Smerdyakov slowly raised his head and looked intently at his visitor through his spectacles; then he slowly took them off and rose from the bench, but by no means respectfully, almost lazily, doing the least possible required by common civility. All this struck Ivan instantly; he took it all in and noted it at once—most of all the look in Smerdyakov’s eyes, positively malicious, churlish and haughty. “What do you want to intrude for?” it seemed to say; “we settled everything then; why have you come again?” Ivan could scarcely control himself.
“It’s hot here,” he said, still standing, and unbuttoned his overcoat.
“Take off your coat,” Smerdyakov conceded.
Ivan took off his coat and threw it on a bench with trembling hands. He took a chair, moved it quickly to the table and sat down. Smerdyakov managed to sit down on his bench before him.
“To begin with, are we alone?” Ivan asked sternly and impulsively. “Can they overhear us in there?”
“No one can hear anything. You’ve seen for yourself: there’s a passage.”
“Listen, my good fellow; what was that you babbled, as I was leaving the hospital, that if I said nothing about your faculty of shamming fits, you wouldn’t tell the investigating lawyer all our conversation at the gate? What do you mean by all? What could you mean by it? Were you threatening me? Have I entered into some sort of compact with you? Do you suppose I am afraid of you?”
Ivan said this in a perfect fury, giving him to understand with obvious intention that he scorned any subterfuge or indirectness and meant to show his cards. Smerdyakov’s eyes gleamed resentfully, his left eye winked, and he at once gave his answer, with his habitual composure and deliberation. “You want to have everything above‐board; very well, you shall have it,” he seemed to say.
“This is what I meant then, and this is why I said that, that you, knowing beforehand of this murder of your own parent, left him to his fate, and that people mightn’t after that conclude any evil about your feelings and perhaps of something else, too—that’s what I promised not to tell the authorities.”
Though Smerdyakov spoke without haste and obviously controlling himself, yet there was something in his voice, determined and emphatic, resentful and insolently defiant. He stared impudently at Ivan. A mist passed before Ivan’s eyes for the first moment.