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Yet he went to see Mitya on the first day of his arrival, and that interview, far from shaking Ivan’s belief in his guilt, positively strengthened it. He found his brother agitated, nervously excited. Mitya had been talkative, but very absent-minded and incoherent. He used violent language, accused Smerdyakov, and was fearfully muddled.
Doctor Herzenstube and Varvinsky, the doctor he met in the hospital, confidently asserted in reply to Ivan’s persistent questions, that Smerdyakov’s epileptic attack was unmistakably genuine, and were surprised indeed at Ivan asking whether he might not have been shamming on the day of the catastrophe.
Something seemed to give way in his brain, and he shuddered all over with a cold shiver. Then Smerdyakov himself looked at him wonderingly; probably the genuineness of Ivan’s horror struck him. “You don’t mean to say you really did not know?” he faltered mistrustfully, looking with a forced smile into his eyes. Ivan still gazed at him, and seemed unable to speak.
Later on, after seeing the police captain and the prosecutor, and hearing the details of the charge and the arrest, he was still more surprised at Alyosha, and ascribed his opinion only to his exaggerated brotherly feeling and sympathy with Mitya, of whom Alyosha, as Ivan knew, was very fond. By the way, let us say a word or two of Ivan’s feeling to his brother Dmitri.
Now Alyosha was impressed by Madame Hohlakov’s blunt and persistent assertion that Katerina Ivanovna was in love with Ivan, and only deceived herself through some sort of pose, from “self-laceration,” and tortured herself by her pretended love for Dmitri from some fancied duty of gratitude. “Yes,” he thought, “perhaps the whole truth lies in those words.” But in that case what was Ivan’s position?
Would you like a wet towel on your head? Perhaps it will do you good.” “Give me the towel: it’s here on the chair. I just threw it down there.” “It’s not here. Don’t worry yourself. I know where it is—here,” said Alyosha, finding a clean towel, folded up and unused, by Ivan’s dressing-table in the other corner of the room.
On his return from Moscow, he abandoned himself hopelessly to his mad and consuming passion for Katerina Ivanovna. This is not the time to begin to speak of this new passion of Ivan’s, which left its mark on all the rest of his life: this would furnish the subject for another novel, which I may perhaps never write.
Nothing was clear in Ivan’s soul, but he looked eagerly around him at the fields, at the hills, at the trees, at a flock of geese flying high overhead in the bright sky. And all of a sudden he felt very happy.
“It must be Rakitin, who’s been going to see him lately,” smiled Alyosha, “though ... that’s not Rakitin’s doing. I didn’t see Mitya yesterday. I’ll see him to-day.” “No, it’s not Rakitin; it’s his brother Ivan Fyodorovitch upsetting him. It’s his going to see him, that’s what it is,” Grushenka began, and suddenly broke off. Alyosha gazed at her in amazement. “Ivan’s going? Has he been to see him?
“Listen, monster.” Ivan’s eyes flashed and he trembled all over. “I am not afraid of your accusations; you can say what you like about me, and if I don’t beat you to death, it’s simply because I suspect you of that crime and I’ll drag you to justice. I’ll unmask you.”
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