Crime and Punishment
The other, a very stout, buxom woman with a purplish-red, blotchy face,
excessively smartly dressed with a brooch on her bosom as big as a
saucer, was standing on one side, apparently waiting for something.
Raskolnikov thrust his notice upon the head clerk. The latter glanced
at it, said: “Wait a minute,” and went on attending to the lady in
mourning.
He breathed more freely. “It can’t be that!”
By degrees he began to regain confidence, he kept urging himself to have
courage and be calm.
“Some foolishness, some trifling carelessness, and I may betray myself!
Hm... it’s a pity there’s no air here,” he added, “it’s stifling.... It
makes one’s head dizzier than ever... and one’s mind too...”
He was conscious of a terrible inner turmoil. He was afraid of losing
his self-control; he tried to catch at something and fix his mind on it,
something quite irrelevant, but he could not succeed in this at all. Yet
the head clerk greatly interested him, he kept hoping to see through him
and guess something from his face.
He was a very young man, about two and twenty, with a dark mobile
face that looked older than his years. He was fashionably dressed and
foppish, with his hair parted in the middle, well combed and pomaded,
and wore a number of rings on his well-scrubbed fingers and a gold chain
on his waistcoat. He said a couple of words in French to a foreigner who
was in the room, and said them fairly correctly.
“Luise Ivanovna, you can sit down,” he said casually to the
gaily-dressed, purple-faced lady, who was still standing as though not
venturing to sit down, though there was a chair beside her.
“Ich danke,” said the latter, and softly, with a rustle of silk she sank
into the chair. Her light blue dress trimmed with white lace floated
about the table like an air-balloon and filled almost half the room. She
smelt of scent. But she was obviously embarrassed at filling half
the room and smelling so strongly of scent; and though her smile was
impudent as well as cringing, it betrayed evident uneasiness.
The lady in mourning had done at last, and got up. All at once, with
some noise, an officer walked in very jauntily, with a peculiar swing of
his shoulders at each step. He tossed his cockaded cap on the table and
sat down in an easy-chair. The small lady positively skipped from her
seat on seeing him, and fell to curtsying in a sort of ecstasy; but the
officer took not the smallest notice of her, and she did not venture to
sit down again in his presence. He was the assistant superintendent. He
had a reddish moustache that stood out horizontally on each side of his
face, and extremely small features, expressive of nothing much except
a certain insolence. He looked askance and rather indignantly at
Raskolnikov; he was so very badly dressed, and in spite of his
humiliating position, his bearing was by no means in keeping with his
clothes. Raskolnikov had unwarily fixed a very long and direct look on
him, so that he felt positively affronted.
“What do you want?” he shouted, apparently astonished that such a ragged
fellow was not annihilated by the majesty of his glance.
“I was summoned... by a notice...” Raskolnikov faltered.
“For the recovery of money due, from _the student_,” the head clerk
interfered hurriedly, tearing himself from his papers. “Here!” and he
flung Raskolnikov a document and pointed out the place. “Read that!”
“Money? What money?” thought Raskolnikov, “but... then... it’s certainly
not _that_.”
And he trembled with joy. He felt sudden intense indescribable relief. A
load was lifted from his back.
“And pray, what time were you directed to appear, sir?” shouted the
assistant superintendent, seeming for some unknown reason more and more
aggrieved. “You are told to come at nine, and now it’s twelve!”
“The notice was only brought me a quarter of an hour ago,” Raskolnikov
answered loudly over his shoulder. To his own surprise he, too, grew
suddenly angry and found a certain pleasure in it. “And it’s enough that
I have come here ill with fever.”
“Kindly refrain from shouting!”
“I’m not shouting, I’m speaking very quietly, it’s you who are shouting
at me. I’m a student, and allow no one to shout at me.”
The assistant superintendent was so furious that for the first minute he
could only splutter inarticulately. He leaped up from his seat.
“Be silent! You are in a government office. Don’t be impudent, sir!”
“You’re in a government office, too,” cried Raskolnikov, “and you’re
smoking a cigarette as well as shouting, so you are showing disrespect
to all of us.”
He felt an indescribable satisfaction at having said this.
The head clerk looked at him with a smile. The angry assistant
superintendent was obviously disconcerted.
“That’s not your business!” he shouted at last with unnatural loudness.
“Kindly make the declaration demanded of you. Show him. Alexandr
Grigorievitch. There is a complaint against you! You don’t pay your
debts! You’re a fine bird!”
But Raskolnikov was not listening now; he had eagerly clutched at the
paper, in haste to find an explanation. He read it once, and a second
time, and still did not understand.
“What is this?” he asked the head clerk.
“It is for the recovery of money on an I O U, a writ. You must
either pay it, with all expenses, costs and so on, or give a written
declaration when you can pay it, and at the same time an undertaking not
to leave the capital without payment, and nor to sell or conceal your
property. The creditor is at liberty to sell your property, and proceed
against you according to the law.”
“But I... am not in debt to anyone!”
“That’s not our business. Here, an I O U for a hundred and fifteen
roubles, legally attested, and due for payment, has been brought us
for recovery, given by you to the widow of the assessor Zarnitsyn, nine
months ago, and paid over by the widow Zarnitsyn to one Mr. Tchebarov.
We therefore summon you, hereupon.”
“But she is my landlady!”
“And what if she is your landlady?”
The head clerk looked at him with a condescending smile of compassion,
and at the same time with a certain triumph, as at a novice under fire
for the first time--as though he would say: “Well, how do you feel now?”
But what did he care now for an I O U, for a writ of recovery! Was that
worth worrying about now, was it worth attention even! He stood, he
read, he listened, he answered, he even asked questions himself, but
all mechanically. The triumphant sense of security, of deliverance from
overwhelming danger, that was what filled his whole soul that moment
without thought for the future, without analysis, without suppositions
or surmises, without doubts and without questioning. It was an instant
of full, direct, purely instinctive joy. But at that very moment
something like a thunderstorm took place in the office. The assistant
superintendent, still shaken by Raskolnikov’s disrespect, still fuming
and obviously anxious to keep up his wounded dignity, pounced on the
unfortunate smart lady, who had been gazing at him ever since he came in
with an exceedingly silly smile.
“You shameful hussy!” he shouted suddenly at the top of his voice. (The
lady in mourning had left the office.) “What was going on at your house
last night? Eh! A disgrace again, you’re a scandal to the whole street.
Fighting and drinking again. Do you want the house of correction? Why,
I have warned you ten times over that I would not let you off the
eleventh! And here you are again, again, you... you...!”
The paper fell out of Raskolnikov’s hands, and he looked wildly at the
smart lady who was so unceremoniously treated. But he soon saw what it
meant, and at once began to find positive amusement in the scandal. He
listened with pleasure, so that he longed to laugh and laugh... all his
nerves were on edge.
“Ilya Petrovitch!” the head clerk was beginning anxiously, but stopped
short, for he knew from experience that the enraged assistant could not
be stopped except by force.
As for the smart lady, at first she positively trembled before the
storm. But, strange to say, the more numerous and violent the terms of
abuse became, the more amiable she looked, and the more seductive the
smiles she lavished on the terrible assistant. She moved uneasily, and
curtsied incessantly, waiting impatiently for a chance of putting in her
word: and at last she found it.
“There was no sort of noise or fighting in my house, Mr. Captain,” she
pattered all at once, like peas dropping, speaking Russian confidently,
though with a strong German accent, “and no sort of scandal, and his
honour came drunk, and it’s the whole truth I am telling, Mr. Captain,
and I am not to blame.... Mine is an honourable house, Mr. Captain,
and honourable behaviour, Mr. Captain, and I always, always dislike any
scandal myself. But he came quite tipsy, and asked for three bottles
again, and then he lifted up one leg, and began playing the pianoforte
with one foot, and that is not at all right in an honourable house, and
he _ganz_ broke the piano, and it was very bad manners indeed and I said
so. And he took up a bottle and began hitting everyone with it. And then
I called the porter, and Karl came, and he took Karl and hit him in the
eye; and he hit Henriette in the eye, too, and gave me five slaps on the
cheek. And it was so ungentlemanly in an honourable house, Mr. Captain,
and I screamed. And he opened the window over the canal, and stood in
the window, squealing like a little pig; it was a disgrace. The idea of
squealing like a little pig at the window into the street! Fie upon him!
And Karl pulled him away from the window by his coat, and it is true,
Mr. Captain, he tore _sein rock_. And then he shouted that _man muss_
pay him fifteen roubles damages. And I did pay him, Mr. Captain, five
roubles for _sein rock_. And he is an ungentlemanly visitor and caused
all the scandal. ‘I will show you up,’ he said, ‘for I can write to all
the papers about you.’”
“Then he was an author?”
“Yes, Mr. Captain, and what an ungentlemanly visitor in an honourable
house....”
“Now then! Enough! I have told you already...”
“Ilya Petrovitch!” the head clerk repeated significantly.
The assistant glanced rapidly at him; the head clerk slightly shook his
head.
“... So I tell you this, most respectable Luise Ivanovna, and I tell it
you for the last time,” the assistant went on. “If there is a scandal
in your honourable house once again, I will put you yourself in the
lock-up, as it is called in polite society. Do you hear? So a literary
man, an author took five roubles for his coat-tail in an ‘honourable
house’? A nice set, these authors!”
And he cast a contemptuous glance at Raskolnikov. “There was a scandal
the other day in a restaurant, too. An author had eaten his dinner and
would not pay; ‘I’ll write a satire on you,’ says he. And there was
another of them on a steamer last week used the most disgraceful
language to the respectable family of a civil councillor, his wife and
daughter. And there was one of them turned out of a confectioner’s shop
the other day. They are like that, authors, literary men, students,
town-criers.... Pfoo! You get along! I shall look in upon you myself one
day. Then you had better be careful! Do you hear?”
With hurried deference, Luise Ivanovna fell to curtsying in all
directions, and so curtsied herself to the door. But at the door, she
stumbled backwards against a good-looking officer with a fresh, open
face and splendid thick fair whiskers. This was the superintendent of
the district himself, Nikodim Fomitch. Luise Ivanovna made haste
to curtsy almost to the ground, and with mincing little steps, she
fluttered out of the office.
“Again thunder and lightning--a hurricane!” said Nikodim Fomitch to Ilya