A strange, physical exhaustion was gaining mastery over him, growing as the time went by. His eyes were closing with weariness. At last the interrogation of the witnesses was over. They proceeded to the final drafting of the protocol. Mitya stood up, left his chair and went into the corner, over by the curtain, lay down on a large, rug-covered trunk that belonged to the landlord and in an instant fell asleep. He dreamed a strange dream, one quite inappropriate to the place and to the time. There he was, traveling in the steppes somewhere, in the place where he had served in the army long ago, in former days, and he was sitting in a car, drawn by a pair of horses, which a muzhik was driving into the sleet. Only Mitya was cold, it was the beginning of November, and the snow was falling in large wet flakes and falling to earth, instantly melting. And the muzhik was driving him cheerfully, brandishing his whip in marvelous style, his beard long and chestnut-colored, not really an old man, but perhaps about fifty, and wearing a grey muzhik zipun. And there not far away was a peasant village, one could see the izbas, black as black, and half of them had burned to the ground, only charred timbers stuck up here and there. And at the entry barrier there were peasant women standing along the road, many of them, an entire row, all of them thin and emaciated, with faces that looked somehow brownish. There, in particular, at the end of the row was one, a tall and bony woman who looked about forty, but might easily be no more than twenty, with a long, thin face and a baby crying in her arms, for her breasts must have withered and there was not a drop of milk in them. And the baby cried and cried, stretching out its bare little arms with pathetic small fists that were a kind of bluish color all over from the cold.
“Why are they crying? What are they crying for?” Mitya asked as they flew past the women in dashing style.
“It’s a bairn,” the yamshchik answered him, “it’s a bairn crying.” And Mitya was struck by the fact that the man had said it in his own, muzhik way: '“a bairn,” not “a baby.” And he liked it that the muzhik had said “bairn”: there seemed more pity in it.
“But why is it crying?” Mitya kept pressing, like one inane. “Why are its little arms bare, why is it not covered up?”
“Why, the bairn is chilled to the bone, its little clothes have frozen through, and don’t keep it warm.”
“But why has it happened? Why?” Mitya kept asking inanely.
“Why, they’re poor, burned out of everything, they’ve no bread, they’re begging for their burned-down site.”
“No, no,” Mitya said, still appearing not to understand. “What I want you to tell me is: why are those homeless mothers standing there, why is everyone poor, why is the bairn wretched, why is the steppe barren, why do they not embrace one another, kiss one another, why do they not sing songs of joy, why are they blackened so by black misfortune, why is the bairn not fed?”
And he felt to himself that although he was asking these questions wildly, without rhyme or reason, he could not prevent himself asking them in just that form, and that that was the form in which they must be asked. And he also felt rising within his heart a tender piety he had never experienced before, felt that he wanted to weep, that he wanted to do something for them all, so that the bairn should not cry any more, so that the bairn’s withered, poverty-blackened mother should not weep, so that no one should have any tears at all from that moment on, and to do this immediately, without delay and without regard to any obstacle, with all the impetuosity of the Karamazovs.
“And I shall come with you, I shell never leave you now, I shall walk with you all my life,” the dear, heartfelt words of Grushenka sounded beside him.
'“What is it you say? Walk where?” he exclaimed, opening his eyes and sitting up on his trunk, every bit like someone who has recovered from a swoon, and smiling radiantly. Over him stood Nikolay Parfenovich, inviting him to attend the reading of the protocol, and sign it. Mitya realized that he had slept for an hour or more, but he paid no attention to Nikolay Parfenovich. He was suddenly struck by the fact that beneath his head there was a pillow that had not been there when he had subsided in exhaustion upon the trunk.
“Who put a pillow under my head? Who was that kind person?” he exclaimed with a kind of ecstatic, grateful emotion and in a voice that almost wept, as though God only knew what boon had been accorded him. The kind person remained unknown even later, though it was possibly one of the muzhiks, or possibly Nikolay Parvenovich’s little scribe who had found him a pillow out of compassion, but Mitya’s entire soul was as if shaken by sobs and tears. He approached the table and declared that he would sign whatever was required.
“I had a good dream, gentlemen,” he declared somehow strangely, with a face somehow new, as though illumined by joy.
- From Book IX of The Brothers Karamazov