Day 62
Book 12 / Chapters 3 and 4
A certain new light suddenly poured over “the case.” Something sympathetic emerged in Mitya’s favor.… But when she had finished, he suddenly exclaimed in a sobbing voice, stretching his hands out to her: “Katya, why have you riuned me!”
Before the serious drama, the warm-up—and you have to love that Herzenstubbe, who’s been such a joke around the little town until now, turns out to be another Grigory, “stubborn as a mule” and a giver of kindness in the form of a bag of nuts to the lost barefoot boy Mitya was as a child.
And after the warm-up, the tease:
But the major effect in Mitya’s favor was produced by the testimony of Katerina Ivanovna, which I shall come to presently. And, generally, when the witnesses à décharge—that is, called by the defense—began to testify, fate seemed suddenly and even seriously to smile on Mitya and—what is most remarkable—to the surprise even of the defense itself.
Alyosha, of course, stands up for Mitya’s innocence and as he’s testifying realizes that he has seen evidence of the phantom amulet:
… during his last meeting with Mitya, in the evening, by the tree, on the road to the monastery, Mitya, hitting himself on the chest, “on the upper part of the chest,” repeated to him several times that he had a means of restoring his honor, and that this means was right there, right there, on his chest… “At the time I thought when he hit himself on the chest, that he was speaking of his heart,” Alyosha went on.
Katerina performs beautifully in Mitya’s favor,
and did not betray by a word, not by a single hint, that Mitya himself had suggested, through her sister, that they “send Katerina Ivanovna to him for the money.” She magnanimously concealed it, and was not ashamed to present it as if she, she herself, had gone running to a young officer, on her own impluse, hoping for something .. to beg him for money.
And yet when she is done he cries, “Now I am condemned!”
Our narrator dangles a new tease before us, “drawing near the catastrophe” that “indeed perhaps ruined Mitya,” but first brings on Grushenka, whose testimony helps undermine Rakitin’s credibility, but otherwise has nothing new to offer—the catastrophe still ahead of us.