Part Five · IV

Raskolnikov had been an active and energetic advocate for Sonya against Luzhin, despite the fact that he himself carried so much horror and suffering of his own in his soul. But, having suffered so much that morning, he was as if glad of the chance to change his impressions, which were becoming unbearable, not to mention how much that was personal and heartfelt lay in his urge to stand up for Sonya. Besides, he had before him, and it alarmed him terribly, especially at moments, the coming meeting with Sonya: he had to tell her who had killed Lizaveta, and he foresaw terrible torment for himself, and was as if warding it off with his hands. And so, when he exclaimed, as he left Katerina Ivanovna’s, “Well, what will you say now, Sofya Semyonovna?” he was evidently still in a sort of outwardly excited state of high spirits, defiance, and recent victory over Luzhin. But something strange happened to him. When he reached Kapernaumov’s apartment, he felt a sudden loss of strength, and fear. He stopped before the door in thought, with a strange question: “Must I tell who killed Lizaveta?” The question was strange because he suddenly, at the same time, felt that not only was it impossible not to tell, but it was impossible even to put off that moment, even for a while. He did not yet know why it was impossible; he only felt it, and this tormenting awareness of his powerlessness before necessity almost crushed him. So as not to reason and torment himself any longer, he quickly opened the door and looked at Sonya from the threshold. She was sitting with her elbows on the little table and her face in her hands, but, seeing Raskolnikov, she quickly stood up and came to meet him, as though she had been waiting for him.

“What would have become of me without you!” she said quickly, meeting him in the middle of the room. Evidently this was all she had wanted to tell him as quickly as possible. That was what she had been waiting for.

Raskolnikov went over to the table and sat down on the chair from which she had just risen. She stood before him two steps away, exactly as yesterday.

“Well, Sonya?” he said, and suddenly felt that his voice was trembling. “The whole thing, you see, rested on ‘social position and the habits connected with it.’ Did you understand that, back there?”

Suffering showed in her face.

“Only don’t talk to me the way you did yesterday!” she interrupted him. “Please, don’t start. There’s torment enough as it is…”

She quickly smiled, afraid that he might not like the reproach.

“I was silly to leave there. What’s happening there now? I was just about to go, but I kept thinking that… you’d come by.”

He told her that Amalia Ivanovna was throwing them out of the apartment and that Katerina Ivanovna had run off somewhere “to seek justice.”

“Oh, my God!” Sonya started up. “Let’s go, quickly…”

And she seized her little cape.

“Forever the same thing!” Raskolnikov cried irritably. “They’re all you ever think about! Stay with me.”

“But… Katerina Ivanovna?”

“Katerina Ivanovna, of course, won’t pass you by, she’ll come to you herself, since she’s run out of the house,” he added peevishly. “If she doesn’t find you in, you’ll be the one to blame, you know…”

Sonya sat down on a chair in tormented indecision. Raskolnikov was silent, looking at the floor and thinking something over.

“Let’s suppose Luzhin didn’t want to this time,” he began, without looking at Sonya. “Well, but if he had wanted to, or if it had somehow come into his calculations, he’d have put you away in prison, you know, if Lebezyatnikov and I hadn’t happened to be there! Eh?”

“Yes,” she said in a weak voice. “Yes!” she repeated, absently and in alarm.

“And I really might not have happened to be there! And Lebezyatnikov turned up quite by chance.”

Sonya was silent.

“Well, and if it had been prison, what then? Do you remember what I said yesterday?”

Again she did not answer. He waited.

“And I thought you’d cry out again: ‘Oh, don’t, stop!’” Raskolnikov laughed, but somehow with effort. “What, silence again?” he asked after a minute. “But we have to talk about something, don’t we? Now, what I’d be particularly interested to know is how you would resolve a certain ‘question,’ as Lebezyatnikov says.” (He seemed to be beginning to get confused.) “No, really, I’m serious. Imagine, Sonya, that you had known all of Luzhin’s intentions beforehand, had known (that is, for certain) that through them Katerina Ivanovna would be utterly ruined, and the children too; you as well, into the bargain (since you count yourself as nothing, so into the bargain). Polechka too… because the same road lies ahead for her. Well, ma’am; so here it is: if suddenly all this were now left to your decision: which of them should live in the world, that is, should Luzhin live and do his vile deeds, or should Katerina Ivanovna die? Then how would you decide: which of them is to die? I’m asking you.”

Sonya looked at him uneasily: she heard something peculiar in this unsteady speech, which was edging toward something from far off.

“I had a feeling you’d ask something like that,” she said, looking at him searchingly.

“All right, so be it; but still, how would you decide?”

“Why do you ask about what can’t happen?” Sonya said with revulsion.

“So it’s better for Luzhin to live and do his vile deeds! You didn’t dare decide even that?”

“But I can’t know God’s providence… And why do you ask what mustn’t be asked? Why such empty questions? How could it happen that it should depend on my decision? And who made me a judge here: who is to live, who is not to live?”

“Once God’s providence gets mixed up in it, there’s nothing to be done,” Raskolnikov grumbled sullenly.

“Better tell me straight out what you want!” Sonya cried in anguish. “You’re leading up to something again… Can it be you came only to torment me!”

She could not bear it and suddenly began to cry bitterly. He looked at her in gloomy anguish. About five minutes passed.

“But you’re right, Sonya,” he said quietly at last. He had suddenly changed; his affectedly brazen and feebly defiant tone had vanished. Even his voice suddenly grew weak. “I told you myself yesterday that I wouldn’t come to ask forgiveness, and here I’ve all but begun by asking forgiveness… What I said about Luzhin and providence, I was saying it for myself… That was my asking forgiveness, Sonya…” He tried to smile, but something feeble and unfinished showed in his pale smile. He bowed his head and covered his face with his hands.

And suddenly a strange, unexpected sensation of a sort of caustic hatred for Sonya passed through his heart. As if surprised and frightened himself by this sensation, he suddenly raised his head and looked at her intently; but he met her uneasy and agonizingly solicitous gaze; there was love in it; his hatred vanished like a phantom. It was not that; he had mistaken one feeling for another. It only meant that the moment had come.

Again he covered his face with his hands and bowed his head. Suddenly he turned pale, got up from the chair, looked at Sonya, and, without uttering a word, moved over to sit on her bed.

This moment was terribly like, in his sensation, the one when he had stood behind the old woman, having already freed the ax from the loop, and felt that “not another instant could be lost.”

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Sonya, terribly frightened.

He could not utter a word. He had intended to tell her not at all, not at all in this way, and did not himself understand what was happening to him now. She came over to him quietly, sat down on the bed beside him, and waited, not taking her eyes off him. Her heart was pounding and sinking. It became unbearable: he turned his deathly pale face toward her; his lips twisted helplessly, straining to utter something. Horror passed through Sonya’s heart.

“What’s the matter with you?” she repeated, drawing away from him a little.

“Nothing, Sonya. Don’t be frightened… Nonsense! Really, if you think it over—it’s nonsense,” he muttered with the air of a man in delirium who does not know what he is doing. “Only why have I come to torment you?” he added suddenly, looking at her. “Really. Why? I keep asking myself that question, Sonya…”

He might perhaps have been asking himself this question a quarter of an hour before, but now he said it in utter powerlessness, barely conscious of himself and feeling a continual trembling throughout his whole body.

“Oh, how you’re suffering!” she said with anguish, gazing at him.

“It’s all nonsense!… Listen, Sonya” (for some reason he suddenly smiled, somehow palely and feebly, for about two seconds), “do you remember what I wanted to tell you yesterday?”

Sonya waited uneasily.

“I said, as I was leaving, that perhaps I was saying good-bye to you forever, but that if I came today I would tell you… who killed Lizaveta.”

She suddenly began to tremble all over.

“Well, so I’ve come to tell you.”

“So you really meant it yesterday…” she whispered with difficulty. “How do you know?” she asked quickly, as if suddenly coming to herself.

Sonya began to breathe with difficulty. Her face was growing paler and paler.

“I know.”

She was silent for a minute.

“Have they found him, then?” she asked timidly.

“No, they haven’t.”

“Then how do you know about it?” she asked again, barely audibly, and again almost after a minute’s silence.

He turned to her and looked at her intently, intently.

“Guess,” he said with the same twisted and feeble smile as before.

It was as if convulsions ran through her whole body.

“But you… me… why are you… frightening me like this?” she said, smiling like a child.

“It must mean I’m a great friend of his… since I know,” Raskolnikov went on, still unrelentingly looking into her face, as though he no longer had the strength to take his eyes away. “He didn’t want… to kill this Lizaveta… He killed her… by accident… He wanted to kill the old woman… when she was alone… and he came… And then Lizaveta came in… And then he… killed her too.”

Another terrible minute passed. They both kept looking at each other.

“So you can’t guess?” he asked suddenly, with the sensation of throwing himself down from a bell tower.

“N-no,” Sonya whispered, barely audibly.

“Take a good look.”

And as soon as he said this, again a former, familiar sensation suddenly turned his soul to ice: he was looking at her and suddenly, in her face, he seemed to see the face of Lizaveta. He vividly remembered the expression on Lizaveta’s face when he was coming at her that time with the ax, and she was backing away from him toward the wall, putting her hand out in front of her, with a perfectly childlike fright in her face, exactly like little children when they suddenly begin to be frightened of something, gaze fixedly and uneasily at the thing frightening them, shrink back, and, stretching out a little hand, get ready to cry. Almost the very same thing happened now with Sonya: just as helplessly, with the same fright, she looked at him for some time and suddenly, putting her left hand out in front of her, lightly, ever so slightly, pressed her fingers against his chest and slowly began to rise from the bed, drawing farther and farther away from him, and her gaze on him grew more and more fixed. Her horror suddenly communicated itself to him: exactly the same fright showed in his face too, he too began looking at her in exactly the same way, and almost even with the same childlike smile.

“Have you guessed?” he whispered at last.

“Lord!” A terrible wail broke from her breast. She fell helplessly onto the bed, face down in the pillows. But a moment later she quickly raised herself, quickly moved close to him, seized both his hands, and, squeezing them tightly in her thin fingers, as in a vise, again began staring fixedly into his face, as though glued to it. With this last, desperate look she wanted to search out and catch at least some last hope for herself. But there was no hope; no doubt remained whatever; it was all true! Even later, afterward, when she recalled this moment, she found it both strange and marvelous: why exactly had she seen so at once, then, that there was no longer any doubt? After all, she could not say, for instance, that she had had any presentiment of something of this sort? And yet now, as soon as he told her this, it suddenly seemed to her that she really had somehow had a presentiment of this very thing.

“Enough, Sonya, enough! Don’t torment me!” he begged in anguish.

He had thought to reveal it to her not at all, not at all in this way, but that was how it came out.

As if beside herself, she jumped up and, wringing her hands, went as far as the middle of the room; but she quickly came back and sat down beside him again, almost touching him shoulder to shoulder. Suddenly, as if pierced, she shuddered, cried out, and threw herself on her knees before him, not knowing why herself.

“What have you, what have you done to yourself!” she said desperately, and, jumping up from her knees, she threw herself on his neck, put her arms around him, and held him tightly, tightly.

Raskolnikov drew back and looked at her with a sad smile:

“How strange you are, Sonya—you hug me and kiss me, when I’ve told you about that. You’re beside yourself.”

“No, there’s no one, no one in the whole world unhappier than you now!” she exclaimed as if in a frenzy, not having heard his remark, and suddenly began sobbing as if in hysterics.

A feeling he had long been a stranger to flooded his soul in a wave and softened it all at once. He did not resist it: two tears rolled from his eyes and hung on his lashes.

“So you won’t leave me, Sonya?” he said, looking at her almost with hope.

“No, no; never and nowhere!” Sonya cried. “I’ll follow you, I’ll go everywhere! Oh, Lord!… Oh, how wretched I am!… And why, why didn’t I know you before! Why didn’t you come before? Oh, Lord!”

“Well, I’ve come now.”

“Now! Oh, what’s to be done now!… Together, together!” she repeated as if in oblivion, and embraced him again. “I’ll go to penal servitude with you, together!” He seemed suddenly to wince all over; the former hateful and almost haughty smile was squeezed out onto his lips.

“I, Sonya, may not want to go to penal servitude just yet,” he said.

Sonya glanced at him quickly.

After her first passionate and agonizing sympathy for the unhappy man, the terrible idea of the murder struck her again. In the changed tone of his words she suddenly heard the murderer. She gazed at him in amazement. She knew nothing yet, neither why, nor how, nor for what purpose it had been. Now all these questions flared up at once in her mind. And again she did not believe it: “He, he a murderer! But is that possible?”

“But what is this! Where am I!” she said in deep bewilderment, as though not yet come to herself. “But how could you, you, such a… bring yourself to do it?… But what is this!”

“Well, yes, to rob. Stop it, Sonya!” he answered somehow wearily and even as if with annoyance.

Sonya stood as if stunned, but suddenly cried out:

“You were hungry! you… to help your mother? Yes?”

“No, Sonya, no,” he muttered, turning away and hanging his head. “I wasn’t so hungry… I really did want to help my mother, but… that’s not quite true either… don’t torment me, Sonya!”

Sonya clasped her hands.

“But can it be, can it be that it’s all real! Lord, what kind of truth is this! Who could believe it?… And how, how can you give away your last money, and yet you killed to rob! Ah!…” she cried out suddenly. “That money you gave Katerina Ivanovna… that money… Lord, can it be that money too…”

“No, Sonya,” he interrupted hastily, “that money wasn’t the same, calm yourself! That money my mother sent me, through a certain merchant, and I received it when I was ill, the same day I gave it away… Razumikhin saw… in fact it was he who received it for me… that money was mine, my very own, really mine.”

Sonya listened to him in bewilderment and tried with all her might to make sense of something.

“And that money… I don’t even know, actually, whether there was any money there,” he added quietly and as if lost in thought. “I took a purse off her neck that time, a chamois one… a full, tight-packed purse… but I didn’t look into it; I didn’t have time, I suppose… Well, and the things, some cuff links and chains or other—I buried all those things and the purse under a stone in a strange courtyard on V—— Avenue, the very next morning… It’s all lying there still…”

Sonya was listening with all her might.

“Well, then why… how could you say: to rob, when you didn’t take anything?” she asked quickly, clutching at a straw.

“I don’t know… I haven’t decided yet—whether I’ll take that money or not,” he said, again as if lost in thought, and suddenly, coming to himself, he gave a quick, short laugh. “Eh, what a stupid thing I just blurted out, eh?”

The thought flashed through Sonya’s mind: “Isn’t he mad?” But at once she dismissed it: no, it was something else. She understood nothing, nothing of it!

“You know, Sonya,” he said suddenly with a sort of inspiration, “you know what I’ll tell you: if I had only killed because I was hungry,” he went on, stressing every word and looking at her enigmatically but sincerely, “then I would now be… happy! You should know that!”

“And what is it to you, what is it to you,” he cried a moment later, even with a sort of despair, “well, what is it to you if I did confess just now that I did wrong? Well, what do you want with this stupid triumph over me? Ah, Sonya, is that what I came to you for now!”

Again Sonya was about to say something, but kept silent.

“That’s why I asked you yesterday to come with me, because you’re all I have left.”

“Come where?” Sonya asked timidly.

“Not to steal and not to kill, don’t worry, not for that,” he smiled caustically. “We’re different people… And you know, Sonya, it’s only now, only this minute, that I’ve understood: where was I asking you to come yesterday? And yesterday, when I asked, I didn’t understand myself where. I asked for one thing only, I came for one thing only: that you not leave me. You won’t leave me, Sonya?”

She squeezed his hand.

“And why, why did I tell her, why did I reveal it to her!” he exclaimed in despair a minute later, looking at her with infinite torment. “Here you are waiting for explanations from me, Sonya, you sit and wait, I can see it; and what am I to tell you? You won’t understand anything of it, you’ll only suffer yourself to pieces… because of me! There, you’re crying and hugging me again—now why are you hugging me? Because I couldn’t bear it myself and came to unload it on someone else: ‘You suffer too, it’ll be easier for me!’ And can you love such a scoundrel?”

“But aren’t you suffering too?” cried Sonya.

Again the same feeling flooded his soul in a wave and again softened it for a moment.

“Sonya, I have a wicked heart, take note of that: it can explain a great deal. That’s just why I came, because I’m wicked. There are some who wouldn’t have come. But I’m a coward and… a scoundrel! But… never mind! that’s not it… I must speak now, and I don’t know how to begin…”

He stopped and thought.

“E-eh, we’re different people!” he cried again. “Not a match. And why, why did I come! I’ll never forgive myself for it!”

“No, no, it’s good that you came!” Sonya kept exclaiming. “It’s better that I should know! Much better!”

He looked at her with pain.

“And what if it really is so!” he said, as if he had made up his mind. “That’s just how it was! Here’s the thing: I wanted to become a Napoleon, that’s why I killed… Well, is it clear now?”

“N-no,” Sonya whispered naively and timidly, “only… speak, speak! I’ll understand, I’ll understand it all inside myself!” she implored him. “You’ll understand? Well, all right, we’ll see!”

He fell silent and thought for a long time.

“The thing is this: I once put this question to myself: what if, for instance, Napoleon had happened to be in my place, and he had had, to begin his career, neither Toulon, nor Egypt, nor the crossing of Mont Blanc, but instead of all these beautiful and monumental things there was simply some ridiculous little old woman, a petty registrar’s widow, whom on top of that you had to kill in order to steal her money out of her trunk (for the career, you understand?), well, would he have brought himself to do it, if there had been no other way out? Wouldn’t he have winced because it was much too unmonumental and… and sinful? Well, I tell you that I tormented myself terribly long over that ‘question,’ so that I felt terribly ashamed when at last I realized (somehow suddenly) that not only would he not have winced, but it would not even have entered his head that it was unmonumental… and he wouldn’t even have understood at all: what is there to wince at? And if only there had been no other road for him, he would have strangled her without letting her make a squeak, without any brooding!… Well, and I too… stopped brooding… strangled her… following the example of an authority… And that is exactly how it was! You find it funny? Yes, Sonya, the funniest thing here is that maybe that’s exactly how it was…”

Sonya did not find it funny at all.

“Better tell me straight out… without examples,” she begged still more timidly and barely audibly.

He turned to her, looked at her sadly, and took her hands.

“You’re right again, Sonya. That’s all nonsense, after all, almost nothing but chatter! You see: you know, don’t you, that my mother has almost nothing. My sister received an education, by chance, and is doomed to drag around as a governess. All their hopes were in me alone. I was studying, but I couldn’t support myself at the university and was forced to leave for a time. Even if it had dragged on like that, in ten or twelve years (if circumstances turned out well) I could still hope to become some sort of teacher or official, with a salary of a thousand roubles…” (He spoke as if reciting something learned by heart.) “And by that time my mother would have withered away from worry and grief, and I still wouldn’t have managed to give her peace, and my sister… well, something even worse might have happened to my sister!… And who wants to pass by everything all his life and turn away from everything, forget about his mother, and, for instance, bear the insult to his sister respectfully? What for? So as to bury them and acquire new ones—a wife and children—and then leave them too without a kopeck and without a crust? Well… well, so I decided to take possession of the old woman’s money and use it for my first years, without tormenting my mother, to keep myself at the university, for my first steps after the university—and to do all this broadly, radically, so as to set up a whole new career and set out on a new, independent road… Well… well, that’s all… Well, of course, killing the old woman—that was a bad thing I did… well, and that’s enough!”

In a sort of powerlessness he dragged himself to the end of his story and hung his head.

“Oh, that’s not it, not it,” Sonya exclaimed in anguish. “And how can anyone… no, it’s not so, not so!”

“You see yourself that it’s not so!… And yet I told it sincerely, the truth!”

“What kind of truth is that! Oh, Lord!”

“I only killed a louse, Sonya, a useless, nasty, harmful louse.”

“A human being—a louse!”

“But I know myself that it’s not a louse,” he answered, looking at her strangely. “Anyway, I’m lying, Sonya,” he added. “I’ve been lying for a long time… That’s all not it; you’re right to say so. There are quite, quite, quite different reasons here!… I haven’t talked with anyone for a long time, Sonya… My head aches badly now.”

His eyes were burning with a feverish fire. He was almost beginning to rave; an uneasy smile wandered on his lips. Through his excited state of mind a terrible powerlessness was already showing. Sonya understood how he was suffering. Her head too was beginning to spin. And he spoke so strangely: as though something could be understood, and yet… “and yet how can it be! How can it be! Oh, Lord!” And she wrung her hands in despair.

“No, Sonya, that’s not it!” he began again, suddenly raising his head, as if a sudden turn of thought had struck him and roused him again. “That’s not it! Better… suppose (yes! that really is better!), suppose that I’m vain, envious, spiteful, vile, vindictive, well… and, perhaps, inclined to madness as well. (Let it all come at once! They’ve talked about madness before, I’ve noticed!) I told you just now that I couldn’t support myself at the university. But do you know that perhaps I could have? My mother would have sent me money for the fees, and for boots, clothes, and bread I could have earned it myself; surely! Lessons were turning up; they offered fifty kopecks a lesson. Razumikhin works, doesn’t he! But I turned spiteful and didn’t want to. Spiteful, exactly (that’s a good word!). I hid away in my corner then like a spider. You’ve been in my kennel, you’ve seen it… And do you know, Sonya, that low ceilings and cramped rooms cramp the soul and the mind! Oh, how I hated that kennel! And still I didn’t want to leave it. Didn’t want to on purpose! I didn’t go out for days at a time, and I didn’t want to work, and I didn’t even want to eat, I just kept lying there. If Nastasya brought something, I’d eat; if she didn’t, the day would pass like that; I didn’t ask on purpose, out of spite! At night there was no light, I’d lie in the dark, and I wouldn’t earn money for candles. I ought to have been studying, but I sold my books; and on my table, on my notes and notebooks, there’s a finger’s depth of dust even now. I preferred lying and thinking. And I kept thinking… And I had such dreams all the time, strange dreams, all sorts of them, no point saying what! But it was only then that I began to imagine that… No, that’s not how it was! Again I’m not telling it right! You see, I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid, and if I know for certain that they are stupid, I don’t want to be cleverer myself? Then I learned, Sonya, that if you wait for everyone to become clever, it will take much too long… Then I learned besides that it will never happen, that people won’t change, and no one can remake them, and it isn’t worth wasting the effort! Yes, that’s so! That’s their law… Law, Sonya! That’s so!… And now I know, Sonya, that whoever is strong and powerful in mind and spirit is their master! Whoever dares much is right in their eyes. Whoever can spit on the most is their lawgiver, and whoever can dare more than anyone is the most right of all! So it has gone up to now, and so it will always be! Only a blind man can’t see it!”

As he said this, Raskolnikov, though he was looking at Sonya, no longer cared whether she would understand or not. The fever had taken full hold of him. He was in a sort of gloomy rapture. (Indeed, he had not talked with anyone for too long!) Sonya understood that this gloomy catechism had become his faith and law.

“I realized then, Sonya,” he went on rapturously, “that power is given only to the one who dares to bend down and pick it up. There’s only one thing here, one thing: you have only to dare! A thought came to me then, for the first time in my life, which no one had ever thought of before me! No one! It suddenly became clear to me as the sun: how is it that not a single person until now has dared or dares, passing by all this absurdity, simply to take it all by the tail and shake it off to the devil! I… I wanted to dare, and I killed… I only wanted to dare, Sonya, that’s the whole reason!”

“Oh, be quiet, be quiet!” cried Sonya, clasping her hands. “You turned away from God, and God has struck you, given you over to the devil!…”

“By the way, Sonya, when I was lying in the dark and kept imagining all this, that was the devil leading me astray? eh?”

“Be quiet! Don’t laugh, you blasphemer, you understand nothing, nothing! Oh, Lord! He won’t understand anything, anything at all!”

“Hush, Sonya, I’m not laughing at all, I know myself that the devil was dragging me. Hush, Sonya, hush!” he repeated gloomily and insistently. “I know everything. I’ve thought it all over and whispered it all to myself, when I was lying there in the dark… I’ve argued it all out with myself, down to the last smallest detail, and I know everything, everything! And I was so sick, so sick then of all this chatter! I wanted to forget everything and begin anew, Sonya, and stop chattering! And can you really think I went like a fool, headlong? I went like a clever man, and that is just what ruined me! And can you really think I didn’t know, for instance, at least this much, that if I had begun to ask and question myself: have I the right to have power?—then, consequently, I have no right to have power. Or that if I put the question: is a human being a louse?—then, consequently, a human being is no longer a louse for me, but a louse for the one to whom it never even occurs and who goes straight ahead without questions… If I tormented myself so many days: would Napoleon have gone or not?—then I must have felt clearly that I was not Napoleon… All, all the torment of all this chatter I endured, Sonya, and I wanted to shake it all off my shoulders: I wanted, Sonya, to kill without casuistry, to kill for myself, for myself alone! I didn’t want to lie about it even to myself! It wasn’t to help my mother that I killed—nonsense! It wasn’t so as to get means and power and become a benefactor of mankind that I killed. Nonsense! I simply killed; I killed for myself, for myself alone: and whether I would then become anyone’s benefactor, or spend my whole life like a spider catching everyone in my web and sucking the living juices out of them, at that moment it must have been all the same to me!… And it wasn’t money, above all, that I needed, Sonya, when I killed; it wasn’t money so much that I needed as something else… I know all that now… Understand me: perhaps, going the same road, I would never have repeated the murder again. I needed to find out something else, something else was pushing me on: I needed to find out then, and find out quickly, whether I was a louse like everyone, or a man? Would I be able to step over, or would I not! Would I dare to bend down and pick it up, or not? Am I a trembling creature, or do I have the right…”

“To kill? You have the right to kill?” Sonya clasped her hands.

“E-eh, Sonya!” he cried out irritably, was about to retort something, but fell contemptuously silent. “Don’t interrupt me, Sonya! I only wanted to prove one thing to you: that the devil dragged me there then, and only afterward explained to me that I had no right to go there, because I am exactly the same kind of louse as everyone else! He made a fool of me, and so I’ve come to you now! Receive your guest! If I weren’t a louse, would I have come to you? Listen: when I went to the old woman that time, I only went to try… You may as well know it!”

“And you killed! You killed!”

“But how did I kill? Is that how people kill? Is that how people go to kill, the way I went then! I’ll tell you sometime how I went… Did I kill the old woman? I killed myself, not the old woman! There I went and did myself in, at one stroke, forever!… And it was the devil who killed that old woman, not I… Enough, enough, Sonya, enough! Leave me alone,” he cried suddenly in convulsive anguish, “leave me alone!”

He leaned his elbows on his knees and squeezed his head between his palms as if in a vise.

“Such suffering!” a tormented wail broke from Sonya.

“Well, what’s to be done now, tell me!” he asked, suddenly raising his head and looking at her with a face hideously distorted by despair.

“What’s to be done!” she exclaimed, suddenly jumping up from her place, and her eyes, until then full of tears, suddenly flashed. “Stand up!” (She seized him by the shoulder; he raised himself, looking at her almost in amazement.) “Go now, this very minute, stand at the crossroads, bow down, first kiss the earth that you have defiled, and then bow to the whole world, to all four sides, and say to everyone, aloud: ‘I have killed!’ Then God will send you life again. Will you go? Will you go?” she kept asking him, trembling all over as if in a fit, seizing both his hands, squeezing them tightly in her own, and looking at him with a fiery gaze.

He was amazed and even struck by her sudden ecstasy.

“You mean penal servitude, Sonya? I must give myself up, is that it?” he asked gloomily.

“Accept suffering and redeem yourself by it, that’s what you must do.”

“No! I won’t go to them, Sonya.”

“But how will you live, how will you live? What will you live with?” Sonya kept exclaiming. “How is that possible now? Well, how will you talk to your mother? (Oh, and them, what will become of them now!) But what am I saying! You’ve already abandoned your mother and sister. You have, you’ve already abandoned them, abandoned them. Oh, Lord!” she cried out. “He knows all this himself already! Well, how, how can you live without a single human being! What will become of you now!”

“Don’t be a child, Sonya,” he said quietly. “What am I guilty of before them? Why should I go? What will I tell them? It’s all only a phantom… They themselves destroy people by the millions, and even think it a virtue. They’re rogues and scoundrels, Sonya!… I won’t go. And what will I say: that I killed but didn’t dare take the money, hid it under a stone?” he added with a caustic grin. “Why, they’ll laugh at me themselves, they’ll say: a fool, not to take it. A coward and a fool! They won’t understand anything, anything, Sonya, and they aren’t worthy to understand. Why should I go? I won’t go. Don’t be a child, Sonya…”

“You’ll be tormented, you’ll be tormented,” she kept repeating, stretching her hands out to him in desperate entreaty.

“Maybe I’ve slandered myself,” he remarked gloomily, as if lost in thought. “Maybe I’m still a man and not a louse, and I was in too much of a hurry to condemn myself… I’ll put up a fight yet.”

A haughty grin was being squeezed out onto his lips.

“To carry such torment! And for a whole life, a whole life!…”

“I’ll get used to it…” he said sullenly and thoughtfully. “Listen,” he began after a minute, “stop crying, it’s time to talk business: I came to tell you that they’re looking for me now, hunting me…”

“Ah!” Sonya cried out in fright.

“Well, why did you cry out! You want me to go to penal servitude yourself, and now you’re frightened? Only here’s the thing: I won’t give myself up to them. I’ll fight them yet, and they won’t be able to do anything. They have no real evidence. Yesterday I was in great danger and thought I was already lost; but today things have mended. All their evidence cuts both ways, that is, I can turn their accusations to my own advantage, you understand? and I will; because I’ve learned how now… But they’ll certainly put me in prison. If it weren’t for a certain chance, they might have put me there today, certainly even, maybe they’ll still put me there today… Only that doesn’t matter, Sonya: I’ll sit there a while, and they’ll let me out… because they haven’t a single real proof and won’t have, I give you my word. And with what they have you can’t put a man away. Well, enough… I only wanted you to know… With my sister and mother I’ll try somehow to manage things so as to reassure them and not frighten them… My sister is provided for now, I think, anyway… and so my mother is too… Well, that’s all. Be careful, though. Will you come to visit me in prison, when I’m in there?”

“Oh, I will! I will!”

They both sat side by side, sad and crushed, as if they had been cast up alone after a storm on an empty shore. He looked at Sonya and felt how much of her love was upon him, and strangely, it suddenly became heavy and painful to him to be loved so. Yes, it was a strange and terrible sensation! On his way to Sonya he had felt that all his hope and all his way out lay in her; he had thought to lay down at least part of his torments, and suddenly, now, when her whole heart had turned to him, he suddenly felt and realized that he had become incomparably more unhappy than he had been before.

“Sonya,” he said, “better not come to see me when I’m in prison.”

Sonya did not answer; she was crying. Several minutes passed.

“Are you wearing a cross?” she suddenly asked, unexpectedly, as if she had suddenly remembered.

At first he did not understand the question.

“No, you’re not, are you? Here, take this one, the cypress-wood one. I have another left, a copper one, Lizaveta’s. Lizaveta and I exchanged crosses, she gave me her cross, and I gave her my little icon. I’ll wear Lizaveta’s now, and this one is for you. Take it… it’s mine! It’s mine!” she implored. “We’ll go to suffer together, so together we’ll bear the cross!…”

“Give it to me!” said Raskolnikov. He did not want to upset her. But at once he drew back the hand he had stretched out for the cross.

“Not now, Sonya. Better later,” he added, to calm her.

“Yes, yes, better, better,” she caught him up eagerly. “When you go to your suffering, you’ll put it on then. You’ll come to me, I’ll put it on you, we’ll pray, and we’ll go.”

At that moment someone knocked three times at the door.

“Sofya Semyonovna, may I come in?” came a very familiar polite voice.

Sonya rushed to the door in fright. The fair-haired physiognomy of Mr. Lebezyatnikov peeped into the room.