Part Six · VI

He spent that whole evening until ten o’clock in various taverns and dives, moving from one to the next. Katya too turned up somewhere, and again sang another lackey’s song, about how someone, “a scoundrel and a tyrant,”

Began to kiss Katya.

Svidrigailov treated them all to drink: Katya, and the organ-grinder, and the singers, and the waiters, and two little clerks of some sort. He had taken up with these clerks, as a matter of fact, because both of them had crooked noses: one nose went crooked to the right, and the other to the left. This struck Svidrigailov. They finally drew him off to some pleasure garden, where he paid for them and for the entrance. In this garden there was one spindly little fir tree, three years old, and three bushes. Besides that, a “Vauxhall” had been built, in essence a drinking house, though you could also get tea there, and in addition there were a few green tables and chairs. A chorus of bad singers and some drunken Munich German, a sort of clown, with a red nose but for some reason extremely melancholy, entertained the public. The clerks quarreled with some other clerks and were about to start a fight. They chose Svidrigailov as judge. He had been judging them for a quarter of an hour already, but they shouted so that there was not the slightest possibility of making anything out. The likeliest thing was that one of them had stolen something and had even managed to sell it on the spot to some Jew who happened to be there; but, having sold it, he did not want to share with his comrade. It turned out in the end that the object sold was a teaspoon belonging to the Vauxhall. At the Vauxhall they missed it, and the business was beginning to assume troublesome proportions. Svidrigailov paid for the spoon, got up, and left the garden. It was about ten o’clock. He himself had not drunk a single drop of wine the whole time, and had only asked for tea at the Vauxhall, and that more for form’s sake. The evening, meanwhile, was stifling and gloomy. Toward ten o’clock terrible storm clouds had moved in from all sides; thunder broke, and the rain came pouring down like a waterfall. The water fell not in drops but lashed the ground in whole streams. Lightning flashed every minute, and you could count to five during each glare. Soaked through to the skin, he reached home, locked himself in, opened his bureau, took out all his money, and tore up two or three papers. Then, thrusting the money into his pocket, he was about to change his clothes, but, looking out the window and listening to the storm and the rain, he gave it up with a wave of his hand, took his hat, and went out without locking the apartment. He went straight to Sonya. She was at home.

She was not alone; around her were the four little children of Kapernaumov. Sofya Semyonovna was giving them tea. She met Svidrigailov silently and respectfully, looked over his soaked clothes with surprise, but did not say a word. The children all ran away at once in indescribable terror.

Svidrigailov sat down at the table and asked Sonya to sit beside him. She timidly prepared to listen.

“I, Sofya Semyonovna, may be going to America,” said Svidrigailov, “and since we are probably seeing each other for the last time, I’ve come to make a few arrangements. Well, did you see that lady today? I know what she told you, no need to repeat it.” (Sonya made a movement and blushed.) “Those people have a certain cast of mind. As for your little sisters and your little brother, they really are provided for, and the money due to them I have paid in for each one, against receipts, where it should go, into safe hands. You had better take these receipts yourself, though, just in case. Here, take them! Well, sir, now that’s done. Here are three five-percent bonds, three thousand in all. These you take for yourself, for yourself alone, and let it stay between us, so that nobody knows, whatever you may hear. You’ll need them, because, Sofya Semyonovna, to live the way you have been is vile, and besides, there is no more need for it.”

“I’m so beholden to you, sir, and the orphans too, sir, and the one who passed away,” Sonya hurried to say, “that if so far I’ve thanked you so little, then… don’t think…”

“Oh, enough, enough.”

“But this money, Arkady Ivanovich, I’m very grateful to you, but I really don’t need it now. I can always feed myself alone, don’t take it for ingratitude: if you’re so charitable, then this money, sir…”

“It’s for you, for you, Sofya Semyonovna, and please, no special discussions, because I haven’t even got the time. And you will need it. Rodion Romanovich has two roads: either a bullet in the brain, or the Vladimirka road to Siberia.” (Sonya looked at him wildly and began to tremble.) “Don’t worry, I know everything, from him himself, and I’m no chatterbox; I won’t tell anyone. You taught him well that time, to go and give himself up and tell. It will be much more to his advantage. Well, when it comes to the Vladimirka, he goes down it, and you after him, surely? Isn’t that so? Isn’t it? Well, and if so, that means money will be needed. Needed for him, you understand? Giving it to you, it’s all the same as giving it to him. Besides, you promised to pay Amalia Ivanovna’s debt too; I heard it, you know. Why is it, Sofya Semyonovna, that you take all these contracts and obligations on yourself so thoughtlessly? It was Katerina Ivanovna who owed that German woman, not you, so you ought to spit on the German woman. You won’t get through life that way. Well, sir, if anyone should ever ask you, say tomorrow or the day after, about me or concerning me (and they will ask you), then don’t mention that I came to see you just now, and on no account show the money or tell anyone that I gave it to you. Well, now goodbye.” (He got up from the chair.) “My regards to Rodion Romanych. By the way: why don’t you keep the money for the time being with Mr. Razumikhin, say. Do you know Mr. Razumikhin? Of course you do. He’s a so-so sort of fellow. Take it to him tomorrow or… when the time comes. And until then hide it well away.”

Sonya also jumped up from her chair and looked at him in fright. She very much wanted to say something, to ask something, but for the first moments she did not dare, and did not know how to begin.

“How can you… how can you, sir, go out now in such rain?”

“Well, setting off for America and being afraid of rain, heh-heh! Goodbye, my dear Sofya Semyonovna! Live, and live long, you’ll be of use to others. By the way… tell Mr. Razumikhin that I send him my regards. Put it just like that: Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, say, sends his regards. Be sure to.”

He went out, leaving Sonya in amazement, in fright, and in some vague and heavy suspicion.

It turned out afterward that on that same evening, after eleven, he paid yet another highly eccentric and unexpected visit. The rain still had not stopped. Wet all over, he walked in at twenty past eleven to the cramped little apartment of his fiancée’s parents on Vasilyevsky Island, on the Third Line, at Maly Avenue. He had a hard time getting them to open and at first caused a great commotion; but Arkady Ivanovich, when he wanted, was a man of extremely charming manners, so that the initial (though, for that matter, extremely shrewd) surmise of the fiancée’s prudent parents, that Arkady Ivanovich had probably got himself so drunk somewhere that he no longer knew what he was doing, at once collapsed of itself. The paralyzed parent was wheeled out in his armchair to Arkady Ivanovich by the fiancée’s tenderhearted and prudent mother, who, as was her custom, at once proceeded to certain remote questions. (This woman never asked direct questions, but always brought into play first smiles and the rubbing of hands, and then, if something had to be found out for certain and without fail, for example, when Arkady Ivanovich would be pleased to set the date of the wedding, she would begin with the most curious and almost greedy questions about Paris and court life there, and only afterward would she arrive, in due order, at the Third Line of Vasilyevsky Island.) At another time all this would of course have inspired much respect, but this time Arkady Ivanovich proved somehow especially impatient and flatly insisted on seeing his fiancée, although he had been informed at the very beginning that she had already gone to bed. Of course, the fiancée appeared. Arkady Ivanovich told her straight out that he had to leave Petersburg for a time on account of a certain very important circumstance, and that he had therefore brought her fifteen thousand roubles in silver, in various bonds, asking her to accept them from him as a present, since he had long been meaning to give her this trifle before the wedding. No particular logical connection between the present and the immediate departure, and the absolute necessity of coming for that purpose in the rain and at midnight, was of course in the least revealed by these explanations, but the affair nonetheless went off very smoothly. Even the requisite ohs and ahs, questions and amazement became somehow suddenly unusually moderate and restrained; on the other hand, the gratitude shown was of the most ardent kind and was even reinforced by the tears of the most prudent mother. Arkady Ivanovich got up, laughed, kissed his fiancée, patted her on the cheek, confirmed that he would be back soon, and, noticing in her eyes a childish curiosity, to be sure, but along with it some very serious, mute question, thought a moment, kissed her a second time, and at once sincerely regretted in his heart that the present would go straight under lock and key for safekeeping by the most prudent of mothers. He went out, leaving them all in an unusually excited state. But the tenderhearted mama at once, in a half whisper and a patter, resolved certain of the most important perplexities, namely, that Arkady Ivanovich was a great man, a man of affairs and connections, a rich man, God knows what he had in his head, he took a notion and went off, he took a notion and gave away money, and so there was nothing to wonder at. Of course, it was strange that he was all wet, but the English, for example, are even more eccentric, and all these people of high tone pay no attention to what is said about them and don’t stand on ceremony. Perhaps he even goes about like that on purpose, to show that he is afraid of no one. And the main thing, not a word about it to anyone, because God knows what may still come of it, and the money under lock and key as soon as possible, and, of course, the best thing in all this is that Fedosya stayed in the kitchen the whole time, and the main thing, on no account, no account, no account must anything be told to that sly baggage Resslich, and so on, and so on. They sat whispering until about two o’clock. The fiancée, however, went to bed much earlier, surprised and a little sad.

Meanwhile Svidrigailov, at precisely midnight, was crossing the ——kov Bridge in the direction of the Petersburg Side. The rain had stopped, but the wind was roaring. He was beginning to shiver, and for a minute he looked at the black water of the Little Neva with a sort of peculiar curiosity, and even with a question. But soon it seemed to him very cold to stand over the water; he turned and went toward ——oy Avenue. He strode along the endless ——oy Avenue for a very long time, almost half an hour, more than once stumbling in the dark on the wooden pavement, but he did not stop searching with curiosity for something along the right-hand side of the avenue. Somewhere here, already at the end of the avenue, he had noticed, while driving past not long ago, a hotel, wooden but spacious, and its name, as far as he remembered, was something like the Adrianople. He was not mistaken in his calculations: in such a backwater this hotel was so conspicuous a point that there was no possibility of not finding it, even in the dark. It was a long, blackened wooden building in which, despite the late hour, lights were still burning and a certain liveliness could be observed. He went in and asked a ragged fellow he met in the corridor for a room. The ragged fellow, looking Svidrigailov over, shook himself and at once led him to a remote room, stuffy and cramped, somewhere at the very end of the corridor, in a corner, under the stairs. But there was no other; all were taken. The ragged fellow looked at him questioningly.

“Is there tea?” asked Svidrigailov.

“That can be done, sir.”

“What else is there?”

“Veal, sir, vodka, sir, snacks, sir.”

“Bring veal and tea.”

“And nothing else will be wanted?” the ragged fellow asked, even in some perplexity.

“Nothing, nothing!”

The ragged fellow withdrew, thoroughly disappointed.

“It must be a fine place,” thought Svidrigailov, “how is it I didn’t know it? I too probably look like someone coming back from some café-chantant who has already had an incident on the way. But it is curious all the same: who stops here and spends the night?”

He lit a candle and examined the room in more detail. It was a little cubbyhole so small that it was hardly high enough even for Svidrigailov, with one window; a very dirty bed, a plain painted table, and a chair took up almost all the space. The walls looked as if they had been knocked together from boards, with shabby wallpaper so dusty and torn that its color (yellow) could still be guessed, but no pattern could be made out at all. One part of the wall and ceiling was cut off at a slant, as is usual in attics, but here the stairs ran above this slope. Svidrigailov set down the candle, sat on the bed, and fell to thinking. But a strange and incessant whispering, rising at times almost to a shout, in the neighboring cubbyhole, finally attracted his attention. This whispering had not stopped from the moment he came in. He listened: someone was abusing and all but tearfully reproaching another, but only one voice could be heard. Svidrigailov got up, shaded the candle with his hand, and at once a little crack gleamed in the wall; he went up to it and began to look. In the room, somewhat larger than his own, there were two guests. One of them, without his frock coat, with an extremely curly head and a red, inflamed face, stood in an orator’s pose, legs apart to keep his balance, and, beating his breast with his hand, was pathetically reproaching the other for being a beggar and not even having any rank to his name, saying that he had pulled him out of the mud and could throw him out whenever he liked, and that all this was seen by the finger of the Most High alone. The friend being reproached sat on a chair and had the look of a man who very much wants to sneeze but cannot possibly manage it. Now and then he glanced at the orator with a sheep-like, bleary look, but clearly had no idea what was being talked about and could hardly have heard anything at all. On the table a candle was burning down; there stood an almost empty decanter of vodka, wineglasses, bread, glasses, cucumbers, and dishes with tea long since drunk. Having examined this picture attentively, Svidrigailov walked away from the crack with indifference and sat down on the bed again.

The ragged fellow, coming back with the tea and the veal, could not refrain from asking once more, “Wouldn’t something else be wanted?” and, having again heard the answer no, withdrew for good. Svidrigailov fell upon the tea to warm himself and drank a glass, but he could not eat a bite, having completely lost his appetite. A fever was evidently beginning in him. He took off his overcoat and his jacket, wrapped himself in the blanket, and lay down on the bed. He was annoyed: “It would be better to be healthy this time, all the same,” he thought, and grinned. The room was stuffy, the candle burned dimly, outside the wind was roaring, somewhere in a corner a mouse was scratching, and the whole room seemed to smell of mice and of something leathery. He lay as if dreaming: thought followed thought. It seemed that he would very much have liked to fasten his imagination on something, anything, in particular. “There must be some sort of garden under the window,” he thought, “the trees are rustling; how I dislike the noise of trees at night, in a storm and in the dark, a nasty sensation!” And he recalled how, passing Petrovsky Park earlier, he had thought of it even with loathing. Here he recalled, while he was at it, the ——kov Bridge too, and the Little Neva, and again he felt somehow cold, as he had earlier, standing over the water. “Never in my life have I liked water, not even in landscapes,” he thought again, and suddenly grinned again at a strange thought: “Here, you’d think, all this aesthetics and comfort ought to be all the same to me now, and yet this is just when I’ve become particular, like an animal that always chooses its place… on a similar occasion. I really ought to have turned off to Petrovsky earlier! It looked dark, I suppose, cold, heh! heh! I almost wanted pleasant sensations!… By the way, why don’t I put out the candle? (He blew it out.) The neighbors have gone to bed,” he thought, not seeing any light in the crack from before. “Well now, Marfa Petrovna, now would be the time for you to pay a call, it’s dark, and the place is suitable, and the moment is original. And yet it’s just now that you won’t come…”

For some reason he suddenly remembered how earlier, an hour before carrying out his design on Dunechka, he had recommended to Raskolnikov that he entrust her to Razumikhin’s protection. “In fact, I may have said it more to egg myself on, as Raskolnikov guessed. But what a rogue that Raskolnikov is, all the same! He’s hauled a lot on his back. He may be a big rogue in time, when the nonsense has jumped out of him, but right now he wants to live too much! On this point that kind of people are scoundrels. Well, the devil take him, let him do as he likes, what is it to me.”

He still could not sleep. Little by little the image of Dunechka from earlier began to rise before him, and suddenly a shudder went through his body. “No, I must drop that now,” he thought, coming to himself, “I must think about something else. It’s strange and funny: I’ve never had great hatred for anyone, never even especially wanted revenge, and that is a bad sign, a bad sign! I never liked to argue either, and never got heated, a bad sign too! And how much I promised her earlier, pah, the devil! And yet she might have ground me down somehow, perhaps…” Again he fell silent and clenched his teeth: again the image of Dunechka appeared before him exactly as she had been when, having fired the first time, she was terribly frightened, lowered the revolver, and, deathly pale, looked at him, so that he could have seized her twice over, and she would not have raised a hand in defense if he himself had not reminded her. He remembered how at that instant he had felt something like pity for her, as if his heart had been squeezed… “Eh! To the devil! These thoughts again, I must drop it all, drop it!…”

He was already dozing off; the feverish shivering was subsiding; suddenly something seemed to run under the blanket over his arm and his leg. He started: “Pah, the devil, why, I do believe that’s a mouse!” he thought. “It’s that I left the veal on the table…” He terribly did not want to uncover himself, get up, get cold, but suddenly something again brushed unpleasantly against his leg; he tore off the blanket and lit the candle. Shaking with feverish chill, he bent to examine the bed: there was nothing; he shook the blanket, and suddenly a mouse jumped out onto the sheet. He rushed to catch it; but the mouse did not run off the bed, but darted in zigzags in all directions, slipped out from under his fingers, ran over his hand, and suddenly dived under the pillow; he threw off the pillow, but in an instant felt something jump inside the front of his shirt, scrabbling over his body, and already behind, on his back, under his shirt. He shook nervously and woke up. The room was dark, he was lying on the bed, wrapped as before in the blanket, the wind was howling under the window. “What filth!” he thought with vexation.

He got up and sat on the edge of the bed, his back to the window. “Better not to sleep at all,” he decided. It was cold and damp from the window, however; without getting up he pulled the blanket over himself and wrapped himself in it. He did not light the candle. He was not thinking about anything, and did not want to think; but daydreams rose one after another, fragments of thoughts flashed by, without beginning or end and without connection. It was as if he were falling into a half doze. Whether it was the cold, or the dark, or the damp, or the wind that howled under the window and shook the trees, something called up in him a sort of stubborn, fantastic inclination and desire, but he kept picturing flowers. He imagined a lovely landscape; a bright, warm, almost hot day, a holiday, Trinity Sunday. A rich, luxurious country cottage in the English taste, all overgrown with fragrant beds of flowers, with borders planted around the whole house; a porch twined with climbing plants and set with banks of roses; a bright, cool staircase laid with a luxurious carpet and lined with rare flowers in Chinese pots. He particularly noticed, in jars of water on the windowsills, bouquets of white and delicate narcissus bending on their bright green, fat, and long stems, with a strong aromatic scent. He did not even want to move away from them, but he went up the stairs and entered a large, high hall, and again here too, everywhere, by the windows, by the doors standing open onto the terrace, on the terrace itself, everywhere there were flowers. The floors were strewn with fresh-mown fragrant grass, the windows were open, fresh, light, cool air came into the room, little birds chirped under the windows, and in the middle of the hall, on tables covered with white satin cloths, stood a coffin. This coffin was upholstered in white gros de Naples and trimmed with thick white ruching. Garlands of flowers twined around it on all sides. All in flowers, there lay in it a girl, in a white tulle dress, her hands folded and pressed to her breast, as if carved from marble. But her loose hair, the hair of a light blonde, was wet; a wreath of roses was wound around her head. The stern and already stiffened profile of her face was also as if carved from marble, but the smile on her pale lips was full of some unchildlike, boundless sorrow and great lament. Svidrigailov knew this girl; there was no icon and no lighted candles by this coffin, and no prayers could be heard. This girl was a suicide: she had drowned herself. She was only fourteen, but hers was already a broken heart, and it had destroyed itself, wounded by an outrage that had horrified and amazed this young, childish consciousness, had flooded her angelically pure soul with undeserved shame, and had torn from her a last cry of despair, not heard, but brazenly outraged on a dark night, in the gloom, in the cold, in the damp thaw, when the wind was howling…

Svidrigailov came to himself, got up from the bed, and stepped to the window. He found the latch by feel and opened the window. The wind rushed furiously into his cramped closet and seemed to plaster his face, and his chest covered only by his shirt, with frosty rime. Under the window there really must have been something like a garden, and, it seemed, a pleasure garden too; probably in the daytime singers sang here as well and tea was carried out to little tables. But now spray flew in at the window from the trees and bushes, it was dark as a cellar, so that you could barely make out only some dark patches that marked objects. Svidrigailov, bending over and leaning his elbows on the sill, had been looking into this murk for five minutes already without tearing himself away. Amid the gloom and the night a cannon shot rang out, then another.

“Ah, the signal! The water is rising,” he thought. “By morning it will pour into the streets, where the ground is lower, it will flood the basements and cellars, the basement rats will float up, and amid the rain and wind people will begin, cursing, wet, to drag their rubbish up to the upper floors… And what time is it now?” And no sooner had he thought it than somewhere close by, ticking and as if hurrying with all its might, a wall clock struck three. “Aha, why, in an hour it will be getting light! Why wait? I’ll go out now, go straight to Petrovsky: there somewhere I’ll pick a big bush all drenched with rain, so that you barely brush it with your shoulder and millions of drops shower your whole head…” He moved away from the window, shut it, lit the candle, pulled on his waistcoat and overcoat, put on his hat, and went out with the candle into the corridor, to find the ragged fellow, who was sleeping somewhere in a closet among all sorts of junk and candle ends, settle up with him for the room, and leave the hotel. “The very best moment, you couldn’t choose a better!”

He walked for a long time along the whole long and narrow corridor without finding anyone, and was about to call out loudly, when suddenly in a dark corner, between an old cupboard and a door, he made out a strange object, something seemingly alive. He bent down with the candle and saw a child, a girl of about five, no more, in a little dress soaked like a floor rag, shivering and crying. She did not seem to be afraid of Svidrigailov, but looked at him in dull surprise with her big black eyes and sobbed now and then, as children do who have cried for a long time but have already stopped and are even consoled, and yet every so often suddenly sob again. The little girl’s face was pale and worn out; she was stiff with cold, but “how did she get here? She must have hidden here and not slept all night.” He began to question her. The little girl suddenly revived and quickly, quickly began to babble something to him in her child’s language. There was something about “mummy” and that “mummy would whip her,” about some cup that she had “bwoke” (broken). The little girl talked without stopping; somehow it could be guessed from all this account that she was an unloved child, whom her mother, some eternally drunk cook, probably from this same hotel, had beaten and frightened; that the girl had broken her mama’s cup and was so frightened that she had run away in the evening; had probably hidden for a long time somewhere in the yard, in the rain, and finally had crept in here, hidden behind the cupboard, and sat here in the corner all night, crying, shivering from the damp, from the dark, and from fear that she would now be beaten hard for all of it. He took her in his arms, went to his room, sat her on the bed, and began to undress her. Her little shoes, full of holes, on her bare feet, were as wet as if they had lain in a puddle all night. Having undressed her, he laid her on the bed, covered her, and wrapped her up in the blanket entirely, head and all. She fell asleep at once. Having finished all this, he again fell gloomily to thinking.

“The idea of getting mixed up in this too!” he decided suddenly, with a heavy and spiteful feeling. “What nonsense!” In vexation he took the candle, to go and find the ragged fellow at all costs and get away from here as soon as possible. “Eh, the brat!” he thought with a curse, already opening the door, but he went back once more to look at the girl, to see whether she was asleep and how she was sleeping. He cautiously lifted the blanket. The little girl was sleeping a sound and blissful sleep. She had warmed up under the blanket, and color had already spread over her pale little cheeks. But it was strange: this color stood out somehow brighter and stronger than an ordinary child’s flush could be. “It’s a feverish flush,” thought Svidrigailov; it was like a flush from wine, just as though she had been given a whole glass to drink. Her scarlet little lips were burning, glowing; but what is this? It suddenly seemed to him that her long black lashes were quivering and blinking, as if they were lifting, and from under them peeped a sly, sharp, somehow unchildlike winking little eye, as though the girl were not asleep and were pretending. Yes, so it was: her little lips were parting in a smile; the corners of her lips were quivering, as if still holding back. But now she had quite stopped holding back; now it was laughter, open laughter; something brazen, provocative shone in this face that was not a child’s at all; it was depravity, it was the face of a camellia, the brazen face of a venal camellia, one of the French ones. Now, no longer hiding at all, both eyes opened: they ran over him with a fiery and shameless look, they called to him, laughed… There was something infinitely hideous and outrageous in that laugh, in those eyes, in all that vileness in a child’s face. “What! a five-year-old!…” whispered Svidrigailov in real horror. “This… what is this?” But now she was turning her whole flaming little face toward him, stretching out her arms… “Ah, accursed thing!” cried Svidrigailov in horror, raising his hand over her… But at that very moment he woke up.

He is on the same bed, wrapped in the blanket just the same; the candle is not lit, and already full daylight is whitening in the windows.

“Nightmare all night!” He raised himself spitefully, feeling completely broken; his bones ached. Outside there was a thoroughly thick fog, and nothing could be made out. It was getting on for five; he had overslept! He got up and put on his jacket and overcoat, still damp. Feeling the revolver in his pocket, he took it out and adjusted the percussion cap; then he sat down, took a notebook out of his pocket, and on the title page, the most noticeable one, wrote a few lines in a large hand. Having read them over, he fell to thinking, his elbow on the table. The revolver and the notebook lay right there by his elbow. Flies that had woken up were sticking to the untouched portion of veal that stood right there on the table. He looked at them for a long time and finally, with his free right hand, began to try to catch a fly. He exhausted himself in efforts for a long time but could not catch it. At last, catching himself at this interesting occupation, he came to, started, got up, and walked resolutely out of the room. A minute later he was in the street.

A thick, milky fog lay over the city. Svidrigailov walked along the slippery, dirty wooden pavement in the direction of the Little Neva. He kept imagining the water of the Little Neva risen high in the night, Petrovsky Island, the wet paths, the wet grass, the wet trees and bushes, and, finally, that very bush… In vexation he began to look at the houses, so as to think about something else. Not a passerby, not a cab did he meet along the avenue. The bright yellow little wooden houses with closed shutters looked dismal and dirty. The cold and damp were getting into his whole body, and he began to shiver. Now and then he came across shop signs and greengrocers’ signs, and read each one carefully. Here the wooden pavement had already come to an end. He was already abreast of a large stone house. A dirty, chilled little dog, its tail between its legs, ran across his path. Some man dead drunk, in an overcoat, lay face down across the sidewalk. He looked at him and went on. A tall watchtower flashed by on his left. “Ha!” he thought, “why, here’s the place, why go to Petrovsky? At least with an official witness…” He almost grinned at this new thought and turned into ——sky Street. Here stood the big house with the watchtower. At the big locked gates of the house, leaning his shoulder against them, stood a small man wrapped in a gray soldier’s greatcoat and a brass Achilles helmet. With a drowsy look he glanced coldly sideways at Svidrigailov as he came up. On his face could be seen that age-old peevish sorrow which is so sourly imprinted on all the faces of the Jewish tribe without exception. The two of them, Svidrigailov and Achilles, examined each other for some time in silence. It finally seemed out of order to Achilles that a man who was not drunk should stand in front of him three paces away, looking straight at him and saying nothing.

“And-zo, vat-zo you vant he-e-ere?” he said, still not stirring or changing his position.

“Why, nothing, brother, good day to you!” answered Svidrigailov.

“Here is not ze place.”

“I, brother, am going to foreign parts.”

“To foreign parts?”

“To America.”

“To America?”

Svidrigailov took out the revolver and cocked it. Achilles raised his eyebrows.

“And-zo, vat-zo, zese sokes (jokes) here is not ze place!”

“But why shouldn’t it be the place?”

“Becoss-zo, it is not ze place.”

“Well, brother, it’s all the same. It’s a good place; if they start asking you, just tell them he went, say, to America.”

He put the revolver to his right temple.

“And-zo, here you cannot, here is not ze place!” Achilles roused himself, his pupils widening more and more.

Svidrigailov pulled the trigger.