Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (famous ebook reader TXT) 📖

positively going now for a ‘rehearsal’ of his project, and at every step his excitement grew more and more violent.

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With a sinking heart and a nervous tremor, he went up to a huge house which on one side looked on to the canal, and on the other into the street. This house was let out in tiny tenements and was inhabited by working people of all kinds—tailors, locksmiths, cooks, Germans of sorts, girls picking up a living as best they could, petty clerks, etc.

There was a continual coming and going through the two gates and in the two courtyards of the house. Three or four door-keepers were employed on the building. The young man was very glad to meet none of them, and at once slipped unnoticed through the door on the right, and up the staircase. It was a back staircase, dark and narrow, but he was familiar with it already, and knew his way, and he liked all these surroundings: in such darkness even the most inquisitive eyes were not to be dreaded.

‘If I am so scared now, what would it be if it somehow came to pass that I were really going to do it?’ he could not help asking himself as he reached the fourth storey.

There his progress was barred by some porters who were engaged in moving furniture out of a flat. He knew that the flat had been occupied by a German clerk in the civil service, and his family. This German was moving out then, and so the fourth floor on this staircase would be untenanted except by the old woman. ‘That’s a good 12 of 967

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thing anyway,’ he thought to himself, as he rang the bell of the old woman’s flat. The bell gave a faint tinkle as though it were made of tin and not of copper. The little flats in such houses always have bells that ring like that. He had forgotten the note of that bell, and now its peculiar tinkle seemed to remind him of something and to bring it clearly before him…. He started, his nerves were terribly overstrained by now. In a little while, the door was opened a tiny crack: the old woman eyed her visitor with evident distrust through the crack, and nothing could be seen but her little eyes, glittering in the darkness. But, seeing a number of people on the landing, she grew bolder, and opened the door wide. The young man stepped into the dark entry, which was partitioned off from the tiny kitchen. The old woman stood facing him in silence and looking inquiringly at him. She was a diminutive, withered up old woman of sixty, with sharp malignant eyes and a sharp little nose. Her colourless, somewhat grizzled hair was thickly smeared with oil, and she wore no kerchief over it. Round her thin long neck, which looked like a hen’s leg, was knotted some sort of flannel rag, and, in spite of the heat, there hung flapping on her shoulders, a mangy fur cape, yellow with age. The old woman coughed and groaned at every instant. The 13 of 967

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young man must have looked at her with a rather peculiar expression, for a gleam of mistrust came into her eyes again.

‘Raskolnikov, a student, I came here a month ago,’ the young man made haste to mutter, with a half bow, remembering that he ought to be more polite.

‘I remember, my good sir, I remember quite well your coming here,’ the old woman said distinctly, still keeping her inquiring eyes on his face.

‘And here … I am again on the same errand,’

Raskolnikov continued, a little disconcerted and surprised at the old woman’s mistrust. ‘Perhaps she is always like that though, only I did not notice it the other time,’ he thought with an uneasy feeling.

The old woman paused, as though hesitating; then stepped on one side, and pointing to the door of the room, she said, letting her visitor pass in front of her:

‘Step in, my good sir.’

The little room into which the young man walked, with yellow paper on the walls, geraniums and muslin curtains in the windows, was brightly lighted up at that moment by the setting sun.

‘So the sun will shine like this then too!’ flashed as it were by chance through Raskolnikov’s mind, and with a 14 of 967

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rapid glance he scanned everything in the room, trying as far as possible to notice and remember its arrangement.

But there was nothing special in the room. The furniture, all very old and of yellow wood, consisted of a sofa with a huge bent wooden back, an oval table in front of the sofa, a dressing-table with a looking-glass fixed on it between the windows, chairs along the walls and two or three halfpenny prints in yellow frames, representing German damsels with birds in their hands—that was all. In the corner a light was burning before a small ikon. Everything was very clean; the floor and the furniture were brightly polished; everything shone.

‘Lizaveta’s work,’ thought the young man. There was not a speck of dust to be seen in the whole flat.

‘It’s in the houses of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness,’ Raskolnikov thought again, and he stole a curious glance at the cotton curtain over the door leading into another tiny room, in which stood the old woman’s bed and chest of drawers and into which he had never looked before. These two rooms made up the whole flat.

‘What do you want?’ the old woman said severely, coming into the room and, as before, standing in front of him so as to look him straight in the face.

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‘I’ve brought something to pawn here,’ and he drew out of his pocket an old-fashioned flat silver watch, on the back of which was engraved a globe; the chain was of steel.

‘But the time is up for your last pledge. The month was up the day before yesterday.’

‘I will bring you the interest for another month; wait a little.’

‘But that’s for me to do as I please, my good sir, to wait or to sell your pledge at once.’

‘How much will you give me for the watch, Alyona Ivanovna?’

‘You come with such trifles, my good sir, it’s scarcely worth anything. I gave you two roubles last time for your ring and one could buy it quite new at a jeweler’s for a rouble and a half.’

‘Give me four roubles for it, I shall redeem it, it was my father’s. I shall be getting some money soon.’

‘A rouble and a half, and interest in advance, if you like!’

‘A rouble and a half!’ cried the young man.

‘Please yourself’—and the old woman handed him back the watch. The young man took it, and was so angry that he was on the point of going away; but checked himself at 16 of 967

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once, remembering that there was nowhere else he could go, and that he had had another object also in coming.

‘Hand it over,’ he said roughly.

The old woman fumbled in her pocket for her keys, and disappeared behind the curtain into the other room.

The young man, left standing alone in the middle of the room, listened inquisitively, thinking. He could hear her unlocking the chest of drawers.

‘It must be the top drawer,’ he reflected. ‘So she carries the keys in a pocket on the right. All in one bunch on a steel ring…. And there’s one key there, three times as big as all the others, with deep notches; that can’t be the key of the chest of drawers … then there must be some other chest or strong-box … that’s worth knowing. Strong-boxes always have keys like that … but how degrading it all is.’

The old woman came back.

‘Here, sir: as we say ten copecks the rouble a month, so I must take fifteen copecks from a rouble and a half for the month in advance. But for the two roubles I lent you before, you owe me now twenty copecks on the same reckoning in advance. That makes thirty-five copecks altogether. So I must give you a rouble and fifteen copecks for the watch. Here it is.’

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‘What! only a rouble and fifteen copecks now!’

‘Just so.’

The young man did not dispute it and took the money.

He looked at the old woman, and was in no hurry to get away, as though there was still something he wanted to say or to do, but he did not himself quite know what.

‘I may be bringing you something else in a day or two, Alyona Ivanovna —a valuable thing—silver—a cigarette-box, as soon as I get it back from a friend …’ he broke off in confusion.

‘Well, we will talk about it then, sir.’

‘Good-bye—are you always at home alone, your sister is not here with you?’ He asked her as casually as possible as he went out into the passage.

‘What business is she of yours, my good sir?’

‘Oh, nothing particular, I simply asked. You are too quick…. Good-day, Alyona Ivanovna.’

Raskolnikov went out in complete confusion. This confusion became more and more intense. As he went down the stairs, he even stopped short, two or three times, as though suddenly struck by some thought. When he was in the street he cried out, ‘Oh, God, how loathsome it all is! and can I, can I possibly…. No, it’s nonsense, it’s rubbish!’ he added resolutely. ‘And how could such an 18 of 967

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atrocious thing come into my head? What filthy things my heart is capable of. Yes, filthy above all, disgusting, loathsome, loathsome!—and for a whole month I’ve been….’ But no words, no exclamations, could express his agitation. The feeling of intense repulsion, which had begun to oppress and torture his heart while he was on his way to the old woman, had by now reached such a pitch and had taken such a definite form that he did not know what to do with himself to escape from his wretchedness.

He walked along the pavement like a drunken man, regardless of the passers-by, and jostling against them, and only came to his senses when he was in the next street.

Looking round, he noticed that he was standing close to a tavern which was entered by steps leading from the pavement to the basement. At that instant two drunken men came out at the door, and abusing and supporting one another, they mounted the steps. Without stopping to think, Raskolnikov went down the steps at once. Till that moment he had never been into a tavern, but now he felt giddy and was tormented by a burning thirst. He longed for a drink of cold beer, and attributed his sudden weakness to the want of food. He sat down at a sticky little table in a dark and dirty corner; ordered some beer, 19 of 967

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and eagerly drank off the first glassful. At once he felt easier; and his thoughts became clear.

‘All that’s nonsense,’ he said hopefully, ‘and there is nothing in it all to worry about! It’s simply physical derangement. Just a glass of beer, a piece of dry bread—

and in one moment the brain is stronger, the mind is clearer and the will is firm! Phew, how utterly petty it all is!’

But in spite of this scornful reflection, he was by now looking cheerful as though he were suddenly set free from a terrible burden: and he gazed round in a friendly way at the people in the room. But even at that moment he had a dim foreboding that this happier frame of mind was also not normal.

There were few people at the time in the tavern.

Besides the two drunken men he had met on the steps, a group consisting of about five men and a girl with