‘He’s downright ill!’ observed Nastasya, not taking her
eyes off him. The porter turned his head for a moment.
‘He’s been in a fever since yesterday,’ she added.
Raskolnikov made no response and held the paper in
his hands, without opening it. ‘Don’t you get up then,’
Nastasya went on compassionately, seeing that he was
letting his feet down from the sofa. ‘You’re ill, and so
don’t go; there’s no such hurry. What have you got
there?’
He looked; in his right hand he held the shreds he had
cut from his trousers, the sock, and the rags of the pocket.
So he had been asleep with them in his hand. Afterwards
reflecting upon it, he remembered that half waking up in
his fever, he had grasped all this tightly in his hand and so
fallen asleep again.
‘Look at the rags he’s collected and sleeps with them, as
though he has got hold of a treasure …’
And Nastasya went off into her hysterical giggle.
Instantly he thrust them all under his great coat and
fixed his eyes intently upon her. Far as he was from being
capable of rational reflection at that moment, he felt that
no one would behave like that with a person who was
going to be arrested. ‘But … the police?’
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‘You’d better have some tea! Yes? I’ll bring it, there’s
some left.’
‘No … I’m going; I’ll go at once,’ he muttered, getting
on to his feet.
‘Why, you’ll never get downstairs!’
‘Yes, I’ll go.’
‘As you please.’
She followed the porter out.
At once he rushed to the light to examine the sock and
the rags.
‘There are stains, but not very noticeable; all covered
with dirt, and rubbed and already discoloured. No one
who had no suspicion could distinguish anything. Nastasya
from a distance could not have noticed, thank God!’ Then
with a tremor he broke the seal of the notice and began
reading; he was a long while reading, before he
understood. It was an ordinary summons from the district
police-station to appear that day at half-past nine at the
office of the district superintendent.
‘But when has such a thing happened? I never have
anything to do with the police! And why just to-day?’ he
thought in agonising bewilderment. ‘Good God, only get
it over soon!’
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He was flinging himself on his knees to pray, but broke
into laughter —not at the idea of prayer, but at himself.
He began, hurriedly dressing. ‘If I’m lost, I am lost, I
don’t care! Shall I put the sock on?’ he suddenly
wondered, ‘it will get dustier still and the traces will be
gone.’
But no sooner had he put it on than he pulled it off
again in loathing and horror. He pulled it off, but
reflecting that he had no other socks, he picked it up and
put it on again—and again he laughed.
‘That’s all conventional, that’s all relative, merely a way
of looking at it,’ he thought in a flash, but only on the top
surface of his mind, while he was shuddering all over,
‘there, I’ve got it on! I have finished by getting it on!’
But his laughter was quickly followed by despair.
‘No, it’s too much for me …’ he thought. His legs
shook. ‘From fear,’ he muttered. His head swam and
ached with fever. ‘It’s a trick! They want to decoy me
there and confound me over everything,’ he mused, as he
went out on to the stairs—‘the worst of it is I’m almost
light-headed … I may blurt out something stupid …’
On the stairs he remembered that he was leaving all the
things just as they were in the hole in the wall, ‘and very
likely, it’s on purpose to search when I’m out,’ he
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thought, and stopped short. But he was possessed by such
despair, such cynicism of misery, if one may so call it, that
with a wave of his hand he went on. ‘Only to get it over!’
In the street the heat was insufferable again; not a drop
of rain had fallen all those days. Again dust, bricks and
mortar, again the stench from the shops and pot-houses,
again the drunken men, the Finnish pedlars and halfbroken-
down cabs. The sun shone straight in his eyes, so
that it hurt him to look out of them, and he felt his head
going round—as a man in a fever is apt to feel when he
comes out into the street on a bright sunny day.
When he reached the turning into the street, in an
agony of trepidation he looked down it … at the house …
and at once averted his eyes.
‘If they question me, perhaps I’ll simply tell,’ he
thought, as he drew near the police-station.
The police-station was about a quarter of a mile off. It
had lately been moved to new rooms on the fourth floor
of a new house. He had been once for a moment in the
old office but long ago. Turning in at the gateway, he saw
on the right a flight of stairs which a peasant was mounting
with a book in his hand. ‘A house-porter, no doubt; so
then, the office is here,’ and he began ascending the stairs
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on the chance. He did not want to ask questions of
anyone.
‘I’ll go in, fall on my knees, and confess everything …’
he thought, as he reached the fourth floor.
The staircase was steep, narrow and all sloppy with
dirty water. The kitchens of the flats opened on to the
stairs and stood open almost the whole day. So there was a
fearful smell and heat. The staircase was crowded with
porters going up and down with their books under their
arms, policemen, and persons of all sorts and both sexes.
The door of the office, too, stood wide open. Peasants
stood waiting within. There, too, the heat was stifling and
there was a sickening smell of fresh paint and stale oil from
the newly decorated rooms.
After waiting a little, he decided to move forward into
the next room. All the rooms were small and low-pitched.
A fearful impatience drew him on and on. No one paid
attention to him. In the second room some clerks sat
writing, dressed hardly better than he was, and rather a
queer-looking set. He went up to one of them.
‘What is it?’
He showed the notice he had received.
‘You are a student?’ the man asked, glancing at the
notice.
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‘Yes, formerly a student.’
The clerk looked at him, but without the slightest
interest. He was a particularly unkempt person with the
look of a fixed idea in his eye.
‘There would be no getting anything out of him,
because he has no interest in anything,’ thought
Raskolnikov.
‘Go in there to the head clerk,’ said the clerk, pointing
towards the furthest room.
He went into that room—the fourth in order; it was a
small room and packed full of people, rather better dressed
than in the outer rooms. Among them were two ladies.
One, poorly dressed in mourning, sat at the table opposite
the chief clerk, writing something at his dictation. The
other, a very stout, buxom woman with a purplish-red,
blotchy face, excessively smartly dressed with a brooch on
her bosom as big as a saucer, was standing on one side,
apparently waiting for something. Raskolnikov thrust his
notice upon the head clerk. The latter glanced at it, said:
‘Wait a minute,’ and went on attending to the lady in
mourning.
He breathed more freely. ‘It can’t be that!’
By degrees he began to regain confidence, he kept
urging himself to have courage and be calm.
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‘Some foolishness, some trifling carelessness, and I may
betray myself! Hm … it’s a pity there’s no air here,’ he
added, ‘it’s stifling…. It makes one’s head dizzier than ever
… and one’s mind too …’
He was conscious of a terrible inner turmoil. He was
afraid of losing his self-control; he tried to catch at
something and fix his mind on it, something quite
irrelevant, but he could not succeed in this at all. Yet the
head clerk greatly interested him, he kept hoping to see
through him and guess something from his face.
He was a very young man, about two and twenty, with
a dark mobile face that looked older than his years. He was
fashionably dressed and foppish, with his hair parted in the
middle, well combed and pomaded, and wore a number of
rings on his well-scrubbed fingers and a gold chain on his
waistcoat. He said a couple of words in French to a
foreigner who was in the room, and said them fairly
correctly.
‘Luise Ivanovna, you can sit down,’ he said casually to
the gaily- dressed, purple-faced lady, who was still
standing as though not venturing to sit down, though
there was a chair beside her.
‘Ich danke,’ said the latter, and softly, with a rustle of
silk she sank into the chair. Her light blue dress trimmed
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with white lace floated about the table like an air-balloon
and filled almost half the room. She smelt of scent. But she
was obviously embarrassed at filling half the room and
smelling so strongly of scent; and though her smile was
impudent as well as cringing, it betrayed evident
uneasiness.
The lady in mourning had done at last, and got up. All
at once, with some noise, an officer walked in very
jauntily, with a peculiar swing of his shoulders at each
step. He tossed his cockaded cap on the table and sat down
in an easy-chair. The small lady positively skipped from
her seat on seeing him, and fell to curtsying in a sort of
ecstasy; but the officer took not the smallest notice of her,
and she did not venture to sit down again in his presence.
He was the assistant superintendent. He had a reddish
moustache that stood out horizontally on each side of his
face, and extremely small features, expressive of nothing
much except a certain insolence. He looked askance and
rather indignantly at Raskolnikov; he was so very badly
dressed, and in spite of his humiliating position, his
bearing was by no means in keeping with his clothes.
Raskolnikov had unwarily fixed a very long and direct
look on him, so that he felt positively affronted.
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‘What do you want?’ he shouted, apparently astonished
that such a ragged fellow was not annihilated by the
majesty of his glance.
‘I was summoned … by a notice …’ Raskolnikov
faltered.
‘For the recovery of money due, from the student ’ the
head clerk interfered hurriedly, tearing himself from his
papers. ‘Here!’ and he flung Raskolnikov a document and
pointed out the place. ‘Read that!’
‘Money? What money?’ thought Raskolnikov, ‘but …
then … it’s certainly not that. ’
And he trembled with joy. He felt sudden intense
indescribable relief. A load was lifted from his back.
‘And pray, what time were you directed to appear, sir?’
shouted the assistant superintendent, seeming for some
unknown reason more and more aggrieved. ‘You are told
to come at nine, and now it’s twelve!’
‘The notice was only brought me a quarter of an hour
ago,’ Raskolnikov answered loudly over his shoulder. To
his own surprise he, too, grew suddenly angry and found a
certain pleasure in it. ‘And it’s enough that I have come
here ill with fever.’
‘Kindly refrain from shouting!’
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‘I’m not shouting, I’m speaking very quietly, it’s you
who are shouting at me. I’m a student, and allow no one
to shout at me.’
The assistant superintendent was so furious that for the
first minute he could only splutter inarticulately. He
leaped up from his seat.
‘Be silent! You are in a government office. Don’t be
impudent, sir!’
‘You’re in a government office, too,’ cried
Raskolnikov, ‘and you’re smoking a cigarette as well as
shouting, so you are showing disrespect to all of us.’
He felt an indescribable satisfaction at having said this.
The head clerk looked at him with a smile. The angry
assistant superintendent was obviously disconcerted.
‘That’s not your business!’ he shouted at last with
unnatural loudness. ‘Kindly make the declaration
demanded of you. Show him. Alexandr Grigorievitch.
There is a complaint against you! You don’t pay your
debts! You’re a fine bird!’
But Raskolnikov was not listening now; he had eagerly
clutched at the paper, in haste to find an explanation. He
read it once, and a second time, and still did not
understand.
‘What is this?’ he asked the head clerk.
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‘It is for the recovery of money on an I O U, a writ.
You must either pay it, with all expenses, costs and so on,
or give a written declaration when you can pay it, and at
the same time an undertaking not to leave the capital
without payment, and nor to sell or conceal your
property. The creditor is at liberty to sell your property,
and proceed against you according to the law.’
‘But I … am not in debt to anyone!’
‘That’s not our business. Here, an I O U for a hundred
and fifteen roubles, legally attested, and due for payment,
has been brought us for recovery, given by you to the
widow of the assessor Zarnitsyn, nine months ago, and
paid over by the widow Zarnitsyn to one Mr. Tchebarov.
We therefore summon you, hereupon.’
‘But she is my landlady!’
‘And what if she is your landlady?’
The head clerk looked at him with a condescending
smile of compassion, and at the same time with a certain
triumph, as at a novice under fire for the first time—as
though he would say: ‘Well, how do you feel now?’ But
what did he care now for an I O U, for a writ of recovery!
Was that worth worrying about now, was it worth
attention even! He stood, he read, he listened, he
answered, he even asked questions himself, but all
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mechanically. The triumphant sense of security, of
deliverance from overwhelming danger, that was what
filled his whole soul that moment without thought for the
future, without analysis, without suppositions or surmises,
without doubts and without questioning. It was an instant
of full, direct, purely instinctive joy. But at that very
moment something like a thunderstorm took place in the
office. The assistant superintendent, still shaken by
Raskolnikov’s disrespect, still fuming and obviously
anxious to keep up his wounded dignity, pounced on the
unfortunate smart lady, who had been gazing at him ever
since he came in with an exceedingly silly smile.
‘You shameful hussy!’ he shouted suddenly at the top
of his voice. (The lady in mourning had left the office.)
‘What was going on at your house last night? Eh! A
disgrace again, you’re a scandal to the whole street.
Fighting and drinking again. Do you want the house of
correction? Why, I have warned you ten times over that I
would not let you off the eleventh! And here you are
again, again, you … you … !’
The paper fell out of Raskolnikov’s hands, and he
looked wildly at the smart lady who was so
unceremoniously treated. But he soon saw what it meant,
and at once began to find positive amusement in the
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scandal. He listened with pleasure, so that he longed to
laugh and laugh … all his nerves were on edge.
‘Ilya Petrovitch!’ the head clerk was beginning
anxiously, but stopped short, for he knew from experience
that the enraged assistant could not be stopped except by
force.
As for the smart lady, at first she positively trembled
before the storm. But, strange to say, the more numerous
and violent the terms of abuse became, the more amiable
she looked, and the more seductive the smiles she lavished
on the terrible assistant. She moved uneasily, and curtsied
incessantly, waiting impatiently for a chance of putting in
her word: and at last she found it.
‘There was no sort of noise or fighting in my house,
Mr. Captain,’ she pattered all at once, like peas dropping,
speaking Russian confidently, though with a strong
German accent, ‘and no sort of scandal, and his honour
came drunk, and it’s the whole truth I am telling, Mr.
Captain, and I am not to blame…. Mine is an honourable
house, Mr. Captain, and honourable behaviour, Mr.
Captain, and I always, always dislike any scandal myself.
But he came quite tipsy, and asked for three bottles again,
and then he lifted up one leg, and began playing the
pianoforte with one foot, and that is not at all right in an
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honourable house, and he ganz broke the piano, and it was
very bad manners indeed and I said so. And he took up a
bottle and began hitting everyone with it. And then I
called the porter, and Karl came, and he took Karl and hit
him in the eye; and he hit Henriette in the eye, too, and
gave me five slaps on the cheek. And it was so
ungentlemanly in an honourable house, Mr. Captain, and
I screamed. And he opened the window over the canal,
and stood in the window, squealing like a little pig; it was
a disgrace. The idea of squealing like a little pig at the
window into the street! Fie upon him! And Karl pulled
him away from the window by his coat, and it is true, Mr.
Captain, he tore sein rock. And then he shouted that man
muss pay him fifteen roubles damages. And I did pay him,
Mr. Captain, five roubles for sein rock. And he is an
ungentlemanly visitor and caused all the scandal. ‘I will
show you up,’ he said, ‘for I can write to all the papers
about you.’’
‘Then he was an author?’
‘Yes, Mr. Captain, and what an ungentlemanly visitor
in an honourable house….’
‘Now then! Enough! I have told you already …’
‘Ilya Petrovitch!’ the head clerk repeated significantly.
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The assistant glanced rapidly at him; the head clerk
slightly shook his head.
‘… So I tell you this, most respectable Luise Ivanovna,
and I tell it you for the last time,’ the assistant went on. ‘If
there is a scandal in your honourable house once again, I
will put you yourself in the lock-up, as it is called in polite
society. Do you hear? So a literary man, an author took
five roubles for his coat-tail in an ‘honourable house’? A
nice set, these authors!’
And he cast a contemptuous glance at Raskolnikov.
‘There was a scandal the other day in a restaurant, too. An
author had eaten his dinner and would not pay; ‘I’ll write
a satire on you,’ says he. And there was another of them
on a steamer last week used the most disgraceful language
to the respectable family of a civil councillor, his wife and
daughter. And there was one of them turned out of a
confectioner’s shop the other day. They are like that,
authors, literary men, students, town-criers…. Pfoo! You
get along! I shall look in upon you myself one day. Then
you had better be careful! Do you hear?’
With hurried deference, Luise Ivanovna fell to
curtsying in all directions, and so curtsied herself to the
door. But at the door, she stumbled backwards against a
good-looking officer with a fresh, open face and splendid
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thick fair whiskers. This was the superintendent of the
district himself, Nikodim Fomitch. Luise Ivanovna made
haste to curtsy almost to the ground, and with mincing
little steps, she fluttered out of the office.
‘Again thunder and lightning—a hurricane!’ said
Nikodim Fomitch to Ilya Petrovitch in a civil and friendly
tone. ‘You are aroused again, you are fuming again! I
heard it on the stairs!’
‘Well, what then!’ Ilya Petrovitch drawled with
gentlemanly nonchalance; and he walked with some
papers to another table, with a jaunty swing of his
shoulders at each step. ‘Here, if you will kindly look: an
author, or a student, has been one at least, does not pay his
debts, has given an I O U, won’t clear out of his room,
and complaints are constantly being lodged against him,
and here he has been pleased to make a protest against my
smoking in his presence! He behaves like a cad himself,
and just look at him, please. Here’s the gentleman, and
very attractive he is!’
‘Poverty is not a vice, my friend, but we know you go
off like powder, you can’t bear a slight, I daresay you took
offence at something and went too far yourself,’ continued
Nikodim Fomitch, turning affably to Raskolnikov. ‘But
you were wrong there; he is a capital fellow, I assure you,
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but explosive, explosive! He gets hot, fires up, boils over,
and no stopping him! And then it’s all over! And at the
bottom he’s a heart of gold! His nickname in the regiment
was the Explosive Lieutenant….’
‘And what a regiment it was, too,’ cried Ilya
Petrovitch, much gratified at this agreeable banter, though
still sulky.
Raskolnikov had a sudden desire to say something
exceptionally pleasant to them all. ‘Excuse me, Captain,’
he began easily, suddenly addressing Nikodim Fomitch,
‘will you enter into my position? … I am ready to ask
pardon, if I have been ill-mannered. I am a poor student,
sick and shattered (shattered was the word he used) by
poverty. I am not studying, because I cannot keep myself
now, but I shall get money…. I have a mother and sister
in the province of X. They will send it to me, and I will
pay. My landlady is a good- hearted woman, but she is so
exasperated at my having lost my lessons, and not paying
her for the last four months, that she does not even send
up my dinner … and I don’t understand this I O U at all.
She is asking me to pay her on this I O U. How am I to
pay her? Judge for yourselves! …’
‘But that is not our business, you know,’ the head clerk
was observing.
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‘Yes, yes. I perfectly agree with you. But allow me to
explain …’ Raskolnikov put in again, still addressing
Nikodim Fomitch, but trying his best to address Ilya
Petrovitch also, though the latter persistently appeared to
be rummaging among his papers and to be
contemptuously oblivious of him. ‘Allow me to explain
that I have been living with her for nearly three years and
at first … at first … for why should I not confess it, at the
very beginning I promised to marry her daughter, it was a
verbal promise, freely given … she was a girl … indeed, I
liked her, though I was not in love with her … a youthful
affair in fact … that is, I mean to say, that my landlady
gave me credit freely in those days, and I led a life of … I
was very heedless …’
‘Nobody asks you for these personal details, sir, we’ve
no time to waste,’ Ilya Petrovitch interposed roughly and
with a note of triumph; but Raskolnikov stopped him
hotly, though he suddenly found it exceedingly difficult to
speak.
‘But excuse me, excuse me. It is for me to explain …
how it all happened … In my turn … though I agree with
you … it is unnecessary. But a year ago, the girl died of
typhus. I remained lodging there as before, and when my
landlady moved into her present quarters, she said to me
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… and in a friendly way … that she had complete trust in
me, but still, would I not give her an I O U for one
hundred and fifteen roubles, all the debt I owed her. She
said if only I gave her that, she would trust me again, as
much as I liked, and that she would never, never—those
were her own words—make use of that I O U till I could
pay of myself … and now, when I have lost my lessons
and have nothing to eat, she takes action against me. What
am I to say to that?’
‘All these affecting details are no business of ours.’ Ilya
Petrovitch interrupted rudely. ‘You must give a written
undertaking but as for your love affairs and all these tragic
events, we have nothing to do with that.’
‘Come now … you are harsh,’ muttered Nikodim
Fomitch, sitting down at the table and also beginning to
write. He looked a little ashamed.
‘Write!’ said the head clerk to Raskolnikov.
‘Write what?’ the latter asked, gruffly.
‘I will dictate to you.’
Raskolnikov fancied that the head clerk treated him
more casually and contemptuously after his speech, but
strange to say he suddenly felt completely indifferent to
anyone’s opinion, and this revulsion took place in a flash,
in one instant. If he had cared to think a little, he would
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have been amazed indeed that he could have talked to
them like that a minute before, forcing his feelings upon
them. And where had those feelings come from? Now if
the whole room had been filled, not with police officers,
but with those nearest and dearest to him, he would not
have found one human word for them, so empty was his
heart. A gloomy sensation of agonising, everlasting
solitude and remoteness, took conscious form in his soul.
It was not the meanness of his sentimental effusions before
Ilya Petrovitch, nor the meanness of the latter’s triumph
over him that had caused this sudden revulsion in his
heart. Oh, what had he to do now with his own baseness,
with all these petty vanities, officers, German women,
debts, police- offices? If he had been sentenced to be burnt
at that moment, he would not have stirred, would hardly
have heard the sentence to the end. Something was
happening to him entirely new, sudden and unknown. It
was not that he understood, but he felt clearly with all the
intensity of sensation that he could never more appeal to
these people in the police-office with sentimental effusions
like his recent outburst, or with anything whatever; and
that if they had been his own brothers and sisters and not
police-officers, it would have been utterly out of the
question to appeal to them in any circumstance of life. He
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had never experienced such a strange and awful sensation.
And what was most agonising—it was more a sensation
than a conception or idea, a direct sensation, the most
agonising of all the sensations he had known in his life.
The head clerk began dictating to him the usual form
of declaration, that he could not pay, that he undertook to
do so at a future date, that he would not leave the town,
nor sell his property, and so on.
‘But you can’t write, you can hardly hold the pen,’
observed the head clerk, looking with curiosity at
Raskolnikov. ‘Are you ill?’
‘Yes, I am giddy. Go on!’
‘That’s all. Sign it.’
The head clerk took the paper, and turned to attend to
others.
Raskolnikov gave back the pen; but instead of getting
up and going away, he put his elbows on the table and
pressed his head in his hands. He felt as if a nail were being
driven into his skull. A strange idea suddenly occurred to
him, to get up at once, to go up to Nikodim Fomitch, and
tell him everything that had happened yesterday, and then
to go with him to his lodgings and to show him the things
in the hole in the corner. The impulse was so strong that
he got up from his seat to carry it out. ‘Hadn’t I better
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think a minute?’ flashed through his mind. ‘No, better cast
off the burden without thinking.’ But all at once he stood
still, rooted to the spot. Nikodim Fomitch was talking
eagerly with Ilya Petrovitch, and the words reached him:
‘It’s impossible, they’ll both be released. To begin with,
the whole story contradicts itself. Why should they have
called the porter, if it had been their doing? To inform
against themselves? Or as a blind? No, that would be too
cunning! Besides, Pestryakov, the student, was seen at the
gate by both the porters and a woman as he went in. He
was walking with three friends, who left him only at the
gate, and he asked the porters to direct him, in the
presence of the friends. Now, would he have asked his
way if he had been going with such an object? As for
Koch, he spent half an hour at the silversmith’s below,
before he went up to the old woman and he left him at
exactly a quarter to eight. Now just consider …’
‘But excuse me, how do you explain this contradiction?
They state themselves that they knocked and the door was
locked; yet three minutes later when they went up with
the porter, it turned out the door was unfastened.’
‘That’s just it; the murderer must have been there and
bolted himself in; and they’d have caught him for a
certainty if Koch had not been an ass and gone to look for
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the porter too. He must have seized the interval to get
downstairs and slip by them somehow. Koch keeps
crossing himself and saying: ‘If I had been there, he would
have jumped out and killed me with his axe.’ He is going
to have a thanksgiving service—ha, ha!’
‘And no one saw the murderer?’
‘They might well not see him; the house is a regular
Noah’s Ark,’ said the head clerk, who was listening.
‘It’s clear, quite clear,’ Nikodim Fomitch repeated
warmly.
‘No, it is anything but clear,’ Ilya Petrovitch
maintained.
Raskolnikov picked up his hat and walked towards the
door, but he did not reach it….
When he recovered consciousness, he found himself
sitting in a chair, supported by someone on the right side,
while someone else was standing on the left, holding a
yellowish glass filled with yellow water, and Nikodim
Fomitch standing before him, looking intently at him. He
got up from the chair.
‘What’s this? Are you ill?’ Nikodim Fomitch asked,
rather sharply.
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‘He could hardly hold his pen when he was signing,’
said the head clerk, settling back in his place, and taking
up his work again.
‘Have you been ill long?’ cried Ilya Petrovitch from his
place, where he, too, was looking through papers. He had,
of course, come to look at the sick man when he fainted,
but retired at once when he recovered.
‘Since yesterday,’ muttered Raskolnikov in reply.
‘Did you go out yesterday?’
‘Yes.’
‘Though you were ill?’
‘Yes.’
‘At what time?’
‘About seven.’
‘And where did you go, my I ask?’
‘Along the street.’
‘Short and clear.’
Raskolnikov, white as a handkerchief, had answered
sharply, jerkily, without dropping his black feverish eyes
before Ilya Petrovitch’s stare.
‘He can scarcely stand upright. And you …’ Nikodim
Fomitch was beginning.
‘No matter,’ Ilya Petrovitch pronounced rather
peculiarly.
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Nikodim Fomitch would have made some further
protest, but glancing at the head clerk who was looking
very hard at him, he did not speak. There was a sudden
silence. It was strange.
‘Very well, then,’ concluded Ilya Petrovitch, ‘we will
not detain you.’
Raskolnikov went out. He caught the sound of eager
conversation on his departure, and above the rest rose the
questioning voice of Nikodim Fomitch. In the street, his
faintness passed off completely.
‘A search—there will be a search at once,’ he repeated
to himself, hurrying home. ‘The brutes! they suspect.’
His former terror mastered him completely again.
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Chapter II
‘And what if there has been a search already? What if I
find them in my room?’
But here was his room. Nothing and no one in it. No
one had peeped in. Even Nastasya had not touched it. But
heavens! how could he have left all those things in the
hole?
He rushed to the corner, slipped his hand under the
paper, pulled the things out and lined his pockets with
them. There were eight articles in all: two little boxes
with ear-rings or something of the sort, he hardly looked
to see; then four small leather cases. There was a chain,
too, merely wrapped in newspaper and something else in
newspaper, that looked like a decoration…. He put them
all in the different pockets of his overcoat, and the
remaining pocket of his trousers, trying to conceal them as
much as possible. He took the purse, too. Then he went
out of his room, leaving the door open. He walked
quickly and resolutely, and though he felt shattered, he
had his senses about him. He was afraid of pursuit, he was
afraid that in another half-hour, another quarter of an hour
perhaps, instructions would be issued for his pursuit, and
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so at all costs, he must hide all traces before then. He must
clear everything up while he still had some strength, some
reasoning power left him…. Where was he to go?
That had long been settled: ‘Fling them into the canal,
and all traces hidden in the water, the thing would be at
an end.’ So he had decided in the night of his delirium
when several times he had had the impulse to get up and
go away, to make haste, and get rid of it all. But to get rid
of it, turned out to be a very difficult task. He wandered
along the bank of the Ekaterininsky Canal for half an hour
or more and looked several times at the steps running
down to the water, but he could not think of carrying out
his plan; either rafts stood at the steps’ edge, and women
were washing clothes on them, or boats were moored
there, and people were swarming everywhere. Moreover
he could be seen and noticed from the banks on all sides;
it would look suspicious for a man to go down on
purpose, stop, and throw something into the water. And
what if the boxes were to float instead of sinking? And of
course they would. Even as it was, everyone he met
seemed to stare and look round, as if they had nothing to
do but to watch him. ‘Why is it, or can it be my fancy?’
he thought.
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At last the thought struck him that it might be better to
go to the Neva. There were not so many people there, he
would be less observed, and it would be more convenient
in every way, above all it was further off. He wondered
how he could have been wandering for a good half- hour,
worried and anxious in this dangerous past without
thinking of it before. And that half-hour he had lost over
an irrational plan, simply because he had thought of it in
delirium! He had become extremely absent and forgetful
and he was aware of it. He certainly must make haste.
He walked towards the Neva along V—— Prospect,
but on the way another idea struck him. ‘Why to the
Neva? Would it not be better to go somewhere far off, to
the Islands again, and there hide the things in some solitary
place, in a wood or under a bush, and mark the spot
perhaps?’ And though he felt incapable of clear judgment,
the idea seemed to him a sound one. But he was not
destined to go there. For coming out of V—— Prospect
towards the square, he saw on the left a passage leading
between two blank walls to a courtyard. On the right
hand, the blank unwhitewashed wall of a four-storied
house stretched far into the court; on the left, a wooden
hoarding ran parallel with it for twenty paces into the
court, and then turned sharply to the left. Here was a
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deserted fenced-off place where rubbish of different sorts
was lying. At the end of the court, the corner of a low,
smutty, stone shed, apparently part of some workshop,
peeped from behind the hoarding. It was probably a
carriage builder’s or carpenter’s shed; the whole place from
the entrance was black with coal dust. Here would be the
place to throw it, he thought. Not seeing anyone in the
yard, he slipped in, and at once saw near the gate a sink,
such as is often put in yards where there are many
workmen or cab-drivers; and on the hoarding above had
been scribbled in chalk the time-honoured witticism,
‘Standing here strictly forbidden.’ This was all the better,
for there would be nothing suspicious about his going in.
‘Here I could throw it all in a heap and get away!’
Looking round once more, with his hand already in his
pocket, he noticed against the outer wall, between the
entrance and the sink, a big unhewn stone, weighing
perhaps sixty pounds. The other side of the wall was a
street. He could hear passers-by, always numerous in that
part, but he could not be seen from the entrance, unless
someone came in from the street, which might well
happen indeed, so there was need of haste.
He bent down over the stone, seized the top of it
firmly in both hands, and using all his strength turned it
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over. Under the stone was a small hollow in the ground,
and he immediately emptied his pocket into it. The purse
lay at the top, and yet the hollow was not filled up. Then
he seized the stone again and with one twist turned it
back, so that it was in the same position again, though it
stood a very little higher. But he scraped the earth about it
and pressed it at the edges with his foot. Nothing could be
noticed.
Then he went out, and turned into the square. Again
an intense, almost unbearable joy overwhelmed him for an
instant, as it had in the police-office. ‘I have buried my
tracks! And who, who can think of looking under that
stone? It has been lying there most likely ever since the
house was built, and will lie as many years more. And if it
were found, who would think of me? It is all over! No
clue!’ And he laughed. Yes, he remembered that he began
laughing a thin, nervous noiseless laugh, and went on
laughing all the time he was crossing the square. But when
he reached the K—— Boulevard where two days before
he had come upon that girl, his laughter suddenly ceased.
Other ideas crept into his mind. He felt all at once that it
would be loathsome to pass that seat on which after the
girl was gone, he had sat and pondered, and that it would
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be hateful, too, to meet that whiskered policeman to
whom he had given the twenty copecks: ‘Damn him!’
He walked, looking about him angrily and distractedly.
All his ideas now seemed to be circling round some single
point, and he felt that there really was such a point, and
that now, now, he was left facing that point—and for the
first time, indeed, during the last two months.
‘Damn it all!’ he thought suddenly, in a fit of
ungovernable fury. ‘If it has begun, then it has begun.
Hang the new life! Good Lord, how stupid it is! … And
what lies I told to-day! How despicably I fawned upon
that wretched Ilya Petrovitch! But that is all folly! What
do I care for them all, and my fawning upon them! It is
not that at all! It is not that at all!’
Suddenly he stopped; a new utterly unexpected and
exceedingly simple question perplexed and bitterly
confounded him.
‘If it all has really been done deliberately and not
idiotically, if I really had a certain and definite object, how
is it I did not even glance into the purse and don’t know
what I had there, for which I have undergone these
agonies, and have deliberately undertaken this base, filthy
degrading business? And here I wanted at once to throw
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into the water the purse together with all the things which
I had not seen either … how’s that?’
Yes, that was so, that was all so. Yet he had known it
all before, and it was not a new question for him, even
when it was decided in the night without hesitation and
consideration, as though so it must be, as though it could
not possibly be otherwise…. Yes, he had known it all, and
understood it all; it surely had all been settled even
yesterday at the moment when he was bending over the
box and pulling the jewel-cases out of it…. Yes, so it was.
‘It is because I am very ill,’ he decided grimly at last, ‘I
have been worrying and fretting myself, and I don’t know
what I am doing…. Yesterday and the day before
yesterday and all this time I have been worrying myself….
I shall get well and I shall not worry…. But what if I don’t
get well at all? Good God, how sick I am of it all!’
He walked on without resting. He had a terrible
longing for some distraction, but he did not know what to
do, what to attempt. A new overwhelming sensation was
gaining more and more mastery over him every moment;
this was an immeasurable, almost physical, repulsion for
everything surrounding him, an obstinate, malignant
feeling of hatred. All who met him were loathsome to
him—he loathed their faces, their movements, their
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gestures. If anyone had addressed him, he felt that he
might have spat at him or bitten him….
He stopped suddenly, on coming out on the bank of
the Little Neva, near the bridge to Vassilyevsky Ostrov.
‘Why, he lives here, in that house,’ he thought, ‘why, I
have not come to Razumihin of my own accord! Here it’s
the same thing over again…. Very interesting to know,
though; have I come on purpose or have I simply walked
here by chance? Never mind, I said the day before
yesterday that I would go and see him the day after; well,
and so I will! Besides I really cannot go further now.’
He went up to Razumihin’s room on the fifth floor.
The latter was at home in his garret, busily writing at
the moment, and he opened the door himself. It was four
months since they had seen each other. Razumihin was
sitting in a ragged dressing-gown, with slippers on his bare
feet, unkempt, unshaven and unwashed. His face showed
surprise.
‘Is it you?’ he cried. He looked his comrade up and
down; then after a brief pause, he whistled. ‘As hard up as
all that! Why, brother, you’ve cut me out!’ he added,
looking at Raskolnikov’s rags. ‘Come sit down, you are
tired, I’ll be bound.’
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And when he had sunk down on the American leather
sofa, which was in even worse condition than his own,
Razumihin saw at once that his visitor was ill.
‘Why, you are seriously ill, do you know that?’ He
began feeling his pulse. Raskolnikov pulled away his hand.
‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I have come for this: I have no
lessons…. I wanted, … but I don’t really want lessons….’
‘But I say! You are delirious, you know!’ Razumihin
observed, watching him carefully.
‘No, I am not.’
Raskolnikov got up from the sofa. As he had mounted
the stairs to Razumihin’s, he had not realised that he
would be meeting his friend face to face. Now, in a flash,
he knew, that what he was least of all disposed for at that
moment was to be face to face with anyone in the wide
world. His spleen rose within him. He almost choked
with rage at himself as soon as he crossed Razumihin’s
threshold.
‘Good-bye,’ he said abruptly, and walked to the door.
‘Stop, stop! You queer fish.’
‘I don’t want to,’ said the other, again pulling away his
hand.
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‘Then why the devil have you come? Are you mad, or
what? Why, this is … almost insulting! I won’t let you go
like that.’
‘Well, then, I came to you because I know no one but
you who could help … to begin … because you are
kinder than anyone— cleverer, I mean, and can judge …
and now I see that I want nothing. Do you hear? Nothing
at all … no one’s services … no one’s sympathy. I am by
myself … alone. Come, that’s enough. Leave me alone.’
‘Stay a minute, you sweep! You are a perfect madman.
As you like for all I care. I have no lessons, do you see,
and I don’t care about that, but there’s a bookseller,
Heruvimov—and he takes the place of a lesson. I would
not exchange him for five lessons. He’s doing publishing
of a kind, and issuing natural science manuals and what a
circulation they have! The very titles are worth the
money! You always maintained that I was a fool, but by
Jove, my boy, there are greater fools than I am! Now he is
setting up for being advanced, not that he has an inkling of
anything, but, of course, I encourage him. Here are two
signatures of the German text—in my opinion, the crudest
charlatanism; it discusses the question, ‘Is woman a human
being?’ And, of course, triumphantly proves that she is.
Heruvimov is going to bring out this work as a
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contribution to the woman question; I am translating it;
he will expand these two and a half signatures into six, we
shall make up a gorgeous title half a page long and bring it
out at half a rouble. It will do! He pays me six roubles the
signature, it works out to about fifteen roubles for the job,
and I’ve had six already in advance. When we have
finished this, we are going to begin a translation about
whales, and then some of the dullest scandals out of the
second part of Les Confessions we have marked for
translation; somebody has told Heruvimov, that Rousseau
was a kind of Radishchev. You may be sure I don’t
contradict him, hang him! Well, would you like to do the
second signature of ‘Is woman a human being?’ If you
would, take the German and pens and paper—all those are
provided, and take three roubles; for as I have had six
roubles in advance on the whole thing, three roubles
come to you for your share. And when you have finished
the signature there will be another three roubles for you.
And please don’t think I am doing you a service; quite the
contrary, as soon as you came in, I saw how you could
help me; to begin with, I am weak in spelling, and
secondly, I am sometimes utterly adrift in German, so that
I make it up as I go along for the most part. The only
comfort is, that it’s bound to be a change for the better.
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