Part Six · VIII

When he came to Sonya’s, dusk was already beginning. All day Sonya had been waiting for him in terrible agitation. She and Dunya had waited together. Dunya had come to her that morning, remembering Svidrigailov’s words of the day before, that Sonya “knew about it.” We will not relate the details of the conversation and the tears of the two women, and how close they became. Dunya at least carried away from this meeting one consolation, that her brother would not be alone: it was to her, Sonya, that he had come first with his confession; in her he had sought a human being when he needed a human being; and she would go after him wherever fate might send him. Dunya did not even ask, but she knew it would be so. She looked at Sonya even with a sort of reverence, and at first almost embarrassed her with this reverent feeling she showed toward her. Sonya was almost ready to cry: she, on the contrary, considered herself unworthy even to look at Dunya. The beautiful image of Dunya, when she had bowed to her with such attention and respect during their first meeting at Raskolnikov’s, had remained in her soul forever after as one of the most beautiful and unattainable visions of her life.

Dunechka at last could not bear it and left Sonya, to wait for her brother in his room; she kept thinking he would go there first. Left alone, Sonya at once began to torment herself with fear at the thought that perhaps he really would commit suicide. Dunya feared the same thing. But all day the two of them had vied with each other in assuring each other, with every argument, that this could not be, and they had been calmer while they were together. Now, though, as soon as they parted, each of them began to think of nothing else. Sonya recalled how yesterday Svidrigailov had told her that Raskolnikov had two roads, the Vladimirka or… She knew, besides, his vanity, his arrogance, his pride, and his unbelief. “Can it really be that only faintheartedness and fear of death can make him live?” she thought at last, in despair. The sun meanwhile was already setting. She stood sadly at the window and looked out of it intently, but all that could be seen from that window was the blank unwhitewashed main wall of the house next door. At last, when she had arrived at complete conviction that the unhappy man was dead, he walked into her room.

A cry of joy burst from her breast. But, looking intently into his face, she suddenly turned pale.

“Well, yes!” said Raskolnikov with a grin. “I’ve come for your crosses, Sonya. It was you who sent me to the crossroads; so why, now that it’s come to the point, have you got cold feet?”

Sonya looked at him in amazement. The tone seemed strange to her; a cold shiver ran through her body, but a minute later she guessed that the tone and the words were all put on. He was even speaking to her while looking somehow into a corner, as though avoiding looking her straight in the face.

“You see, Sonya, I’ve calculated that this way it will perhaps be more to my advantage. There’s a circumstance here… Well, it’s a long story, and there’s no point. You know what makes me angry, though? It annoys me that all those stupid, brutish mugs will crowd around me in a moment, goggling their eyes right at me, asking me their stupid questions, which I’ll have to answer, pointing their fingers… Pah! You know, I’m not going to Porfiry; I’m sick of him. I’d rather go to my friend Gunpowder, now won’t I surprise him, won’t I produce an effect of a kind. But I ought to be more cool-headed; I’ve become much too bilious lately. Would you believe it: just now I threatened my sister practically with my fist, only because she turned around for a last look at me. It’s swinishness, a state like this! Eh, what I’ve come to! Well, then, where are the crosses?”

He seemed not himself. He could not even stay in one place for a single minute, could not fix his attention on a single object; his thoughts leaped one over another, his talk wandered; his hands trembled slightly.

Sonya silently took two crosses out of a drawer, one of cypress wood and one of copper, crossed herself, crossed him, and put the little cypress cross on his breast.

“That means it’s a symbol that I’m taking up the cross, heh-heh! And true enough, I’ve suffered little so far! The cypress one, that is, the common people’s; the copper one is Lizaveta’s, you’re taking it for yourself, show me? So she had it on… at that moment? I know two crosses like these too, a silver one and a little icon. I threw them onto the old woman’s breast that time. Those would be just right now, really, those are the ones I ought to put on… But I’m talking nonsense, I’ll forget what matters; I’m so absentminded somehow!… You see, Sonya, I came, properly speaking, to give you notice, so that you would know… Well, and that’s all… That’s all I came for, you know. (Hm, I thought, though, that I would say more.) After all, you yourself wanted me to go, well, so I’ll sit in prison, and your wish will come true; well, why are you crying? You too? Stop it, enough; oh, how hard all this is for me!”

A feeling, however, was born in him; his heart contracted as he looked at her. “This one, what’s this one crying for?” he thought to himself. “What am I to her? Why is she crying, why is she getting me ready for the road like Mother or Dunya? She’ll be my nanny!”

“Cross yourself, pray at least once,” Sonya asked in a trembling, timid voice.

“Oh, by all means, as much as you like! And from a pure heart, Sonya, from a pure heart…”

He had wanted, though, to say something else.

He crossed himself several times. Sonya seized her shawl and threw it over her head. It was the green drap-de-dames shawl, probably the very one Marmeladov had mentioned that time, the “family” shawl. The thought of it flashed through Raskolnikov’s mind, but he did not ask. Indeed, he was already beginning to feel himself that he was terribly absentminded and somehow hideously agitated. That frightened him. He was suddenly struck too by the fact that Sonya meant to go out with him.

“What are you doing! Where are you going? Stay, stay! I’m going alone,” he cried in fainthearted vexation and, almost angry, went to the door. “And what’s the use of a whole retinue!” he muttered, going out.

Sonya remained standing in the middle of the room. He had not even said goodbye to her, he had already forgotten about her; one stinging and rebellious doubt was boiling up in his soul.

“But is it so, is all this really so?” he thought again, going down the stairs. “Is it really impossible still to stop and set everything right again… and not go?”

But he kept going all the same. He suddenly felt once and for all that there was no point in asking himself questions. Coming out into the street, he remembered that he had not said goodbye to Sonya, that she had remained standing in the middle of the room in her green shawl, not daring to move after his shout, and he stopped for an instant. At that same moment a thought suddenly lit him up brightly, as though it had been waiting to strike him once and for all.

“Well, what for, why did I go to her just now? I told her: on business; what business? There was no business at all! To announce that I was going; so what? A great need! Do I love her, or what? Surely not, no? Here I’ve just driven her away like a dog. Did I really need crosses from her? Oh, how low I’ve fallen! No, I needed her tears, I needed to see her fright, to watch her heart ache and be torn! I had to catch hold of something at least, to put it off, to look at a human being! And I dared to rely on myself so much, to dream so much of myself, beggar that I am, nonentity that I am, scoundrel, scoundrel!”

He was walking along the embankment of the canal, and he had not far left to go. But on reaching the bridge he stopped, and suddenly turned aside onto the bridge and went to the Haymarket.

He looked around greedily to the right and to the left, peered strenuously at every object and could not fix his attention on anything; everything slipped away. “In a week, in a month, they’ll drive me somewhere across this bridge in one of those prison vans, how will I look at this canal then, should I remember this?” flashed through his head. “Here’s this sign, how will I read these very letters then? Here it says ‘Tavarishchestvo,’¹ well, I’ll remember this a, the letter a, and look at it in a month, at this very a: how will I look at it then? What will I feel and think then?… God, how base all this must be, all these present… cares of mine! Of course, all this must be curious… in its way… (ha-ha-ha! what am I thinking about!) I’m becoming a child, I’m showing off to myself; well, why am I shaming myself? Pah, how they shove! This fat one, a German, he must be, who shoved me: well, does he know whom he shoved? A woman with a baby begging for alms, it’s curious that she thinks me happier than herself. Why not give her something, for the oddity of it? Ha, a five-kopeck piece has survived in my pocket, where from? Here, here… take it, mother!”

“God keep you!” came the beggar woman’s plaintive voice.

He entered the Haymarket. It was unpleasant, very unpleasant for him to rub against the people, but he went precisely where more people could be seen. He would have given anything in the world to be alone; but he felt himself that he would not stay alone for a single minute. In the crowd a drunk man was making a disgraceful scene: he kept wanting to dance, but kept toppling over to one side. People had surrounded him. Raskolnikov squeezed through the crowd, watched the drunk for a few minutes, and suddenly burst into a short, abrupt laugh. A minute later he had already forgotten about him, did not even see him, though he was looking at him. He walked away at last, not even remembering where he was; but when he reached the middle of the square, a movement suddenly took place in him, a sensation took possession of him all at once, seized the whole of him, body and mind.

He suddenly remembered Sonya’s words: “Go to the crossroads, bow down to the people, kiss the earth, because you have sinned against it too, and say to the whole world aloud: ‘I am a murderer!’” He trembled all over, remembering this. And the hopeless anguish and anxiety of all this time, but especially of the last hours, had crushed him to such a degree that he simply plunged into the possibility of this whole, new, full sensation. It came upon him suddenly like a sort of fit: it caught fire in his soul as a single spark and suddenly, like fire, engulfed all of him. Everything in him softened at once, and the tears gushed out. Just as he stood, he fell to the earth…

He knelt in the middle of the square, bowed down to the ground, and kissed that dirty earth, with delight and happiness. He got up and bowed down a second time.

“Look how tanked up he is!” a young fellow beside him remarked.

There was laughter.

“He’s going to Jerusalem, brothers, saying goodbye to his children and his homeland, bowing down to the whole world, kissing the capital city of St. Petersburg and its ground,” added some tipsy little fellow of the tradesman class.

“Just a young lad still!” a third put in.

“One of the gentry!” someone remarked in a solid voice.

“Nowadays you can’t tell who’s gentry and who isn’t.”

All these responses and remarks held Raskolnikov back, and the words “I killed,” which were perhaps ready to fly off his tongue, died away in him. He bore all these shouts calmly, however, and, without looking around, went straight through the lane in the direction of the police station. One vision flashed before him on the way, but he was not surprised by it; he had already sensed that it had to be so. At the moment when, on the Haymarket, he had bowed to the ground the second time, turning to the left, some fifty paces from himself, he had seen Sonya. She was hiding from him behind one of the wooden sheds that stood on the square, so she had accompanied him on the whole of his sorrowful procession! Raskolnikov felt and understood at that moment, once and for all, that Sonya was with him now forever and would follow him even to the ends of the earth, wherever fate might lead him. His whole heart turned over… but here he was already at the fatal place…

He walked into the courtyard fairly briskly. He had to go up to the third floor. “I’ll be climbing for a while yet,” he thought. In general it seemed to him that the fatal moment was still far off, that a lot of time still remained, that a great deal could still be thought over.

Again the same rubbish, the same eggshells on the spiral staircase, again the doors of the apartments wide open, again the same kitchens with fumes and stench pouring out of them. Raskolnikov had not been here since that time. His legs were going numb and giving way, but they walked. He stopped for a moment to catch his breath, to pull himself together, to go in like a human being. “But what for? why?” he suddenly thought, realizing what he was doing. “If I have to drink this cup anyway, then isn’t it all the same? The fouler, the better.” In his imagination at that moment flashed the figure of Ilya Petrovich Gunpowder. “Am I really going to him? Couldn’t it be someone else? Couldn’t it be Nikodim Fomich? Turn around now and go to the superintendent himself at his lodgings? At least it would go off in a homely way… No, no! To Gunpowder, to Gunpowder! If drink, then drink it all at once…”

Turning cold and barely conscious of himself, he opened the door of the police station. This time there were very few people in it: some caretaker was standing there and another man of the common people. The guard did not even look out from behind his partition. Raskolnikov went through into the next room. “Maybe I won’t have to tell after all,” flickered in him. Here some individual from among the clerks, in a civilian frock coat, was settling down to write something at a desk. In the corner another clerk was taking his seat. Zametov was not there. Nikodim Fomich, of course, was not there either.

“Nobody here?” Raskolnikov asked, addressing the individual at the desk.

“Whom do you want?”

“A-a-ah! Not a sound to hear, not a sight to see, and yet a Russian smell… how does it go in that fairy tale… I forget! M-my r-respec’s!” a familiar voice cried suddenly.

Raskolnikov trembled. Before him stood Gunpowder; he had suddenly come out of the third room. “It’s fate itself,” thought Raskolnikov. “Why is he here?”

“To see us? What about?” Ilya Petrovich exclaimed. (He was evidently in the most excellent and even a tiny bit excited state of mind.) “If it’s on business, you’ve come too early. I’m here myself by chance… But for that matter, whatever I can do. I confess to you… what? what? Excuse me…”

“Raskolnikov.”

“Well, of course: Raskolnikov! And could you really have supposed I had forgotten! Please, don’t take me for that sort of… Rodion Ro… Ro… Rodionych, is it?”

“Rodion Romanych.”

“Yes, yes-yes! Rodion Romanych, Rodion Romanych! That’s just what I was trying to get at. I even made inquiries many times. I confess to you, I have sincerely grieved ever since that we behaved so that time, you and I… afterward it was explained to me, I learned that you were a young literary man and even a scholar… and, so to speak, first steps… Oh, Lord! Why, which of our literary men and scholars has not taken original steps at first! My wife and I, we both respect literature, and my wife, why, to the point of passion!… Literature and the artistic! As long as a man is noble, all the rest can be acquired by talents, knowledge, reason, genius! A hat, well, what, for example, does a hat mean? A hat is a pancake, I’ll buy one at Zimmermann’s; but what is kept under the hat and covered by the hat, that I won’t buy, sir!… I confess, I even wanted to come to you to explain myself, but I thought perhaps you… But I won’t even ask: do you really need something? Your family has arrived, they say?”

“Yes, my mother and sister.”

“I even had the honor and the happiness of meeting your sister, an educated and charming person. I confess, I was sorry that you and I got so heated that time. A to-do! And as for my giving you a certain sort of look that time, on the occasion of your fainting fit, that was afterward explained in the most brilliant manner! Bigotry and fanaticism! I understand your indignation. Perhaps you’re changing your lodgings on account of your family’s arrival?”

“N-no, I just… I came in to ask… I thought I would find Zametov here.”

“Ah, yes! You’ve become friends, of course; I heard, sir. Well, Zametov isn’t with us, you’ve missed him. Yes, sir, we have lost Alexander Grigoryevich! Since yesterday he is not on hand; he has transferred… and, in transferring, he even quarreled with everyone… even so impolitely… A flighty boy, nothing more; he even showed promise; but there you are, what can you do with them, with our brilliant youth! He wants to take some examination or other, but with us it’s only a matter of talking and showing off, and that’s the end of the examination. It’s not the same as, for example, you or that Mr. Razumikhin, your friend! Your career is the learned field, and failures won’t knock you off course now! For you all these beauties of life, one may say, nihil est, an ascetic, a monk, a hermit!… For you a book, a pen behind the ear, learned research, that’s where your spirit soars! I myself, in part… have you been pleased to read Livingstone’s journals?”

“No.”

“Well, I have. Nowadays, though, a great many nihilists have spread about; well, and that’s understandable; what times these are, I ask you? But for that matter, I with you… you, of course, are certainly not a nihilist! Answer frankly, frankly!”

“N-no…”

“No, you know, be frank with me, don’t be shy, as if you were alone with yourself! Service is one thing, and another thing… you thought I was going to say friendship, no, sir, you didn’t guess! Not friendship, but the feeling of a citizen and a man, the feeling of humanity and of love for the Most High. I may be an official person, and in office, but I am always bound to feel the citizen and the man in myself, and to answer for it… You were pleased to mention Zametov just now. Zametov, he’ll make some scandal in the French manner in an indecent establishment, over a glass of champagne or Don wine, that’s what your Zametov is! While I, perhaps, have, so to speak, burned with devotion and lofty feelings, and on top of that I have standing, rank, I hold a post! I am married and have children. I fulfill the duty of a citizen and a man, and who is he, allow me to ask? I treat you as a man ennobled by education. Then there are these midwives, too many of them spreading about.”

Raskolnikov raised his eyebrows questioningly. The words of Ilya Petrovich, who had evidently just come from the table, rattled and poured out before him for the most part like empty sounds. But part of them he still somehow understood; he looked on questioningly and did not know how all this would end.

“I’m talking about these cropped-haired girls,” the talkative Ilya Petrovich went on. “I named them midwives myself, on my own, and I find the name perfectly satisfactory. Heh! heh! They push their way into the academy, they study anatomy; well, tell me, if I fall ill, am I going to call a young lady to treat me? Heh! heh!”

Ilya Petrovich guffawed, thoroughly pleased with his witticisms.

“Granted, it’s an immoderate thirst for enlightenment; but once you’re enlightened, that’s enough. Why abuse it? Why insult noble persons, as that scoundrel Zametov does? Why did he insult me, I ask you? Then again, how many of these suicides have spread about, you can’t imagine. They all spend their last money and kill themselves. Girls, boys, old men… Why, just this morning there was a report about some gentleman who had recently arrived. Nil Pavlych, hey, Nil Pavlych! what’s his name, the gentleman they reported earlier, who shot himself on the Petersburg Side?”

“Svidrigailov,” someone answered hoarsely and indifferently from the other room.

Raskolnikov started.

“Svidrigailov! Svidrigailov has shot himself!” he cried.

“What! You know Svidrigailov?”

“Yes… I know him… He arrived recently…”

“Well, yes, he arrived recently, he had lost his wife, a man of dissolute behavior, and suddenly he shot himself, and so scandalously you can’t imagine… he left a few words in his notebook, that he was dying in his right mind and asked that no one be blamed for his death. This one had money, they say. How is it you are pleased to know him?”

“I… am acquainted… my sister lived in their house as a governess…”

“Well, well, well… So you can tell us something about him. And you had no suspicion?”

“I saw him yesterday… he… was drinking wine… I knew nothing.”

Raskolnikov felt as if something had fallen on him and crushed him.

“You seem to have turned pale again. The air is so close here…”

“Yes, it’s time for me to go, sir,” muttered Raskolnikov. “Excuse me for troubling you…”

“Oh, not at all, as much as you like! You’ve given me pleasure, and I’m glad to declare…”

Ilya Petrovich even held out his hand.

“I only wanted… I came to see Zametov…”

“I understand, I understand, and you’ve given me pleasure.”

“I… am very glad… goodbye, sir…” Raskolnikov smiled.

He went out; he was swaying. His head was spinning. He did not feel whether he was standing on his feet. He began to go down the stairs, propping himself against the wall with his right hand. It seemed to him that some caretaker with a register in his hand pushed against him, climbing up toward the station; that some little dog was barking its head off somewhere on the floor below, and that some woman threw a rolling pin at it and shouted. He went down and came out into the courtyard. There in the courtyard, not far from the entrance, stood Sonya, pale, deathly white all over, and she looked at him wildly, wildly. He stopped in front of her. Something pained and tormented showed in her face, something desperate. She threw up her hands. A hideous, lost smile was forced out on his lips. He stood a while, grinned, and turned back upstairs, to the police station again.

Ilya Petrovich had sat down and was rummaging in some papers. Before him stood the same peasant who had just pushed against Raskolnikov climbing the stairs.

“A-a-ah? You again! Did you leave something?… But what’s the matter with you?”

Raskolnikov, with whitened lips and a motionless gaze, quietly approached him, came right up to the table, leaned his hand on it, wanted to say something but could not; only some incoherent sounds could be heard.

“You’re ill, a chair! Here, sit down on the chair, sit down! Water!”

Raskolnikov sank onto the chair, but did not take his eyes off the face of Ilya Petrovich, who was very unpleasantly surprised. For a minute the two looked at each other and waited. Water was brought.

“It was I…” Raskolnikov began.

“Drink some water.”

Raskolnikov pushed the water away with his hand and quietly, with pauses, but distinctly, said:

“It was I who killed the old official’s widow and her sister Lizaveta with an axe that time, and robbed them.”

Ilya Petrovich opened his mouth. People came running from all sides.

Raskolnikov repeated his statement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Notes

1. 1. Tovarishchestvo, “company” or “partnership,” misspelled on the sign with an a for the first o.