Part Two · VI

But the moment she was gone, he got up, hooked the door shut, untied the bundle of clothes that Razumikhin had brought earlier and tied up again himself, and began to dress. A strange thing: he seemed suddenly to have become completely calm; there was none of the half-crazed delirium of earlier, none of the panic fear of all this last while. It was the first minute of some strange, sudden calm. His movements were precise and clear, and a firm intention showed through them. “Today, this very day!…” he muttered to himself. He understood, however, that he was still weak, but the most intense strain of mind, which had reached the point of calm, of a fixed idea, gave him strength and self-assurance; he hoped, besides, that he would not fall down in the street. Fully dressed, in everything new, he glanced at the money lying on the table, thought a moment, and put it in his pocket. There were twenty-five roubles. He took all the copper five-kopeck pieces too, the change from the ten roubles Razumikhin had spent on the clothes. Then he quietly lifted the hook, went out of the room, went down the stairs, and glanced into the kitchen, which stood wide open: Nastasya was standing with her back to him and, bent over, was blowing on the landlady’s samovar. She heard nothing. And who could have supposed that he would go out? A minute later he was already in the street.

It was about eight o’clock; the sun was setting. The stuffiness was the same as before; but he greedily breathed in that stinking, dusty, city-infected air. His head was just beginning to swim a little; some wild energy suddenly glittered in his inflamed eyes and his wasted, pale yellow face. He did not know, and did not even think, where to go; he knew one thing: “that all this had to be ended today, in one go, right now; that otherwise he would not go back home, because he did not want to live like this.” How to end it? With what? Of that he had no notion, and did not want to think. He drove the thought away: the thought tormented him. He only felt and knew that everything had to change, one way or another, “no matter how,” he repeated with a desperate, fixed self-assurance and resolve.

From old habit, by the usual way of his former walks, he headed straight for the Haymarket. Before he reached the Haymarket, in the roadway in front of a small grocer’s shop, a young dark-haired organ-grinder stood cranking out some highly sentimental romance. He was accompanying a girl of about fifteen who stood in front of him on the sidewalk, dressed like a young lady, in a crinoline, a little mantle, gloves, and a straw hat with a flame-colored feather; all of it old and worn out. In a street voice, cracked but rather pleasant and strong, she was singing out the romance in expectation of a two-kopeck piece from the shop. Raskolnikov stopped beside two or three listeners, listened a while, took out a five-kopeck piece, and put it in the girl’s hand. She suddenly broke off her singing on the most sentimental and highest little note, as if she had cut it with a knife, and called out sharply to the organ-grinder, “That’ll do!” And the two of them trudged on to the next shop.

“Do you like street singing?” Raskolnikov suddenly addressed a passerby, a man no longer young, who had been standing beside him at the barrel organ and had the look of an idler. The man looked at him wildly and was surprised. “I like it,” Raskolnikov went on, but with an air as if he were not talking about street singing at all, “I like it when they sing to a barrel organ on a cold, dark, damp autumn evening, it has to be damp, when all the passersby have pale-green, sickly faces; or, even better, when wet snow is falling, quite straight down, no wind, you know? and the gas lamps shine through it…”

“I don’t know, sir… Excuse me…” muttered the gentleman, frightened both by the question and by Raskolnikov’s strange look, and he crossed to the other side of the street.

Raskolnikov walked straight on and came out at that corner of the Haymarket where the tradesman and the woman who had been talking with Lizaveta that time had their stall; but they were not there now. Recognizing the place, he stopped, looked around, and turned to a young fellow in a red shirt who was yawning at the entrance to a flour store.

“It’s a tradesman who sells here on the corner, isn’t it, with a woman, his wife, eh?”

“All sorts sell here,” the fellow answered, sizing Raskolnikov up from on high.

“What’s his name?”

“Whatever they christened him.”

“You wouldn’t be from Zaraisk too, would you? What province?”

The fellow looked at Raskolnikov again.

“Where we come from, Your Excellency, it’s not a province, it’s a district, and it was my brother did the traveling, and I sat at home, so I don’t know, sir… Kindly forgive me, Your Excellency, be so generous.”

“Is that an eating house, up there?”

“That’s a tavvern, and there’s billiards too; and princesses to be found… Tra-la!”

Raskolnikov crossed the square. There, on the corner, stood a dense crowd of people, all peasants. He pushed into the very thickest of it, peering into faces. For some reason he felt drawn to start talking with everyone. But the peasants paid no attention to him, and all kept jabbering away about something among themselves, bunching up in little knots. He stood a while, thought, and went off to the right, along the sidewalk, in the direction of V——. Having passed the square, he found himself in a lane…

He had walked through this short lane before; it makes a bend and leads from the square into Sadovaya Street. Lately he had even been drawn to loiter about all these places when he felt sick at heart, “so as to feel sicker still.” But now he went in without thinking of anything. There is a big building here, given over entirely to drinking dens and other establishments for eating and drinking; women kept running out of them every minute, dressed the way you go out “to the neighbors’”: bareheaded and in nothing but their dresses. In two or three spots they crowded on the sidewalk in groups, mostly by the entrances to the basement floor, where, by two steps, you could go down into various highly amusing establishments. In one of these, just at that moment, there was a banging and a din that carried all down the street, a guitar was strumming, songs were being sung, and it was very merry. A big group of women crowded at the entrance; some were sitting on the steps, others on the sidewalk, others stood talking. Nearby, in the roadway, a drunken soldier with a cigarette was lurching about, swearing loudly, and seemed to want to go in somewhere but as if he had forgotten where. One ragamuffin was swearing at another ragamuffin, and some dead-drunk man lay sprawled across the street. Raskolnikov stopped by the big group of women. They were talking in hoarse voices; all were in cotton print dresses and goatskin shoes, and bareheaded. Some were over forty, but there were some of seventeen as well, almost all with blackened eyes.

For some reason he was taken by the singing and all that banging and din, down there… From below you could hear how, amid guffaws and squeals, to the thin falsetto of a rollicking tune and to the guitar, someone was dancing desperately, beating time with his heels. He listened intently, gloomily and thoughtfully, bending at the entrance and peering curiously from the sidewalk into the passage.

Oh my handsome watchman, you, / Don’t you beat me for nothing, do!—

the singer’s thin voice poured out. Raskolnikov wanted terribly to make out what they were singing, as if that were the whole point.

“Shall I go in?” he thought. “They’re laughing! Drunk. Well, why not get drunk myself?”

“Won’t you come in, dear sir?” one of the women asked in a rather ringing voice that was not yet altogether hoarse. She was young, and even not repulsive—the only one in the whole group.

“Look, a pretty one!” he answered, straightening up and looking at her.

She smiled; she liked the compliment very much.

“You’re a very pretty one yourself,” she said.

“How skinny you are!” another remarked in a bass voice. “Just let out of the hospital, or what?”

“Look like generals’ daughters, and every nose a snub!” suddenly broke in a tipsy peasant who had come up, in an open coat, with a slyly laughing mug. “Look at the fun!”

“Go on in, since you’ve come!”

“I will! Sweet stuff!”

And he tumbled down below.

Raskolnikov moved on.

“Listen, sir!” the girl cried after him.

“What?”

She grew embarrassed.

“I’d always be glad, dear sir, to share an hour with you, but just now somehow I can’t get up the nerve with you. Make me a present, nice gentleman, of six kopecks for a drink!”

Raskolnikov took out what came out: three five-kopeck pieces.

“Oh, what a kindest gentleman!”

“What’s your name?”

“Just ask for Duklida.”

“No, really, what is this,” one of the group suddenly remarked, shaking her head at Duklida. “I just don’t know how anybody can ask like that! I think I’d sink through the floor from the shame of it alone…”

Raskolnikov looked curiously at the one who was speaking. She was a pockmarked wench of about thirty, covered in bruises, with a swollen upper lip. She spoke and condemned calmly and seriously.

“Where was it,” thought Raskolnikov, walking on, “where was it I read how a man condemned to death, an hour before his death, says or thinks that if he had to live somewhere high up, on a rock, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet—and all around there would be chasms, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, and eternal storm—and had to stay like that, standing on an arshin¹ of space, all his life, a thousand years, eternity—it would be better to live like that than to die right now! Only to live, to live and live! No matter how—only to live!… What truth! Lord, what truth! Man is a scoundrel! And a scoundrel is he who calls him a scoundrel for it,” he added a minute later.

He came out into another street: “Ah! The Crystal Palace! Razumikhin was talking about the Crystal Palace earlier. Only, what was it I wanted? Yes, to read!… Zosimov said he’d read in the newspapers…”

“Have you got newspapers?” he asked, going into a very spacious and even tidy tavern establishment of several rooms, though rather empty. Two or three customers were drinking tea, and in one far room sat a group of four or so drinking champagne. Raskolnikov thought Zametov was among them. However, from a distance he could not see well.

“So what!” he thought.

“Vodka, sir?” asked the waiter.

“Bring me tea. And bring me some newspapers, old ones, for about five days running, and I’ll give you something for vodka.”

“Very good, sir. Here’s today’s, sir. And vodka, sir?”

The old newspapers and the tea appeared. Raskolnikov sat down and began searching: “Izler—Izler—the Aztecs—the Aztecs—Izler—Bartola—Massimo—the Aztecs—Izler…² pah, the devil! Ah, here are the local items: woman fell down the stairs—tradesman burned up from drink—fire in Peski—fire on the Petersburg Side—another fire on the Petersburg Side—another fire on the Petersburg Side—Izler—Izler—Izler—Izler—Massimo… Ah, here…”

At last he found what he was after and began to read; the lines jumped before his eyes, but he read the whole “report” through and greedily set about looking for later additions in the following numbers. His hands trembled with convulsive impatience as he turned the sheets. Suddenly someone sat down beside him, at his table. He looked: Zametov, the very same Zametov and looking just the same, with his rings, his watch chains, the part in his black, curly, pomaded hair, in a dandyish waistcoat, a somewhat shabby frock coat, and none-too-fresh linen. He was cheerful, or at least he was smiling very cheerfully and good-naturedly. His swarthy face was a little flushed from the champagne he had drunk.

“What! You here?” he began, puzzled, and in a tone as if he had known him for ages. “Why, only yesterday Razumikhin was telling me you were still out of your mind. How strange! And I was at your place, you know…”

Raskolnikov had known he would come over. He put the newspapers aside and turned to Zametov. There was a smirk on his lips, and some new irritable impatience showed through that smirk.

“That I know, that you were,” he answered, “I heard, sir. You were looking for the sock… And you know, Razumikhin is crazy about you, he says you went with him to Laviza Ivanovna’s, the one you were trying to help that time, you kept winking at Lieutenant Gunpowder, and he just didn’t get it, remember? You’d think you couldn’t not get it—it was plain as day… eh?”

“And what a brawler he is!”

“Gunpowder?”

“No, your friend, Razumikhin…”

“You have a fine life, Mr. Zametov; free admission to the pleasantest places! Who was that pouring you champagne just now?”

“Oh, that was us… having a drink… Pouring, you call it?!”

“An honorarium! You take advantage of everything!” Raskolnikov laughed. “Never mind, kindest boy, never mind!” he added, slapping Zametov on the shoulder. “I don’t mean it spitefully, but ‘out of all, like, love, just playing,’ as that workman of yours said when he was pummeling Mitka, there, in the old woman’s case.”

“And how do you know?”

“Why, maybe I know more than you do.”

“How strange you are… You must still be very ill. You shouldn’t have gone out…”

“So I seem strange to you?”

“Yes. What are you doing reading newspapers?”

“Newspapers.”

“There’s a lot about fires…”

“No, I’m not reading about fires.” Here he gave Zametov an enigmatic look; a mocking smile again twisted his lips. “No, I’m not reading about fires,” he went on, winking at Zametov. “But confess, my sweet youth, you want terribly to know what I was reading about?”

“I don’t want to at all; I just asked. Can’t a person ask? Why do you keep…”

“Listen, you’re an educated man, literary, eh?”

“I was in the sixth form of the gymnasium,” Zametov answered with a certain dignity.

“The sixth form! Oh, my little sparrow! With a part in his hair, in rings—a rich man! Pah, what a darling little boy!” Here Raskolnikov burst into nervous laughter, right in Zametov’s face. Zametov drew back, and was not exactly offended, but very much surprised.

“Pah, how strange you are!” Zametov repeated very seriously. “It seems to me you’re still raving.”

“Raving? You lie, little sparrow!… So I’m strange? Well, but I make you curious, eh? Curious?”

“Curious.”

“So shall I tell you what I was reading, what I was searching for? Look how many numbers I had them haul out! Suspicious, eh?”

“Well, tell me.”

“Got your ears up?”

“Up where?”

“I’ll tell you later up where, but now, my dearest fellow, I declare to you… no, better: ‘I confess’… No, that’s not it either: ‘I am giving a deposition, and you are taking it down’—that’s it! So I depose that I was reading, was interested… was looking for… searching for…” Raskolnikov narrowed his eyes and waited. “Searching—and came in here for that very purpose—for the murder of the old woman, the official’s widow,” he brought out at last, almost in a whisper, bringing his face extremely close to Zametov’s face. Zametov looked straight back at him, point-blank, without stirring and without drawing his face away from his. What seemed strangest of all to Zametov afterward was that the silence between them lasted exactly one whole minute, and for exactly one whole minute they looked at each other like that.

“Well, so what if you were reading?” he cried suddenly, bewildered and impatient. “What business is it of mine! What of it?”

“It’s that very old woman,” Raskolnikov went on in the same whisper, not stirring at Zametov’s exclamation, “the very one, you remember, that they started telling about in the office, and I fainted. Well, do you understand now?”

“But what is it? What… ‘understand’?” Zametov said, almost in alarm.

Raskolnikov’s fixed and serious face was transformed in a single instant, and suddenly he burst again into the same nervous laughter as before, as though he were utterly unable to restrain himself. And in one flash he recalled, with an extraordinary clarity of sensation, one recent instant when he stood behind the door with the axe, the latch was jumping, they were swearing and pushing at the door, and he suddenly wanted to shout at them, to swear back at them, to stick his tongue out at them, to tease them, to laugh, to laugh out loud, laugh, laugh!

“Either you’re mad, or…” Zametov said—and stopped, as though suddenly struck by a thought that had flashed unexpectedly through his mind.

“Or? Or what? Well, what? Come on, tell me!”

“Nothing!” Zametov answered crossly. “It’s all nonsense!”

They both fell silent. After his sudden, fitlike outburst of laughter, Raskolnikov suddenly became thoughtful and sad. He leaned his elbow on the table and propped his head on his hand. He seemed to have completely forgotten about Zametov. The silence lasted quite a long time.

“Why aren’t you drinking your tea? It’ll get cold,” said Zametov.

“Eh? What? Tea?… All right…” Raskolnikov took a gulp from his glass, put a bit of bread in his mouth, and suddenly, looking at Zametov, seemed to remember everything and as it were gave himself a shake: his face at that same moment took on its original mocking expression. He went on drinking his tea.

“There are a lot of these swindles going on nowadays,” said Zametov. “Just recently I was reading in the Moscow News that they caught a whole gang of counterfeiters in Moscow. A whole society. They were forging banknotes.”

“Oh, that was a long time ago! I read about it a month back,” Raskolnikov answered calmly. “So those, in your opinion, are swindlers?” he added with a smirk.

“How are they not swindlers?”

“Those? Those are children, blancs-becs,³ not swindlers! A whole fifty people banding together for a thing like that! Is that possible? Even three would be too many, and then only if each was surer of the others than of himself! Otherwise one of them only has to blab when he’s drunk, and it’s all gone to dust! Blancs-becs! They hire unreliable people to change the notes at the banks: trust a job like that to the first comer? Well, suppose it worked even with blancs-becs, suppose each of them changed a million for himself, and then what? For the rest of their lives? Each one depending on the others for the rest of his life! Better to hang yourself! And they didn’t even know how to change them: one started changing at a bank, received five thousand, and his hands trembled. He counted four, and took the fifth without counting, on trust, just to get it in his pocket and run away quickly. Well, and he aroused suspicion. And the whole thing burst because of one fool! Is that really possible?”

“That his hands trembled?” Zametov took it up. “No, that’s possible, sir. No, I’m perfectly sure that’s possible. Sometimes you can’t hold out.”

“Hold out against that?”

“And you, I suppose, would hold out? No, I couldn’t have! To go into such a horror for a hundred roubles’ reward! To go with a forged note—where?—into a banking office, where they know that business inside out—no, I’d lose my nerve. Wouldn’t you lose your nerve?”

Raskolnikov suddenly wanted terribly to “stick his tongue out” again. A chill ran down his spine at moments.

“I wouldn’t do it like that,” he began from afar. “Here’s how I’d change them: I’d count the first thousand, about four times over, from every end, peering at every note, and set about the second thousand; I’d start counting it, count to the middle, and pull out some fifty-rouble note, and up to the light with it, and turn it over and up to the light again—isn’t it forged? ‘I’m afraid, you see: a relative of mine lost twenty-five roubles that way just the other day’; and I’d tell a whole story about it. And when I started counting the third thousand—no, excuse me: I think I counted the seventh hundred wrong back there in the second thousand, I have my doubts, and I’d drop the third and go back to the second—and all five like that. And when I’d finished, I’d pull a note out of the fifth and out of the second, and up to the light again, and doubtful again, ‘change it, please’—and I’d sweat the clerk till the seventh sweat poured off him, so he wouldn’t know how to get me off his hands! I’d finish it all at last, go off, open the door—but no, excuse me, back I’d come again, to ask about something, get some explanation or other—that’s how I’d do it!”

“Pah, what terrible things you say!” said Zametov, laughing. “Only all that is just talk, and in reality you’d surely slip up. In this, I tell you, in my opinion, not only you and I, but even a seasoned, desperate man can’t answer for himself. Why look far—here’s an example: an old woman was murdered in our district. Now there, you’d think, was a desperate head, took every risk in broad daylight, saved himself only by a miracle—and his hands still trembled: he couldn’t manage to rob her properly, he didn’t hold out; you can see it from the case…”

Raskolnikov seemed offended.

“You can see it! Well, go on, catch him now, just try!” he cried out, gloatingly egging Zametov on.

“Well, they’ll catch him.”

“Who? You? You catch him? You’ll run yourselves ragged! Here’s the main thing for you: is the man spending money or not? Had no money, and now suddenly starts spending—well, how can it not be him? A mere child could fool you on that, if he wanted to!”

“That’s just it, they all do that,” Zametov answered. “He’ll kill cleverly, risk his life, and then right away he’s caught in a pothouse. It’s by the spending they’re caught. They’re not all as clever as you. You wouldn’t go to a pothouse, of course?”

Raskolnikov knitted his brows and looked intently at Zametov.

“You seem to have got a taste for it, and want to know how I’d act here too?” he asked with displeasure.

“I’d like to,” the other answered firmly and seriously. He had begun to speak and look somehow much too seriously.

“Very much?”

“Very much.”

“All right. Here’s how I’d act,” Raskolnikov began, again suddenly bringing his face close to Zametov’s face, again looking at him point-blank and speaking again in a whisper, so that this time Zametov even shuddered. “Here’s what I’d do: I’d take the money and the things, and as soon as I left there, right away, without stopping anywhere, I’d go somewhere where it’s out of the way and there’s nothing but fences, and almost nobody around—a kitchen garden or something like that. I’d have spotted beforehand some stone in that yard, a pood or a pood and a half in weight, somewhere in a corner, by the fence, that’s been lying there maybe since the house was built; I’d lift that stone—there’s bound to be a hollow under it—and in that hollow I’d put all the things and the money. I’d put them in and roll the stone back over them, the way it lay before, press it down with my foot, and walk away. And for a year I wouldn’t take them, for two, for three I wouldn’t—well, go and look for it! It was there, and it’s gone!”

“You’re mad,” Zametov brought out, for some reason also almost in a whisper, and for some reason suddenly moved away from Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov’s eyes flashed; he turned terribly pale; his upper lip quivered and began to twitch. He leaned toward Zametov as close as he could and began moving his lips without uttering anything; this went on for half a minute or so; he knew what he was doing but could not restrain himself. The terrible word, like the latch on the door that time, was simply jumping on his lips: any moment now it would break loose; any moment now, just let it go, any moment now, just say it!

“And what if it was I who killed the old woman and Lizaveta?” he said suddenly and—came to his senses.

Zametov looked at him wildly and turned white as a tablecloth. His face twisted into a smile.

“But is that possible?” he said, barely audibly.

Raskolnikov looked at him spitefully.

“Admit you believed it? Yes? You did, didn’t you?”

“Not at all! Now more than ever I don’t believe it!” Zametov said hastily.

“Caught at last! The little sparrow’s caught. So you did believe before, if now you ‘more than ever don’t believe’?”

“But not at all!” Zametov exclaimed, visibly embarrassed. “So that’s why you were frightening me, to lead me up to this?”

“So you don’t believe it? And what were you talking about without me, that time I walked out of the office? And why did Lieutenant Gunpowder question me after I fainted? Hey, you,” he shouted to the waiter, getting up and taking his cap, “how much do I owe?”

“Thirty kopecks in all, sir,” the waiter answered, running up.

“And here’s another twenty kopecks for vodka. Look how much money!” He held out his trembling hand with the banknotes to Zametov. “Red ones, blue ones, twenty-five roubles. Where from? And where did the new clothes turn up from? You know there wasn’t a kopeck! They’ve questioned the landlady already, I bet… Well, enough! Assez causé!⁴ Goodbye… a most pleasant…!”

He went out, all trembling from some wild, hysterical sensation in which, meanwhile, there was a share of unbearable delight—gloomy, though, and terribly tired. His face was twisted, as if after some fit. His exhaustion was rapidly increasing. His strength was roused and came now all at once, with the first jolt, with the first irritating sensation, and ebbed just as quickly as the sensation ebbed.

And Zametov, left alone, sat on a long while in the same spot, deep in thought. Raskolnikov had inadvertently turned all his thoughts upside down on a certain point and had settled his opinion once and for all.

“Ilya Petrovich is a blockhead!” he decided once and for all.

Raskolnikov had no sooner opened the street door than, suddenly, right on the front steps, he ran into Razumikhin coming in. Neither saw the other even a step away, so that they nearly knocked heads. For some time they measured each other with their eyes. Razumikhin was in the greatest amazement, but suddenly anger, real anger, flashed menacingly in his eyes.

“So this is where you are!” he shouted at the top of his voice. “Ran away from bed! And I even looked for him under the sofa! We went up to the attic, you know! I nearly beat Nastasya on your account… And here he is! Rodka! What does this mean? Tell me the whole truth! Confess! Do you hear?”

“It means that I’m sick to death of all of you, and I want to be alone,” Raskolnikov answered calmly.

“Alone? When you can’t even walk yet, when your mug’s still white as a sheet, and you’re gasping for breath! Idiot!… What were you doing in the Crystal Palace? Confess this minute!”

“Let me go!” said Raskolnikov and tried to walk past. This drove Razumikhin out of his mind: he seized him hard by the shoulder.

“Let you go? You dare say ‘let me go’? Do you know what I’m going to do with you right now? I’ll grab you up in my arms, tie you in a knot, and carry you home under my arm, under lock and key!”

“Listen, Razumikhin,” Raskolnikov began quietly and apparently quite calmly, “can’t you see that I don’t want your good deeds? And why this urge to do good to those who… spit on it? To those, finally, who find it seriously hard to bear? Well, why did you hunt me out at the start of my illness? Maybe I’d have been very glad to die? Well, haven’t I shown you plainly enough today that you’re tormenting me, that you… bore me sick! What an urge, really, to torment people! I assure you that all this is seriously hindering my recovery, because it irritates me constantly. Zosimov left earlier, didn’t he, so as not to irritate me! For God’s sake, you leave me alone too! And what right, finally, do you have to keep me by force? Can’t you see that I’m speaking in my perfectly right mind now? How, how, teach me, can I finally beg you not to pester me and not to do me good deeds? Let me be ungrateful, let me be base, only leave me alone, all of you, for God’s sake, leave me alone! Leave me alone! Leave me alone!”

He had begun calmly, rejoicing in advance at all the venom he was preparing to pour out, and ended in a frenzy and gasping for breath, as with Luzhin earlier.

Razumikhin stood a moment, thought, and let go of his arm.

“Then go to the devil!” he said quietly and almost thoughtfully. “Stop!” he roared suddenly, when Raskolnikov was about to move off. “Listen to me. I declare to you that you’re all, every last one of you, little babblers and little braggarts! Get yourselves a little suffering and you fuss over it like a hen with an egg! Even in that you steal from other authors. Not a sign of independent life in you! You’re made of spermaceti ointment, and instead of blood you have serum! I don’t believe a single one of you! The first thing with you, in all circumstances, is how not to resemble a human being! Sto-o-op!” he shouted with redoubled fury, noticing that Raskolnikov was again starting to leave. “Hear me out! You know I’m having a housewarming party today, maybe they’ve already come, but I left my uncle there—I just ran in—to receive the guests. So, if you weren’t a fool, not a vulgar fool, not a downright fool, not a translation from the foreign… you see, Rodya, I admit you’re a clever fellow, but you’re a fool!—so, if you weren’t a fool, you’d do better to drop in on me today, sit the evening, than wear out your boots for nothing. Since you’ve gone out, well, it can’t be helped! I’d roll you up such soft armchairs, the landlords have some… A bit of tea, company… Or else I’ll lay you out on the couch—anyway you’ll be lying among us… And Zosimov will be there. Will you come, or what?”

“No.”

“Li-i-ar!” Razumikhin cried out impatiently. “How do you know? You can’t answer for yourself! And you don’t understand anything about it… A thousand times I’ve spat and broken with people just the same way and then come running back… You’ll get ashamed—and you’ll come back to the man! So remember, Pochinkov’s house, third floor…”

“Why, at this rate you’ll let somebody beat you, I suppose, Mr. Razumikhin, for the pleasure of doing good.”

“Who? Me? I’ll twist his nose off for the mere idea! Pochinkov’s house, number forty-seven, in the flat of Babushkin, the civil servant…”

“I won’t come, Razumikhin.” Raskolnikov turned and walked away.

“I bet you will!” Razumikhin shouted after him. “Otherwise you… otherwise I don’t want to know you! Wait, hey! Is Zametov in there?”

“He is.”

“Did you see him?”

“I saw him.”

“And talked?”

“Talked.”

“About what? Well, devil take you, don’t tell me, then. Pochinkov’s, forty-seven, Babushkin’s, remember!”

Raskolnikov reached Sadovaya Street and turned the corner. Razumikhin looked after him, lost in thought. At last, with a wave of his hand, he went into the building, but stopped halfway up the stairs.

“Devil take it!” he went on, almost aloud. “He talks sense, and yet it’s as if… But I’m a fool too! As if madmen don’t talk sense! And it seemed to me that’s just what Zosimov is a bit afraid of!” He tapped his finger on his forehead. “Well, what if… well, how can I let him go off alone now? He may drown himself… Eh, I’ve blundered! I can’t!” And he ran back, after Raskolnikov, but there was no trace of him. He spat and with quick steps went back into the Crystal Palace to question Zametov as soon as possible.

Raskolnikov went straight to the ——sky Bridge, stood in the middle, at the railing, leaned both elbows on it, and began looking along the water. After parting from Razumikhin, he had grown so weak that he barely made it here. He wanted to sit or lie down somewhere, in the street. Bending over the water, he looked mechanically at the last pink glow of the sunset, at the row of houses darkening in the thickening dusk, at one distant little window, somewhere in a garret, on the left embankment, that blazed as if in flames from the last ray of sun striking it for a moment, at the darkening water of the canal, and seemed to be peering into that water attentively. At last some red circles began spinning before his eyes, the houses began to move, the passersby, the embankments, the carriages—all of it spun and danced around him. Suddenly he started, saved again, perhaps, from fainting by one wild and hideous sight. He felt that someone had come to stand next to him, on his right, beside him; he looked—and saw a woman, tall, with a kerchief on her head, with a yellow, elongated, drink-ravaged face and reddish, sunken eyes. She was looking straight at him but obviously saw nothing and distinguished no one. Suddenly she leaned her right arm on the railing, raised her right leg and swung it over the rail, then the left, and threw herself into the canal. The dirty water parted and swallowed its victim for an instant, but a minute later the drowning woman floated up, and she was carried slowly downstream, head and legs in the water, back on top, with her skirt bunched up and ballooning over the water like a pillow.

“She’s drowned herself! She’s drowned herself!” shouted dozens of voices; people came running, both embankments were lined with spectators, on the bridge a crowd gathered around Raskolnikov, pressing and crushing him from behind.

“Merciful heavens, why, it’s our Afrosinyushka!” a woman’s plaintive cry was heard somewhere not far off. “Merciful heavens, save her! Good people, dear fathers, pull her out!”

“A boat! A boat!” people shouted in the crowd.

But a boat was no longer needed: a policeman ran down the steps of the landing to the canal, threw off his greatcoat and boots, and plunged into the water. There was not much work to it: the drowning woman was being carried by the water two steps from the landing; he grabbed her by the clothes with his right hand, with his left he managed to catch hold of a pole his comrade held out to him, and at once the drowning woman was pulled out. They laid her on the granite slabs of the landing. She came to quickly, raised herself, and began sneezing and snorting, senselessly wiping her wet dress with her hands. She said nothing.

“She’s drunk herself to the horrors, dear sirs, to the horrors,” the same woman’s voice howled, now beside Afrosinyushka. “The other day she wanted to hang herself too, they took her down from the rope. I just went to the shop now, left a little girl to watch her—and look, what a sin has come of it! She’s a townswoman, sir, one of our townsfolk, we live close by, second house from the end, right there…”

The people were dispersing, the police were still busy with the drowned woman, someone shouted something about the office… Raskolnikov looked at it all with a strange feeling of indifference and detachment. He felt disgusted. “No, it’s vile… water… not worth it,” he muttered to himself. “Nothing will come of it,” he added, “no use waiting. What’s this, the office… And why isn’t Zametov at the office? The office is open till after nine…” He turned his back to the railing and looked around him.

“Well, then! Why not!” he said resolutely, moved off the bridge, and headed in the direction where the office was. His heart was empty and dull. He did not want to think. Even the anguish had passed, not a trace of the energy of earlier, when he had left the house “to end it all!” Complete apathy had taken its place.

“Well, it’s a way out!” he thought, walking quietly and listlessly along the canal embankment. “I’ll end it anyway, because I want to… But is it a way out? Never mind! There’ll be an arshin of space—heh! What an end, though! Can it really be the end? Shall I tell them or not? Eh… devil! And I’m tired: to lie down or sit down somewhere, quickly! The most shameful thing is that it’s so very stupid. To hell with that, too. Pah, what stupid things come into your head…”

To get to the office he had to go straight on and take the second turning to the left: it was just two steps away. But when he reached the first turning, he stopped, thought, turned into a lane, and went the roundabout way, by two streets—perhaps without any purpose, or perhaps to drag out one more minute at least and gain time. He walked looking at the ground. Suddenly it was as if someone whispered something in his ear. He raised his head and saw that he was standing by that house, right at the gates. Since that evening he had not been here and had not passed by.

An irresistible and inexplicable desire drew him. He went into the building, walked through the whole archway, then into the first entrance on the right, and began climbing the familiar stairs to the fourth floor. On the narrow and steep staircase it was very dark. He stopped on each landing and looked around with curiosity. On the first-floor landing the window frame had been taken out entirely: “That wasn’t so then,” he thought. Here was the second-floor flat where Nikolashka and Mitka had worked: “Locked; and the door freshly painted; so it’s up for rent.” Here was the third floor… and the fourth… “Here!” Bewilderment seized him: the door of this flat stood wide open, there were people inside, voices could be heard; he had not expected that at all. After hesitating a little, he climbed the last steps and went into the flat.

It too was being redone; there were workmen in it; this seemed to stun him. For some reason he had imagined that he would find everything exactly as he had left it then, even, perhaps, the corpses in the same places on the floor. And now: bare walls, no furniture; strange somehow! He walked over to the window and sat on the windowsill.

There were only two workmen, both young fellows, one older and the other much younger. They were hanging new wallpaper on the walls, white, with little lilac-colored flowers, in place of the old yellow paper, frayed and worn out. For some reason Raskolnikov disliked this terribly; he looked at this new wallpaper with hostility, as though he were sorry that everything had been so changed.

The workmen had evidently stayed late and were now hurriedly rolling up their paper and getting ready to go home. Raskolnikov’s appearance drew almost no attention from them. They were talking about something. Raskolnikov folded his arms and began to listen.

“So she comes to me, see, in the morning,” the older one was telling the younger, “early-early-earliest, all dressed up. ‘And what are you lemoning at me for,’ I says, ‘what are you oranging at me for,’ I says?—‘I want,’ she says, ‘Tit Vasilyevich, from now on, henceforth, to be entirely at your will.’ So that’s how it is! And how she was dressed up: a magazine, a regular magazine!”

“And what’s a magazine, unc’?” asked the young one. He was evidently taking lessons from “unc’.”

“A magazine, that is, my dear brother, is pictures, colored ones, and they come here to the tailors every Saturday, by post, from abroad, about, that is, how everybody should dress, the male sex as well as, equally, the female. A drawing, that means. The male sex is mostly drawn in fur-trimmed coats, but in the female department there’s such soufflers, brother, that you could give me everything and it wouldn’t be enough!”

“And what don’t they have in this Piter!” the younger one cried with enthusiasm. “Excepting father and mother, they’ve got everything!”

“Excepting that, my dear brother, everything’s to be found,” the older one concluded didactically.

Raskolnikov got up and went into the other room, where the trunk and the chest of drawers had stood before; the room seemed terribly small to him without the furniture. The wallpaper was all the same; in the corner on the wallpaper there was sharply marked the place where the icon case had stood. He looked and went back to his window. The older workman was eyeing him sidelong.

“What do you want, sir?” he asked suddenly, turning to him.

Instead of answering, Raskolnikov got up, went out into the entryway, took hold of the bell-pull, and pulled. The same bell, the same tinny sound! He pulled a second, a third time; he listened and remembered. The former, agonizingly frightening, hideous sensation began to come back to him more and more vividly and keenly, he shuddered at every ring, and it became more and more pleasant to him.

“What d’you want? Who are you?” the workman shouted, coming out to him. Raskolnikov went back in at the door.

“I want to rent the flat,” he said. “I’m looking it over.”

“Nobody rents a ’partment at night; and besides, you have to come with the caretaker.”

“The floor’s been washed; will they paint it?” Raskolnikov went on. “Is there no blood?”

“What blood?”

“Why, the old woman was murdered here, with her sister. There was a whole pool here.”

“What sort of man are you?” the workman shouted uneasily.

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“You want to know?… Let’s go to the police office, I’ll tell you there.”

The workmen looked at him in bewilderment.

“It’s time we were going, sir, we’ve stayed late. Come on, Alyoshka. We have to lock up,” said the older workman.

“Well, let’s go!” Raskolnikov answered indifferently, and went out ahead, slowly going down the stairs. “Hey, caretaker!” he shouted as he came out under the gateway.

Several people were standing right at the street entrance to the building, gaping at passersby: both caretakers, a woman, a tradesman in a long robe, and someone else. Raskolnikov went straight up to them.

“What do you want?” one of the caretakers responded.

“Have you been to the police office?”

“Just been. What do you want?”

“Are they sitting there?”

“They are.”

“And the assistant is there?”

“He was, a while. What do you want?”

Raskolnikov did not answer and stood next to him, lost in thought.

“He came to look at the ’partment,” said the older workman, coming up.

“What ’partment?”

“Where we’re working. ‘Why,’ he says, ‘did you wash the blood off? There was a murdering happened here,’ he says, ‘and I’ve come to rent it.’ And he went to ringing the bell, near tore it off. And let’s go to the office, he says, I’ll prove it all there. Wouldn’t leave off.”

The caretaker, puzzled and frowning, examined Raskolnikov.

“And who are you?” he shouted, more menacingly.

“I am Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a former student, and I live in Shil’s house, here in the lane, not far from here, in flat number fourteen. Ask the caretaker… he knows me.” Raskolnikov said all this somehow lazily and pensively, without turning around and looking intently at the darkened street.

“But what did you come to the ’partment for?”

“To look.”

“What’s there to look at?”

“What if we just take him to the police office?” the tradesman suddenly joined in, and fell silent.

Raskolnikov looked at him sideways over his shoulder, looked attentively, and said just as quietly and lazily:

“Let’s go!”

“Take him, and that’s that!” the tradesman took it up, emboldened. “Why was he going on about that, what’s he got in his head, eh?”

“Drunk or not drunk, God only knows,” muttered the workman.

“But what do you want?” the caretaker shouted again, beginning to get seriously angry. “Why are you pestering?”

“Got scared of the office, have you?” Raskolnikov said to him mockingly.

“Scared of what? Why are you pestering?”

“A sharper!” cried the woman.

“Why waste words on him,” shouted the other caretaker, a huge peasant in an open coat with keys at his belt. “Get out!… A sharper, sure enough… Get out!”

And seizing Raskolnikov by the shoulder, he flung him into the street. Raskolnikov nearly went head over heels but did not fall, righted himself, silently looked at all the spectators, and walked on.

“A queer man,” said the workman.

“Queer folk nowadays,” said the woman.

“Should’ve taken him to the office all the same,” added the tradesman.

“No use getting mixed up,” decided the big caretaker. “A sharper, sure as can be! He’s asking for it, that’s plain, and once you get mixed up, you’ll never get unmixed… We know!”

“So do I go, or not,” thought Raskolnikov, stopping in the middle of the roadway at the crossing and looking around him, as if expecting a last word from someone. But nothing answered from anywhere; everything was dull and dead, like the stones he walked on, dead for him, for him alone… Suddenly, far off, some two hundred paces from him, at the end of the street, in the thickening darkness, he made out a crowd, talking, shouts… In the midst of the crowd stood some carriage… A little light began to flicker in the middle of the street. “What is it?” Raskolnikov turned to the right and went toward the crowd. It was as though he were clutching at everything, and he smiled coldly, thinking this, because he had surely decided about the office already and firmly knew that it would all be over in a moment.

Notes

1. 1. Arshin: an old Russian measure of length, about 28 inches (71 cm).

2. 2. Items from the Petersburg papers of summer 1865: Izler ran a popular pleasure garden with entertainments; “the Aztecs,” Bartola and Massimo, were two microcephalic dwarfs exhibited in the city as descendants of an ancient Aztec race.

3. 3. French: “greenhorns” (literally “white beaks”); Raskolnikov uses the word in Russianized form.

4. 4. French: “Enough chatter!”