Strange to say, during those days it never occurred to him to think of the approaching return of the "officer," that is, of the man who had been such a fatal influence in Grushenka's life, and whose arrival she was expecting with such emotion and dread.
It is true that of late Grushenka had been very silent about it.
Yet he was perfectly aware of a letter she had received a month ago from her seducer, and had heard of it from her own lips. He partly knew, too, what the letter contained.
In a moment of spite Grushenka had shown him that letter, but to her astonishment he attached hardly any consequence to it.
It would be hard to say why this was. Perhaps, weighed down by all the hideous horror of his struggle with his own father for this woman, he was incapable of imagining any danger more terrible, at any rate for the time.
He simply did not believe in a suitor who suddenly turned up again after five years' disappearance, still less in his speedy arrival.
Moreover, in the "officer's" first letter which had been shown to Mitya, the possibility of his new rival's visit was very vaguely suggested. The letter was very indefinite, high-flown, and full of sentimentality.
It must be noted that Grushenka had concealed from him the last lines of the letter, in which his return was alluded to more definitely.
He had, besides, noticed at that moment, he remembered afterwards, a certain involuntary proud contempt for this missive from Siberia on Grushenka's face.
Grushenka told him nothing of what had passed later between her and this rival; so that by degrees he had completely forgotten the officer's existence.
He felt that whatever might come later, whatever turn things might take, his final conflict with Fyodor Pavlovitch was close upon him, and must be decided before anything else.
With a sinking heart he was expecting every moment Grushenka's decision, always believing that it would come suddenly, on the impulse of the moment.
All of a sudden she would say to him:
"Take me, I'm yours for ever," and it would all be over. He would seize her and bear her away at once to the ends of the earth.
Oh, then he would bear her away at once, as far, far away as possible; to the farthest end of Russia, if not of the earth, then he would marry her, and settle down with her incognito, so that no one would know anything about them, there, here, or anywhere.
Then, oh then, a new life would begin at once!
Of this different, reformed and "virtuous" life ("it must, it must be virtuous") he dreamed feverishly at every moment.
He thirsted for that reformation and renewal.
The filthy morass, in which he had sunk of his own free will, was too revolting to him, and, like very many men in such cases, he put faith above all in change of place. If only it were not for these people, if only it were not for these circumstances, if only he could fly away from this accursed place- he would be altogether regenerated, would enter on a new path.
That was what he believed in, and what he was yearning for.
But all this could only be on condition of the first, the happy solution of the question.
There was another possibility, a different and awful ending.
Suddenly she might say to him:
"Go away. I have just come to terms with Fyodor Pavlovitch. I am going to marry him and don't want you"- and then... but then... But Mitya did not know what would happen then. Up to the last hour he didn't know. That must be said to his credit.
He had no definite intentions, had planned no crime.
He was simply watching and spying in agony, while he prepared himself for the first, happy solution of his destiny.
He drove away any other idea, in fact.
But for that ending a quite different anxiety arose, a new, incidental, but yet fatal and insoluble difficulty presented itself.
If she were to say to him:
"I'm yours; take me away," how could he take her away?
Where had he the means, the money to do it?
It was just at this time that all sources of revenue from Fyodor Pavlovitch, doles which had gone on without interruption for so many years, ceased.
Grushenka had money, of course, but with regard to this Mitya suddenly evinced extraordinary pride; he wanted to carry her away and begin the new life with her himself, at his own expense, not at hers. He could not conceive of taking her money, and the very idea caused him a pang of intense repulsion.
I won't enlarge on this fact or analyse it here, but confine myself to remarking that this was his attitude at the moment.
All this may have arisen indirectly and unconsciously from the secret stings of his conscience for the money of Katerina Ivanovna that he had dishonestly appropriated.
"I've been a scoundrel to one of them, and I shall be a scoundrel again to the other directly," was his feeling then, as he explained after: "and when Grushenka knows, she won't care for such a scoundrel."
Where then was he to get the means, where was he to get the fateful money?
Without it, all would be lost and nothing could be done, "and only because I hadn't the money. Oh, the shame of it!"
To anticipate things: he did, perhaps, know where to get the money, knew, perhaps, where it lay at that moment.
I will say no more of this here, as it will all be clear later. But his chief trouble, I must explain however obscurely, lay in the fact that to have that sum he knew of, to have the right to take it, he must first restore Katerina Ivanovna's three thousand- if not, "I'm a common pick-pocket, I'm a scoundrel, and I don't want to begin a new life as a scoundrel," Mitya decided. And so he made up his mind to move heaven and earth to return Katerina Ivanovna that three thousand, and that first of all.
The final stage of this decision, so to say, had been reached only during the last hours, that is, after his last interview with Alyosha, two days before, on the high-road, on the evening when Grushenka had insulted Katerina Ivanovna, and Mitya, after hearing Alyosha's account of it, had admitted that he was a scoundrel, and told him to tell Katerina Ivanovna so, if it could be any comfort to her.