Love Letters and Life Navigation — The Brothers Karamazov

Madame Hohlakov meets Alyosha flustered. Katerina's hysterics have ended in a fainting fit, and now she lies in a fever, unconscious. They have sent for Herzenstube and the aunts. This is serious, she says, as though nothing before had been. Alyosha begins to tell his errand. She has no time. She begs him to sit with Lise, and whispers that the girl is truly remorseful for having laughed at him yesterday and today. She was only joking, but the remorse touched her mother.

With Lise he is back in their Moscow day-dreams of two years ago. He tells Ilusha's story with warm feeling. When he comes to the man trampling the money, she clasps her hands. He let the captain run away. They are without food, and the case is hopeless. Alyosha says it is better he did not run. The two hundred roubles will still come. Tomorrow the captain will be sure to take them. He is weak and timorous, and he has suffered so much. He had to fling the notes down first. Lise asks whether looking into a soul like that, from above, is contempt. Alyosha says it cannot be contempt when we are all just the same as he is. We must care for people as for children, or for the sick.

Lise flushes and makes her confession. She did not write yesterday as a joke. She kisses his hand three times. They kiss, and then she says they must put off more kissing. They are not ready for that yet. She talks of a velvet coat and a white waistcoat, and of the letter he kept. She does not like Ivan. Alyosha says his brothers are destroying themselves, and his father too, and others with them. It is the primitive force of the Karamazovs, as Father Païssy called it, a crude, unbridled, earthly force. Perhaps, he says, he does not even believe in God. And the best man in the world is leaving the earth. Lise makes the sign of the cross over him and tells him to hurry back while the elder is alive.

He means to leave without a good-bye. Madame Hohlakov is waiting at the door. She has run down to the stairs, like the last scene of a play, and she calls the engagement childish nonsense. She will never be at home to him, and she will take Lise away. Then she demands the letter at once, in the name of the dying elder. Alyosha will not show it, even if Lise sanctioned it. Katerina is still unconscious. He says he will come tomorrow, and he runs downstairs into the street.