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

to her? Through inevitable circumstances I am forced to be absent and shall not be at the dinner in spite of your mamma’s kind invitation.’

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‘Yes … I’ll tell her … at once.’

And Sonia hastily jumped up from her seat.

‘Wait, that’s not all,’ Pyotr Petrovitch detained her, smiling at her simplicity and ignorance of good manners,

‘and you know me little, my dear Sofya Semyonovna, if you suppose I would have ventured to trouble a person like you for a matter of so little consequence affecting myself only. I have another object.’

Sonia sat down hurriedly. Her eyes rested again for an instant on the grey-and-rainbow-coloured notes that remained on the table, but she quickly looked away and fixed her eyes on Pyotr Petrovitch. She felt it horribly indecorous, especially for her to look at another person’s money. She stared at the gold eye-glass which Pyotr Petrovitch held in his left hand and at the massive and extremely handsome ring with a yellow stone on his middle finger. But suddenly she looked away and, not knowing where to turn, ended by staring Pyotr Petrovitch again straight in the face. After a pause of still greater dignity he continued.

‘I chanced yesterday in passing to exchange a couple of words with Katerina Ivanovna, poor woman. That was sufficient to enable me to ascertain that she is in a position—preternatural, if one may so express it.’

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‘Yes … preternatural …’ Sonia hurriedly assented.

‘Or it would be simpler and more comprehensible to say, ill.’

‘Yes, simpler and more comprehen … yes, ill.’

‘Quite so. So then from a feeling of humanity and so to speak compassion, I should be glad to be of service to her in any way, foreseeing her unfortunate position. I believe the whole of this poverty-stricken family depends now entirely on you?’

‘Allow me to ask,’ Sonia rose to her feet, ‘did you say something to her yesterday of the possibility of a pension?

Because she told me you had undertaken to get her one.

Was that true?’

‘Not in the slightest, and indeed it’s an absurdity! I merely hinted at her obtaining temporary assistance as the widow of an official who had died in the service—if only she has patronage … but apparently your late parent had not served his full term and had not indeed been in the service at all of late. In fact, if there could be any hope, it would be very ephemeral, because there would be no claim for assistance in that case, far from it…. And she is dreaming of a pension already, he-he-he! … A go-ahead lady!’

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‘Yes, she is. For she is credulous and good-hearted, and she believes everything from the goodness of her heart and

… and … and she is like that … yes … You must excuse her,’ said Sonia, and again she got up to go.

‘But you haven’t heard what I have to say.’

‘No, I haven’t heard,’ muttered Sonia.

‘Then sit down.’ She was terribly confused; she sat down again a third time.

‘Seeing her position with her unfortunate little ones, I should be glad, as I have said before, so far as lies in my power, to be of service, that is, so far as is in my power, not more. One might for instance get up a subscription for her, or a lottery, something of the sort, such as is always arranged in such cases by friends or even outsiders desirous of assisting people. It was of that I intended to speak to you; it might be done.’

‘Yes, yes … God will repay you for it,’ faltered Sonia, gazing intently at Pyotr Petrovitch.

‘It might be, but we will talk of it later. We might begin it to-day, we will talk it over this evening and lay the foundation so to speak. Come to me at seven o’clock.

Mr. Lebeziatnikov, I hope, will assist us. But there is one circumstance of which I ought to warn you beforehand and for which I venture to trouble you, Sofya

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Semyonovna, to come here. In my opinion money cannot be, indeed it’s unsafe to put it into Katerina Ivanovna’s own hands. The dinner to-day is a proof of that. Though she has not, so to speak, a crust of bread for to-morrow and … well, boots or shoes, or anything; she has bought to-day Jamaica rum, and even, I believe, Madeira and …

and coffee. I saw it as I passed through. To-morrow it will all fall upon you again, they won’t have a crust of bread.

It’s absurd, really, and so, to my thinking, a subscription ought to be raised so that the unhappy widow should not know of the money, but only you, for instance. Am I right?’

‘I don’t know … this is only to-day, once in her life….

She was so anxious to do honour, to celebrate the memory…. And she is very sensible … but just as you think and I shall be very, very … they will all be … and God will reward … and the orphans …’

Sonia burst into tears.

‘Very well, then, keep it in mind; and now will you accept for the benefit of your relation the small sum that I am able to spare, from me personally. I am very anxious that my name should not be mentioned in connection with it. Here … having so to speak anxieties of my own, I cannot do more …’

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And Pyotr Petrovitch held out to Sonia a ten-rouble note carefully unfolded. Sonia took it, flushed crimson, jumped up, muttered something and began taking leave.

Pyotr Petrovitch accompanied her ceremoniously to the door. She got out of the room at last, agitated and distressed, and returned to Katerina Ivanovna, overwhelmed with confusion.

All this time Lebeziatnikov had stood at the window or walked about the room, anxious not to interrupt the conversation; when Sonia had gone he walked up to Pyotr Petrovitch and solemnly held out his hand.

‘I heard and saw everything,’ he said, laying stress on the last verb. ‘That is honourable, I mean to say, it’s humane! You wanted to avoid gratitude, I saw! And although I cannot, I confess, in principle sympathise with private charity, for it not only fails to eradicate the evil but even promotes it, yet I must admit that I saw your action with pleasure—yes, yes, I like it.’

‘That’s all nonsense,’ muttered Pyotr Petrovitch, somewhat disconcerted, looking carefully at

Lebeziatnikov.

‘No, it’s not nonsense! A man who has suffered distress and annoyance as you did yesterday and who yet can sympathise with the misery of others, such a man … even 665 of 967

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though he is making a social mistake—is still deserving of respect! I did not expect it indeed of you, Pyotr Petrovitch, especially as according to your ideas … oh, what a drawback your ideas are to you! How distressed you are for instance by your ill-luck yesterday,’ cried the simple-hearted Lebeziatnikov, who felt a return of affection for Pyotr Petrovitch. ‘And, what do you want with marriage, with legal marriage, my dear, noble Pyotr Petrovitch? Why do you cling to this legality of marriage?

Well, you may beat me if you like, but I am glad, positively glad it hasn’t come off, that you are free, that you are not quite lost for humanity…. you see, I’ve spoken my mind!’

‘Because I don’t want in your free marriage to be made a fool of and to bring up another man’s children, that’s why I want legal marriage,’ Luzhin replied in order to make some answer.

He seemed preoccupied by something.

‘Children? You referred to children,’ Lebeziatnikov started off like a warhorse at the trumpet call. ‘Children are a social question and a question of first importance, I agree; but the question of children has another solution.

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children later, but now as to the question of honour, I confess that’s my weak point. That horrid, military, Pushkin expression is unthinkable in the dictionary of the future. What does it mean indeed? It’s nonsense, there will be no deception in a free marriage! That is only the natural consequence of a legal marriage, so to say, its corrective, a protest. So that indeed it’s not humiliating …

and if I ever, to suppose an absurdity, were to be legally married, I should be positively glad of it. I should say to my wife: ‘My dear, hitherto I have loved you, now I respect you, for you’ve shown you can protest!’ You laugh! That’s because you are of incapable of getting away from prejudices. Confound it all! I understand now where the unpleasantness is of being deceived in a legal marriage, but it’s simply a despicable consequence of a despicable position in which both are humiliated. When the deception is open, as in a free marriage, then it does not exist, it’s unthinkable. Your wife will only prove how she respects you by considering you incapable of opposing her happiness and avenging yourself on her for her new husband. Damn it all! I sometimes dream if I were to be married, pfoo! I mean if I were to marry, legally or not, it’s just the same, I should present my wife with a lover if she had not found one for herself. ‘My dear,’ I should say, 667 of 967

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‘I love you, but even more than that I desire you to respect me. See!’ Am I not right?’

Pyotr Petrovitch sniggered as he listened, but without much merriment. He hardly heard it indeed. He was preoccupied with something else and even Lebeziatnikov at last noticed it. Pyotr Petrovitch seemed excited and rubbed his hands. Lebeziatnikov remembered all this and reflected upon it afterwards.

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Chapter II

It would be difficult to explain exactly what could have originated the idea of that senseless dinner in Katerina Ivanovna’s disordered brain. Nearly ten of the twenty roubles, given by Raskolnikov for Marmeladov’s funeral, were wasted upon it. Possibly Katerina Ivanovna felt obliged to honour the memory of the deceased ‘suitably,’

that all the lodgers, and still more Amalia Ivanovna, might know ‘that he was in no way their inferior, and perhaps very much their superior,’ and that no one had the right

‘to turn up his nose at him.’ Perhaps the chief element was that peculiar ‘poor man’s pride,’ which compels many poor people to spend their last savings on some traditional social ceremony, simply in order to do ‘like other people,’

and not to ‘be looked down upon.’ It is very probable, too, that Katerina Ivanovna longed on this occasion, at the moment when she seemed to be abandoned by everyone, to show those ‘wretched contemptible lodgers’ that she knew ‘how to do things, how to entertain’ and that she had been brought up ‘in a genteel, she might almost say aristocratic colonel’s family’ and had not been meant for sweeping floors and washing the children’s rags at night.

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Even the poorest and most broken-spirited people are sometimes liable to these paroxysms of pride and vanity which take the form of an irresistible nervous craving. And Katerina Ivanovna was not broken-spirited; she might have been killed by circumstance, but her spirit could not have been broken, that is, she could not have been intimidated, her will could not be crushed. Moreover Sonia had said with good reason that her mind was unhinged. She could not be said to be insane, but for a year past she had been so harassed that her mind might well be overstrained. The later stages of consumption are apt, doctors tell us, to affect the intellect.

There was no great variety of wines, nor was there Madeira; but wine there was. There was vodka, rum and Lisbon wine, all of the poorest quality but in