Crime and Punishment (65 page)

‘Were you there when he questioned Nikolai?’

‘After he'd let you go, he let me go as well, and then he started questioning Nikolai.’

The artisan paused and suddenly bowed again, touching the floor with one finger.

‘Forgive me my slander and my hatred.’

‘God will forgive you,’ Raskolnikov answered, and as soon as he said this, the artisan bowed to him, not to the floor, this time, however, but only to the waist, turned slowly away and went out of the room. ‘It's all conjecture, it's still all conjecture,’ Raskolnikov kept saying to himself, and left the room in better spirits than ever.

‘Now let's resume the struggle,’ he said with a vicious, sarcastic smile, as he went down the stairs. The viciousness was aimed at himself; he remembered his ‘faint-heartedness’ with shame and contempt.

The morning that followed his fateful meeting with Dunya and Pulkheria Aleksandrovna had a sobering effect on Pyotr Petrovich. To his exceedingly great annoyance, he had little by little been compelled to accept as an unalterable
fait accompli
the very thing which only the previous day had seemed an event belonging almost to the realms of fantasy, and which, although it had taken place, still seemed impossible to him. All night a black serpent of wounded self-esteem had eaten at his heart. The first thing Pyotr Petrovich did upon getting out of bed was to take a look in the mirror. He was afraid he might have had an attack of jaundice overnight. From this point of view all was, however, still satisfactory for the moment and, having taken a look at his nobly virtuous, white and of late somewhat portly features, Pyotr Petrovich actually felt somewhat consoled for a moment, in the fullest conviction that he would be able to find himself a wife somewhere else, and perhaps a better one, too; but at once came to his senses and spat to one side with energy, bringing a silent but sarcastic smile to the face of his young friend and room-companion, Andrei Semyonovich Lebezyatnikov. Pyotr Petrovich noticed this smile, and he immediately put it down as a black mark against his young friend. He had been putting down a good many black marks against him recently. His rage grew doubly intense when he suddenly realized that he ought not to have told Andrei Semyonovich about the results of last night's meeting. That was the second mistake he had made yesterday, in the heat of the moment, under the sway of his own
over-expansiveness and irritation… And then all throughout this morning, as if by special design, one disagreeable event had followed another. Even at the Senate a setback had awaited him in connection with the matter he was petitioning for there. He was particularly irritated by the owner of the apartment he had rented with a view to his impending marriage, and which had been brightened up at his own expense: this owner, a German craftsman who had made a lot of money, would not on any account agree to violate the terms of the contract that had just been signed and demanded the full forfeit prescribed therein, in spite of the fact that Pyotr Petrovich was returning the apartment to him in a state of virtual redecoration. Things were exactly the same in the furniture store, where the staff refused to give him back one single rouble of the deposit he had paid on the furniture that he had purchased, but had not yet been moved into the apartment. ‘I'm not getting married just for the sake of the furniture!’ Pyotr Petrovich said to himself, grinding his teeth, and at the same time a desperate hope fleeted through his mind once more: ‘Is the whole situation really so irrevocably lost and hopeless? Can I really not have another try?’ The thought of Dunya sent another seductive twinge to his heart. In agony he endured this moment and it was an undeniable fact that had it been possible for him to do away with Raskolnikov right there and then, by simply stating the desire, Pyotr Petrovich would have lost no time in stating it.

‘I also went wrong in not giving them any money,’ he thought as he returned in low spirits to Lebezyatnikov's closet of a room. ‘Why was I such a Jew, the devil take it? It wasn't even a real saving! I planned to make their lives a misery and lead them to the point where they'd view me as their Providence, and see what they've gone and done! Confound it! No, if to cover this whole visit I'd given them, say, fifteen hundred roubles for the trousseau and the presents and all those various little boxes, toilet-cases, cornelians, dress-materials and all that frilly rubbish they could have bought at Knop's or the English Shop,
¹
the whole thing would have been neater and… more secure! They wouldn't have been able to refuse me so easily then! They're the sort of people who would have thought it their duty to give back
both presents and money in such a situation; and it would have been difficult for them to do that, it would have broken their hearts! And their consciences would have bothered them: “How can we drive away a man who's been so generous to us, and tactful about it, too?” Damn! I slipped up there!’ And, beginning to grind his teeth again, Pyotr Petrovich admitted that he'd been a fool – but only to himself, of course.

Reaching this conclusion, he went home twice as irritated and enraged as he had been on setting out. The preparations for the funeral snacks in Katerina Ivanovna's room aroused a mild curiosity in him. The previous day he had heard a few things about this promised event; he even thought he remembered having been invited to it; but because of his own troubles nothing else had engaged his attention. Making haste to inquire about it from Mrs Lippewechsel, who was busying herself with the laying of the table in the absence of Katerina Ivanovna (who was at the cemetery), he had discovered that the event was to be a grand one, that nearly all the lodgers had been invited, even those whom the deceased had not known, that even Andrei Semyonovich Lebezyatnikov had been invited, in spite of his earlier quarrel with Katerina Ivanovna, and that to cap it all, he himself, Pyotr Petrovich, had not only been invited but was actually expected with the greatest of impatience, being very nearly the most important lodger and guest of them all. Amalia Ivanovna had also been invited as a guest of honour, in spite of all the earlier unpleasantness, and was now for that reason bustling about in her role of landlady, almost deriving pleasure from it; she was moreover dressed up to the nines, in mourning perhaps, but nevertheless in mourning that was new and made of silk, and taking pride in it. All this evidence and information had given Pyotr Petrovich a certain idea, and it was in a state of some reflection that he entered his room, or rather the room of Andrei Semyonovich Lebezyatnikov. The fact was, he had also discovered, that among those invited was Raskolnikov.

For some reason Andrei Semyonovich had been at home all that morning. To this gentleman Pyotr Petrovich had formed a strange, yet in part quite natural relation: Pyotr Petrovich despised and hated him beyond all measure, and had done so
from the day he had moved in with him; yet at the same time he seemed a little apprehensive of him. On arriving in St Petersburg he had put up at his lodgings not merely out of stingy thrift – though that had probably been his main motive – there had been another motive, too. Back in the provinces he had heard of Andrei Semyonovich, his former pupil, as one of the foremost young progressives, who even played a significant role in certain curious and legendary circles. Pyotr Petrovich had been struck by this. For these powerful, omniscient circles with their contempt for everyone and accusations against all and sundry had long inspired Pyotr Petrovich with a peculiar, though wholly vague, sense of terror. It went without saying that, back there in the provinces, he had been unable to form even an approximate conception of
what it was all about
. He had heard, like everyone else, that particularly in St Petersburg there were to be found progressives, nihilists, public accusers, and so on, and so forth, but, like many people, he tended to exaggerate and distort the sense and significance of these labels to the point of the absurd. For several years now he had feared more than anything else being made the victim of a
public accusation
, and this was the principal reason for his constant, exaggerated sense of anxiety, especially when he had dreamt of moving his practice to St Petersburg. In this respect he was, as they say, ‘affrit’, in the way small children sometimes are. Some years earlier, in the provinces, when he had only just been beginning to organize his career, he had encountered two cases involving the merciless public accusation and exposure of rather important persons in local government to whom he had been attached and who had afforded him official protection. One of these cases had ended in a particularly scandalous manner for the man who had been accused, and the other had very nearly ended in outright disaster. This was why Pyotr Petrovich had made it his object to discover, as soon as he arrived in St Petersburg, ‘what it was all about’ and, if necessary, to get ahead of the game and curry favour with ‘our younger generations’. In this matter he had placed his reliance upon Andrei Semyonovich and had, for his visit to Raskolnikov, for example, already learned how to roll off certain phrases parrot-fashion…

Of course, he had quickly perceived that Andrei Semyonovich was an extremely vulgar and simple-minded little man. But this in no way altered Pyotr Petrovich's opinion or made him feel any the more confident. Even had he gained the certainty that all progressives were the same little idiots, his anxiety would not have been laid to rest. If he were to be quite honest, none of these theories, ideas and systems (with which Andrei Semyonovich positively assailed him) was of the slightest interest to him. He had his own, personal motive. All he wished to do was to ascertain as quickly as possible
what was going on here
, whether
these people
had any power or not, and whether he personally had any reason to be afraid of them. If he were to undertake a certain project, would they accuse him or would they not? And if so, what would they accuse him of, and why particularly now? Nor was that all: might it not be possible for him to ingratiate himself with them and then pull a fast one on them, if they really were so powerful? Did he or did he not need to do this? Might he not, for example, further his career a little at their expense? In short, there were hundreds of questions waiting to be answered.

This Andrei Semyonovich was a wasted and scrofulous individual, small in stature, employed in some civil service department or other; he was blond to the point of strangeness, and sported a pair of mutton-chop whiskers of which he was very proud. On top of all this, he almost constantly suffered from an infection in both eyes. As for his heart, it was rather soft, but he spoke in a thoroughly self-confident and sometimes positively overbearing manner – which, when one compared it with his pathetic appearance, nearly always sounded ridiculous. At Amalia Ivanovna's he was, however, considered one of the more distinguished residents, that is to say, he did not indulge in drinking and always paid his rent on time. In spite of all these qualities, Andrei Semyonovich really was rather stupid. He adhered to the cause of progress and ‘our younger generations’ as a kind of enthusiastic pastime. He was one of that countless and multifarious legion of vulgar persons, sickly abortions and half-educated petty tyrants who like a flash attach themselves to those current ideas that are most fashionable in order, again
like a flash, to vulgarize them, caricaturing the very cause they seek to serve, sometimes with great genuineness.

In spite of his being very good-natured, Lebezyatnikov was, however, also beginning to tire of his room-companion and former tutor Pyotr Petrovich. This state of affairs had come about mutually and seemingly by chance. Andrei Semyonovich might be rather simple-minded, but even so he had begun to realize that Pyotr Petrovich was deceiving him and viewed him with secret contempt, and that ‘this fellow’ ‘was the wrong sort altogether’. He had attempted to explain to him the system of Fourier and the theory of Darwin, but Pyotr Petrovich had, especially of late, begun to listen with just a shade too much sarcasm, and had even, most recently, begun to respond with abuse. The truth of the matter was that his instincts had begun to tell him that Lebezyatnikov was not only a vulgar and stupid little man, but was also possibly a liar, and that he had no significant connections whatsoever even within his own circle, but had only heard a few things at third-hand; not only that: it was probable that he did not even have a decent grasp of his own ‘propaganda’, for he said far too many contradictory things, and what kind of a public accuser would he make? We should, incidentally, observe in passing that during the last week and a half Pyotr Petrovich had (particularly in the first few days) gladly accepted from Andrei Semyonovich some very strange items of praise; that is to say, he had made no objection and had remained silent when, for example, Andrei Semyonovich had ascribed to him a readiness to assist the founding of a new and soon-to-be-established ‘commune’
²
somewhere in Meshchanskaya Street; or, for example, not to stand in Dunya's way if, right from the first month of their marriage, she decided to take a lover; or, not to have his children baptized, and so on and so forth – all of it along the same lines. Pyotr Petrovich, true to form, did not object to having such qualities ascribed to him and allowed himself to be praised even in this manner – so pleasant to him was any form of praise.

Pyotr Petrovich, who for certain reasons of his own had that morning cashed some five per cent bonds, was sitting at the table counting packets of credit and serial notes. Andrei
Semyonovich, who practically never had any money, was pacing about the room and doing his best to eye all these packets indifferently and even with disdain. Pyotr Petrovich, for example, would never for one moment have believed that Andrei Semyonovich was really capable of viewing such a large amount of money with indifference; Andrei Semyonovich, for his part, reflected bitterly that Pyotr Petrovich really was in all probability capable of thinking about him in this light, and was possibly even glad of the chance to tease and tickle his young friend with these laid-out piles of banknotes, in order to remind him of his insignificance and the difference that existed between them.