Crime and Punishment (17 page)

Having finished with this, he thrust his fingers into the narrow slit between his ‘Turkish’ sofa and the floor, felt about in the left-hand corner and pulled out the ‘pledge’ he had manufactured and hidden there a long time ago. This ‘pledge’ was in fact not really a pledge at all, just a smoothly planed piece of wood no larger or thicker than the average silver cigarette-case. He had found this piece of wood on one of his walks, in a certain courtyard, one wing of which housed some workshop or other. Later he had added a thin, smooth iron plate – it had probably broken off something else – which he had also found in the
street that same day. Fitting the two objects together (the iron one was smaller than the wooden one), he bound them firmly to each other, crosswise, by means of a length of thread; then he wrapped them neatly and presentably in a sheet of clean, white paper and tied the parcel with a slender ribbon, also crosswise, adjusting the knot in such a manner that it would be rather difficult to undo. This was so that the old woman's attention would be distracted for a time; while she was fiddling with the knot he would seize the moment. He had added the iron plate for the sake of extra weight, so that the old woman would not at once guess that the ‘item’ was made of wood. All this he had been keeping under his sofa until the time came. No sooner had he retrieved the thing than he suddenly heard a shout down in the yard somewhere:

‘It struck six long ago!’

‘Long ago! Oh my God!’

He rushed to the door, listened, snatched up his hat and began to descend his thirteen steps, cautiously, inaudibly, like a cat. A most important part of the business still lay ahead – he had to steal an axe from the kitchen. That the deed had to be done with an axe was something he had decided long ago. He also had a folding garden knife; but he had no confidence in the knife, and still less in his own strength – that was why he had finally decided that he must use an axe. It may, incidentally, be worth noting here one peculiar feature of all the final decisions he had so far taken in this affair. They all had one strange characteristic: the more final they had grown, the more monstrous and absurd they at once became to his eyes. In spite of the entire agonizing inner struggle he went through, never for one instant was he able to believe in the feasibility of his intentions, during that whole time.

And even if it were somehow to come to pass that he managed to work everything out, make all his decisions watertight, down to the last detail, leaving no room for a single doubt – even then he would have turned his back on the whole thing as on something absurd, outrageous and impossible. There remained, however, a whole host of unresolved points and questions that still had to be dealt with. As for how he was to get hold of an
axe, that trivial question did not trouble him in the slightest, because there was nothing easier. The fact was that Nastasya was hardly ever at home, and this was especially true in the evenings: she was either going off to see the neighbours or running down to the corner shop, and she always left the door wide open. That was the very thing the landlady kept having those quarrels with her about. So, all he had to do when the time came was to go quietly into the kitchen and take the axe, and then, an hour later (when it was all over), come in once more and put it back. There were, however, certain imponderables: supposing he were to return an hour later in order to put the axe back, only to find that Nastasya, too, had returned? Then, of course, he would have to go past and wait until she had gone out again. But what if she were to notice that the axe had gone, and begin to look for it, raise a hue and cry? Then there would be suspicion, or at least grounds for suspicion.

But these were merely trivial considerations to which he did not even begin to give any thought, and indeed he had not the time to do so. He was thinking about what was most important – the detail could wait until
he was satisfied with everything
. This latter condition really did seem unrealizable, however. At least, that was how it appeared to him. There was no way, for example, that he could ever imagine bringing his ratiocinations to an end, getting up and simply going there… Even his recent
rehearsal
(the visit he had made with the intention of making a final survey of the place) had only been an
attempt
at a rehearsal, not a real one, much as if he had said: ‘Come on, I'll go and test it out, what's the point of lying here dreaming?’ – and had at once been unable to go through with it, had shrugged his shoulders and run away in bitter rage at himself. Yet at the same time he had the feeling that, so far as the moral aspects of the question were concerned, his analysis was now complete: his casuistry had been whetted sharp as a razor, and he was unable to find any more conscious objections within himself. In the last resort, however, he simply had no faith in himself and obstinately, slavishly, sought objections right, left and centre, fumbling around for them as though someone were compelling him and drawing him to it. But now this latest day, which had dawned
so unexpectedly and had decided everything, acted on him in an almost entirely mechanical fashion: as though someone had taken him by the hand and pulled him along behind him, inexorably, blindly, with unnatural force, countenancing no objections. As though a corner of his clothing had got caught in the flywheel of a machine, and he was beginning to be drawn into it.

At first – this had actually been a long time earlier – a certain question had preoccupied him: why were nearly all crimes so easily tracked down and found out, and why did the traces of nearly all criminals show up so clearly? Little by little he had arrived at certain diverse and interesting conclusions and, in his opinion, the principal cause was to be found less in the criminal's lack of ability to conceal the material evidence of his crime than it was in the criminal himself; it was the criminal himself who, in almost every case, became subject at the moment of his crime to a kind of failure of will and reason, which were replaced by a childish and phenomenal frivolity, and this right at the very moment when the things that were needed most of all were reason and caution. According to the way he saw it, this eclipse of reason and failure of will attacked human beings like an illness, developing slowly and reaching their crisis not long before the enactment of the crime; they continued to manifest themselves in the same critical fashion at the moment of the crime itself and also for a short time thereafter, depending on the individual; then they passed, in the same way that every illness passes. On the other hand, the question of whether it was an illness that gave rise to the crime, or whether the crime itself was, by its own peculiar nature, invariably accompanied by something resembling an illness, was one that he did not yet feel able to determine.

Arriving at such conclusions, he decided that where he personally was concerned, in his own undertaking, there could be no such morbid upheavals, and that his reason and his will would remain inalienably with him throughout the entire enactment of what he had planned, for the sole reason that what he had planned was – ‘not a crime’… We shall omit the lengthy process by which he had arrived at this last conclusion; we have run too
far ahead even as it is… We shall merely add that in general the factual, purely material difficulties of the undertaking played a decidedly secondary role within his mind. ‘As long as I can manage to preserve my will and my reason and exercise them over them to the fullest extent, then they in their turn will all be vanquished when it becomes necessary for them to acquaint themselves with every last, microscopic detail of the affair…’ But the affair was not making any progress. He continued to have not the slightest faith in his final decisions, and when the fatal hour struck, everything turned out not that way at all, but somehow unexpectedly – even, one might almost say, astonishingly.

A circumstance of the most trivial kind landed him in an impasse even before he had got to the bottom of the stairs. As he drew level with his landlady's kitchen, the door to which as always stood wide open, he directed a cautious, disapproving look inside, in order to find out in advance whether, Nastasya being absent, the landlady was there, or, if she was not, whether the door to her room was properly shut – he did not want her peeping out of there when he went in for the axe. Great, however, was his amazement when he suddenly saw that not only was Nastasya at home and in her kitchen, but she was actually doing some work: she was taking the laundry out of its basket and hanging it on the clothes-line! At the sight of him she stopped what she was doing, turned towards him and continued to stare at him steadily all the time he was passing. He averted his eyes and continued his descent as though he had not noticed anything. But the whole affair was at an end: he had no axe! He was horribly shaken.

‘Now where did I get that idea?’ he thought, as he was going through the entrance-way. ‘Where did I get the idea that she'd be bound to be out just then? Why was I so certain of it – why, why?’ He felt crushed, even in some way humiliated. He wanted to jeer at himself with malicious spite… A slow-witted, animal rage seethed up inside him.

He paused in the entrance-way in order to reflect. To go out on to the street like this, for show, as if he were taking a walk, was a prospect he found repugnant; the thought of going back to his room was one still more repugnant. ‘What a chance I've
lost forever!’ he muttered as he stood, shorn of purpose, in the entrance-way, right opposite the yardkeeper's dark little cubicle, the door to which also stood open. Suddenly he gave a start. From the little room, which was only two yards away from him, his eyes had caught the glint of something underneath a bench on the right… He looked around him – no one. On tiptoe he approached the yardkeeper's room, went down the two little steps and called the yardkeeper in a faint voice. ‘As I thought, he's not at home! But he must be somewhere nearby in the yard, because the door is wide open.’ He pounced headlong on the axe (it was an axe), dragging it out from under the bench where it lay in between two logs and, right there and then, while he was still inside, fastened it to his loop, stuck both hands in his pockets and stepped out of the cubicle again; no one had noticed anything! ‘If reason won't, the devil will!’ he thought, smiling a strange, ironic smile. This stroke of fortune had thoroughly revived his spirits.

He continued on his way quietly and
sedately
, without hurry, in order not to give rise to any suspicion. He paid little attention to the passers-by, making a great effort not to look them in the face at all, and to be as inconspicuous as possible. Then he remembered he was wearing his hat. ‘For God's sake! I even had some money the day before yesterday, yet I didn't go and buy a cap instead!’ A curse erupted from his soul.

Glancing casually out of one eye into a little shop, he saw that the clock on the wall inside said ten past seven. He would have to hurry, and at the same time make a detour: approach the house by a roundabout route, from the other side…

Previously, whenever he had had occasion to picture all this to himself in his imagination, he had sometimes thought that he would be very afraid. But he was not particularly afraid now – indeed, he was not afraid at all. At the present moment he was actually preoccupied by some totally irrelevant thoughts, though they did not last for long. On his way past Yusupov Park
¹
he even began to be thoroughly taken up with an imaginary project of his own devising: the construction of tall fountains, and the way in which they would properly refresh the air on all the city's squares. Little by little he moved on to the
conviction that if the Summer Garden were to be extended the entire length of the Field of Mars and even possibly connected with the gardens of the Mikhailovsky Palace, this would be an attractive improvement that would also be of benefit to the city. At this point he suddenly began to develop an interest in the question of why it was that in all great cities people seemed to be especially inclined to live and settle in precisely those parts of town where there were no gardens or fountains, where there were dirt and foul smells and all kinds of filth, and that this was not really caused by material necessity. Here he recalled his own walks in the Haymarket, and for a moment he snapped out of his trance. ‘What a load of nonsense!’ he thought. ‘God, I'd do better not to think at all!’

‘I suppose this must be how men who are being led to the scaffold cling with their thoughts to all the things they meet along the way.’
²
This notion flashed across his mind, but it was only a flash, like lightning; he suppressed it as quickly as possible… But now he was close – here was the house, here were the gates. Somewhere a clock beat a single chime. ‘What, is it really half-past seven? That's impossible, it must be fast!’

To his good fortune, everything went without incident at the gates again. Not only that, but at that very moment, as if by design, a cart carrying an enormous load of hay was in the process of entering the gate in front of him, completely shielding him from view during the whole time he was walking through the entrance-way; the instant the cart had succeeded in manoeuvring through the gate into the yard, he slipped through to the right. Over there, on the other side of the haycart, several voices could be heard shouting and talking, but no one observed him and he encountered no one, either. Many of the windows that looked on to this enormous quadrangular courtyard were open at that moment, but he did not raise his head – he had not the strength. The staircase that led up to the old woman's apartment was close by, just inside the gateway, to the right. He was already on the stairs…

Pausing for breath and pressing one hand against his thumping heart, then feeling about for the axe and setting it straight again, he began carefully and quietly to ascend the staircase,
straining his ears every moment. But at that particular time the staircase was quite deserted; all the doors were shut; no one was about. True, the door to one empty apartment on the second floor was wide open, and some decorators were at work inside, painting, but they paid him no attention. He stood still for a moment, thought, and then continued his ascent. ‘Of course it would have been better if there'd been nobody here at all, but… there are two more floors above them.’