The Valet's Dangerous Game — The Brothers Karamazov

On parting from Alyosha, Ivan walks home to his father's house. A depression grows at every step, and he cannot name it. It is not only loathing for the house, and not only the vexation left by the talk. Something external keeps working on him, like an object set down in the wrong place. He comes to the bench by the gate. Smerdyakov is sitting there. At once he knows that this is the man his soul loathes, and that it has been this man on his mind all the way.

He means to pass in silence. Instead he asks, softly and meekly, to his own surprise, whether his father is asleep or has waked. To his own surprise again, he sits down. They fall into talk that seems to be about nothing. Smerdyakov speaks with an affected calm, as if he were putting Ivan off with a secondary reason simply to say something. He raises his eyes and asks why Ivan does not go to Tchermashnya. The question is sudden. It is the thing Ivan has already been turning over, and he is furious at his own curiosity.

The valet draws the picture out. Father and son are at war over Grushenka. Dmitri has threatened the old man. Smerdyakov is afraid of being blamed if disaster comes, afraid of being called an accomplice because he is the one who stays in the house. He talks of the signals at the door, the knocks that mean Grushenka and no one else. Dmitri knows those signals now. Smerdyakov told him. If Dmitri uses them and tries to get in, Ivan says, do not let him in.

Grigory will not open the door until he hears a voice, and Grigory will not come. Smerdyakov has his own plan for being out of the way. He speaks of the three thousand the father still owes Dmitri, and of how good a thing it would be, from Dmitri's point of view, to take it. Ivan is going to Moscow early in the morning, if the valet cares to know. He gets up at last with the sense that the conversation has said more than either of them has put into words, and that he has sat down when he meant to walk past.