Part Three · VI

“…I don’t believe it! I can’t believe it!” the perplexed Razumikhin kept repeating, trying with all his might to refute Raskolnikov’s arguments. They were already approaching Bakaleyev’s rooms, where Pulcheria Alexandrovna and Dunya had long been waiting for them. Razumikhin kept stopping on the way in the heat of the conversation, flustered and excited by the mere fact that they were speaking of it openly for the first time.

“Don’t believe it, then!” Raskolnikov answered with a cold and careless smile. “You, as is your custom, noticed nothing, and I weighed every word.”

“You’re suspicious, that’s why you weighed them… Hm… true, I agree, Porfiry’s tone was rather strange, and especially that scoundrel Zametov!… You’re right, there was something about him—but why? Why?”

“He changed his mind overnight.”

“But on the contrary, on the contrary! If they had that brainless idea, they’d have tried with all their might to hide it and conceal their cards, so as to catch you later… But now—it’s insolent and careless!”

“If they had facts, that is, real facts, or at least suspicions with some sort of grounds, then they really would try to hide their game in hopes of winning still more (but then they would have made a search long ago!). But they don’t have a fact, not one—it’s all a mirage, all double-edged, just a fleeting idea—so they’re trying to throw me off with insolence. And maybe he got angry himself that there are no facts, and burst out from vexation. And maybe he has some intention… He seems to be an intelligent man… Maybe he wanted to frighten me by letting me see that he knows… There’s a psychology of its own here, brother… But then it’s disgusting to explain all this. Drop it!”

“And insulting, insulting! I understand you! But… since we’ve now begun to talk openly (and it’s excellent that we’ve finally begun to talk openly, I’m glad!)—then I’ll confess to you straight out now that I noticed it in them long ago, this idea, all this time, in the tiniest little form, of course, a creeping form, but why even a creeping one! How dare they? Where, where are the roots of it hidden in them? If you knew how furious I was! What: because a poor student, mangled by poverty and hypochondria, on the eve of a cruel illness with delirium, which had perhaps already begun in him (note that!), suspicious, proud, knowing his own worth, who for six months had seen no one in his corner, in rags and in boots without soles—stands before some precinct flunkeys and endures their abuse; and here’s an unexpected debt under his nose, an overdue promissory note held by court councillor Chebarov, rotten-smelling paint, thirty degrees Réaumur,¹ stale air, a crowd of people, the story of the murder of a person he had visited the day before, and all this—on an empty stomach! How could he not faint! And on that, on that to base everything! The devil take it! I understand that it’s galling, but in your place, Rodka, I’d have laughed in all their faces, or better: I’d have spa-a-at in all their mugs, and thick, and handed out a couple dozen slaps in every direction, cleverly, the way they always should be given, and that would have been the end of it. Spit on it! Cheer up! For shame!”

“He put that well, though,” Raskolnikov thought.

“Spit on it? And tomorrow another interrogation!” he said bitterly. “Am I really to start explaining myself to them? It’s galling enough that yesterday I lowered myself to Zametov in the tavern…”

“The devil take it! I’ll go to Porfiry myself! And I’ll squeeze him, like a relative; let him lay it all out for me down to the roots! And as for Zametov…”

“At last he’s caught on!” thought Raskolnikov.

“Stop!” cried Razumikhin, suddenly seizing him by the shoulder. “Stop! You’ve got it wrong! I’ve thought it over: you’ve got it wrong! What sort of trap was that? You say the question about the workmen was a trap? Think it through: well, if you had done it, could you have let slip that you saw them painting the apartment… and the workmen? On the contrary: you saw nothing, even if you had seen! Who confesses against himself?”

“If I had done that thing, then I would certainly have said that I saw both the workmen and the apartment,” Raskolnikov went on answering, reluctantly and with visible disgust.

“But why speak against yourself?”

“Because only peasants, or the most inexperienced novices, deny everything flatly and wholesale under questioning. A man who is the least bit developed and experienced will certainly try, as far as possible, to admit all the external and unavoidable facts; only he’ll look for other reasons for them, he’ll slip in some feature of his own, peculiar and unexpected, which will give them an entirely different meaning and show them in a different light. Porfiry might have counted precisely on my being sure to answer that way, and sure to say that I’d seen them, for verisimilitude, and slip in something by way of explanation…”

“But then he’d have told you at once that two days before, the workmen couldn’t have been there, and that consequently you were there precisely on the day of the murder, after seven. He’d have tripped you up on nothing!”

“But that’s just what he was counting on, that I wouldn’t have time to think, and would hurry precisely to answer more plausibly, and would forget that two days before, the workmen couldn’t have been there.”

“But how could you forget that?”

“Easiest thing in the world! It’s on just such utterly trivial things that clever people are most easily tripped up. The cleverer a man is, the less he suspects that he’ll be tripped up on something simple. The cleverest man has to be tripped up precisely on the simplest thing. Porfiry isn’t nearly as stupid as you think…”

“Then he’s a scoundrel, after that!”

Raskolnikov could not help laughing. But at that same moment his own animation and eagerness, with which he had spoken this last explanation, seemed strange to him, when he had kept up all the preceding conversation with sullen disgust, evidently for a purpose, out of necessity.

“I’m acquiring a taste for it on certain points!” he thought to himself.

But almost at that same moment he somehow suddenly became uneasy, as if an unexpected and alarming thought had struck him. His uneasiness grew. They had already reached the entrance to Bakaleyev’s rooms.

“Go in alone,” Raskolnikov said suddenly, “I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going? We’re already here!”

“I have to, I have to; there’s something… I’ll come in half an hour… Tell them there.”

“As you like, but I’m going with you!”

“What, you want to torment me too!” he cried with such bitter irritation, with such despair in his look, that Razumikhin’s arms dropped. For some time he stood on the front steps and gloomily watched the other striding quickly toward his lane. At last, clenching his teeth and squeezing his fists, swearing on the spot that this very day he would squeeze the whole of Porfiry like a lemon, he went upstairs to reassure Pulcheria Alexandrovna, who was already alarmed by their long absence.

When Raskolnikov reached his building, his temples were wet with sweat and he was breathing heavily. He hurried up the stairs, went into his unlocked room, and at once fastened the hook. Then, frightened and frantic, he rushed to the corner, to that very hole in the wallpaper where the things had lain that time, thrust his hand into it, and for several minutes carefully felt all over the hole, going through every nook and every fold of the paper. Finding nothing, he stood up and drew a deep breath. Just now, as he was already approaching Bakaleyev’s front steps, he had suddenly imagined that some article, some chain, a stud, or even the paper they had been wrapped in, with a mark in the old woman’s hand, might somehow have slipped through that time and got lost in some little crack, and then suddenly come forward before him as unexpected and irrefutable evidence.

He stood as if lost in thought, and a strange, humiliated, half-senseless smile wandered on his lips. At last he took his cap and quietly left the room. His thoughts were tangled. Pensively he went down into the gateway.

“Why, here he is himself!” cried a loud voice; he raised his head.

The caretaker was standing at the door of his cubbyhole and pointing straight at him for a short man who looked like a townsman, dressed in something like a long robe, in a waistcoat, and from a distance very much resembling a peasant woman. His head, in a greasy cap, hung down, and his whole body seemed hunched. His flabby, wrinkled face showed him to be past fifty; his small, puffy little eyes looked out sullenly, sternly, and with displeasure.

“What is it?” asked Raskolnikov, going up to the caretaker.

The townsman squinted at him from under his brows and looked him over intently and attentively, without hurrying; then he slowly turned and, without saying a word, walked out of the gateway into the street.

“But what is it!” cried Raskolnikov.

“Why, this fellow was asking whether a student lives here, gave your name, whose place you lodge at. You came down just then, I pointed you out, and he went off. Just look at that.”

The caretaker too was somewhat bewildered, though not very, and after thinking a tiny bit more, he turned and crawled back into his cubbyhole.

Raskolnikov rushed after the townsman and at once saw him walking along the other side of the street with the same even, unhurried step, his eyes fixed on the ground, as if he were thinking something over. He soon caught up with him, but for some time walked behind; at last he drew level with him and looked sideways into his face. The man noticed him at once, gave him a quick look, but lowered his eyes again, and so they walked for a minute or so, side by side, without saying a word.

“You were asking for me… at the caretaker’s?” Raskolnikov said at last, but somehow very quietly.

The townsman gave no answer and did not even look at him. Again they were silent.

“But why do you… come asking… and say nothing… what is this?” Raskolnikov’s voice broke, and the words somehow would not come out clearly.

This time the townsman raised his eyes and looked at Raskolnikov with an ominous, somber look.

“Murderer!” he said suddenly, in a quiet but clear and distinct voice…

Raskolnikov walked beside him. His legs suddenly went terribly weak, a chill ran down his back, and his heart seemed to stop for an instant; then suddenly it began pounding, as if it had come off a hook. So they walked about a hundred steps, side by side and again in complete silence.

The townsman did not look at him.

“But what are you… what… who is a murderer?” Raskolnikov muttered, barely audibly.

“You are a murderer,” the man pronounced, still more distinctly and impressively, and as if with the smile of some hateful triumph, and again looked straight into Raskolnikov’s pale face and into his deadened eyes. They had both come up to a crossroads then. The townsman turned left into a street and walked on without looking back. Raskolnikov stayed where he was and looked after him for a long time. He saw the man, after going some fifty steps, turn around and look at him, still standing motionless in the same spot. It was impossible to make out, but it seemed to Raskolnikov that this time too the man smiled his cold, hateful, and triumphant smile.

With quiet, weakened steps, his knees trembling, and as if terribly chilled, Raskolnikov went back and climbed up to his little closet of a room. He took off his cap and put it on the table, and for ten minutes he stood beside it, motionless. Then in exhaustion he lay down on the sofa and painfully, with a faint moan, stretched out on it; his eyes were closed. He lay that way for half an hour or so.

He was not thinking of anything. There were just some thoughts or scraps of thoughts, some images, without order or connection—faces of people he had seen as far back as childhood or met somewhere only once and would never even have remembered; the bell tower of the church of V—; a billiard table in some tavern and some officer at the billiard table, the smell of cigars in some basement tobacco shop, a drinking den, a back stairway, quite dark, all slopped with dishwater and strewn with eggshells, and from somewhere comes the ringing of Sunday bells… Objects succeeded one another and whirled like a whirlwind. Some of them he even liked, and he clung to them, but they went out, and in general something weighed on him inside, but not much. At times it was even good… The slight chill did not go away, and this too was almost good to feel.

He heard Razumikhin’s hurried steps and his voice, closed his eyes, and pretended to be asleep. Razumikhin opened the door and stood for some time on the threshold, as if pondering. Then he quietly stepped into the room and carefully came up to the sofa. Nastasya’s whisper was heard:

“Leave him be; let him sleep it off; he’ll eat after.”

“That’s right,” answered Razumikhin.

Both went out carefully and pulled the door to. Another half hour or so passed. Raskolnikov opened his eyes and turned over again onto his back, clasping his hands behind his head…

“Who is he? Who is this man who has come up out of the ground? Where was he and what did he see? He saw everything, there’s no doubt of that. Then where was he standing, and where was he watching from? Why is he only now coming up out from under the floor? And how could he have seen—is it possible?… Hm…” Raskolnikov went on, growing cold and shuddering, “and the jewel case that Nikolai found behind the door: is that possible too? Evidence? Overlook one hundred-thousandth of a line—and there’s your evidence the size of an Egyptian pyramid! A fly was flying, it saw! Is that sort of thing possible?”

And with loathing he suddenly felt how weak he had grown, physically weak.

“I ought to have known it,” he thought with a bitter smile, “and how did I dare, knowing myself, foreseeing myself, to take an ax and bloody myself! I was obliged to know beforehand… Eh! but I did know beforehand!…” he whispered in despair.

At times he stopped motionless before some thought:

“No, those people aren’t made that way; the real ruler, to whom everything is permitted, shells Toulon, makes a slaughter in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, spends half a million people in the Moscow campaign, and gets off with a pun in Vilna;² and after his death they set up idols to him—and so everything is permitted. No, such people, evidently, are made not of flesh but of bronze!”

One sudden, extraneous thought almost made him laugh:

“Napoleon, the pyramids, Waterloo—and a scrawny, nasty little registrar’s widow, a little old crone, a moneylender, with a red trunk under her bed—well, how would even Porfiry Petrovich digest that!… How could they digest it!… Aesthetics will get in the way: would Napoleon, they’ll say, go crawling under a ‘little old crone’s’ bed! Eh, rubbish!…”

At moments he felt that he was as if delirious: he was falling into a feverishly ecstatic mood.

“The little old crone is nonsense!” he thought hotly and impetuously. “The old woman was a mistake, maybe, she’s not the point! The old woman was only an illness… I wanted to step over as quickly as possible… I didn’t kill a human being, I killed a principle! The principle I killed, all right, but step over I didn’t, I stayed on this side… All I managed was to kill. And I didn’t even manage that, it turns out… A principle? Why was that little fool Razumikhin abusing the socialists earlier? A hardworking and commercial people, busy with ‘the common happiness’… No, life is given to me once, and there will never be any more of it, I don’t want to wait for ‘universal happiness.’ I want to live myself, or else better not to live at all. What of it? I simply didn’t want to walk past a hungry mother, clutching my rouble in my pocket, waiting for ‘universal happiness.’ ‘I am carrying my little brick to the universal happiness, they say, and therefore I feel peace of heart.’ Ha-ha! Then why did you let me slip by? I live only once, after all, I want to too… Eh, I am an aesthetic louse, and nothing more,” he suddenly added, laughing like a madman. “Yes, I really am a louse,” he went on, clinging to the thought with malicious glee, rummaging in it, playing and amusing himself with it, “if only because, first, I am now reasoning about being a louse; because, second, for a whole month I troubled all-gracious Providence, calling it to witness that I was undertaking this not for my own flesh and lust, they say, but have in view a magnificent and agreeable goal—ha-ha! Because, third, I resolved to observe all possible justice in carrying it out, weight and measure, and arithmetic: of all the lice I chose the most utterly useless one, and, having killed her, resolved to take from her exactly as much as I needed for the first step, and neither more nor less (and the rest, then, would simply have gone to the monastery, under her will—ha-ha!)… Because, because I am a louse once and for all,” he added, grinding his teeth, “because I myself am perhaps still nastier and viler than the louse I killed, and I had a presentiment beforehand that I would tell myself this after I had killed! Can anything compare with such horror! Oh, the vulgarity! Oh, the baseness!… Oh, how I understand the ‘prophet,’ with his saber, on his horse. Allah commands, and obey, ‘trembling’ creature! He is right, he is right, the ‘prophet,’ when he sets up a goo-o-ood battery somewhere across a street and blasts the righteous and the guilty alike, without even deigning to explain himself! Obey, trembling creature, and—do not desire, because—it is not your business!… Oh, never, never will I forgive the little old crone!”

His hair was wet with sweat, his trembling lips were parched, his motionless gaze was fixed on the ceiling.

“Mother, sister, how I loved them! Why do I hate them now? Yes, I hate them, I hate them physically, I can’t bear them near me… Earlier I went up and kissed Mother, I remember… To embrace her and think that if she found out, then… should I tell her then? That would be just like me… Hm! she must be the same as I am,” he added, thinking with an effort, as if struggling against the delirium that was taking hold of him. “Oh, how I hate the little old crone now! I think I’d kill her a second time if she came to! Poor Lizaveta! Why did she have to turn up there!… Strange, though, why do I hardly think about her, as if I hadn’t killed her?… Lizaveta! Sonya! Poor, meek ones, with meek eyes… Dear ones!… Why don’t they weep? Why don’t they moan?… They give everything… they look meekly and quietly… Sonya, Sonya! Quiet Sonya!…”

He dozed off; it seemed strange to him that he did not remember how he could have come to be in the street. It was already late evening. The twilight was thickening, the full moon was growing brighter and brighter; but the air was somehow especially stifling. People were walking through the streets in crowds; artisans and busy people were going home, others were strolling; there was a smell of lime, dust, stagnant water. Raskolnikov walked along sad and preoccupied: he remembered very well that he had left the house with some intention, that he had to do something and hurry, but what exactly he had forgotten. Suddenly he stopped and saw that on the other side of the street, on the sidewalk, a man was standing and waving to him. He started toward him across the street, but suddenly the man turned and walked off as if nothing had happened, his head lowered, not looking back and giving no sign that he had called him. “Come now, did he call me?” thought Raskolnikov, but he began to catch up all the same. Some ten steps short of him, he suddenly recognized him and—was frightened; it was the townsman from before, in the same robe and just as hunched. Raskolnikov walked at a distance; his heart was pounding; they turned into a lane—the man still did not look back. “Does he know I’m following him?” thought Raskolnikov. The townsman went in at the gate of a large building. Raskolnikov quickly went up to the gate and began watching: would he look back and call him? Indeed, having gone all the way through the gateway and already coming out into the courtyard, the man suddenly turned around and again seemed to wave to him. Raskolnikov at once went through the gateway, but in the courtyard the townsman was no longer there. So he must have gone in just now by the first stairway. Raskolnikov rushed after him. Indeed, two flights up someone’s measured, unhurried steps could still be heard. Strange, the stairway seemed familiar! There’s the window on the first floor; sadly and mysteriously the moonlight passed through the panes; and here is the second floor. Bah! This is the very apartment where the workmen were painting… How did he not recognize it at once? The steps of the man going ahead died away: “so he has stopped or hidden somewhere.” Here is the third floor; should he go on? And what a silence there, it’s even frightening… But he went on. The noise of his own footsteps frightened and alarmed him. God, how dark! The townsman must be lurking here somewhere in a corner. Ah! the apartment is standing wide open onto the stairs; he thought for a moment and went in. The entry was very dark and empty, not a soul, as if everything had been carried out; quietly, on tiptoe, he went into the parlor: the whole room was brightly flooded with moonlight; everything here was as before: the chairs, the mirror, the yellow sofa, and the little framed pictures. An enormous, round, copper-red moon was looking straight in at the windows. “It’s the moon that makes it so silent,” thought Raskolnikov, “it must be setting a riddle now.” He stood and waited, waited a long time, and the more silent the moon was, the harder his heart pounded, until it even began to hurt. And still silence. Suddenly there was an instantaneous dry crack, as if a splinter of kindling had been broken, and everything went still again. A fly that had woken up suddenly struck the windowpane in mid-flight and buzzed plaintively. At that very moment, in the corner, between a small cupboard and the window, he made out what seemed to be a woman’s cloak hanging on the wall. “Why is there a cloak here?” he thought. “It wasn’t here before…” He went up softly and guessed that someone seemed to be hiding behind the cloak. Carefully he drew the cloak aside with his hand and saw that a chair stood there, and on the chair in the corner sat the little old crone, all hunched over and with her head bent, so that he could not make out her face at all, but it was she. He stood over her: “She’s afraid!” he thought, quietly freed the ax from the loop, and struck the old woman on the crown of the head, once and again. But strange: she did not even stir under the blows, as if she were made of wood. He was frightened, bent closer, and began examining her; but she bent her head still lower. Then he stooped all the way to the floor and looked up into her face from below, looked and went numb with horror: the little old crone was sitting and laughing—simply dissolving in quiet, inaudible laughter, holding herself in with all her might so that he would not hear her. Suddenly it seemed to him that the bedroom door had opened just a crack and that in there too someone seemed to be laughing and whispering. Fury overcame him: with all his strength he began beating the old woman on the head, but with every blow of the ax the laughter and whispering from the bedroom sounded louder and more audible, and the little old crone was simply heaving all over with laughter. He rushed to run away, but the whole entry is already full of people, the doors onto the stairs are wide open, and on the landing, on the stairs, and down below—people everywhere, head to head, all looking—but all hushed and waiting, silent… His heart was constricted, his legs would not move, they had taken root… He wanted to cry out and—woke up.

He drew a heavy breath—but strange, the dream seemed to be still going on: his door was wide open, and on the threshold stood a man entirely unknown to him, studying him intently.

Raskolnikov had not yet fully opened his eyes and instantly closed them again. He lay on his back and did not stir. “Is the dream going on or not,” he thought, and slightly, imperceptibly, raised his lashes again to look: the stranger was standing in the same place and continued to peer at him. Suddenly he stepped carefully over the threshold, cautiously pulled the door to behind him, went up to the table, waited a minute or so—all this time not taking his eyes off him—and quietly, without a sound, sat down on the chair beside the sofa; he set his hat down beside him, on the floor, and leaned with both hands on his cane, resting his chin on his hands. It was plain that he had prepared to wait a long time. As far as could be made out through his blinking lashes, the man was no longer young, thickset, and with a thick, fair, almost white beard…

Some ten minutes passed. It was still light, but evening was coming on. There was complete silence in the room. Not a single sound came even from the stairs. Only some big fly buzzed and beat about, striking the windowpane in mid-flight. At last it became unbearable: Raskolnikov suddenly raised himself and sat up on the sofa.

“Well, speak, what do you want?”

“And I just knew you weren’t asleep, but only pretending,” the stranger answered strangely, laughing calmly. “Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, allow me to introduce myself…”

Notes

1. 1. About 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The Réaumur scale, then usual in Russia, sets water’s freezing point at 0 and its boiling point at 80.

2. 2. Napoleon’s career in brief: the siege of Toulon (1793), the “whiff of grapeshot” against a royalist crowd in Paris (1795), the army abandoned in Egypt (1799), the campaign against Moscow (1812). Fleeing through Vilna after the retreat, he is said to have remarked, “From the sublime to the ridiculous is only a step.”