What follows is almost an orgy, a feast to which all are welcome. Grushenka is the first to call for wine. She wants to drink. She wants to be quite drunk, as they were before. Does he remember how they made friends here last time? Dmitri is almost delirious, feeling that his happiness is at hand. But she is continually sending him away from her. Go and enjoy yourself. Tell them to dance, to make merry, let the stove be heated, let everyone come in. He pours, he pays, he remembers Andrey out in the yard with the horses. The peasants of Mokroe crowd to the noise. Money goes out as if it had no owner.
The girls sing. A merchant comes to try them. Will they love him, will they not? It appears he wins their love because the merchant will make gold, and his queen she will gladly be. Kalganov is indignant. That is a song of yesterday. Who writes such things for them? They might as well have had a railwayman come to try his luck. Dmitri goes out onto the balcony that runs round the building on the inner side, overlooking the courtyard. The fresh air revives him. He stands alone in a dark corner and suddenly clutches his head. If he is to shoot himself, why not now? He does not stay in the dark. He runs back to her.
She is crying over the five years. It must have been the wife that ruined the officer. He threw her up to get married. The wife must have changed him. How shameful it is. She is ashamed for all her life. Curse those five years. She clings to Dmitri and weeps, and the name she gives him is not the name she gave the man in the wig. He is her falcon. The other was a gander. She remembers the onion. Wicked as she has been, she wants to pray. Let them dance, she says. Don't stop them. Everyone in the world is good. Everyone, even the worst. They talk of the money, of Katya, of what is still to be paid back, and of a life that might be lived even in Siberia. He is ready to go wherever she goes.
The chorus breaks into "Ah, my porch, my new porch." She flings back her head, half opens her lips, smiles, waves her handkerchief, and then, with a violent lurch, stands still in the middle of the room, looking bewildered. I'm weak, she says. Forgive me. I can't. I'm sorry. The noise goes on, and then it does not. The curtains part. The stout man in the overcoat and the forage-cap with a cockade is the police captain, Mihail Makarovitch. The consumptive-looking dandy with the polished boots is the deputy prosecutor. He has a chronometer worth four hundred roubles. The small young man in spectacles is the investigating lawyer, lately come from the school of jurisprudence. Dmitri knows them. He knows what the hour has turned into. He is told that he is charged with the murder of his father, Fyodor Pavlovitch, perpetrated this night.
Coming Up in Chapter 54
Pyotr Ilyitch makes himself heard at the widow Morozov's locked gates. Fenya, still upset from two hours before, tells him of the brass pestle and of the blood on Dmitri's hands. He had said he had killed someone, and he has gone to Mokroe. Before eleven, Perhotin is on his way to Madame Hohlakov.
