Crime and Punishment
Petrovitch in a civil and friendly tone. “You are aroused again, you are
fuming again! I heard it on the stairs!”
“Well, what then!” Ilya Petrovitch drawled with gentlemanly nonchalance;
and he walked with some papers to another table, with a jaunty swing of
his shoulders at each step. “Here, if you will kindly look: an author,
or a student, has been one at least, does not pay his debts, has given
an I O U, won’t clear out of his room, and complaints are constantly
being lodged against him, and here he has been pleased to make a protest
against my smoking in his presence! He behaves like a cad himself, and
just look at him, please. Here’s the gentleman, and very attractive he
is!”
“Poverty is not a vice, my friend, but we know you go off like powder,
you can’t bear a slight, I daresay you took offence at something and
went too far yourself,” continued Nikodim Fomitch, turning affably to
Raskolnikov. “But you were wrong there; he is a capital fellow, I assure
you, but explosive, explosive! He gets hot, fires up, boils over, and no
stopping him! And then it’s all over! And at the bottom he’s a heart of
gold! His nickname in the regiment was the Explosive Lieutenant....”
“And what a regiment it was, too,” cried Ilya Petrovitch, much gratified
at this agreeable banter, though still sulky.
Raskolnikov had a sudden desire to say something exceptionally pleasant
to them all. “Excuse me, Captain,” he began easily, suddenly addressing
Nikodim Fomitch, “will you enter into my position?... I am ready to
ask pardon, if I have been ill-mannered. I am a poor student, sick
and shattered (shattered was the word he used) by poverty. I am not
studying, because I cannot keep myself now, but I shall get money.... I
have a mother and sister in the province of X. They will send it to
me, and I will pay. My landlady is a good-hearted woman, but she is so
exasperated at my having lost my lessons, and not paying her for the
last four months, that she does not even send up my dinner... and I
don’t understand this I O U at all. She is asking me to pay her on this
I O U. How am I to pay her? Judge for yourselves!...”
“But that is not our business, you know,” the head clerk was observing.
“Yes, yes. I perfectly agree with you. But allow me to explain...”
Raskolnikov put in again, still addressing Nikodim Fomitch, but trying
his best to address Ilya Petrovitch also, though the latter persistently
appeared to be rummaging among his papers and to be contemptuously
oblivious of him. “Allow me to explain that I have been living with her
for nearly three years and at first... at first... for why should I not
confess it, at the very beginning I promised to marry her daughter, it
was a verbal promise, freely given... she was a girl... indeed, I liked
her, though I was not in love with her... a youthful affair in fact...
that is, I mean to say, that my landlady gave me credit freely in those
days, and I led a life of... I was very heedless...”
“Nobody asks you for these personal details, sir, we’ve no time to
waste,” Ilya Petrovitch interposed roughly and with a note of triumph;
but Raskolnikov stopped him hotly, though he suddenly found it
exceedingly difficult to speak.
“But excuse me, excuse me. It is for me to explain... how it all
happened... In my turn... though I agree with you... it is unnecessary.
But a year ago, the girl died of typhus. I remained lodging there as
before, and when my landlady moved into her present quarters, she said
to me... and in a friendly way... that she had complete trust in me,
but still, would I not give her an I O U for one hundred and fifteen
roubles, all the debt I owed her. She said if only I gave her that,
she would trust me again, as much as I liked, and that she would never,
never--those were her own words--make use of that I O U till I could pay
of myself... and now, when I have lost my lessons and have nothing to
eat, she takes action against me. What am I to say to that?”
“All these affecting details are no business of ours.” Ilya Petrovitch
interrupted rudely. “You must give a written undertaking but as for your
love affairs and all these tragic events, we have nothing to do with
that.”
“Come now... you are harsh,” muttered Nikodim Fomitch, sitting down at
the table and also beginning to write. He looked a little ashamed.
“Write!” said the head clerk to Raskolnikov.
“Write what?” the latter asked, gruffly.
“I will dictate to you.”
Raskolnikov fancied that the head clerk treated him more casually and
contemptuously after his speech, but strange to say he suddenly felt
completely indifferent to anyone’s opinion, and this revulsion took
place in a flash, in one instant. If he had cared to think a little,
he would have been amazed indeed that he could have talked to them like
that a minute before, forcing his feelings upon them. And where had
those feelings come from? Now if the whole room had been filled, not
with police officers, but with those nearest and dearest to him, he
would not have found one human word for them, so empty was his heart. A
gloomy sensation of agonising, everlasting solitude and remoteness, took
conscious form in his soul. It was not the meanness of his sentimental
effusions before Ilya Petrovitch, nor the meanness of the latter’s
triumph over him that had caused this sudden revulsion in his heart.
Oh, what had he to do now with his own baseness, with all these petty
vanities, officers, German women, debts, police-offices? If he had been
sentenced to be burnt at that moment, he would not have stirred, would
hardly have heard the sentence to the end. Something was happening to
him entirely new, sudden and unknown. It was not that he understood, but
he felt clearly with all the intensity of sensation that he could
never more appeal to these people in the police-office with sentimental
effusions like his recent outburst, or with anything whatever; and that
if they had been his own brothers and sisters and not police-officers,
it would have been utterly out of the question to appeal to them in any
circumstance of life. He had never experienced such a strange and awful
sensation. And what was most agonising--it was more a sensation than a
conception or idea, a direct sensation, the most agonising of all the
sensations he had known in his life.
The head clerk began dictating to him the usual form of declaration,
that he could not pay, that he undertook to do so at a future date, that
he would not leave the town, nor sell his property, and so on.
“But you can’t write, you can hardly hold the pen,” observed the head
clerk, looking with curiosity at Raskolnikov. “Are you ill?”
“Yes, I am giddy. Go on!”
“That’s all. Sign it.”
The head clerk took the paper, and turned to attend to others.
Raskolnikov gave back the pen; but instead of getting up and going away,
he put his elbows on the table and pressed his head in his hands. He
felt as if a nail were being driven into his skull. A strange idea
suddenly occurred to him, to get up at once, to go up to Nikodim
Fomitch, and tell him everything that had happened yesterday, and then
to go with him to his lodgings and to show him the things in the hole
in the corner. The impulse was so strong that he got up from his seat
to carry it out. “Hadn’t I better think a minute?” flashed through his
mind. “No, better cast off the burden without thinking.” But all at once
he stood still, rooted to the spot. Nikodim Fomitch was talking eagerly
with Ilya Petrovitch, and the words reached him:
“It’s impossible, they’ll both be released. To begin with, the whole
story contradicts itself. Why should they have called the porter, if it
had been their doing? To inform against themselves? Or as a blind? No,
that would be too cunning! Besides, Pestryakov, the student, was seen at
the gate by both the porters and a woman as he went in. He was walking
with three friends, who left him only at the gate, and he asked the
porters to direct him, in the presence of the friends. Now, would he
have asked his way if he had been going with such an object? As for
Koch, he spent half an hour at the silversmith’s below, before he went
up to the old woman and he left him at exactly a quarter to eight. Now
just consider...”
“But excuse me, how do you explain this contradiction? They state
themselves that they knocked and the door was locked; yet three minutes
later when they went up with the porter, it turned out the door was
unfastened.”
“That’s just it; the murderer must have been there and bolted himself
in; and they’d have caught him for a certainty if Koch had not been
an ass and gone to look for the porter too. _He_ must have seized the
interval to get downstairs and slip by them somehow. Koch keeps crossing
himself and saying: ‘If I had been there, he would have jumped out and
killed me with his axe.’ He is going to have a thanksgiving service--ha,
ha!”
“And no one saw the murderer?”
“They might well not see him; the house is a regular Noah’s Ark,” said
the head clerk, who was listening.
“It’s clear, quite clear,” Nikodim Fomitch repeated warmly.
“No, it is anything but clear,” Ilya Petrovitch maintained.
Raskolnikov picked up his hat and walked towards the door, but he did
not reach it....
When he recovered consciousness, he found himself sitting in a chair,
supported by someone on the right side, while someone else was standing
on the left, holding a yellowish glass filled with yellow water, and
Nikodim Fomitch standing before him, looking intently at him. He got up
from the chair.
“What’s this? Are you ill?” Nikodim Fomitch asked, rather sharply.
“He could hardly hold his pen when he was signing,” said the head clerk,
settling back in his place, and taking up his work again.
“Have you been ill long?” cried Ilya Petrovitch from his place, where
he, too, was looking through papers. He had, of course, come to look at
the sick man when he fainted, but retired at once when he recovered.
“Since yesterday,” muttered Raskolnikov in reply.
“Did you go out yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“Though you were ill?”
“Yes.”
“At what time?”
“About seven.”
“And where did you go, may I ask?”
“Along the street.”
“Short and clear.”
Raskolnikov, white as a handkerchief, had answered sharply, jerkily,
without dropping his black feverish eyes before Ilya Petrovitch’s stare.
“He can scarcely stand upright. And you...” Nikodim Fomitch was
beginning.
“No matter,” Ilya Petrovitch pronounced rather peculiarly.
Nikodim Fomitch would have made some further protest, but glancing at
the head clerk who was looking very hard at him, he did not speak. There
was a sudden silence. It was strange.
“Very well, then,” concluded Ilya Petrovitch, “we will not detain you.”
Raskolnikov went out. He caught the sound of eager conversation on his
departure, and above the rest rose the questioning voice of Nikodim
Fomitch. In the street, his faintness passed off completely.
“A search--there will be a search at once,” he repeated to himself,
hurrying home. “The brutes! they suspect.”
His former terror mastered him completely again.
CHAPTER II
“And what if there has been a search already? What if I find them in my
room?”
But here was his room. Nothing and no one in it. No one had peeped in.
Even Nastasya had not touched it. But heavens! how could he have left
all those things in the hole?
He rushed to the corner, slipped his hand under the paper, pulled the
things out and lined his pockets with them. There were eight articles in
all: two little boxes with ear-rings or something of the sort, he hardly
looked to see; then four small leather cases. There was a chain, too,
merely wrapped in newspaper and something else in newspaper, that looked