Mortar's companion

Usage examples of pestle.

But as he ran out, he still surprised both Fenya and old Matryona by a most unexpected act: on the table stood a brass mortar with a pestle in it, a small brass pestle, only seven inches long.

Mitya suddenly, without stopping, snatched the pestle from the mortar with his other hand, shoved it into his side pocket, and made off with it.

Mitya was beside himself, and suddenly he snatched the brass pestle from his pocket.

The pestle fell two paces away from Grigory, not in the grass, however, but on a footpath, in a most conspicuous place.

They began searching near the fence with a lantern and found the brass pestle, thrown right on the garden path for all to see.

I grabbed the pestle in order to run and kill my father, Fyodor Pavlovich .

When he finally came to the moment when, seeing his father leaning out of the window, hatred boiled up in him and he snatched the pestle from his pocket, he suddenly stopped as if on purpose.

As soon as Mitya described how, sitting astride the fence, he had hit Grigory, who was clutching his left leg, on the head with the pestle, and then jumped down at once to the stricken man, the prosecutor stopped him and asked him to describe in greater detail how he was sitting on the fence.

But observe: beside himself as he may have been, he did take the brass pestle with him.

The defendant, at night, in the garden, climbs the fence as he is fleeing, and strikes down with a brass pestle the servant who has seized him by the leg.

No, if we really are so calculating and hard-hearted, would it not be better, having jumped down, simply to whack the fallen servant on the head again and again with the same pestle, so as to kill him finally, and, having eradicated the witness, to put all worry out of our mind?

I took from the two women, both of whom can later recognize the pestle as theirs and testify that I took it from their house.

But we did it precisely because we felt bitter at having killed a man, an old servant, and therefore in vexation, with a curse, we threw the pestle away as a murderous weapon, it could not be otherwise, or why throw it with such force?

A most ordinary thought comes to my mind here: what if this pestle had not been lying in plain sight, had not been on the shelf from which the defendant snatched it, but had been put away in a cupboard?

How, then, can I possibly arrive at the conclusion that the pestle is a proof of arming and premeditating?