فصل 01 - بخش 02

CHAPTER ONE

HE LAY LIKE THAT for a very long time. Now and then he seemed to wake up, and at such moments he became conscious that it was far into the night, but it did not occur to him to get up. At last he noticed that it was already dawn. He was lying on his back, still dazed from his recent oblivion. Fearful, despairing cries rose shrilly from the street, sounds which he heard every night under his window after two o’clock; now they woke him up.

“Ah! The drunkards are coming out of the taverns,” he thought, “it’s past two o’clock,” and at once he leaped up, as though someone had pulled him from the sofa.

“What! Past two o’clock!”

He sat down on the sofa—and instantly remembered everything! All at once, in a flash, he remembered everything.

At first he thought he was going mad. A dreadful chill came over him; but the chill was from the fever that had begun long before in his sleep. Now he suddenly started shivering violently, so that his teeth chattered and all his limbs were shaking. He opened the door and began listening; everyone in the house was asleep. With amazement he gazed at himself and everything in the room around him, wondering how he could have come in the night before without fastening the door and have flung himself on the sofa without undressing, without even taking his hat off. It had fallen off and was lying on the floor near his pillow.

“If someone had come in, what would they have thought? That I’m drunk but . . . ”

He rushed to the window. There was enough light for him to begin hurriedly checking himself all over from head to foot, all his clothes: were there no traces? But there was no use doing it like that; shivering with cold, he began taking off everything and looking himself over again. He turned everything over to the last threads and rags and, mistrusting himself, went through his search three times.

But there seemed to be nothing, no trace, except in one place, where some thick drops of congealed blood were clinging to the frayed edge of his trousers. He picked up a big pocket knife and cut off the frayed threads. There seemed to be nothing more.

Suddenly he remembered that the purse and the things he had taken out of the old woman’s box were still in his pockets! He had not thought until then of taking them out and hiding them! He had not even thought of them while he was examining his clothes! What next? Instantly he rushed to take them out and fling them on the table. When he had pulled out everything and turned the pocket inside out to be sure there was nothing left, he carried the whole heap to the corner. The paper had come off the bottom of the wall and hung there in tatters. He began stuffing all the things into the hole under the paper. “They’re in! All out of sight, and the purse too!” he thought gleefully, getting up and gazing blankly at the hole which bulged out more than ever. Suddenly he shuddered all over with horror. “My God!” he whispered in despair. “What’s the matter with me? Are they hidden? Is that the way to hide things?” He had not counted on having trinkets to hide. He had only thought of money, and so he had not prepared a hiding-place.

“But now, now, what am I pleased about?” he thought, “Is that hiding things? My reason’s deserting me—it’s as simple as that!”

He sat down on the sofa in exhaustion and was at once shaken by another unbearable fit of shivering. Mechanically he drew from a chair beside him his old student’s winter coat, which was still warm though almost in rags, covered himself up with it and once more sank into drowsiness and delirium. He lost consciousness.

Not more than five minutes had passed when he jumped up a second time, and at once pounced in a frenzy on his clothes again.

“How could I go to sleep again with nothing done? Yes, yes; I haven’t taken the noose off the armhole! I forgot it, forgot a thing like that! Such a piece of evidence!”

He pulled off the noose, hurriedly cut it to pieces and threw the bits among his linen under the pillow.

“Pieces of torn linen couldn’t arouse suspicion, whatever happened; I think not, I think not—anyway!” he repeated, standing in the middle of the room, and with painful concentration he started gazing about him again, at the floor and everywhere, trying to make sure he had not forgotten anything. The conviction that all his faculties were failing him, even his memory and his most basic powers of reflection, began to be an insufferable torture.

“Surely it isn’t beginning already? Surely it isn’t my punishment coming upon me? It is!”

The frayed rags he had cut off his trousers were actually lying on the floor in the middle of the room, where anyone coming in would see them!

“What is the matter with me!” he cried again, distraught.

Then a strange idea entered his head; that, perhaps, all his clothes were covered with blood, that, perhaps, there were many stains, but that he did not see them, did not notice them because his perceptions were failing, were going to pieces . . . his reason was clouded . . . Suddenly he remembered that there had been blood on the purse too. “Ah! Then there must be blood on the pocket too, because I put the wet purse in my pocket!” In a flash he had turned the pocket inside out and, yes! There were traces, stains on the lining of the pocket!

“So my reason has not quite deserted me, so I still have some kind of memory and common sense, since I guessed it myself,” he thought triumphantly, with a deep sigh of relief. “It’s simply the weakness of fever, a moment’s delirium,” and he tore the whole lining out of the left pocket of his trousers. At that instant the sunlight fell on his left boot; on the sock which poked out from the boot he thought there were traces! He flung off his boots—“traces! The tip of the sock was soaked with blood”; he must have unwarily stepped into that pool . . . “But what am I to do with this now? Where am I to put the sock and rags and pocket?” He gathered them all up in his hands and stood in the middle of the room.

“In the stove? But they would search the stove first. Burn them? But what can I burn them with? There aren’t even any matches. No, better go out and throw it all away somewhere. Yes, better throw it away,” he repeated, sitting down on the sofa again, “and straightaway, immediately, without delay . . . ” But his head sank on the pillow instead. Again the unbearable icy shivering came over him; again he drew his coat over him.

And for a long while, for some hours, he was haunted by the impulse to “go off somewhere at once, this minute, and fling it all away, just so it’s out of sight and done with, at once, at once!” Several times he tried to rise from the sofa but could not.

He was properly woken at last by a violent knocking on his door.

“Open the door, are you dead or alive? He keeps sleeping here!” shouted Nastasia, banging with her fist on the door. “For days on end he’s been snoring here like a dog! A dog he is too. Open it, come on! It’s past ten.” “Maybe he’s not at home,” said a man’s voice.

“Ha! That’s the porter’s voice . . . What does he want?”

He jumped up and sat on the sofa. Even the beating of his heart was painful.

“Then who can have latched the door?” retorted Nastasia.

“He’s taken to bolting himself in! As if he were worth stealing! Open it, you idiot, wake up!”

“What do they want? Why the porter? They’ve found me out. Resist or open? Come what may! . . . ”

He half rose, stooped forward and unlatched the door.

His room was so small that he could undo the latch without leaving the bed. Yes; the porter and Nastasia were standing there.

Nastasia stared at him in a strange way. He glanced with a defiant and desperate air at the porter, who without a word held out a gray folded paper sealed with wax.

“A notice from the office,” he announced, as he gave him the paper.

“From what office?”

“A summons to the police office, of course. You know which office.”

“To the police? . . . What for? . . . ”

“How can I tell? You’re sent for, so you go.”

The man looked at him attentively, looked round the room and turned to go away.

“He’s seriously ill!” observed Nastasia, not taking her eyes off him. The porter turned his head for a moment. “He’s been in a fever since yesterday,” she added.

Raskolnikov made no response and held the paper in his hands, without opening it. “Don’t get up then,” Nastasia went on compassionately, seeing that he was letting his feet down from the sofa. “You’re ill, so don’t go; there’s no hurry. What have you got there?” He looked; in his right hand he held the shreds he had cut from his trousers, the sock, and the rags of the pocket. So he had been asleep with them in his hand. When he reflected on it afterwards, he remembered that, half waking up in his fever, he had grasped all this tightly in his hand and fallen asleep again.

“Look at the rags he’s collected and sleeps with, as though he’s got treasure in his hands . . . ”

And Nastasia went off into her hysterical giggle.

Instantly he thrust them all under his overcoat and fixed his eyes intently upon her. Far as he was from being capable of rational reflection at that moment, he felt that no-one would behave like that with a person who was going to be arrested. “But . . . the police?” “You’d better have some tea! Yes? I’ll bring it, there’s some left.”

“No . . . I’m going; I’ll go at once,” he muttered, getting on to his feet.

“Why, you’ll never get downstairs!”

“Yes, I’ll go.”

“As you wish.”

She followed the porter out.

At once he rushed to the light to examine the sock and the rags.

“There are stains, but not very noticeable; all covered with dirt, and rubbed and discolored. No-one who wasn’t suspicious could distinguish anything. Nastasia couldn’t have noticed from a distance, thank God!” Then with a tremor he broke the seal of the notice and began reading; he spent a long time reading it before he understood. It was an ordinary summons from the district police station to appear that day at half past nine at the office of the district superintendent.

“But when has such a thing happened? I never have anything to do with the police! And why just today?” he thought in agonizing bewilderment. “Good God, just get it over with as soon as possible!” He was flinging himself on his knees to pray, but broke into laughter—not at the idea of prayer, but at himself.

He began to dress himself hurriedly. “If I’m lost, I’m lost, I don’t care! Shall I put the sock on?” he suddenly wondered. “It will get even dustier and the traces will be gone.”

But no sooner had he put it on than he pulled it off again in loathing and horror. He pulled it off, but reflecting that he had no other socks, he picked it up and put it on again—and again he laughed.

“That’s all conventional, that’s all relative, just a way of looking at it,” he thought in a flash, but only on the surface of his mind, while he was shuddering all over. “There, I’ve got it on! I’ve actually managed to get it on!” But his laughter was quickly followed by despair.

“No, it’s too much for me . . . ” he thought. His legs shook. “Fear,” he muttered. His head swam and ached with fever. “It’s a trick! They want to decoy me and confuse me about everything,” he mused, as he went out onto the stairs. “The worst of it is I’m almost light-headed . . . I may blurt out something stupid . . . ” On the stairs he remembered that he was leaving all the things just as they were in the hole in the wall, “and, very likely, it’s on purpose to search when I’m out,” he thought, and stopped short. But he was possessed by such despair, such cynicism of misery, if that is what it could be called, that with a wave of his hand he went on. “Just to get it over with!” In the street the heat was unbearable again; not a drop of rain had fallen. Again, dust, bricks and mortar, again, the stench from the stores and taverns, again the drunken men, the Finnish street-sellers and half-broken-down cabs. The sun shone straight in his eyes, so that it hurt him to look out of them, and he felt his head spinning—as a person in a fever is apt to feel when they come out into the street on a bright sunny day.

When he reached the turning into the street, in agonizing terror he looked down it . . . at the house . . . and at once turned his eyes away.

“If they question me, perhaps I’ll just tell them everything,” he thought, as he neared the police station.

The police station was about a quarter of a mile off. It had recently been moved to new rooms on the fourth floor of a new house. He had been once for a moment in the old office, but long ago. Turning in at the gateway, he saw on the right a flight of stairs which a peasant was mounting with a book in his hand. “A house-porter, no doubt; so then, the office is here,” and he began climbing the stairs in case. He did not want to ask anyone any questions.

“I’ll go in, fall on my knees, and confess everything . . . ” he thought as he reached the fourth floor.

The staircase was steep, narrow and all sloppy with dirty water. The kitchens of the apartments opened onto the stairs and stood open almost the whole day. There was a terrible smell and heat. The staircase was crowded with porters going up and down with their books under their arms, policemen, and people of all sorts and both sexes. The door of the office, too, stood wide open. Peasants stood waiting inside. There, too, the heat was stifling and there was a sickening smell of fresh paint and stale oil from the newly decorated rooms.

After waiting a little, he decided to move forward into the next room. All the rooms were small and low-ceilinged. A terrible impatience drew him on and on. No-one paid attention to him. In the second room some clerks sat writing, dressed hardly better than he was—a rather strange-looking set. He went up to one of them.

“What is it?”

He showed him the notice he had received.

“You’re a student?” the man asked, glancing at the notice.

“Yes, a former student.”

The clerk looked at him, but without any interest. He was a particularly untidy person with a fixed expression in his eye.

“There would be no use trying to get anything out of him because he has no interest in anything,” thought Raskolnikov.

“Go in there to the head clerk,” said the clerk, pointing towards the furthest room.

He went into the room, the fourth in order; it was a small room and packed full of people, who were rather better dressed than in the outer rooms. Among them were two ladies. One, dressed in cheap mourning clothes, sat at the table opposite the chief clerk, writing something at his dictation. The other, a very stout, buxom woman with a purplish-red, blotchy face, excessively smartly dressed with a brooch on her bosom as big as a saucer, was standing on one side, apparently waiting for something. Raskolnikov thrust his notice at the head clerk. The latter glanced at it, said, “Wait a minute,” and went on attending to the lady in mourning.

He breathed more freely. “It can’t be that!”

By degrees he began to regain confidence, he kept urging himself to have courage and be calm.

“Some foolishness, some insignificant carelessness, and I may betray myself! Hm . . . it’s a pity there’s no air here,” he added, “it’s stifling . . . It makes your head dizzier than ever . . . and your mind too . . . ” He was conscious of a terrible inner turmoil. He was afraid of losing his self-control; he tried to catch at something and fix his mind on it, something entirely irrelevant, but he could not succeed at all. Yet the head clerk greatly interested him; he kept hoping to see through him and guess something from his face.

He was a very young man, about twenty-two, with a dark mobile face that looked older than its years. He was fashionably dressed and effeminate, with his hair parted in the middle, well combed and greased, and wore a number of rings on his well-scrubbed fingers and a gold chain on his waistcoat. He said a couple of words in French to a foreigner who was in the room and said them fairly correctly.

“Luise Ivanovna, you can sit down,” he said casually to the cheerfully dressed, purple-faced lady, who was still standing as if she were not venturing to sit down, though there was a chair beside her.

“Ich danke,”17 said the latter, and softly, with a rustle of silk she sank into the chair. Her light blue dress trimmed with white lace floated about the table like an air-balloon and filled almost half the room. She smelt of scent. But she was obviously embarrassed at filling half the room and smelling so strongly of scent; and though her smile was impudent as well as cringing, it betrayed evident uneasiness.

The lady in mourning had done at last and got up. All at once, with some noise, an officer walked in very jauntily, with a peculiar swing of his shoulders at each step. He tossed his cockaded cap on the table and sat down in an easy-chair. The small lady really skipped from her seat when she saw him, and started curtsying in a sort of ecstasy; but the officer did not take the slightest notice of her, and she did not venture to sit down again in his presence. He was the assistant superintendent. He had a reddish moustache that stood out horizontally on each side of his face, with extremely small features that expressed nothing much except insolence. He looked sideways and rather indignantly at Raskolnikov; he was so badly dressed, and in spite of his humiliating position, his bearing was by no means in keeping with his clothes. Raskolnikov had unwarily fixed a very long and direct look at him, and he felt offended.

“What do you want?” he shouted, apparently astonished that such a ragged person was not annihilated by the majesty of his gaze.

“I was summoned . . . by a notice . . . ” Raskolnikov faltered.

“For the recovery of money due, from the student,” the head clerk interfered hurriedly, tearing himself from his papers. “Here!” and he flung Raskolnikov a document and pointed out the place. “Read that!” “Money? What money?” thought Raskolnikov, “but . . . then . . . it’s definitely not that.”

And he trembled with joy. He felt sudden intense indescribable relief. A load was lifted from his back.

“And what time were you asked to appear, sir?” shouted the assistant superintendent, seeming for some unknown reason to be more and more aggrieved. “You were told to come at nine, and now it’s twelve!” “The notice was only brought to me a quarter of an hour ago,” Raskolnikov answered loudly over his shoulder. To his own surprise, he too grew suddenly angry and found a certain pleasure in it. “And it’s enough that I’ve come here ill with fever.” “Please stop shouting!”

“I’m not shouting, I’m speaking very quietly, it’s you who are shouting at me. I’m a student: I don’t let anyone shout at me.”

The assistant superintendent was so furious that for the first minute he could only splutter inarticulately. He leaped up from his seat.

“Be silent! You are in a government office. Don’t be impudent, sir!”

“You’re in a government office, too,” cried Raskolnikov, “and you’re smoking a cigarette as well as shouting, so you are showing disrespect to all of us.”

He felt an indescribable satisfaction at having said this.

The head clerk looked at him with a smile. The angry assistant superintendent was obviously confused.

“That’s not your business!” he shouted at last with unnatural loudness. “Kindly make the declaration demanded of you. Show him, Alexander Grigorievich. There is a complaint against you! You don’t pay your debts! Who’s the disrespectful one around here!” But Raskolnikov was not listening now; he had eagerly clutched at the paper in order to find an explanation. He read it once, and a second time, and still did not understand.

“What is this?” he asked the head clerk.

“It is for the recovery of money on an I.O.U., a writ. You must either pay it, with all expenses, costs and so on, or give a written declaration as to when you can pay it and at the same time an undertaking not to leave the capital without payment, nor to sell or conceal your property. The creditor is at liberty to sell your property, and proceed against you according to the law.” “But I . . . am not in debt to anyone!”

“That’s not our business. Here, an I.O.U. for a hundred and fifteen rubles, legally attested, and due for payment, has been brought us for recovery, given by you to the widow of the assessor Zarnitsyn, nine months ago, and paid by the widow Zarnitsyn to a Mr. Chebarov. That is why we have summoned you.” “But she is my landlady!”

“And what if she is your landlady?”

The head clerk looked at him with a patronizing smile of compassion, and at the same time with a certain triumph, like he would at a novice under fire for the first time—as though he was about to say: “Well, how do you feel now?” But what did he care now for an I.O.U., for a writ of recovery! Was that worth worrying about now, was it even worth his attention! He stood, he read, he listened, he answered, he even asked questions himself, but he did it all mechanically. The triumphant sense of security, of deliverance from overwhelming danger—that was what filled his whole soul that moment without thought for the future, without analysis, without suppositions or surmises, without doubts and without questioning. It was an instant of full, direct, purely instinctive joy. But at that very moment something like a thunderstorm took place in the office. The assistant superintendent, still shaken by Raskolnikov’s disrespect, still fuming and obviously anxious to keep up his wounded dignity, pounced on the unfortunate lady, who had been gazing at him ever since he came in with an exceedingly silly smile.

“And you!” he shouted suddenly at the top of his voice. (The lady in mourning had left the office.) “What was going on at your house last night? Eh! Yet another scandal, you’re a disgrace to the whole street. Fighting and drinking again. Do you want to end up in jail? I have warned you ten times over that I would not let you off the eleventh! And here you are again, again, you . . . you! . . . ” The paper fell out of Raskolnikov’s hands, and he looked wildly at the smart lady who was being so unceremoniously treated. But he soon saw what it meant, and at once began to find some real amusement in the scandal. He listened with such pleasure that he longed to laugh and laugh . . . all his nerves were on edge.

“Ilia Petrovich!” the head clerk began anxiously, but stopped short, for he knew from experience that the enraged assistant could not be stopped except by force.

As for the smart lady, at first she trembled before the storm. But strange to say, the more numerous and violent the terms of abuse became, the more likeable she looked, and the more seductive the smiles she lavished on the terrible assistant. She moved uneasily, and curtsied incessantly, waiting impatiently for a chance of putting in her word; and at last she found it.

“There was no noise or fighting in my house, Mr. Captain,” she pattered all at once, like peas dropping, speaking Russian confidently, though with a strong German accent, “and no scandal, and his honor came drunk, and it’s the whole truth I am telling, Mr. Captain, and I am not to blame . . . Mine is an honorable house, Mr. Captain, and honorable behavior, Mr. Captain, and I always, always dislike any scandal myself. But he came so tipsy, and asked for three bottles again, and then he lifted up one leg, and began playing the piano with one foot, and that is not at all right in an honorable house, and he ganz18 broke the piano, and it was very bad manners indeed and I said so. And he picked up a bottle and began hitting everyone with it. And then I called the porter, and Karl came, and he took Karl and hit him in the eye; and he hit Henriette in the eye, too, and gave me five slaps on the cheek. And it was so ungentlemanly in an honorable house, Mr. Captain, and I screamed. And he opened the window over the canal, and stood in the window, squealing like a little pig; it was a disgrace. The idea of squealing like a little pig at the window into the street! And Karl pulled him away from the window by his coat, and it is true, Mr. Captain, he tore sein Rock.19 And then he shouted that man muss pay him20 fifteen rubles damages. And I did pay him, Mr. Captain, five rubles for sein Rock. And he is an ungentlemanly visitor and caused all the scandal. ‘I will show you up,’ he said, ‘because I can write to all the papers about you.’ ” “So he was an author?”

“Yes, Mr. Captain, and what an ungentlemanly visitor in an honorable house . . . ”

“Now then! Enough! I have told you already . . . ”

“Ilia Petrovich!” the head clerk repeated significantly.

The assistant glanced rapidly at him; the head clerk shook his head slightly.

“ . . . So I’m telling you again, Mrs. Luise Ivanovna, and I’m telling you for the last time,” the assistant went on. “If there is one more scandal in your honorable house, I will put you in the lock-up, as it is called in polite society. Do you hear? So a literary man, an author took five rubles for his coat-tail in an ‘honorable house’? A nice lot, these authors!” And he cast a contemptuous glance at Raskolnikov. “There was a scandal the other day in a restaurant, too. An author had eaten his dinner and would not pay; ‘I’ll write a satire about you,’ he says. And there was another of them on a steamer last week who used the most disgraceful language to the respectable family of a civil councilor, his wife and daughter. And there was one of them turned out of a confectioner’s store the other day. They are like that, authors, literary men, students, town-criers . . . Pah! You get along! I shall look in on you myself one day. Then you had better be careful! Do you hear?” With hasty submissiveness, Luise Ivanovna started curtsying to everyone, and then curtsied herself to the door. But at the door, she stumbled backwards against a good-looking officer with a fresh, open face and splendid thick fair whiskers. This was the superintendent of the district himself, Nikodim Fomich. Luise Ivanovna made haste to curtsy almost to the ground, and with dainty little steps, she fluttered out of the office.

“Again thunder and lightning—a hurricane!” said Nikodim Fomich to Ilia Petrovich in a civil and friendly tone. “You are aroused again, you are fuming again! I heard it on the stairs!” “Well, what’s it matter!” Ilia Petrovich drawled with gentlemanly indifference; and he walked with some papers to another table, with a jaunty swing of his shoulders at each step. “Here, if you will glance over this: an author, or a student, has been one at least, does not pay his debts, has given an I.O.U., won’t clear out of his room, and complaints are constantly being lodged against him, and here he has made a protest against my smoking in his presence! He behaves like a hooligan himself; just take a look. That’s him over there: attractive, isn’t he?” “Poverty is not a vice, my friend, but we know you go off like powder, you can’t bear any disagreements, you probably took offense at something and went too far yourself,” continued Nikodim Fomich, turning affably to Raskolnikov. “But you were wrong there; he is a wonderful person, I assure you, but explosive, explosive! He gets hot, fires up, boils over, and no stopping him! And then it’s all over! And at the bottom he’s a heart of gold! His nickname in the regiment was the Explosive Lieutenant . . . ” “And what a regiment it was, too,” cried Ilia Petrovich, happy with all this friendly chat, although he was still sulking.

All at once, Raskolnikov had a desire to say something exceptionally pleasant to them all. “Excuse me, Captain,” he began easily, suddenly addressing Nikodim Fomich, “look at it from my point of view . . . I apologize if I have been badly behaved. I am a poor student, sick and shattered” (“shattered” was the word he used) “by poverty. I am not studying, because I cannot keep myself now, but I shall get money . . . I have a mother and sister in the province of X. They will send it to me, and I will pay. My landlady is a good-hearted woman, but she is so angry at my having lost my lessons, and not paying her for the last four months, that she does not even send up my dinner . . . and I don’t understand this I.O.U. at all. She is asking me to pay her what is on this I.O.U. How can I pay her? Judge for yourselves! . . . ” “But that is not our business, you know,” the head clerk was observing.

“Yes, yes. I entirely agree with you. But let me explain . . . ” Raskolnikov put in again, still addressing Nikodim Fomich, but trying his best to address Ilia Petrovich as well, though the latter persistently appeared to be rummaging among his papers and to be contemptuously oblivious of him. “Allow me to explain that I have been living with her for nearly three years and at first . . . at first . . . why should I not confess it, at the very beginning I promised to marry her daughter, it was a verbal promise, freely given . . . she was a girl . . . indeed, I liked her, though I was not in love with her . . . a youthful affair, in fact . . . that is, I mean to say, that my landlady gave me credit freely in those days, and I led a life of . . . I paid very little attention . . . ” “Nobody asks you for these personal details, sir, we can’t waste our time on this,” Ilia Petrovich interrupted roughly and with a note of triumph; but Raskolnikov stopped him hotly, though he suddenly found it extremely difficult to speak.

“But excuse me, excuse me. It is for me to explain . . . how it all happened . . . In my turn . . . though I agree with you . . . it is unnecessary. But a year ago, the girl died of typhus. I remained lodging there as before, and when my landlady moved into her present quarters, she said to me . . . and in a friendly way . . . that she had complete trust in me, but still, would I not give her an I.O.U. for one hundred and fifteen rubles, all the debt I owed her? She said if only I gave her that, she would trust me again, as much as I liked, and that she would never, never—those were her own words—make use of that I.O.U. until I could pay it myself . . . and now, when I have lost my lessons and have nothing to eat, she takes action against me. What am I to say to that?” “All these affecting details are no business of ours,” Ilia Petrovich interrupted rudely. “You must give a written undertaking but as for your love affairs and all these tragic events, we have nothing to do with that.” “Come now . . . you are harsh,” muttered Nikodim Fomich, sitting down at the table and also beginning to write. He looked a little ashamed.

“Write!” said the head clerk to Raskolnikov.

“Write what?” the latter asked, gruffly.

“I will dictate to you.”

Raskolnikov thought that the head clerk treated him more casually and contemptuously after his speech, but strangely enough he suddenly felt completely indifferent to anyone’s opinion, and this revulsion took place in a flash, in an instant. If he had cared to think a little, he would have been amazed, in fact, that he could have talked to them like that a minute before, forcing his feelings on them. And where had those feelings come from? Now if the whole room had been filled, not with police officers, but with those nearest and dearest to him, he would not have found one human word for them, so empty was his heart. A gloomy sensation of agonizing, eternal solitude and remoteness took conscious form in his soul. It was not the meanness of his sentimental outburst before Ilia Petrovich nor the meanness of the latter’s triumph over him that had caused this sudden revulsion in his heart. What should he do now with his own baseness, with all these petty vanities, officers, German women, debts, police offices? If he had been sentenced to be burnt at that moment, he would not have stirred, would hardly have heard the sentence to the end. Something was happening to him, something entirely new, sudden and unknown. It was not that he understood, but he felt clearly with all the intensity of sensation that he could no longer appeal to these people in the police office with sentimental outbursts, or with anything whatsoever; and that if they had been his own brothers and sisters and not police officers, it would have been utterly out of the question to appeal to them in any circumstance of life. He had never experienced such a strange and awful sensation. And what was most agonizing was that it was more a sensation than a conception or idea, a direct sensation, the most agonizing of all the sensations he had known in his life.

The head clerk began dictating to him the usual form of declaration, that he could not pay, that he undertook to do so at a future date, that he would not leave the town or sell his property, and so on.

“But you can’t write, you can hardly hold the pen,” observed the head clerk, looking with curiosity at Raskolnikov. “Are you ill?”

“Yes, I am dizzy. Go on!”

“That’s all. Sign it.”

The head clerk took the paper, and turned to attend to the others.

Raskolnikov gave back the pen; but instead of getting up and going away, he put his elbows on the table and pressed his head in his hands. He felt as if a nail were being driven into his skull. A strange idea suddenly occurred to him—to get up at once, to go up to Nikodim Fomich, and tell him everything that had happened yesterday, and then to go with him to his lodgings and to show him the things in the hole in the corner. The impulse was so strong that he got up from his seat to carry it out. “Hadn’t I better think a minute?” flashed through his mind. “No, better cast off the burden without thinking.” But all at once he stood still, rooted to the spot. Nikodim Fomich was talking eagerly to Ilia Petrovich, and the words reached him: “It’s impossible, they’ll both be released. To begin with, the whole story contradicts itself. Why should they have called the porter, if it had been their doing? To inform against themselves? Or as a blind? No, that would be too cunning! Besides, Pestriakov, the student, was seen at the gate by both the porters and a woman as he went in. He was walking with three friends, who left him only at the gate, and he asked the porters to direct him, in the presence of his friends. Now, would he have asked his way if he had been going with a purpose like that? As for Koch, he spent half an hour at the silver-smith’s below, before he went up to the old woman, and he left him at exactly a quarter to eight. Now just consider . . . ” “But, excuse me, how do you explain this contradiction? They state themselves that they knocked and the door was locked; yet three minutes later when they went up with the porter, it turned out the door was unfastened.” “That’s just it; the murderer must have been there and bolted himself in; and they’d have caught him for certain if Koch had not been an ass and gone to look for the porter too. He must have seized the interval to get downstairs and slip by them somehow. Koch keeps crossing himself and saying: “If I had been there, he would have jumped out and killed me with his axe.’ He is going to have a thanks-giving service—ha, ha!” “And no-one saw the murderer?”

“They might well have not seen him; the house is a real Noah’s Ark,” said the head clerk, who was listening.

“It’s clear, it’s clear,” Nikodim Fomich repeated hotly.

“No, it is anything but clear,” Ilia Petrovich maintained.

Raskolnikov picked up his hat and walked towards the door, but he did not reach it . . .

When he regained consciousness, he found himself sitting in a chair, supported by someone on the right, while someone else was standing on the left, holding a yellowish glass filled with yellow water, and Nikodim Fomich standing before him, looking intently at him. He got up from the chair.

“What’s this? Are you ill?” Nikodim Fomich asked, rather sharply.

“He could hardly hold his pen when he was signing,” said the head clerk, settling back in his place and taking up his work again.

“Have you been ill long?” cried Ilia Petrovich from his place, where he, too, was looking through papers. He had, of course, come to look at the sick man when he fainted, but retired at once when he recovered.

“Since yesterday,” muttered Raskolnikov in reply.

“Did you go out yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“Though you were ill?”

“Yes.”

“At what time?”

“About seven.”

“And where did you go, may I ask?”

“Along the street.”

“Short and clear.”

Raskolnikov, white as a handkerchief, had answered sharply, jerkily, without dropping his black feverish eyes before Ilia Petrovich’s stare.

“He can scarcely stand upright. And you . . . ” Nikodim Fomich was beginning.

“No matter,” Ilia Petrovich pronounced in a strange voice.

Nikodim Fomich would have made some further protest, but glancing at the head clerk who was looking very hard at him, he did not speak. There was a strange silence suddenly.

“Very well, then,” concluded Ilia Petrovich, “we will not keep you.”

Raskolnikov went out. He caught the sound of eager conversation on his departure, and above the rest rose the questioning voice of Nikodim Fomich. In the street, his faintness passed completely.

“A search—there will be a search at once,” he repeated to himself, hurrying home. “The brutes! They suspect me.”

His former terror completely mastered him once more.