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

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 204 of 967

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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 205 of 967

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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 206 of 967

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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 209 of 967

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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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Though who can tell, maybe it’s sometimes for the worse.

Will you take it?’

Raskolnikov took the German sheets in silence, took the three roubles and without a word went out.

Razumihin gazed after him in astonishment. But when Raskolnikov was in the next street, he turned back, mounted the stairs to Razumihin’s again and laying on the table the German article and the three roubles, went out again, still without uttering a word.

‘Are you raving, or what?’ Razumihin shouted, roused to fury at last. ‘What farce is this? You’ll drive me crazy too … what did you come to see me for, damn you?’

‘I don’t want … translation,’ muttered Raskolnikov from the stairs.

‘Then what the devil do you want?’ shouted

Razumihin from above. Raskolnikov continued

descending the staircase in silence.

‘Hey, there! Where are you living?’

No answer.

‘Well, confound you then!’

But Raskolnikov was already stepping into the street.

On the Nikolaevsky Bridge he was roused to full consciousness again by an unpleasant incident. A coachman, after shouting at him two or three times, gave 211 of 967

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him a violent lash on the back with his whip, for having almost fallen under his horses’ hoofs. The lash so infuriated him that he dashed away to the railing (for some unknown reason he had been walking in the very middle of the bridge in the traffic). He angrily clenched and ground his teeth. He heard laughter, of course.

‘Serves him right!’

‘A pickpocket I dare say.’

‘Pretending to be drunk, for sure, and getting under the wheels on purpose; and you have to answer for him.’

‘It’s a regular profession, that’s what it is.’

But while he stood at the railing, still looking angry and bewildered after the retreating carriage, and rubbing his back, he suddenly felt someone thrust money into his hand. He looked. It was an elderly woman in a kerchief and goatskin shoes, with a girl, probably her daughter wearing a hat, and carrying a green parasol.

‘Take it, my good man, in Christ’s name.’

He took it and they passed on. It was a piece of twenty copecks. From his dress and appearance they might well have taken him for a beggar asking alms in the streets, and the gift of the twenty copecks he doubtless owed to the blow, which made them feel sorry for him.

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He closed his hand on the twenty copecks, walked on for ten paces, and turned facing the Neva, looking towards the palace. The sky was without a cloud and the water was almost bright blue, which is so rare in the Neva. The cupola of the cathedral, which is seen at its best from the bridge about twenty paces from the chapel, glittered in the sunlight, and in the pure air every ornament on it could be clearly distinguished. The pain from the lash went off, and Raskolnikov forgot about it; one uneasy and not quite definite idea occupied him now completely. He stood still, and gazed long and intently into the distance; this spot was especially familiar to him. When he was attending the