had the right.”
He hardly contested the evidence against him, and if he tried to turn a fact to his advantage, it was in an absurd and incoherent way. He hardly seemed to wish to defend himself to Ivan or anyone else.
Quite the contrary, he was angry and proudly scornful of the charges against him; he was continually firing up and abusing everyone. He only laughed contemptuously at Grigory’s evidence about the open door, and declared that it was “the devil that opened it.” But he could not bring forward any coherent explanation of the fact.
He even succeeded in insulting Ivan during their first interview, telling him sharply that it was not for people who declared that “everything was lawful,” to suspect and question him. Altogether he was anything but friendly with Ivan on that occasion.
Immediately after that interview with Mitya, Ivan went for the first time to see Smerdyakov.
In the railway train on his way from Moscow, he kept thinking of Smerdyakov and of his last conversation with him on the evening before he went away. Many things seemed to him puzzling and suspicious. But when he gave his evidence to the investigating lawyer Ivan said nothing, for the time, of that conversation. He put that off till he had seen Smerdyakov, who was at that time in the hospital.
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. They gave him to understand that the attack was an exceptional one, the fits persisting and recurring several times, so that the patient’s life was positively in danger, and it was