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

How, how can he live by himself! What will become of you now?’

‘Don’t be a child, Sonia,’ he said softly. ‘What wrong have I done them? Why should I go to them? What should I say to them? That’s only a phantom…. They destroy men by millions themselves and look on it as a virtue. They are knaves and scoundrels, Sonia! I am not going to them. And what should I say to them—that I murdered her, but did not dare to take the money and hid it under a stone?’ he added with a bitter smile. ‘Why, they would laugh at me, and would call me a fool for not getting it. A coward and a fool! They wouldn’t understand and they don’t deserve to understand. Why should I go to them? I won’t. Don’t be a child, Sonia….’

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‘It will be too much for you to bear, too much!’ she repeated, holding out her hands in despairing supplication.

‘Perhaps I’ve been unfair to myself,’ he observed gloomily, pondering, ‘perhaps after all I am a man and not a louse and I’ve been in too great a hurry to condemn myself. I’ll make another fight for it.’

A haughty smile appeared on his lips.

‘What a burden to bear! And your whole life, your whole life!’

‘I shall get used to it,’ he said grimly and thoughtfully.

‘Listen,’ he began a minute later, ‘stop crying, it’s time to talk of the facts: I’ve come to tell you that the police are after me, on my track….’

‘Ach!’ Sonia cried in terror.

‘Well, why do you cry out? You want me to go to Siberia and now you are frightened? But let me tell you: I shall not give myself up. I shall make a struggle for it and they won’t do anything to me. They’ve no real evidence.

Yesterday I was in great danger and believed I was lost; but to-day things are going better. All the facts they know can be explained two ways, that’s to say I can turn their accusations to my credit, do you understand? And I shall, for I’ve learnt my lesson. But they will certainly arrest me.

If it had not been for something that happened, they 745 of 967

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would have done so to-day for certain; perhaps even now they will arrest me to-day…. But that’s no matter, Sonia; they’ll let me out again … for there isn’t any real proof against me, and there won’t be, I give you my word for it.

And they can’t convict a man on what they have against me. Enough…. I only tell you that you may know…. I will try to manage somehow to put it to my mother and sister so that they won’t be frightened…. My sister’s future is secure, however, now, I believe … and my mother’s must be too…. Well, that’s all. Be careful, though. Will you come and see me in prison when I am there?’

‘Oh, I will, I will.’

They sat side by side, both mournful and dejected, as though they had been cast up by the tempest alone on some deserted shore. He looked at Sonia and felt how great was her love for him, and strange to say he felt it suddenly burdensome and painful to be so loved. Yes, it was a strange and awful sensation! On his way to see Sonia he had felt that all his hopes rested on her; he expected to be rid of at least part of his suffering, and now, when all her heart turned towards him, he suddenly felt that he was immeasurably unhappier than before.

‘Sonia,’ he said, ‘you’d better not come and see me when I am in prison.’

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Sonia did not answer, she was crying. Several minutes passed.

‘Have you a cross on you?’ she asked, as though suddenly thinking of it.

He did not at first understand the question.

‘No, of course not. Here, take this one, of cypress wood. I have another, a copper one that belonged to Lizaveta. I changed with Lizaveta: she gave me her cross and I gave her my little ikon. I will wear Lizaveta’s now and give you this. Take it … it’s mine! It’s mine, you know,’ she begged him. ‘We will go to suffer together, and together we will bear our cross!’

‘Give it me,’ said Raskolnikov.

He did not want to hurt her feelings. But immediately he drew back the hand he held out for the cross.

‘Not now, Sonia. Better later,’ he added to comfort her.

‘Yes, yes, better,’ she repeated with conviction, ‘when you go to meet your suffering, then put it on. You will come to me, I’ll put it on you, we will pray and go together.’

At that moment someone knocked three times at the door.

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‘Sofya Semyonovna, may I come in?’ they heard in a very familiar and polite voice.

Sonia rushed to the door in a fright. The flaxen head of Mr. Lebeziatnikov appeared at the door.

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Chapter V

Lebeziatnikov looked perturbed.

‘I’ve come to you, Sofya Semyonovna,’ he began.

‘Excuse me … I thought I should find you,’ he said, addressing Raskolnikov suddenly, ‘that is, I didn’t mean anything … of that sort … But I just thought … Katerina Ivanovna has gone out of her mind,’ he blurted out suddenly, turning from Raskolnikov to Sonia.

Sonia screamed.

‘At least it seems so. But … we don’t know what to do, you see! She came back—she seems to have been turned out somewhere, perhaps beaten…. So it seems at least, …

She had run to your father’s former chief, she didn’t find him at home: he was dining at some other general’s….

Only fancy, she rushed off there, to the other general’s, and, imagine, she was so persistent that she managed to get the chief to see her, had him fetched out from dinner, it seems. You can imagine what happened. She was turned out, of course; but, according to her own story, she abused him and threw something at him. One may well believe it…. How it is she wasn’t taken up, I can’t understand!

Now she is telling everyone, including Amalia Ivanovna; 749 of 967

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but it’s difficult to understand her, she is screaming and flinging herself about…. Oh yes, she shouts that since everyone has abandoned her, she will take the children and go into the street with a barrel-organ, and the children will sing and dance, and she too, and collect money, and will go every day under the general’s window … ‘to let everyone see well-born children, whose father was an official, begging in the street.’ She keeps beating the children and they are all crying. She is teaching Lida to sing ‘My Village,’ the boy to dance, Polenka the same. She is tearing up all the clothes, and making them little caps like actors; she means to carry a tin basin and make it tinkle, instead of music…. She won’t listen to anything….

Imagine the state of things! It’s beyond anything!’

Lebeziatnikov would have gone on, but Sonia, who had heard him almost breathless, snatched up her cloak and hat, and ran out of the room, putting on her things as she went. Raskolnikov followed her and Lebeziatnikov came after him.

‘She has certainly gone mad!’ he said to Raskolnikov, as they went out into the street. ‘I didn’t want to frighten Sofya Semyonovna, so I said ‘it seemed like it,’ but there isn’t a doubt of it. They say that in consumption the tubercles sometimes occur in the brain; it’s a pity I know 750 of 967

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nothing of medicine. I did try to persuade her, but she wouldn’t listen.’

‘Did you talk to her about the tubercles?’

‘Not precisely of the tubercles. Besides, she wouldn’t have understood! But what I say is, that if you convince a person logically that he has nothing to cry about, he’ll stop crying. That’s clear. Is it your conviction that he won’t?’

‘Life would be too easy if it were so,’ answered Raskolnikov.

‘Excuse me, excuse me; of course it would be rather difficult for Katerina Ivanovna to understand, but do you know that in Paris they have been conducting serious experiments as to the possibility of curing the insane, simply by logical argument? One professor there, a scientific man of standing, lately dead, believed in the possibility of such treatment. His idea was that there’s nothing really wrong with the physical organism of the insane, and that insanity is, so to say, a logical mistake, an error of judgment, an incorrect view of things. He gradually showed the madman his error and, would you believe it, they say he was successful? But as he made use of douches too, how far success was due to that treatment remains uncertain…. So it seems at least.’

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Raskolnikov had long ceased to listen. Reaching the house where he lived, he nodded to Lebeziatnikov and went in at the gate. Lebeziatnikov woke up with a start, looked about him and hurried on.

Raskolnikov went into his little room and stood still in the middle of it. Why had he come back here? He looked at the yellow and tattered paper, at the dust, at his sofa….

From the yard came a loud continuous knocking; someone seemed to be hammering … He went to the window, rose on tiptoe and looked out into the yard for a long time with an air of absorbed attention. But the yard was empty and he could not see who was hammering. In the house on the left he saw some open windows; on the window-sills were pots of sickly-looking geraniums. Linen was hung out of the windows … He knew it all by heart.

He turned away and sat down on the sofa.

Never, never had he felt himself so fearfully alone!

Yes, he felt once more that he would perhaps come to hate Sonia, now that he had made her more miserable.

‘Why had he gone to her to beg for her tears? What need had he to poison her life? Oh, the meanness of it!’

‘I will remain alone,’ he said resolutely, ‘and she shall not come to the prison!’

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Five minutes later he raised his head with a strange smile. That was a strange thought.

‘Perhaps it really would be better in Siberia,’ he thought suddenly.

He could not have said how long he sat there with vague thoughts surging through his mind. All at once the door opened and Dounia came in. At first she stood still and looked at him from the doorway, just as he had done at Sonia; then she came in and sat down in the same place as yesterday, on the chair facing him. He looked silently and almost vacantly at her.

‘Don’t be angry, brother; I’ve only come for one minute,’ said Dounia.

Her face looked thoughtful but not stern. Her eyes were bright and soft. He saw that she too had come to him with love.

‘Brother, now I know all, all. Dmitri Prokofitch has explained and told me everything. They are worrying and persecuting you through a stupid and contemptible suspicion…. Dmitri Prokofitch told me that there is no danger, and that you are wrong in looking upon it with such horror. I don’t think so, and I fully understand how indignant you must be, and that that indignation may have a permanent effect on you. That’s what I am afraid of. As 753 of 967

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for your cutting yourself off from us, I don’t judge you, I don’t venture to judge you, and forgive me for having blamed you for it. I feel that I too, if I had so great a trouble, should keep away from everyone. I shall tell mother nothing of this but I shall talk about you continually and shall tell her from you that you will come very soon. Don’t worry about her; I