Part Two · I

He lay like that for a very long time. At times he seemed to wake up, and at those moments he noticed that it had long been night, but it did not enter his head to get up. At last he noticed that it was already as light as day. He was lying on his back on the sofa, still stupefied from his recent oblivion. Terrible, desperate howls reached him sharply from the street, which, however, he heard under his window every night after two. It was they that had woken him now. “Ah! there are the drunks coming out of the taverns already,” he thought, “it’s after two,” and suddenly he jumped up, as though someone had torn him off the sofa. “What! After two already!” He sat down on the sofa—and then he remembered everything! Suddenly, in one instant, he remembered everything!

For the first moment he thought he would go out of his mind. A terrible cold gripped him; but the cold came also from the fever, which had begun in him long before, while he slept. And now suddenly such a chill struck him that his teeth nearly jumped out and everything in him simply shook. He opened the door and began to listen: everything in the house was fast asleep. With amazement he looked himself over and everything around him in the room and could not understand how he could have come in yesterday without hooking the door and thrown himself on the sofa, not only without undressing, but even with his hat on: it had rolled off and was lying right there on the floor, near the pillow. “If anyone had come in, what would he have thought? That I was drunk, but…” He rushed to the window. There was enough light, and he hurriedly began examining himself, all over, from head to foot, all his clothes: were there any traces? But it could not be done that way: shaking with chills, he began taking everything off and examining it all over again. He turned everything over, to the last thread and scrap, and, not trusting himself, repeated the examination about three times. But there was nothing, it seemed, no traces at all; only in one place, where his trousers had frayed at the bottom and hung in a fringe, thick traces of caked blood remained on that fringe. He seized his big folding knife and cut off the fringe. There was nothing more, it seemed. Suddenly he remembered that the purse and the things he had pulled out of the old woman’s trunk were all still lying in his pockets! He had not even thought until now of taking them out and hiding them! He had not remembered them even just now, while he was examining his clothes! What was this? Instantly he rushed to take them out and throw them on the table. When he had taken out everything, even turning his pockets inside out to make sure nothing more was left, he carried the whole heap to the corner. There, in the very corner, low down, the wallpaper had come away from the wall and was torn in one place: at once he began stuffing everything into this hole, under the paper: “It went in! All out of sight, and the purse too!” he thought joyfully, half rising and staring dully at the corner, at the hole, which bulged out even more now. Suddenly he shuddered all over with horror: “My God,” he whispered in despair, “what’s the matter with me? Is that hidden? Is that the way to hide things?”

True, he had not counted on things; he had thought there would only be money, and so he had not prepared a place beforehand—“but now, now what am I glad about?” he thought. “Is that the way to hide things? My reason really is deserting me!” In exhaustion he sat down on the sofa, and at once an unbearable chill shook him again. Mechanically he dragged over his old student’s winter coat, which lay beside him on a chair, warm but almost in rags by now, covered himself with it, and sleep and delirium again seized him together. He sank into oblivion.

No more than five minutes later he jumped up again and at once, in a frenzy, rushed to his clothes again. “How could I have fallen asleep again when nothing’s been done! Just so, just so: I still haven’t taken the loop off from under the arm! Forgot it, forgot a thing like that! Such evidence!” He tore off the loop and hurriedly began ripping it to pieces, stuffing them under the pillow among the linen. “Pieces of torn canvas will never arouse suspicion in any case; it seems so, it seems so!” he repeated, standing in the middle of the room, and with an attention strained to the point of pain he began looking around again, on the floor and everywhere: had he forgotten anything else? The certainty that everything, even memory, even simple reasoning, was deserting him began to torment him unbearably. “What, can it be starting already, can this be the punishment coming already? There, there, just so!” Indeed, the scraps of the fringe he had cut off his trousers were simply lying on the floor, in the middle of the room, for the first person to see! “But what is the matter with me!” he cried again, like a lost man.

Here a strange thought came into his head: that perhaps all his clothes were covered in blood, that perhaps there were many spots, but he just did not see them, did not notice them, because his reasoning was weakened, shattered… his mind darkened… Suddenly he remembered that there had been blood on the purse too. “Bah! So then there must be blood in the pocket too, because I stuffed the purse in my pocket still wet!” Instantly he turned the pocket inside out, and—just so—on the lining of the pocket there were traces, spots! “So my reason hasn’t completely deserted me yet, so I still have some sense and memory, since I caught it myself and guessed it!” he thought triumphantly, drawing a deep, joyful breath with his whole chest. “It’s simply feverish weakness, delirium for a minute,” and he tore the whole lining out of the left pocket of his trousers. At that moment a ray of sunlight lit up his left boot: on the sock, which was peeping out of the boot, there seemed to be marks. He kicked off the boot: “Marks, indeed! The whole tip of the sock is soaked with blood”; he must have stepped carelessly in that pool… “But what am I to do with this now? Where am I to put this sock, the fringe, the pocket?”

He raked all of it up in his hand and stood in the middle of the room. “In the stove? But the stove is the first place they’ll rummage in. Burn it? But what would I burn it with? I don’t even have matches. No, better go out somewhere and throw it all away. Yes! better throw it away!” he repeated, sitting down on the sofa again, “and right now, this minute, without delay!…” But instead his head sank onto the pillow again; again the unbearable chill froze him; again he dragged the coat over himself. And for a long time, several hours, it kept appearing to him in fits and starts that “here, I should go somewhere right now, without putting it off, and throw it all away, so it’s out of sight, quickly, quickly!” Several times he strained to get up from the sofa, wanted to rise, but could no longer do it. What finally woke him was a loud knocking at the door.

“Open up, are you alive or not? He’s forever snoring!” Nastasya was shouting, banging on the door with her fist. “Snores away whole days on end, like a dog! A dog is what he is! Open up, won’t you. It’s after ten.”

“Maybe he’s not even in!” said a man’s voice.

“Bah! that’s the caretaker’s voice… What does he want?”

He jumped up and sat on the sofa. His heart was pounding so that it even hurt.

“Then who hooked the door?” Nastasya retorted. “Look at that, he’s taken to locking himself in! Afraid somebody’ll carry you off? Open up, you blockhead, wake up!”

“What do they want? Why the caretaker? Everything is known. Resist, or open? To hell with it…”

He half rose, leaned forward, and took the hook off.

His whole room was of such a size that it was possible to take the hook off without getting out of bed.

Just so: there stood the caretaker and Nastasya.

Nastasya looked him over somehow strangely. He glanced at the caretaker with a defiant and desperate air. The man silently held out to him a gray paper, folded in two and sealed with bottle wax.

“A summons, from the office,” he said, handing him the paper.

“From what office?…”

“The police, I mean, they’re calling you, to the office. You know what office.”

“To the police!… What for?…”

“How should I know. They want you, so go.” He looked at him attentively, glanced around the room, and turned to leave.

“Looks like you’ve got really sick?” remarked Nastasya, who had not taken her eyes off him. The caretaker also turned his head for a moment. “He’s been in a fever since yesterday,” she added.

He made no answer and held the paper in his hands without opening it.

“Well, don’t get up, then,” Nastasya went on, moved to pity and seeing that he was lowering his feet from the sofa. “If you’re sick, don’t go: it won’t burn down. What’s that you’ve got in your hands?”

He looked: in his right hand were the cut-off pieces of fringe, the sock, and the shreds of the torn-out pocket. He had slept with them like that. Later, thinking it over, he remembered that even half waking in his fever he had squeezed all this tight, tight in his hand and fallen asleep again like that.

“Look what rags he’s collected, and sleeps with them like they were treasure…” And Nastasya went off into her morbid, nervous laughter. Instantly he thrust everything under the coat and fixed his eyes on her intently. Though he was capable of very little clear reasoning at that minute, he felt that a man would not be treated like this when they came to take him. “But… the police?”

“You should have some tea? Want some, eh? I’ll bring it; there’s some left…”

“No… I’ll go: I’ll go right now,” he muttered, getting to his feet.

“I bet you won’t even make it down the stairs?”

“I’ll go…”

“Suit yourself.”

She went out after the caretaker. At once he rushed to the light to examine the sock and the fringe: “There are spots, but they aren’t very noticeable; it’s all got dirty, rubbed, and faded already. Anyone who doesn’t know beforehand won’t make out anything. So Nastasya couldn’t have noticed anything from a distance, thank God!” Then, trembling, he unsealed the summons and began to read; he read for a long time and at last understood. It was an ordinary summons from the district police to appear that day, at half past nine, at the office of the district superintendent.

“But when did this ever happen? I have no business of my own at all with the police! And why just today?” he thought in tormenting bewilderment. “Lord, if only it would be over quickly!” He started to throw himself on his knees to pray, but even laughed himself—not at the prayer, but at himself. He began hurriedly getting dressed. “If I’m lost, I’m lost, it’s all the same! Put on the sock!” it suddenly occurred to him. “It will get even more rubbed in the dust, and the traces will disappear.” But no sooner had he put it on than he at once pulled it off again in loathing and horror. He pulled it off, but, realizing that he had no other, he took it and put it on again—and laughed again. “It’s all conventional, all relative, it’s all just forms,” he thought fleetingly, with only the edge of his mind, while he himself was trembling all over, “there, I’ve put it on! I ended up putting it on, didn’t I!” The laughter, however, at once gave way to despair. “No, it’s beyond my strength…” he thought. His legs were trembling. “From fear,” he muttered to himself. His head was spinning and aching from the fever. “It’s a trick! They want to lure me in by a trick and then suddenly trip me up on everything,” he went on to himself, coming out onto the stairs. “What’s bad is that I’m almost delirious… I might blurt out some stupid lie…”

On the stairs he remembered that he was leaving all the things just as they were, in the hole in the wallpaper—“and maybe they’re doing a search on purpose while I’m out”—he remembered and stopped. But such despair and such, if one may say so, cynicism of ruin suddenly took possession of him that he waved his hand and went on.

“If only it would be over quickly!…”

In the street, again, the heat was unbearable; if only there had been one drop of rain in all those days. Again dust, brick, and lime, again the stench from the shops and taverns, again drunks at every turn, Finnish peddlers, and half-broken-down cabs. The sun flashed brightly in his eyes, so that it hurt to look and his head spun completely—the usual sensation of a feverish man who suddenly comes out into the street on a bright sunny day.

Reaching the turning into yesterday’s street, he glanced down it with tormenting anxiety, at that house… and at once looked away.

“If they ask, maybe I’ll tell,” he thought, approaching the office.

The office was about a quarter of a verst from him. It had just moved to new quarters, in a new building, on the fourth floor. He had been in the old quarters once, briefly, but very long ago. Going in under the gateway, he saw a staircase on the right, down which a peasant was coming with a book in his hands: “A caretaker, then; so the office must be here,” and he began climbing up, at a guess. He did not want to ask anyone anything.

“I’ll go in, get down on my knees, and tell everything…” he thought, as he came up to the fourth floor.

The staircase was narrow, steep, and all covered with slops. All the kitchens of all the apartments on all four floors opened onto this staircase and stood that way almost all day. That was why it was terribly stuffy. Up and down went caretakers with books under their arms, messengers, and all sorts of people of both sexes—visitors. The door to the office itself was also wide open. He went in and stopped in the entry. Some peasants stood waiting there. Here too it was extraordinarily stuffy, and, besides that, there was a nauseating smell of fresh, not yet dried paint made with rancid oil, from the newly painted rooms. Having waited a little, he decided to move on farther, into the next room. All the rooms were tiny and low. A terrible impatience drew him on farther and farther. No one noticed him. In the second room some clerks sat writing, dressed perhaps a little better than he was, all strange-looking people of some kind. He turned to one of them.

“What do you want?”

He showed the summons from the office.

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

“Yes, a former student.”

The clerk looked him over, without any curiosity, however. He was a particularly disheveled man of some sort, with a fixed idea in his eyes.

“You won’t find out anything from him, because it’s all the same to him,” thought Raskolnikov.

“Go in there, to the head clerk,” said the clerk, and poked his finger forward, pointing to the very last room.

He went into this room (the fourth in order), cramped and packed full of the public—people somewhat more cleanly dressed than in the other rooms. Among the visitors were two ladies. One, in mourning, poorly dressed, sat at the table opposite the head clerk and was writing something at his dictation. The other lady, very stout and purple-red, blotchy, a woman of imposing appearance, and somehow far too splendidly dressed, with a brooch on her bosom the size of a saucer, was standing to one side waiting for something. Raskolnikov thrust his summons at the head clerk. The man glanced at it briefly, said, “Wait,” and went on attending to the lady in mourning.

He breathed more freely. “It can’t be that!” Little by little he began to take heart; he urged himself with all his might to take heart and come to his senses.

“Some stupidity, some tiniest carelessness, and I could give myself away completely! Hm… a pity there’s no air here,” he added, “it’s stifling… My head’s spinning even more… and my mind too…”

He felt a terrible disorder in his whole being. He was afraid himself that he would not master himself. He tried to fasten on something and think about anything at all, something completely extraneous, but he did not succeed at all. The head clerk, however, interested him greatly: he kept wanting to guess something from his face, to see through him. He was a very young man, about twenty-two, with a swarthy, mobile face that looked older than his years, dressed fashionably and like a fop, with his hair parted at the back of his head, combed and pomaded, with a great many rings and signets on his white, brush-scrubbed fingers and gold chains on his waistcoat. With a foreigner who was there he even exchanged a word or two in French, and very creditably.

“Luiza Ivanovna, you might sit down,” he said in passing to the overdressed purple-red lady, who was still standing as though she dared not sit down on her own, though there was a chair right next to her.

“Ich danke,” she said, and quietly, with a silken rustle, lowered herself onto the chair. Her light blue dress with white lace trimming spread around the chair like a balloon and took up almost half the room. There was a waft of perfume. But the lady was evidently timid about taking up half the room and smelling so strongly of perfume, though she was smiling both cowardly and brazenly, yet with obvious uneasiness.

The lady in mourning finished at last and began to get up. Suddenly, with a certain amount of noise, very jauntily and somehow peculiarly twisting his shoulders at every step, an officer came in, threw his cap with its cockade on the table, and sat down in an armchair. The splendid lady fairly leaped from her seat on seeing him and with a kind of peculiar rapture began curtsying; but the officer paid not the slightest attention to her, and she no longer dared sit down in his presence. He was a lieutenant, the assistant to the district superintendent, with a reddish mustache that stuck out horizontally on both sides and with extremely small features, which expressed nothing in particular, however, except a certain insolence. He looked askance at Raskolnikov and with some indignation: his clothes were really too wretched, and in spite of all his abasement his bearing still did not suit his clothes; Raskolnikov, imprudently, had looked at him too directly and too long, so that the man even took offense.

“What do you want?” he shouted, probably surprised that such a ragamuffin did not even think of shrinking from his lightning glance.

“I was summoned… by a summons…” Raskolnikov answered somehow.

“It’s the case about the recovery of money from him, from the student,” the head clerk put in hurriedly, tearing himself away from his paper. “Here, sir!” and he tossed a ledger over to Raskolnikov, pointing out a place in it. “Read it!”

“Money? What money?” thought Raskolnikov, “but… then it certainly can’t be that!” And he shuddered with joy. Suddenly he felt terribly, inexpressibly light. Everything had flown off his shoulders.

“And what time does it say you were to come, m’dear sir?” shouted the lieutenant, more and more offended, at what no one knew. “They write nine o’clock for you, and now it’s already after eleven!”

“They brought it to me only a quarter of an hour ago,” Raskolnikov answered loudly, over his shoulder, having also grown angry, suddenly and unexpectedly for himself, and even finding a certain pleasure in it. “And it’s enough that I’ve come here sick with fever.”

“Kindly do not shout!”

“I’m not shouting, I’m speaking quite evenly, it’s you who are shouting at me; and I’m a student, and I won’t allow anyone to shout at me.”

The assistant flared up so that for the first minute he could not even get anything out, and only a kind of spray flew from his lips. He jumped up from his seat.

“Kindly be si-i-i-lent! You are in a government office. No r-r-rudeness, s’r!”

“And you’re in a government office too,” cried Raskolnikov, “and besides shouting, you’re smoking a cigarette, so you’re showing disrespect to all of us.” Having said this, Raskolnikov felt an inexpressible delight.

The head clerk was looking at them with a smile. The hot-tempered lieutenant was visibly taken aback.

“That is none of your business, sir!” he shouted at last, somehow unnaturally loudly, “but kindly give the statement that’s required of you. Show him, Alexander Grigoryevich. Complaints against you! You don’t pay your debts! What a bright falcon has flown in here!”

But Raskolnikov was no longer listening and had greedily seized the paper, looking for the answer to the riddle as fast as he could. He read it once, then again, and did not understand.

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

“It’s money being claimed from you on a promissory note, a recovery. You must either pay it with all the costs, fines, and so on, or give a written statement as to when you can pay, and at the same time an undertaking not to leave the capital before payment and not to sell or conceal your property. And the creditor is free to sell your property and to proceed against you according to the law.”

“But I… don’t owe anybody anything!”

“That’s not our business. What we’ve received for recovery is an overdue and legally protested promissory note for one hundred and fifteen roubles, issued by you to the widow of a collegiate assessor, Zarnitsyna, nine months ago, and transferred from the widow Zarnitsyna in payment to Court Councillor Chebarov, and so we are inviting you to give a statement.”

“But she’s my landlady, isn’t she?”

“Well, what if she is your landlady?”

The head clerk was looking at him with a condescending smile of pity, and at the same time of a certain triumph, as at a novice who is only just coming under fire: “Well, how do you feel now?” But what, what did he care now about the promissory note, about the recovery! Was it worth now even the slightest anxiety, or even the slightest attention! He stood, read, listened, answered, even asked questions himself, but all of it mechanically. The triumph of self-preservation, deliverance from the danger that had been crushing him—that was what filled his whole being at that minute, without foresight, without analysis, without future guesses and riddles, without doubts and without questions. It was a minute of complete, immediate, purely animal joy. But at that very minute something like thunder and lightning broke out in the office. The lieutenant, still shaken by the disrespect, all aflame, and obviously wishing to prop up his wounded pride, fell upon the unfortunate “splendid lady” with all his thunderbolts; she had been looking at him, ever since he came in, with the stupidest of smiles.

“And you, you so-and-so and such-and-such,” he shouted suddenly at the top of his voice (the lady in mourning had already gone out), “what went on at your place last night? eh? Disgrace again, you’re making a row for the whole street again. Fighting and drinking again. You’re dreaming of the house of correction! I’ve told you before, I’ve warned you ten times that the eleventh time I wouldn’t let you off! And there you go again, again, you so-and-so and such-and-such!”

The paper even fell out of Raskolnikov’s hands, and he stared wildly at the splendid lady who was being dressed down so unceremoniously: but soon, however, he understood what it was about, and at once the whole business began to please him very much. He listened with pleasure, so much so that he wanted to laugh, laugh, laugh… All his nerves were simply jumping.

“Ilya Petrovich!” the head clerk began solicitously, but stopped to wait for the right moment, because there was no way to restrain the boiling lieutenant except by the arms, as he knew from his own experience.

As for the splendid lady, at first she simply quaked at the thunder and lightning; but, strange to say, the more numerous and strong the curses became, the more amiable she looked, the more charming grew the smile she turned on the terrible lieutenant. She was mincing in place and curtsying incessantly, impatiently waiting for them to let her get a word in at last, and she got her chance.

“No noise and fights at my place there vas not, Mister Kapitän,” she suddenly rattled away, as if a sack of peas had spilled, with a strong German accent, though in brisk Russian, “and no, no Skandal, und they come drunk, and all this I vill tell, Mister Kapitän, und I am not guilty… I haf a noble house, Mister Kapitän, and noble manners, Mister Kapitän, und I alvays, alvays myself vanted no Skandal. Und they come all drunk and then three bottles more ask, und then one lift up his feet and started vith his foot the piano play, und this is not at all nice in a noble house, und he ganz the piano break, und there is completely, completely no manners here, und I tell him so. Und he took a bottle und started everybody from behind vith the bottle poking. Und then I quick the caretaker call, und Karl come, und he took Karl und hit him in the eye, und Henriette also hit in the eye, und me five times on the cheek he hit. Und this is so indelicate in a noble house, Mister Kapitän, und I scream. Und he open the vindow onto the canal und stand in the vindow und like a little pig squeal; und this is a disgrace. Und how can anyone from a vindow onto the street like a little pig squeal; und this is a disgrace. Fui-fui-fui! Und Karl from behind by his tailcoat pull him from the vindow und then, this is true, Mister Kapitän, he tear his sein Rock. Und then he shout that fifteen roubles man muss fine pay him. Und I myself, Mister Kapitän, five roubles pay him for his sein Rock. Und this is an ignoble guest, Mister Kapitän, und every kind of Skandal he make! I, he say, vill have a big satire gedruckt about you, because I can in all the newspapers about you everything compose.”

“One of the writers, then?”

“Yes, Mister Kapitän, und vhat an ignoble guest this is, Mister Kapitän, vhen in a noble house…”

“Now, now, now! Enough! I’ve told you, told you, I did tell you…”

“Ilya Petrovich!” the head clerk said again, meaningfully. The lieutenant glanced at him quickly; the head clerk gave a slight nod.

“…So here is my last word to you, most respected Laviza Ivanovna, and this is the very last time,” the lieutenant went on. “If there is a scandal in your noble house even one more time, I’ll have you yourself hauled off zugunder, as they say in the lofty style. You hear? So a literary man, a writer, took five roubles for his coattail in a ‘noble house’? There they are, your writers!” and he shot a contemptuous glance at Raskolnikov. “The day before yesterday, in a tavern, another business: had his dinner and didn’t care to pay; ‘I’ll describe you in a satire for it,’ he says. And on a steamer, last week, another one called the respectable family of a state councillor, his wife and daughter, the vilest names. One was thrown out of a pastry shop on his neck the other day. That’s what they’re like, writers, literary men, students, heralds… pfui! And you, get out! I’ll look in on you myself… then watch out! You hear?”

Luiza Ivanovna, with hurried amiability, set about curtsying in all directions and, curtsying, backed her way to the door; but in the doorway she bumped her behind into an imposing officer with an open, fresh face and splendid, very thick blond side-whiskers. This was Nikodim Fomich himself, the district superintendent. Luiza Ivanovna hastened to curtsy almost to the floor and, with quick little steps, bouncing, flew out of the office.

“Crashing again, thunder and lightning again, a whirlwind, a hurricane!” Nikodim Fomich said, turning amiably and in a friendly way to Ilya Petrovich. “Your heart’s been stirred up again, you’ve boiled over again! I heard it from the stairs.”

“Oh, what of it!” Ilya Petrovich said with gentlemanly nonchalance (and not even “what of it” but somehow “O-oh wha-at of it!”), moving with some papers to another table and picturesquely jerking his shoulders with every step, whichever way the step, that way the shoulder. “Here, sir, if you’ll kindly look: a gentleman writer, or rather a student, a former one, that is, doesn’t pay his debts, has handed out promissory notes, won’t vacate his room, complaints come in about him constantly, and he’s pleased to take offense because I lit a cigarette in his presence! They behave like sc-sc-scoundrels themselves, and here, sir, kindly take a look at him: there he is in his most attractive guise, sir!”

“Poverty is no vice, my friend, but there it is! He’s gunpowder, you know, he couldn’t bear the insult. You must have taken offense at something against him and couldn’t restrain yourself either,” Nikodim Fomich went on, turning amiably to Raskolnikov, “but you shouldn’t have: the mo-o-st no-o-o-ble of men, I tell you, but gunpowder, gunpowder! Flares up, boils over, burns out—and it’s gone! And it’s all over! And in the end there’s nothing but a heart of gold! In the regiment they even called him ‘Lieutenant Gunpowder’…”

“And what a r-r-regiment it was!” exclaimed Ilya Petrovich, very pleased to have been tickled so pleasantly, but still sulking.

Raskolnikov suddenly wanted to say something extraordinarily pleasant to them all.

“But for pity’s sake, Captain,” he began very casually, turning suddenly to Nikodim Fomich, “enter into my position too… I’m even ready to apologize to him, if I’ve been disrespectful in any way on my side. I’m a poor and sick student, oppressed (he actually said “oppressed”) by poverty. I’m a former student, because I can’t support myself now, but I’ll be getting money… I have a mother and sister in —— Province… They’ll send it to me, and I’ll… pay. My landlady is a kind woman, but she’s got so angry because I lost my lessons and haven’t paid for going on four months that she doesn’t even send me up any dinner… And I don’t understand at all what this note is! Now she’s claiming from me on this promissory note, but how am I going to pay her, judge for yourselves!…”

“But that’s not our business, you know…” the head clerk tried to remark again…

“Allow me, allow me, I entirely agree with you, but allow me to explain too,” Raskolnikov took up again, addressing not the head clerk but still Nikodim Fomich, though trying with all his might to address Ilya Petrovich too, although the latter stubbornly pretended to be rummaging in his papers and contemptuously paying no attention to him, “allow me for my part to explain that I’ve been living with her for about three years now, ever since I came from the provinces, and earlier… earlier… but then why shouldn’t I confess it in my turn, from the very beginning I gave a promise that I would marry her daughter, a verbal promise, completely free… She was a girl… actually, I even liked her… though I wasn’t in love… in a word, youth, that is, I mean to say that my landlady gave me a lot of credit at the time, and I led a sort of life… I was very frivolous…”

“Nobody is asking you for such intimacies, m’dear sir, and there’s no time,” Ilya Petrovich tried to interrupt rudely and triumphantly, but Raskolnikov stopped him hotly, though it had suddenly become extremely hard for him to speak.

“But allow me, do allow me to tell it all, in part… how it was and… in my turn… though it’s unnecessary, I agree with you, to tell it—but a year ago this girl died of typhus, and I stayed on as a lodger, as I was, and when my landlady moved to her present apartment, she said to me… and said it in a friendly way… that she had complete confidence in me and all… but wouldn’t I give her this promissory note for one hundred and fifteen roubles, all that she reckoned I owed her. Allow me, sir: she said precisely that as soon as I gave her this paper, she would give me as much credit as I liked again, and that never, never, for her part—those were her own words—would she make use of this paper until I paid myself… And now, when I’ve lost my lessons and have nothing to eat, she goes and files it for recovery… What can I say now?”

“All these sentimental details, m’dear sir, are no concern of ours,” Ilya Petrovich cut him off insolently. “You must give a statement and an undertaking, and as for your having been pleased to be in love and all those tragic passages, we have nothing whatever to do with that.”

“Come now, you’re… being cruel…” muttered Nikodim Fomich, sitting down at the table and also starting to sign papers. He felt somehow ashamed.

“Write, then,” the head clerk said to Raskolnikov.

“Write what?” Raskolnikov asked, somehow particularly rudely.

“I’ll dictate it to you.”

It seemed to Raskolnikov that the head clerk had become more offhand and more contemptuous with him after his confession, but, strange to say—he himself suddenly became decidedly indifferent to anyone’s opinion whatever, and this change took place somehow in a single instant, in a single minute. If he had wanted to think a little, he would of course have been amazed at how he could have talked to them like that a minute ago, and even forced his feelings on them. And where had those feelings come from? On the contrary, now, if the room had suddenly filled not with police officers but with his very dearest friends, even then, it seems, he would not have found a single human word for them, so suddenly empty had his heart become. A gloomy sensation of tormenting, infinite solitude and estrangement suddenly made itself consciously felt in his soul. It was not the baseness of his heartfelt effusions before Ilya Petrovich, nor the baseness of the lieutenant’s triumph over him, that had suddenly so turned his heart over. Oh, what did he care now about his own baseness, about all these vanities, lieutenants, German women, recoveries, offices, and so on, and so on! If he had been sentenced to be burned at that minute, even then he would not have stirred, would hardly even have listened attentively to the sentence. Something was happening to him that was completely unfamiliar to him, new, sudden, and never before experienced. Not that he understood it, but he felt clearly, with all the force of feeling, that not only with sentimental effusions, as just now, but with anything whatever, he could no longer address these people in the police office, and were they all his own brothers and sisters and not police lieutenants, even then there would be no reason at all for him to address them, and in no circumstance of life whatever; never until that minute had he experienced such a strange and terrible sensation. And what was most tormenting of all—it was more a sensation than a consciousness, than an idea; an immediate sensation, the most tormenting sensation of all the sensations he had lived through in his life until now.

The head clerk began dictating to him the form of statement usual in such a case, that is: I cannot pay, I promise to pay on such and such a date (some day or other), I will not leave the city, I will neither sell nor give away my property, and so on.

“But you can’t write, the pen is falling out of your hands,” the head clerk remarked, peering curiously at Raskolnikov. “Are you ill?”

“Yes… my head is spinning… go on!”

“That’s all; sign it.”

The head clerk took back the paper and turned to the others.

Raskolnikov gave back the pen, but instead of getting up and leaving, he put both elbows on the table and squeezed his head in his hands. It was as if a nail were being driven into the crown of his head. A strange thought suddenly came to him: to get up now, go over to Nikodim Fomich, and tell him everything about yesterday, everything to the last detail, then go with them to his room and show them the things, in the corner, in the hole. The urge was so strong that he had already got up from his seat to carry it out. “Shouldn’t I think it over for at least a minute?” flashed through his head. “No, better without thinking, and get it off my shoulders!” But suddenly he stopped as if rooted to the spot: Nikodim Fomich was talking hotly to Ilya Petrovich, and the words reached him:

“It can’t be, they’ll both be released! In the first place, everything contradicts it; judge for yourself: why would they call the caretaker if it was their doing? To inform on themselves, or what? Or as a ruse? No, that would be too cunning by far! And finally, the student Pestryakov was seen right at the gate by both caretakers and a townswoman at the very moment he was going in: he was walking with three friends and parted with them right at the gate, and asked the caretakers about the address, with his friends still there. Now, would a man like that be asking about the address if he was going there with such an intention? And as for Koch, before going in to the old woman he sat for half an hour downstairs at the silversmith’s and went up to the old woman from there at exactly a quarter to eight. Now just think…”

“But excuse me, how did they come to such a contradiction: they themselves insist that they knocked and that the door was locked, and three minutes later, when they came with the caretaker, it turns out the door was open?”

“That’s just the point: the murderer was certainly in there and had bolted himself in; and they would certainly have caught him there if Koch hadn’t played the fool and gone for the caretaker himself. And it was precisely in that interval that he managed to get down the stairs and slip past them somehow. Koch crosses himself with both hands: ‘If I had stayed there,’ he says, ‘he would have jumped out and killed me with the ax.’ He wants to have a Russian thanksgiving service said, heh-heh!…”

“And nobody saw the murderer?”

“How could anybody see him there? That house is a Noah’s ark,” remarked the head clerk, who had been listening from his place.

“The case is clear, the case is clear!” Nikodim Fomich repeated hotly.

“No, the case is very unclear,” Ilya Petrovich clinched it.

Raskolnikov picked up his hat and went toward the door, but he did not reach the door…

When he came to, he saw that he was sitting on a chair, that some man was holding him up on the right, that on the left stood another man with a yellow glass filled with yellow water, and that Nikodim Fomich was standing before him and looking at him intently; he got up from the chair.

“What is this, are you ill?” Nikodim Fomich asked rather sharply.

“Even when he was signing, he could barely move the pen,” remarked the head clerk, sitting down in his place and taking up his papers again.

“And have you been ill long?” shouted Ilya Petrovich from his place, also sorting through papers. He too, of course, had been examining the sick man while he was in his faint, but had stepped away at once when he came to.

“Since yesterday…” Raskolnikov muttered in reply.

“And did you go out yesterday?”

“I did.”

“Ill?”

“Ill.”

“At what time?”

“After seven in the evening.”

“And where to, may I ask?”

“Along the street.”

“Short and clear.”

Raskolnikov answered sharply, curtly, all as pale as a handkerchief, and without lowering his black, inflamed eyes before Ilya Petrovich’s gaze.

“He can barely stand on his feet, and you…” Nikodim Fomich started to remark.

“No-thing to it!” Ilya Petrovich said somehow peculiarly.

Nikodim Fomich wanted to add something more, but, glancing at the head clerk, who was also looking at him very intently, fell silent. Suddenly everyone fell silent. It was strange.

“Well, sir, very good, sir,” Ilya Petrovich concluded, “we won’t detain you.”

Raskolnikov went out. He could still hear how, after he left, an animated conversation began, in which the questioning voice of Nikodim Fomich sounded most clearly of all… In the street he came to himself completely.

“A search, a search, there’ll be a search right away!” he repeated to himself, hurrying to get home. “Bandits! they suspect!” The fear of earlier seized him again entirely, from head to foot.