Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky (mini ebook reader .TXT) 📗

the door and opened it. If the porter had asked him, ‘What do you want?’ he would perhaps have simply handed him the axe. But again the porter was not at home, and he succeeded in putting the axe back under the bench, and even covering it with the chunk of wood as before. He met no one, not a soul, afterwards on the way to his room; the landlady’s door was shut. When he was in his room, he flung himself on the sofa just as he was—he did not sleep, but sank into blank forgetfulness. If anyone had come into his room then, he would have jumped up at once and screamed. Scraps and shreds of thoughts were simply swarming in his brain, but he could not catch at one, he could not rest on one, in spite of all his efforts….

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PART II

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Chapter I

So he lay a very long while. Now and then he seemed to wake up, and at such moments he noticed that it was far into the night, but it did not occur to him to get up. At last he noticed that it was beginning to get light. He was lying on his back, still dazed from his recent oblivion.

Fearful, despairing cries rose shrilly from the street, sounds which he heard every night, indeed, under his window after two o’clock. They woke him up now.

‘Ah! the drunken men are coming out of the taverns,’

he thought, ‘it’s past two o’clock,’ and at once he leaped up, as though someone had pulled him from the sofa.

‘What! Past two o’clock!’

He sat down on the sofa—and instantly recollected everything! All at once, in one flash, he recollected everything.

For the first moment he thought he was going mad. A dreadful chill came over him; but the chill was from the fever that had begun long before in his sleep. Now he was suddenly taken with violent shivering, so that his teeth chattered and all his limbs were shaking. He opened the door and began listening—everything in the house was asleep. With amazement he gazed at himself and 168 of 967

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everything in the room around him, wondering how he could have come in the night before without fastening the door, and have flung himself on the sofa without undressing, without even taking his hat off. It had fallen off and was lying on the floor near his pillow.

‘If anyone had come in, what would he have thought?

That I’m drunk but …’

He rushed to the window. There was light enough, and he began hurriedly looking himself all over from head to foot, all his clothes; were there no traces? But there was no doing it like that; shivering with cold, he began taking off everything and looking over again. He turned everything over to the last threads and rags, and mistrusting himself, went through his search three times.

But there seemed to be nothing, no trace, except in one place, where some thick drops of congealed blood were clinging to the frayed edge of his trousers. He picked up a big claspknife and cut off the frayed threads. There seemed to be nothing more.

Suddenly he remembered that the purse and the things he had taken out of the old woman’s box were still in his pockets! He had not thought till then of taking them out and hiding them! He had not even thought of them while he was examining his clothes! What next? Instantly he 169 of 967

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rushed to take them out and fling them on the table.

When he had pulled out everything, and turned the pocket inside out to be sure there was nothing left, he carried the whole heap to the corner. The paper had come off the bottom of the wall and hung there in tatters. He began stuffing all the things into the hole under the paper:

‘They’re in! All out of sight, and the purse too!’ he thought gleefully, getting up and gazing blankly at the hole which bulged out more than ever. Suddenly he shuddered all over with horror; ‘My God!’ he whispered in despair: ‘what’s the matter with me? Is that hidden? Is that the way to hide things?’

He had not reckoned on having trinkets to hide. He had only thought of money, and so had not prepared a hiding-place.

‘But now, now, what am I glad of?’ he thought, ‘Is that hiding things? My reason’s deserting me—simply!’

He sat down on the sofa in exhaustion and was at once shaken by another unbearable fit of shivering.

Mechanically he drew from a chair beside him his old student’s winter coat, which was still warm though almost in rags, covered himself up with it and once more sank into drowsiness and delirium. He lost consciousness.

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Not more than five minutes had passed when he

jumped up a second time, and at once pounced in a frenzy on his clothes again.

‘How could I go to sleep again with nothing done?

Yes, yes; I have not taken the loop off the armhole! I forgot it, forgot a thing like that! Such a piece of evidence!’

He pulled off the noose, hurriedly cut it to pieces and threw the bits among his linen under the pillow.

‘Pieces of torn linen couldn’t rouse suspicion, whatever happened; I think not, I think not, any way!’ he repeated, standing in the middle of the room, and with painful concentration he fell to gazing about him again, at the floor and everywhere, trying to make sure he had not forgotten anything. The conviction that all his faculties, even memory, and the simplest power of reflection were failing him, began to be an insufferable torture.

‘Surely it isn’t beginning already! Surely it isn’t my punishment coming upon me? It is!’

The frayed rags he had cut off his trousers were actually lying on the floor in the middle of the room, where anyone coming in would see them!

‘What is the matter with me!’ he cried again, like one distraught.

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Then a strange idea entered his head; that, perhaps, all his clothes were covered with blood, that, perhaps, there were a great many stains, but that he did not see them, did not notice them because his perceptions were failing, were going to pieces … his reason was clouded…. Suddenly he remembered that there had been blood on the purse too.

‘Ah! Then there must be blood on the pocket too, for I put the wet purse in my pocket!’

In a flash he had turned the pocket inside out and, yes!—there were traces, stains on the lining of the pocket!

‘So my reason has not quite deserted me, so I still have some sense and memory, since I guessed it of myself,’ he thought triumphantly, with a deep sigh of relief; ‘it’s simply the weakness of fever, a moment’s delirium,’ and he tore the whole lining out of the left pocket of his trousers. At that instant the sunlight fell on his left boot; on the sock which poked out from the boot, he fancied there were traces! He flung off his boots; ‘traces indeed!

The tip of the sock was soaked with blood;’ he must have unwarily stepped into that pool…. ‘But what am I to do with this now? Where am I to put the sock and rags and pocket?’

He gathered them all up in his hands and stood in the middle of the room.

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‘In the stove? But they would ransack the stove first of all. Burn them? But what can I burn them with? There are no matches even. No, better go out and throw it all away somewhere. Yes, better throw it away,’ he repeated, sitting down on the sofa again, ‘and at once, this minute, without lingering …’

But his head sank on the pillow instead. Again the unbearable icy shivering came over him; again he drew his coat over him.

And for a long while, for some hours, he was haunted by the impulse to ‘go off somewhere at once, this moment, and fling it all away, so that it may be out of sight and done with, at once, at once!’ Several times he tried to rise from the sofa, but could not.

He was thoroughly waked up at last by a violent knocking at his door.

‘Open, do, are you dead or alive? He keeps sleeping here!’ shouted Nastasya, banging with her fist on the door.

‘For whole days together he’s snoring here like a dog! A dog he is too. Open I tell you. It’s past ten.’

‘Maybe he’s not at home,’ said a man’s voice.

‘Ha! that’s the porter’s voice…. What does he want?’

He jumped up and sat on the sofa. The beating of his heart was a positive pain.

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‘Then who can have latched the door?’ retorted Nastasya. ‘He’s taken to bolting himself in! As if he were worth stealing! Open, you stupid, wake up!’

‘What do they want? Why the porter? All’s discovered.

Resist or open? Come what may! …’

He half rose, stooped forward and unlatched the door.

His room was so small that he could undo the latch without leaving the bed. Yes; the porter and Nastasya were standing there.

Nastasya stared at him in a strange way. He glanced with a defiant and desperate air at the porter, who without a word held out a grey folded paper sealed with bottle-wax.

‘A notice from the office,’ he announced, as he gave him the paper.

‘From what office?’

‘A summons to the police office, of course. You know which office.’

‘To the police? … What for? …’

‘How can I tell? You’re sent for, so you go.’

The man looked at him attentively, looked round the room and turned to go away.

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‘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