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

at that moment a gentleman in civilian uniform and an overcoat—a solid- looking official of about fifty with a decoration on his neck (which delighted Katerina Ivanovna and had its effect on the policeman)—

approached and without a word handed her a green three-rouble note. His face wore a look of genuine sympathy.

Katerina Ivanovna took it and gave him a polite, even ceremonious, bow.

‘I thank you, honoured sir,’ she began loftily. ‘The causes that have induced us (take the money, Polenka: you see there are generous and honourable people who are ready to help a poor gentlewoman in distress). You see, honoured sir, these orphans of good family—I might even say of aristocratic connections—and that wretch of a general sat eating grouse … and stamped at my disturbing him. ‘Your excellency,’ I said, ‘protect the orphans, for 763 of 967

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you knew my late husband, Semyon Zaharovitch, and on the very day of his death the basest of scoundrels slandered his only daughter.’ … That policeman again! Protect me,’

she cried to the official. ‘Why is that policeman edging up to me? We have only just run away from one of them.

What do you want, fool?’

‘It’s forbidden in the streets. You mustn’t make a disturbance.’

‘It’s you’re making a disturbance. It’s just the same as if I were grinding an organ. What business is it of yours?’

‘You have to get a licence for an organ, and you haven’t got one, and in that way you collect a crowd.

Where do you lodge?’

‘What, a license?’ wailed Katerina Ivanovna. ‘I buried my husband to-day. What need of a license?’

‘Calm yourself, madam, calm yourself,’ began the official. ‘Come along; I will escort you…. This is no place for you in the crowd. You are ill.’

‘Honoured sir, honoured sir, you don’t know,’

screamed Katerina Ivanovna. ‘We are going to the Nevsky…. Sonia, Sonia! Where is she? She is crying too!

What’s the matter with you all? Kolya, Lida, where are you going?’ she cried suddenly in alarm. ‘Oh, silly children! Kolya, Lida, where are they off to? …’

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Kolya and Lida, scared out of their wits by the crowd, and their mother’s mad pranks, suddenly seized each other by the hand, and ran off at the sight of the policeman who wanted to take them away somewhere. Weeping and wailing, poor Katerina Ivanovna ran after them. She was a piteous and unseemly spectacle, as she ran, weeping and panting for breath. Sonia and Polenka rushed after them.

‘Bring them back, bring them back, Sonia! Oh stupid, ungrateful children! … Polenka! catch them…. It’s for your sakes I …’

She stumbled as she ran and fell down.

‘She’s cut herself, she’s bleeding! Oh, dear!’ cried Sonia, bending over her.

All ran up and crowded around. Raskolnikov and Lebeziatnikov were the first at her side, the official too hastened up, and behind him the policeman who

muttered, ‘Bother!’ with a gesture of impatience, feeling that the job was going to be a troublesome one.

‘Pass on! Pass on!’ he said to the crowd that pressed forward.

‘She’s dying,’ someone shouted.

‘She’s gone out of her mind,’ said another.

‘Lord have mercy upon us,’ said a woman, crossing herself. ‘Have they caught the little girl and the boy?

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They’re being brought back, the elder one’s got them….

Ah, the naughty imps!’

When they examined Katerina Ivanovna carefully, they saw that she had not cut herself against a stone, as Sonia thought, but that the blood that stained the pavement red was from her chest.

‘I’ve seen that before,’ muttered the official to Raskolnikov and Lebeziatnikov; ‘that’s consumption; the blood flows and chokes the patient. I saw the same thing with a relative of my own not long ago … nearly a pint of blood, all in a minute…. What’s to be done though? She is dying.’

‘This way, this way, to my room!’ Sonia implored. ‘I live here! … See, that house, the second from here….

Come to me, make haste,’ she turned from one to the other. ‘Send for the doctor! Oh, dear!’

Thanks to the official’s efforts, this plan was adopted, the policeman even helping to carry Katerina Ivanovna.

She was carried to Sonia’s room, almost unconscious, and laid on the bed. The blood was still flowing, but she seemed to be coming to herself. Raskolnikov,

Lebeziatnikov, and the official accompanied Sonia into the room and were followed by the policeman, who first drove back the crowd which followed to the very door.

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Polenka came in holding Kolya and Lida, who were trembling and weeping. Several persons came in too from the Kapernaumovs’ room; the landlord, a lame one-eyed man of strange appearance with whiskers and hair that stood up like a brush, his wife, a woman with an everlastingly scared expression, and several open-mouthed children with wonder-struck faces. Among these, Svidrigaïlov suddenly made his appearance. Raskolnikov looked at him with surprise, not understanding where he had come from and not having noticed him in the crowd.

A doctor and priest wore spoken of. The official whispered to Raskolnikov that he thought it was too late now for the doctor, but he ordered him to be sent for.

Kapernaumov ran himself.

Meanwhile Katerina Ivanovna had regained her breath.

The bleeding ceased for a time. She looked with sick but intent and penetrating eyes at Sonia, who stood pale and trembling, wiping the sweat from her brow with a handkerchief. At last she asked to be raised. They sat her up on the bed, supporting her on both sides.

‘Where are the children?’ she said in a faint voice.

‘You’ve brought them, Polenka? Oh the sillies! Why did you run away…. Och!’

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Once more her parched lips were covered with blood.

She moved her eyes, looking about her.

‘So that’s how you live, Sonia! Never once have I been in your room.’

She looked at her with a face of suffering.

‘We have been your ruin, Sonia. Polenka, Lida, Kolya, come here! Well, here they are, Sonia, take them all! I hand them over to you, I’ve had enough! The ball is over.’ (Cough!) ‘Lay me down, let me die in peace.’

They laid her back on the pillow.

‘What, the priest? I don’t want him. You haven’t got a rouble to spare. I have no sins. God must forgive me without that. He knows how I have suffered…. And if He won’t forgive me, I don’t care!’

She sank more and more into uneasy delirium. At times she shuddered, turned her eyes from side to side, recognised everyone for a minute, but at once sank into delirium again. Her breathing was hoarse and difficult, there was a sort of rattle in her throat.

‘I said to him, your excellency,’ she ejaculated, gasping after each word. ‘That Amalia Ludwigovna, ah! Lida, Kolya, hands on your hips, make haste! Glissez, glissez! pas de basque! Tap with your heels, be a graceful child!

‘ Du hast Diamanten und Perlen

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‘What next? That’s the thing to sing.

‘ Du hast die schonsten Augen Madchen, was willst du mehr?

‘What an idea! Was willst du mehr? What things the fool invents! Ah, yes!

‘In the heat of midday in the vale of Dagestan.

‘Ah, how I loved it! I loved that song to distraction, Polenka! Your father, you know, used to sing it when we were engaged…. Oh those days! Oh that’s the thing for us to sing! How does it go? I’ve forgotten. Remind me! How was it?’

She was violently excited and tried to sit up. At last, in a horribly hoarse, broken voice, she began, shrieking and gasping at every word, with a look of growing terror.

‘In the heat of midday! … in the vale! … of Dagestan!

… With lead in my breast! …’

‘Your excellency!’ she wailed suddenly with a heartrending scream and a flood of tears, ‘protect the orphans!

You have been their father’s guest … one may say aristocratic….’ She started, regaining consciousness, and gazed at all with a sort of terror, but at once recognised Sonia.

‘Sonia, Sonia!’ she articulated softly and caressingly, as though surprised to find her there. ‘Sonia darling, are you here, too?’

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They lifted her up again.

‘Enough! It’s over! Farewell, poor thing! I am done for!

I am broken!’ she cried with vindictive despair, and her head fell heavily back on the pillow.

She sank into unconsciousness again, but this time it did not last long. Her pale, yellow, wasted face dropped back, her mouth fell open, her leg moved convulsively, she gave a deep, deep sigh and died.

Sonia fell upon her, flung her arms about her, and remained motionless with her head pressed to the dead woman’s wasted bosom. Polenka threw herself at her mother’s feet, kissing them and weeping violently.

Though Kolya and Lida did not understand what had happened, they had a feeling that it was something terrible; they put their hands on each other’s little shoulders, stared straight at one another and both at once opened their mouths and began screaming. They were both still in their fancy dress; one in a turban, the other in the cap with the ostrich feather.

And how did ‘the certificate of merit’ come to be on the bed beside Katerina Ivanovna? It lay there by the pillow; Raskolnikov saw it.

He walked away to the window. Lebeziatnikov skipped up to him.

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‘She is dead,’ he said.

‘Rodion Romanovitch, I must have two words with you,’ said Svidrigaïlov, coming up to them.

Lebeziatnikov at once made room for him and

delicately withdrew. Svidrigaïlov drew Raskolnikov further away.

‘I will undertake all the arrangements, the funeral and that. You know it’s a question of money and, as I told you, I have plenty to spare. I will put those two little ones and Polenka into some good orphan asylum, and I will settle fifteen hundred roubles to be paid to each on coming of age, so that Sofya Semyonovna need have no anxiety about them. And I will pull her out of the mud too, for she is a good girl, isn’t she? So tell Avdotya Romanovna that that is how I am spending her ten thousand.’

‘What is your motive for such benevolence?’ asked Raskolnikov.

‘Ah! you sceptical person!’ laughed Svidrigaïlov. ‘I told you I had no need of that money. Won’t you admit that it’s simply done from humanity? She wasn’t ‘a louse,’ you know’ (he pointed to the corner where the dead woman lay), ‘was she, like some old pawnbroker woman? Come, you’ll agree, is Luzhin to go on living, and doing wicked 771 of 967

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things or is she to die? And if I didn’t help them, Polenka would go the same way.’

He said this with an air of a sort of gay winking slyness, keeping his eyes fixed on Raskolnikov, who turned white and cold, hearing his own phrases, spoken to Sonia. He quickly stepped back and looked wildly at Svidrigaïlov.

‘How do you know?’ he whispered, hardly able to breathe.

‘Why, I lodge here at Madame Resslich’s, the other side of the wall. Here is Kapernaumov, and there lives Madame Resslich, an old and devoted friend of mine. I am a neighbour.’

‘You?’

‘Yes,’ continued Svidrigaïlov, shaking with laughter. ‘I assure you on my honour, dear Rodion Romanovitch, that you have interested me enormously. I told you we should become friends, I foretold it. Well, here we have.

And you will see what an accommodating person I am.

You’ll see that you can get on with me!’

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PART VI

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Chapter I

A strange period began for Raskolnikov: it was as though a fog had fallen upon him and wrapped him in a dreary solitude from which there was no escape. Recalling that period long after, he believed that his mind had been clouded at times, and that it had continued so, with intervals, till the final catastrophe. He was convinced that he had been mistaken about many things at that time, for instance as to the date of certain events.