Crime and Punishment
again at two o’clock with soup. He was lying as before. The tea stood
untouched. Nastasya felt positively offended and began wrathfully
rousing him.
“Why are you lying like a log?” she shouted, looking at him with
repulsion.
He got up, and sat down again, but said nothing and stared at the floor.
“Are you ill or not?” asked Nastasya and again received no answer.
“You’d better go out and get a breath of air,” she said after a pause.
“Will you eat it or not?”
“Afterwards,” he said weakly. “You can go.”
And he motioned her out.
She remained a little longer, looked at him with compassion and went
out.
A few minutes afterwards, he raised his eyes and looked for a long while
at the tea and the soup. Then he took the bread, took up a spoon and
began to eat.
He ate a little, three or four spoonfuls, without appetite, as it were
mechanically. His head ached less. After his meal he stretched himself
on the sofa again, but now he could not sleep; he lay without stirring,
with his face in the pillow. He was haunted by day-dreams and such
strange day-dreams; in one, that kept recurring, he fancied that he was
in Africa, in Egypt, in some sort of oasis. The caravan was resting,
the camels were peacefully lying down; the palms stood all around in a
complete circle; all the party were at dinner. But he was drinking water
from a spring which flowed gurgling close by. And it was so cool, it was
wonderful, wonderful, blue, cold water running among the parti-coloured
stones and over the clean sand which glistened here and there like
gold.... Suddenly he heard a clock strike. He started, roused himself,
raised his head, looked out of the window, and seeing how late it was,
suddenly jumped up wide awake as though someone had pulled him off the
sofa. He crept on tiptoe to the door, stealthily opened it and began
listening on the staircase. His heart beat terribly. But all was quiet
on the stairs as if everyone was asleep.... It seemed to him strange and
monstrous that he could have slept in such forgetfulness from the
previous day and had done nothing, had prepared nothing yet.... And
meanwhile perhaps it had struck six. And his drowsiness and stupefaction
were followed by an extraordinary, feverish, as it were distracted
haste. But the preparations to be made were few. He concentrated all his
energies on thinking of everything and forgetting nothing; and his heart
kept beating and thumping so that he could hardly breathe. First he had
to make a noose and sew it into his overcoat--a work of a moment. He
rummaged under his pillow and picked out amongst the linen stuffed away
under it, a worn out, old unwashed shirt. From its rags he tore a long
strip, a couple of inches wide and about sixteen inches long. He folded
this strip in two, took off his wide, strong summer overcoat of some
stout cotton material (his only outer garment) and began sewing the two
ends of the rag on the inside, under the left armhole. His hands shook
as he sewed, but he did it successfully so that nothing showed outside
when he put the coat on again. The needle and thread he had got ready
long before and they lay on his table in a piece of paper. As for the
noose, it was a very ingenious device of his own; the noose was intended
for the axe. It was impossible for him to carry the axe through the
street in his hands. And if hidden under his coat he would still have
had to support it with his hand, which would have been noticeable. Now
he had only to put the head of the axe in the noose, and it would hang
quietly under his arm on the inside. Putting his hand in his coat
pocket, he could hold the end of the handle all the way, so that it did
not swing; and as the coat was very full, a regular sack in fact, it
could not be seen from outside that he was holding something with the
hand that was in the pocket. This noose, too, he had designed a
fortnight before.
When he had finished with this, he thrust his hand into a little opening
between his sofa and the floor, fumbled in the left corner and drew out
the _pledge_, which he had got ready long before and hidden there. This
pledge was, however, only a smoothly planed piece of wood the size and
thickness of a silver cigarette case. He picked up this piece of wood
in one of his wanderings in a courtyard where there was some sort of
a workshop. Afterwards he had added to the wood a thin smooth piece
of iron, which he had also picked up at the same time in the street.
Putting the iron which was a little the smaller on the piece of wood,
he fastened them very firmly, crossing and re-crossing the thread round
them; then wrapped them carefully and daintily in clean white paper and
tied up the parcel so that it would be very difficult to untie it. This
was in order to divert the attention of the old woman for a time, while
she was trying to undo the knot, and so to gain a moment. The iron strip
was added to give weight, so that the woman might not guess the first
minute that the “thing” was made of wood. All this had been stored by
him beforehand under the sofa. He had only just got the pledge out when
he heard someone suddenly about in the yard.
“It struck six long ago.”
“Long ago! My God!”
He rushed to the door, listened, caught up his hat and began to descend
his thirteen steps cautiously, noiselessly, like a cat. He had still the
most important thing to do--to steal the axe from the kitchen. That the
deed must be done with an axe he had decided long ago. He had also a
pocket pruning-knife, but he could not rely on the knife and still less
on his own strength, and so resolved finally on the axe. We may note in
passing, one peculiarity in regard to all the final resolutions taken by
him in the matter; they had one strange characteristic: the more final
they were, the more hideous and the more absurd they at once became in
his eyes. In spite of all his agonising inward struggle, he never for
a single instant all that time could believe in the carrying out of his
plans.
And, indeed, if it had ever happened that everything to the least point
could have been considered and finally settled, and no uncertainty of
any kind had remained, he would, it seems, have renounced it all
as something absurd, monstrous and impossible. But a whole mass of
unsettled points and uncertainties remained. As for getting the axe,
that trifling business cost him no anxiety, for nothing could be easier.
Nastasya was continually out of the house, especially in the evenings;
she would run in to the neighbours or to a shop, and always left the
door ajar. It was the one thing the landlady was always scolding her
about. And so, when the time came, he would only have to go quietly into
the kitchen and to take the axe, and an hour later (when everything
was over) go in and put it back again. But these were doubtful points.
Supposing he returned an hour later to put it back, and Nastasya had
come back and was on the spot. He would of course have to go by and wait
till she went out again. But supposing she were in the meantime to miss
the axe, look for it, make an outcry--that would mean suspicion or at
least grounds for suspicion.
But those were all trifles which he had not even begun to consider, and
indeed he had no time. He was thinking of the chief point, and put off
trifling details, until _he could believe in it all_. But that seemed
utterly unattainable. So it seemed to himself at least. He could not
imagine, for instance, that he would sometime leave off thinking, get
up and simply go there.... Even his late experiment (i.e. his visit with
the object of a final survey of the place) was simply an attempt at
an experiment, far from being the real thing, as though one should say
“come, let us go and try it--why dream about it!”--and at once he
had broken down and had run away cursing, in a frenzy with himself.
Meanwhile it would seem, as regards the moral question, that his
analysis was complete; his casuistry had become keen as a razor, and he
could not find rational objections in himself. But in the last resort
he simply ceased to believe in himself, and doggedly, slavishly sought
arguments in all directions, fumbling for them, as though someone were
forcing and drawing him to it.
At first--long before indeed--he had been much occupied with one
question; why almost all crimes are so badly concealed and so easily
detected, and why almost all criminals leave such obvious traces? He
had come gradually to many different and curious conclusions, and in his
opinion the chief reason lay not so much in the material impossibility
of concealing the crime, as in the criminal himself. Almost every
criminal is subject to a failure of will and reasoning power by a
childish and phenomenal heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence
and caution are most essential. It was his conviction that this eclipse
of reason and failure of will power attacked a man like a disease,
developed gradually and reached its highest point just before the
perpetration of the crime, continued with equal violence at the moment
of the crime and for longer or shorter time after, according to the
individual case, and then passed off like any other disease. The
question whether the disease gives rise to the crime, or whether the
crime from its own peculiar nature is always accompanied by something of
the nature of disease, he did not yet feel able to decide.
When he reached these conclusions, he decided that in his own case there
could not be such a morbid reaction, that his reason and will would
remain unimpaired at the time of carrying out his design, for the
simple reason that his design was “not a crime....” We will omit all the
process by means of which he arrived at this last conclusion; we have
run too far ahead already.... We may add only that the practical, purely
material difficulties of the affair occupied a secondary position in his
mind. “One has but to keep all one’s will-power and reason to deal
with them, and they will all be overcome at the time when once one has
familiarised oneself with the minutest details of the business....” But
this preparation had never been begun. His final decisions were what he
came to trust least, and when the hour struck, it all came to pass quite
differently, as it were accidentally and unexpectedly.
One trifling circumstance upset his calculations, before he had even
left the staircase. When he reached the landlady’s kitchen, the door
of which was open as usual, he glanced cautiously in to see whether, in
Nastasya’s absence, the landlady herself was there, or if not, whether
the door to her own room was closed, so that she might not peep out when
he went in for the axe. But what was his amazement when he suddenly
saw that Nastasya was not only at home in the kitchen, but was occupied
there, taking linen out of a basket and hanging it on a line. Seeing
him, she left off hanging the clothes, turned to him and stared at him
all the time he was passing. He turned away his eyes, and walked past as
though he noticed nothing. But it was the end of everything; he had not
the axe! He was overwhelmed.
“What made me think,” he reflected, as he went under the gateway, “what
made me think that she would be sure not to be at home at that moment!
Why, why, why did I assume this so certainly?”
He was crushed and even humiliated. He could have laughed at himself in
his anger.... A dull animal rage boiled within him.
He stood hesitating in the gateway. To go into the street, to go a walk
for appearance’ sake was revolting; to go back to his room, even more
revolting. “And what a chance I have lost for ever!” he muttered,
standing aimlessly in the gateway, just opposite the porter’s little
dark room, which was also open. Suddenly he started. From the porter’s