Crime and Punishment
‘protect the orphans, for you knew my late husband, Semyon Zaharovitch,
and on the very day of his death the basest of scoundrels slandered his
only daughter.’... That policeman again! Protect me,” she cried to the
official. “Why is that policeman edging up to me? We have only just run
away from one of them. What do you want, fool?”
“It’s forbidden in the streets. You mustn’t make a disturbance.”
“It’s you’re making a disturbance. It’s just the same as if I were
grinding an organ. What business is it of yours?”
“You have to get a licence for an organ, and you haven’t got one, and in
that way you collect a crowd. Where do you lodge?”
“What, a license?” wailed Katerina Ivanovna. “I buried my husband
to-day. What need of a license?”
“Calm yourself, madam, calm yourself,” began the official. “Come along;
I will escort you.... This is no place for you in the crowd. You are
ill.”
“Honoured sir, honoured sir, you don’t know,” screamed Katerina
Ivanovna. “We are going to the Nevsky.... Sonia, Sonia! Where is she?
She is crying too! What’s the matter with you all? Kolya, Lida, where
are you going?” she cried suddenly in alarm. “Oh, silly children! Kolya,
Lida, where are they off to?...”
Kolya and Lida, scared out of their wits by the crowd, and their
mother’s mad pranks, suddenly seized each other by the hand, and ran off
at the sight of the policeman who wanted to take them away somewhere.
Weeping and wailing, poor Katerina Ivanovna ran after them. She was
a piteous and unseemly spectacle, as she ran, weeping and panting for
breath. Sonia and Polenka rushed after them.
“Bring them back, bring them back, Sonia! Oh stupid, ungrateful
children!... Polenka! catch them.... It’s for your sakes I...”
She stumbled as she ran and fell down.
“She’s cut herself, she’s bleeding! Oh, dear!” cried Sonia, bending over
her.
All ran up and crowded around. Raskolnikov and Lebeziatnikov were the
first at her side, the official too hastened up, and behind him the
policeman who muttered, “Bother!” with a gesture of impatience, feeling
that the job was going to be a troublesome one.
“Pass on! Pass on!” he said to the crowd that pressed forward.
“She’s dying,” someone shouted.
“She’s gone out of her mind,” said another.
“Lord have mercy upon us,” said a woman, crossing herself. “Have they
caught the little girl and the boy? They’re being brought back, the
elder one’s got them.... Ah, the naughty imps!”
When they examined Katerina Ivanovna carefully, they saw that she had
not cut herself against a stone, as Sonia thought, but that the blood
that stained the pavement red was from her chest.
“I’ve seen that before,” muttered the official to Raskolnikov and
Lebeziatnikov; “that’s consumption; the blood flows and chokes the
patient. I saw the same thing with a relative of my own not long ago...
nearly a pint of blood, all in a minute.... What’s to be done though?
She is dying.”
“This way, this way, to my room!” Sonia implored. “I live here!... See,
that house, the second from here.... Come to me, make haste,” she turned
from one to the other. “Send for the doctor! Oh, dear!”
Thanks to the official’s efforts, this plan was adopted, the policeman
even helping to carry Katerina Ivanovna. She was carried to Sonia’s
room, almost unconscious, and laid on the bed. The blood was still
flowing, but she seemed to be coming to herself. Raskolnikov,
Lebeziatnikov, and the official accompanied Sonia into the room and were
followed by the policeman, who first drove back the crowd which followed
to the very door. Polenka came in holding Kolya and Lida, who
were trembling and weeping. Several persons came in too from the
Kapernaumovs’ room; the landlord, a lame one-eyed man of strange
appearance with whiskers and hair that stood up like a brush, his
wife, a woman with an everlastingly scared expression, and several
open-mouthed children with wonder-struck faces. Among these,
Svidrigaïlov suddenly made his appearance. Raskolnikov looked at him
with surprise, not understanding where he had come from and not having
noticed him in the crowd. A doctor and priest were spoken of. The
official whispered to Raskolnikov that he thought it was too late now
for the doctor, but he ordered him to be sent for. Kapernaumov ran
himself.
Meanwhile Katerina Ivanovna had regained her breath. The bleeding ceased
for a time. She looked with sick but intent and penetrating eyes at
Sonia, who stood pale and trembling, wiping the sweat from her brow with
a handkerchief. At last she asked to be raised. They sat her up on the
bed, supporting her on both sides.
“Where are the children?” she said in a faint voice. “You’ve brought
them, Polenka? Oh the sillies! Why did you run away.... Och!”
Once more her parched lips were covered with blood. She moved her eyes,
looking about her.
“So that’s how you live, Sonia! Never once have I been in your room.”
She looked at her with a face of suffering.
“We have been your ruin, Sonia. Polenka, Lida, Kolya, come here! Well,
here they are, Sonia, take them all! I hand them over to you, I’ve had
enough! The ball is over.” (Cough!) “Lay me down, let me die in peace.”
They laid her back on the pillow.
“What, the priest? I don’t want him. You haven’t got a rouble to spare.
I have no sins. God must forgive me without that. He knows how I have
suffered.... And if He won’t forgive me, I don’t care!”
She sank more and more into uneasy delirium. At times she shuddered,
turned her eyes from side to side, recognised everyone for a minute,
but at once sank into delirium again. Her breathing was hoarse and
difficult, there was a sort of rattle in her throat.
“I said to him, your excellency,” she ejaculated, gasping after each
word. “That Amalia Ludwigovna, ah! Lida, Kolya, hands on your hips,
make haste! _Glissez, glissez! pas de basque!_ Tap with your heels, be a
graceful child!
“_Du hast Diamanten und Perlen_
“What next? That’s the thing to sing.
“_Du hast die schönsten Augen Mädchen, was willst du mehr?_
“What an idea! _Was willst du mehr?_ What things the fool invents! Ah,
yes!
“In the heat of midday in the vale of Dagestan.
“Ah, how I loved it! I loved that song to distraction, Polenka! Your
father, you know, used to sing it when we were engaged.... Oh, those
days! Oh, that’s the thing for us to sing! How does it go? I’ve
forgotten. Remind me! How was it?”
She was violently excited and tried to sit up. At last, in a horribly
hoarse, broken voice, she began, shrieking and gasping at every word,
with a look of growing terror.
“In the heat of midday!... in the vale!... of Dagestan!... With lead in
my breast!...”
“Your excellency!” she wailed suddenly with a heart-rending scream and
a flood of tears, “protect the orphans! You have been their father’s
guest... one may say aristocratic....” She started, regaining
consciousness, and gazed at all with a sort of terror, but at once
recognised Sonia.
“Sonia, Sonia!” she articulated softly and caressingly, as though
surprised to find her there. “Sonia darling, are you here, too?”
They lifted her up again.
“Enough! It’s over! Farewell, poor thing! I am done for! I am broken!”
she cried with vindictive despair, and her head fell heavily back on the
pillow.
She sank into unconsciousness again, but this time it did not last long.
Her pale, yellow, wasted face dropped back, her mouth fell open, her leg
moved convulsively, she gave a deep, deep sigh and died.
Sonia fell upon her, flung her arms about her, and remained motionless
with her head pressed to the dead woman’s wasted bosom. Polenka threw
herself at her mother’s feet, kissing them and weeping violently. Though
Kolya and Lida did not understand what had happened, they had a feeling
that it was something terrible; they put their hands on each other’s
little shoulders, stared straight at one another and both at once opened
their mouths and began screaming. They were both still in their fancy
dress; one in a turban, the other in the cap with the ostrich feather.
And how did “the certificate of merit” come to be on the bed beside
Katerina Ivanovna? It lay there by the pillow; Raskolnikov saw it.
He walked away to the window. Lebeziatnikov skipped up to him.
“She is dead,” he said.
“Rodion Romanovitch, I must have two words with you,” said Svidrigaïlov,
coming up to them.
Lebeziatnikov at once made room for him and delicately withdrew.
Svidrigaïlov drew Raskolnikov further away.
“I will undertake all the arrangements, the funeral and that. You know
it’s a question of money and, as I told you, I have plenty to spare. I
will put those two little ones and Polenka into some good orphan asylum,
and I will settle fifteen hundred roubles to be paid to each on coming
of age, so that Sofya Semyonovna need have no anxiety about them. And I
will pull her out of the mud too, for she is a good girl, isn’t she? So
tell Avdotya Romanovna that that is how I am spending her ten thousand.”
“What is your motive for such benevolence?” asked Raskolnikov.
“Ah! you sceptical person!” laughed Svidrigaïlov. “I told you I had no
need of that money. Won’t you admit that it’s simply done from humanity?
She wasn’t ‘a louse,’ you know” (he pointed to the corner where the
dead woman lay), “was she, like some old pawnbroker woman? Come, you’ll
agree, is Luzhin to go on living, and doing wicked things or is she to
die? And if I didn’t help them, Polenka would go the same way.”
He said this with an air of a sort of gay winking slyness, keeping his
eyes fixed on Raskolnikov, who turned white and cold, hearing his own
phrases, spoken to Sonia. He quickly stepped back and looked wildly at
Svidrigaïlov.
“How do you know?” he whispered, hardly able to breathe.
“Why, I lodge here at Madame Resslich’s, the other side of the wall.
Here is Kapernaumov, and there lives Madame Resslich, an old and devoted
friend of mine. I am a neighbour.”
“You?”
“Yes,” continued Svidrigaïlov, shaking with laughter. “I assure you
on my honour, dear Rodion Romanovitch, that you have interested me
enormously. I told you we should become friends, I foretold it. Well,
here we have. And you will see what an accommodating person I am. You’ll
see that you can get on with me!”
PART VI
CHAPTER I
A strange period began for Raskolnikov: it was as though a fog had
fallen upon him and wrapped him in a dreary solitude from which there
was no escape. Recalling that period long after, he believed that his
mind had been clouded at times, and that it had continued so, with
intervals, till the final catastrophe. He was convinced that he had been
mistaken about many things at that time, for instance as to the date
of certain events. Anyway, when he tried later on to piece his
recollections together, he learnt a great deal about himself from what
other people told him. He had mixed up incidents and had explained
events as due to circumstances which existed only in his imagination. At
times he was a prey to agonies of morbid uneasiness, amounting sometimes
to panic. But he remembered, too, moments, hours, perhaps whole days,
of complete apathy, which came upon him as a reaction from his previous
terror and might be compared with the abnormal insensibility, sometimes
seen in the dying. He seemed to be trying in that latter stage to escape
from a full and clear understanding of his position. Certain essential
facts which required immediate consideration were particularly irksome
to him. How glad he would have been to be free from some cares, the
neglect of which would have threatened him with complete, inevitable
ruin.
He was particularly worried about Svidrigaïlov, he might be said to be
permanently thinking of Svidrigaïlov. From the time of Svidrigaïlov’s