running!—there must have been a row. There can’t have been any dinner. Surely they’ve not been beating the Father Superior! Or have they, perhaps, been beaten? It would serve them right!”
There was reason for Rakitin’s exclamations. There had been a scandalous, an unprecedented scene. It had all come from the impulse of a moment.
VIII
The Scandalous Scene
Miüsov, as a man of breeding and delicacy, could not but feel some inward qualms, when he reached the Father Superior’s with Ivan: he felt ashamed of having lost his temper. He felt that he ought to have disdained that despicable wretch, Fyodor Pavlovitch, too much to have been upset by him in Father Zossima’s cell, and so to have forgotten himself. “The monks were not to blame, in any case,” he reflected, on the steps. “And if they’re decent people here (and the Father Superior, I understand, is a nobleman) why not be friendly and courteous with them? I won’t argue, I’ll fall in with everything, I’ll win them by politeness, and … and … show them that I’ve nothing to do with that Aesop, that buffoon, that Pierrot, and have merely been taken in over this affair, just as they have.”