Crime and Punishment (31 page)

‘There have been a lot of economic changes…’ Zosimov commented.

‘How is one to explain it?’ Razumikhin said, rallying to the attack. ‘Why, it may quite readily be explained by the all too deep-rooted lack of effective activity.’

‘Explain yourself more clearly, sir.’

‘Well, it's what your lecturer in world history replied when he was asked why he'd been forging lottery tickets: “Everyone's making themselves better-off by various means, so I wanted to do the same in as short a time as possible.” I don't remember his exact words, but the gist of it was that he wanted it all for nothing, as quickly as possible, without any effort. People have grown accustomed to having everything ready-made for them, they're used to depending on the guidance of others, having everything chewed up for them first. Well, and when the great hour finally struck, they all showed themselves at face value…’

‘But do you not consider that morality is involved? And, as it were, the rules of…’

‘What have you got to worry about?’ Raskolnikov said, unexpectedly intervening. ‘Why, it's all turned out according to your theory!’

‘What theory?’

‘Well, if you take those ideas you were advocating just now to their ultimate conclusion, the end result would be that it's all right to go around killing people…’

‘For goodness’ sake!’ Luzhin exclaimed.

‘No, that's not right,’ was Zosimov's comment.

Raskolnikov lay pale, his upper lip quivering and his breath coming with difficulty.

‘Everything has its limits,’ Luzhin went on, in a haughty, superior tone. ‘An economic concept is not yet tantamount to an invitation to murder, and one has only to suppose…’

‘Is it true,’ Raskolnikov interrupted again in a voice that trembled with malevolent hostility, betraying a kind of pleasure in being offensive, ‘is it true that you told your fiancée… at the very moment you received her consent, that what appealed to you most about her was the fact… that she is destitute…
because a man does better to take a wife from a poor background so he can have mastery over her later on… and be able to wield the constant reproach over her that he's done her a favour?…’

‘Sir!’ Luzhin exclaimed in vicious irritation, flushing scarlet and thrown completely off balance. ‘Sir… to distort my purpose in this manner! Forgive me, but I must tell you that the rumours that have reached you, or, to be more precise, which have been brought to you, contain not a shred of solid foundation, and I… have my suspicions as to who… to put it briefly… this arrow… to put it briefly, your mother… Indeed, I had already noticed that, for all her excellent qualities, her ideas are somewhat sentimental and romantic in nature… But even so, I was a thousand versts from the supposition that she could possibly have construed and represented the matter in a form such as this, perverted by her imagination… And moreover… moreover…’

‘Do you want to know something?’ Raskolnikov exclaimed, raising himself on his pillow and fixing him with a penetrating, glittering stare. ‘Do you?’

‘Well, sir?’ Luzhin stood still and waited with an offended, challenging look on his face. The silence lasted for several seconds.

‘If you so much as dare… to say another single word… about my mother… I'll knock you head over heels downstairs!’

‘Hey, what's got into you?’ cried Razumikhin.

‘Ah, so that's the way it is!’ Luzhin turned pale and bit his lip. ‘Now listen to me, my good fellow,’ he began in measured tones, doing his utmost to restrain himself, but breathing fiercely none the less. ‘From the very outset, as soon as I arrived here, I observed your hostility, but remained here on purpose in order to learn more. There is much that I am willing to forgive a man who is ill and a relative of mine, but now… I will never…’

‘I'm not ill!’ Raskolnikov shouted.

‘What a pity!…’

‘Oh, go to the devil!’

But Luzhin was already on his way out, not bothering to finish what he had been saying, squeezing his way once again between table and chair; this time Razumikhin stood up in order
to let him through. Without giving anyone a glance, and without even nodding to Zosimov, who had for a long time been motioning to him to leave the sick man in peace, Luzhin went out, cautiously raising his hat to shoulder-height as he bent down in order to pass through the doorway. And even the curve of his spine seemed on this occasion to say that he was carrying away with him a terrible personal insult.

‘We can't just let him go like that, can we?’ said a perplexed Razumikhin, shaking his head.

‘Leave me, leave me alone, all of you!’ Raskolnikov shouted in a frenzy. ‘Will you leave me alone now, you torturers! I'm not afraid of you! I'm not afraid of anyone, anyone now! Go away! I want to be alone, alone, alone!’

‘Come on,’ Zosimov said, motioning to Razumikhin.

‘For pity's sake, we can't just leave him like that.’

‘Come on!’ Zosimov said again, insistently, and went out. Razumikhin thought for a moment and then ran to catch him up.

‘It might have made him worse if we hadn't done as he wanted,’ Zosimov said, on his way down the staircase now. ‘He mustn't be made irritable…’

‘What is it that's wrong with him?’

‘If only he could be given some kind of beneficial shock, that's what he needs! He was all right just a while ago… He's got something on his mind, you know. Some fixed idea that's hanging over him… I'm very much afraid that that's the case… there's no doubt of it!’

‘Perhaps it's that gentleman, that Pyotr Petrovich fellow! From what they were saying it appears he's getting married to Rodya's sister, and that Rodya had had a letter about it just before he fell ill…’

‘Yes; the devil must have brought him just now; he may have upset the whole process of recovery. By the way, have you noticed that he's indifferent to everything, doesn't say a word about anything except the one subject, that sends him into a frenzy: that murder…’

‘Yes, yes!’ Razumikhin said, following his train of thought. ‘I've noticed that a lot! It interests him, he gets scared about it. He
got scared about it on the day he fell ill, in the superintendent's bureau; he passed out.’

‘You can let me know some more about that this evening, and I'll tell you a few things afterwards. He interests me, very much! In half an hour's time I'll look in to see how he is… He won't catch pneumonia, anyway…’

‘I'm most grateful to you! I'll wait downstairs with Pashenka in the meantime and Nastasya can keep an eye on him for me…’

When they had gone, Raskolnikov gave Nastasya a look of anguished impatience: but she seemed to be in no hurry to leave.

‘Would you like some tea now?’ she asked.

‘Later! I want to sleep! Leave me alone…’

With a cramped, convulsive movement he turned to the wall; Nastasya went out.

As soon as she had gone, however, he got up, set the door on the hook, untied the bundle of clothes which Razumikhin had brought earlier and done up again, and began to put them on. It was a strange thing: he suddenly seemed to have become completely calm; now he was affected neither by the mad delirium that had plagued him earlier, nor the panic fear from which he had suffered all the time thereafter. This was his first moment of a strange, abrupt calm. His movements were precise and clearly focused, they contained a hint of a firm resolve. ‘Today, it must be today!…’ he muttered to himself. Though he knew he was still weak, a most powerful emotional tension which had attained the pitch of a state of calm, a fixed and obsessive idea, had given him strength and self-confidence; even so, he hoped he would not fall down in the street. Completely attired in his new suit of clothes, he looked at the money that lay on the table, thought for a moment, and put it in his pocket. It amounted to twenty-five roubles. He also took all the copper five-copeck coins, the change from the ten roubles Razumikhin had spent on the clothes. Then he quietly undid the hook,
emerged from the room and descended the staircase, glancing in through the wide-open door of the kitchen as he went: Nastasya stood there with her back to him, bending down as she blew on the coals in the landlady's samovar. She did not sense his presence. And indeed, who would ever have supposed that he might simply leave? A moment later, and he was out on the street.

It was about eight o'clock, the sun was going down. There was still the same breathless heat as before; but it was with greed that he inhaled this stinking, dust-laden, town-infected air. His head began to go round a little; a kind of wild energy suddenly shone in his inflamed eyes and pale yellow, emaciated features. He did not know where he should go, and was not even thinking of it; all he knew was that ‘all
this
must be brought to an end today, in one go, right now; otherwise I can't go home, because
I don
'
t want to go on living like this
’. How was he to bring it to an end? With what means? He had not the slightest idea, and he did not want to think about it, either. He drove the thought away: thought tormented him. All he could do was feel, knowing that, whatever else happened, the situation must be changed, ‘by whatever means possible’, he kept repeating with a desperate, obsessive self-confidence and resolve.

Following his old habit, and taking the customary route of his previous walks, he set off straight for the Haymarket. Some distance before he got there, in the roadway in front of a chandler's shop, he encountered a young man with black hair who was playing the hurdy-gurdy, churning out a thoroughly poignant romance. He was accompanying a girl of about fifteen who stood before him on the pavement, dressed like a young lady of the aristocracy in a crinoline, mantilla, gloves and a straw hat with a bright orange feather in it; all of these were old and shabby. In a nasal street voice that was none the less strong and appealing she was singing the romance to its end in the expectation of receiving a two-copeck piece from the shop. Raskolnikov paused, side by side with two or three other members of the audience, listened for a while, took out a five-copeck coin and placed it in the girl's hand. Quite suddenly she interrupted her singing on the very highest and most poignant note, as though she had cut it off with a knife, called sharply to
the hurdy-gurdy player: ‘That's enough!’, and they both dragged themselves off to the next little shop.

‘Do you like street-singing?’ Raskolnikov suddenly inquired, addressing himself to the elderly passer-by who had been standing next to him listening to the hurdy-gurdy and who had the appearance of a
flâneur
. The man looked at him in timid astonishment. ‘I do,’ Raskolnikov went on, but with an air that suggested he was talking about some subject quite remote from that of street-singing. ‘I like to hear singing to the accompaniment of a hurdy-gurdy on a cold, dark and damp autumn evening, it must be a damp one, when the faces of all the passers-by are pale green and sickly-looking; or, even better, when wet snow is falling, quite vertically, with no wind, do you know? And through it the gas-lamps gleaming…’

‘No, sir, I don't know… Excuse me…’ the gentleman muttered, frightened both by Raskolnikov's question and by his strange appearance, and crossed over to the other side of the street.

Raskolnikov walked straight on and emerged at the corner of the Haymarket where the artisan and the peasant woman had been talking to Lizaveta that day; but now they were nowhere to be seen. Recognizing the spot, he stopped, looked around and turned to a young lad in a red shirt who was standing outside the entrance to a flour-dealer's shop
¹
and staring with vacant curiosity:

‘There's an artisan who has a stall on this corner, with a peasant woman, his wife, isn't there?’

‘There's all kinds of folk have stalls here,’ the lad replied, giving Raskolnikov a measuring look from above.

‘What's his name?’

‘Whatever he was christened.’

‘You're from Zaraisk, too, aren't you? Which province?’

The lad again surveyed Raskolnikov.

‘What we have, your excellency, is not a province but a district, and since my brother's the one who did the travelling, while I stayed at home, I don't rightly know, sir… Perhaps your excellency will forgive me out of the greatness of his soul.’

‘Is that an eating-house up there?’

‘It's an inn. They've got billiards, too; and you'll find some of those princesses there… Couldn't be better.’

Raskolnikov walked across the square. At this corner there was a dense crowd of people – muzhiks, all of them. He squeezed his way into the very thick of them, peering into their faces. For some reason he felt a longing to talk to them all. But the muzhiks paid no attention to him, and somehow kept on making a tremendous din, bunched up into little groups. He stood for a bit, reflected, and then turned right along the pavement in the direction of V—. Leaving the square behind, he found himself in a side-lane
²
…

He had walked down this lane many times before. It made a bend, and led from the square to Sadovaya Street. During his recent weeks of wretchedness he had actually felt a longing to loaf around in all these places, ‘so as to get even more wretched’. Now he entered the lane, thinking of nothing. There was a large building here which was entirely taken up with drinking dens and other food-and-drink establishments; every moment or so women came running out of them, attired ‘for the neighbourhood’ – bareheaded and wearing only their dresses. In two or three places they were huddled together on the pavement in groups, mostly at the top of the descents to the lower floor, where by way of a couple of steps it was possible to enter various establishments of a highly recreational nature. Coming from one of these at that moment was enough noise and uproar to fill the whole street, the strum of a guitar, the singing of songs, and the sound of people enjoying themselves to the full. A large group of women was gathered outside the entrance; some of them sat on the steps, others on the pavement, and yet others stood talking together. Beside them, in the roadway, loudly swearing, a drunken soldier was wandering around aimlessly with a cigarette in his hand, apparently looking for some place he wanted to go to, but unable to remember where it was. One ragged man was exchanging abuse with another ragged man, and someone else who was dead drunk lay sprawled across the street. Raskolnikov stopped beside the large group of women. They were talking in hoarse voices; they were all wearing cotton dresses and goat-skin shoes, and their heads were uncovered.
Some of them were over forty, but there were others who were not much more than seventeen, and nearly all of them had black bruise-marks round their eyes.