Crime and Punishment (68 page)

Pyotr Petrovich kept laughing, ‘ha-ha’, to himself as he listened, but without any special enthusiasm. Indeed, he was hardly listening to any of it. He really was thinking about something else, and even Lebezyatnikov finally noticed this. Pyotr Petrovich was in an undeniable state of agitation, rubbing his hands, thinking and pondering. Later on, Andrei Semyonovich recalled all this and succeeded in putting two and two together…

It would be hard to say what precisely the reasons were that had put the idea of this senseless funeral banquet into Katerina Ivanovna's muddled head. She really had squandered very nearly ten of the twenty or so roubles Raskolnikov had given her for the expenses of Marmeladov's funeral. It might have been that Katerina Ivanovna considered herself under an obligation to her dead husband to honour his memory ‘in proper fashion’, so that all the residents, and Amalia Ivanovna in particular, should know that he had been ‘no worse than they were, and possibly even rather better’, and that none of them was entitled to ‘behave in that stuck-up manner’ in his presence. It was possible that the decisive factor was that singular ‘pride of the poor’, in consequence of which, where certain social rituals
are concerned, rituals obligatory and unavoidable for each and every participant in our mode of life, many poor people strain themselves to their last resources and spend every last copeck they have saved in order to be ‘no worse than others’ and in order that those others should not ‘look down their noses’ at them. It was highly probable, too, that Katerina Ivanovna wished, precisely on this occasion, precisely at the moment when she appeared to have been abandoned by everyone in the whole world, to demonstrate to all those ‘nasty, worthless tenants’ that not only did she ‘know how to do things properly and entertain in style’, but that she had not been prepared by her upbringing for such a lot in life, having been reared ‘in the noble, one might even say aristocratic, home of a colonel’, and had certainly not been intended to sweep her own floor and wash the rags of her children at nights. These paroxysms of pride and vanity sometimes visit the very poorest and downtrodden people, among whom they occasionally acquire the character of an irritable, overwhelming need. But Katerina Ivanovna was not one of the downtrodden: while her circumstances might destroy her entirely, the prospect of her being mentally
trodden on
, that is to say of her being intimidated and deprived of her own will, was not in view. Then again, Sonya had with good reason said of her that her mind was growing confused. True, it could not yet have been maintained that this was so in any conclusive or definitive sense, but the fact remained that recently, throughout the whole of the past year, her poor head had been through such a great deal that some harm had been inevitable. As medical men have observed, the serious onset of consumption also tends to cause a derangement of the mental faculties.

Wines
, in the plural, and of different varieties, there were none; neither was there any
madeira
. That had been an exaggeration. There was, however, drink. There were vodka, rum and Lisbon wine, all of the most inferior quality, but present in ample quantities. As for comestibles, there were, besides the traditional
kut
'
ya
, some three or four dishes (one of which, incidentally, was
blinis
), all from Amalia Ivanovna's kitchen, and in addition two samovars had been set up for the tea and
punch that was to follow the meal. Katerina Ivanovna herself had seen to the purchase of the provisions with the help of a wretched little Pole who lived at Mrs Lippewechsel's, heaven only knew for what reason, and who had immediately turned himself into Katerina Ivanovna's errand boy, having spent the whole of the previous day and the whole of that morning rushing about frantically at top speed, apparently making a particular effort to render this latter circumstance as noticeable as he could. Every moment or so he had come running to Katerina Ivanovna, had even gone out to look for her in the Gostiny Dvor, kept calling her
pani chorazyna
,
¹
and ended by making her sick and tired of him, even though at first she had said that without this ‘obliging and generous’ man she would have been totally lost. It was typical of Katerina Ivanovna that she would hurry to deck out anyone and everyone in the brightest and most favourable colours, to praise them in such terms that would make people sometimes feel positively embarrassed, to ascribe to their credit various things that had never actually taken place, to believe quite sincerely and candidly that they had and then suddenly, overnight, grow disillusioned with them, snubbing, abusing and driving away with violent shoves the very person she had, only a few hours ago, quite literally worshipped. She was by nature cheerful, peaceable and fond of laughter, but her constant misfortunes and reverses had made her desire and demand so
fiercely
that everyone should live in peace and happiness and
not dare
to live in any other way that the very slightest dissonance in her life, the very slightest rebuff, would immediately send her into a state bordering upon frenzy, and in a single flash, after the most resplendent hopes and fantasies, she would begin to curse fate, raging at anything that was on hand and beating her head against the wall. Amalia Ivanovna had also suddenly acquired extraordinary importance in Katerina Ivanovna's eyes and had received from her an extraordinary degree of respect, probably for the sole reason that this funeral banquet was being held and that Amalia Ivanovna had decided to take a personal hand in all the preparations for it: she had undertaken to lay the table, to provide the tablecloth and napkins, the crockery and so on and to cook the food in
her own kitchen. Katerina Ivanovna had left her in charge of everything and had gone off to the cemetery. And indeed, it had all been magnificently prepared: the table had actually been properly laid for once, and although all the crockery and cutlery, the forks, knives, glasses and cups, were a mixed assembly, of various styles and calibres, belonging to different tenants, everything was in place by the appointed hour, and Amalia Ivanovna, feeling that she had performed her task with distinction, greeted the returning guests with a certain pride, grandly attired in a black dress and a cap adorned with new mourning ribbons. For some reason this pride, though merited, did not appeal to Katerina Ivanovna: ‘One might think the table might never have been laid were it not for Amalia Ivanovna!’ She was likewise unimpressed by the cap with its new ribbons: for all she knew, this stupid German woman was simply proud of being the landlady and of having consented out of charity to help her poor tenants. Out of charity! Thank you very much! In the home of Katerina Ivanovna's father, who had been a colonel and very nearly the governor of a province, the table had on occasion been laid for forty people, ‘and Amalia Ivanovna, or, more correctly, Lyudvigovna, would not even have been allowed in the kitchen…’ All the same, Katerina Ivanovna decided not to make her feelings known prematurely, though in her heart she had determined that Amalia Ivanovna must be taken down a peg or two and put in her proper place that very day, or otherwise heaven only knew what ideas she might get, and for the meantime simply treated her with coldness. Another unpleasant circumstance was also contributing to Katerina Ivanovna's irritation: of the tenants who had been invited to the funeral banquet, hardly any had arrived, with the exception of the little Pole, who had even managed to look in at the cemetery as well; the tenants who did show up for the actual snacks themselves were all the seediest and poorest ones, many of them not even sober, quite simply the riff-raff. All the more senior and respectable ones were absent, as if in accordance with some earlier plan. Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, for example, who might have been said to be the most respectable of all the tenants, did not put in an appearance, and yet only the previous evening
Katerina Ivanovna had told the whole wide world – in other words, Amalia Ivanovna, Polya, Sonya and the little Pole – that this was a most noble and magnanimous man, endowed with a vast range of connections and a private fortune, her first husband's former friend, who had been received in her father's house and who had promised to exercise every means possible to get her a sizeable pension. We should observe here that in boasting of anyone's connections and private fortune Katerina Ivanovna did so without any selfish aims or personal calculation whatsoever, from pure disinterest, out of the fullness of her heart, as it were, and the sheer satisfaction of giving praise and increasing even further the value of its object. In addition to Luzhin and doubtless ‘following his example’, ‘that nasty villain Lebezyatnikov’ had not appeared, either. Who did he think he was? He had only been invited out of charity, and because he lived in the same room as Pyotr Petrovich and was his friend, and so ‘it would have been embarrassing not to invite him’. There was also a certain fine lady and her ‘overripe spinster’ of a daughter, who, although they had been living only for a couple of weeks in Amalia Ivanovna's rented rooms, had already made several complaints about the noise and shouting that had come from the Marmeladovs’ room, especially when the deceased had returned home drunk, complaints of which Katerina Ivanovna had naturally become aware from the lips of Amalia Ivanovna when the latter in the course of a row with her had threatened to evict the entire family, shouting at the top of her voice that they were disturbing ‘respectable tenants’, ‘whose feet they were not worth’. Katerina Ivanovna had now made a special point of inviting this lady and her daughter, ‘whose feet they were not worth’, particularly since up until now, whenever they had met one another by chance, the lady had haughtily turned away – so now she would learn that here ‘we think and feel on a rather higher level, and harbour no malice’, and they would see that Katerina Ivanovna had not been accustomed to living in such circumstances. She had been planning to explain this to them at the meal-table, along with the fact of her deceased father's gubernatorial status, observing in passing as she did so that there was really no need for them to turn away upon meeting
her, and that this was extremely stupid. Neither had the fat lieutenant-colonel (who was really a retired second-grade captain) shown up, but it turned out that he had been ‘legless’ since the morning of the previous day. In short, the only guests who put in an appearance were: the little Pole, a shabby office clerk with no conversation, dressed in a stained tail-coat, his face covered in blackheads, who gave off a repulsive smell; then there was a little, deaf old man who was almost completely blind, had once worked in a postal station somewhere and had for some obscure reason been living at Amalia Ivanovna's for longer than anyone could remember. A certain drunken retired army lieutenant, really just a supply clerk, also arrived; he had the loudest and most indecent laugh, and – ‘can you imagine it?’ – was not even wearing a waistcoat! There was one man who sat straight down at the table without even saying hallo to Katerina Ivanovna, and finally there was a certain individual who, for lack of any other clothing, arrived in his dressing-gown, but this was considered so improper that by dint of vigorous efforts Amalia Ivanovna and the little Pole managed to show him the door. The little Pole, however, had brought two other little Poles along with him, who had never lived at Amalia Ivanovna's and whom no one had ever seen at the rented rooms before. All of this irritated Katerina Ivanovna in the extreme. For whom had all these preparations been made, after all? In order to save space, the children had not been seated at the table, which as it was took up practically the whole room, but had had places laid for them on the travelling-box in the rear corner, the two younger ones being posted on the bench, while Polya, as eldest, had the task of keeping an eye on them, giving them their food and wiping their little noses ‘like well-brought-up children’. In short, Katerina Ivanovna found herself with no alternative but to receive her guests with a redoubled grandness of manner and a positive
hauteur
. Of some of them she took a particularly dim view, eyeing them severely and requesting them to sit down at table with an air of lofty superiority. For some reason, convinced that Amalia Ivanovna must be to blame for all the non-arrivals, she suddenly began to address her in an extremely offhand way, which Amalia Ivanovna
noticed at once and which offended her vanity no end. A beginning of this kind did not augur a felicitous conclusion. At last they were seated.

Raskolnikov had entered almost at the very moment of their return from the cemetery. Katerina Ivanovna had been delighted to see him, in the first instance because he was the only ‘educated guest’ of those she had invited and, as everyone knew, was ‘getting ready for a professorship at St Petersburg University’, and in the second instance because he had immediately and politely apologized to her for not having been able to attend the funeral, in spite of his earnest wish to do so. She had fairly pounced on him, had made him sit on her left at table (Amalia Ivanovna was seated on her right) and, in spite of her constant fussing and fretting about the food being properly passed round so that everyone got some of everything, in spite of her tormenting cough, which every few moments interrupted her speech and deprived her of air, and seemed to have become much worse during these past few days, she kept turning constantly to Raskolnikov and in a semi-whisper pouring out to him all her pent-up feelings and all her justified indignation about the disastrous funeral banquet; at the same time her indignation alternated with the most cheerful, the most unrestrained laughter directed at her assembled guests, and particularly at the landlady herself.

‘It's that old cuckoo who is to blame for it all. You know who I mean; her, her!’ and Katerina Ivanovna nodded his attention towards the landlady. ‘Look at her: making those big eyes like that, she knows we're talking about her, but she can't understand what we're saying, and her eyes are popping out of her head. Phoo, the old owl, ha-ha-ha!… Cahuh-cahuh-cahuh! And what's she trying to prove with that cap? Have you noticed that she wants everyone to think she's making me a concession and doing me a favour by attending? I asked her, since she's a woman of social standing, to invite some of the better sort of people, and particularly those who knew my dead husband, and look who she's brought with her! Clowns! Chimney-sweeps! Look at that one with dirt all over his face: he's a walking nonentity! And those wretched little Poles!… ha-ha-ha!
Cahuh-cahuh-cahuh! No one, no one has ever seen them here before, not even I have ever seen them; so why have they come, I ask you? There they sit, neatly in a row.
Panie
,
hej!!
’ she suddenly shouted to one of them. ‘Have you had a
blini
? Have some more! Drink the beer, the beer! Won't you have some vodka? Look: he's leapt to his feet, he's bowing, look, look: they must be starving, the poor wretches! Never mind, let them eat. At least they don't make any noise, although… although I must say I fear for the landlady's silver spoons! Amalia Ivanovna!’ she said to her suddenly, almost out loud. ‘If anyone steals your spoons I must warn you in advance that I can't be held responsible for them! Ha-ha-ha!’ she laughed, turning back to Raskolnikov again suddenly, nodding his attention towards the landlady again and delighting in her own mischievous behaviour. ‘She didn't understand, she didn't understand that time, either! She's sitting there with her mouth open, look: she's an owl, a real old owl, a brown owl wearing new ribbons, ha-ha-ha!’