Essential Novelists - Fyodor Dostoevsky. Fyodor Dostoevsky

the day he was ill in the police office; he fainted.”

      “Tell me more about that this evening and I’ll tell you something afterwards. He interests me very much! In half an hour I’ll go and see him again.... There’ll be no inflammation though.”

      “Thanks! And I’ll wait with Pashenka meantime and will keep watch on him through Nastasya....”

      Raskolnikov, left alone, looked with impatience and misery at Nastasya, but she still lingered.

      “Won’t you have some tea now?” she asked.

      “Later! I am sleepy! Leave me.”

      He turned abruptly to the wall; Nastasya went out.

      CHAPTER VI

      ––––––––

      BUT AS SOON AS SHE went out, he got up, latched the door, undid the parcel which Razumihin had brought in that evening and had tied up again and began dressing. Strange to say, he seemed immediately to have become perfectly calm; not a trace of his recent delirium nor of the panic fear that had haunted him of late. It was the first moment of a strange sudden calm. His movements were precise and definite; a firm purpose was evident in them. “To-day, to-day,” he muttered to himself. He understood that he was still weak, but his intense spiritual concentration gave him strength and self-confidence. He hoped, moreover, that he would not fall down in the street. When he had dressed in entirely new clothes, he looked at the money lying on the table, and after a moment’s thought put it in his pocket. It was twenty-five roubles. He took also all the copper change from the ten roubles spent by Razumihin on the clothes. Then he softly unlatched the door, went out, slipped downstairs and glanced in at the open kitchen door. Nastasya was standing with her back to him, blowing up the landlady’s samovar. She heard nothing. Who would have dreamed of his going out, indeed? A minute later he was in the street.

      It was nearly eight o’clock, the sun was setting. It was as stifling as before, but he eagerly drank in the stinking, dusty town air. His head felt rather dizzy; a sort of savage energy gleamed suddenly in his feverish eyes and his wasted, pale and yellow face. He did not know and did not think where he was going, he had one thought only: “that all this must be ended to-day, once for all, immediately; that he would not return home without it, because he would not go on living like that.” How, with what to make an end? He had not an idea about it, he did not even want to think of it. He drove away thought; thought tortured him. All he knew, all he felt was that everything must be changed “one way or another,” he repeated with desperate and immovable self-confidence and determination.

      From old habit he took his usual walk in the direction of the Hay Market. A dark-haired young man with a barrel organ was standing in the road in front of a little general shop and was grinding out a very sentimental song. He was accompanying a girl of fifteen, who stood on the pavement in front of him. She was dressed up in a crinoline, a mantle and a straw hat with a flame-coloured feather in it, all very old and shabby. In a strong and rather agreeable voice, cracked and coarsened by street singing, she sang in hope of getting a copper from the shop. Raskolnikov joined two or three listeners, took out a five copeck piece and put it in the girl’s hand. She broke off abruptly on a sentimental high note, shouted sharply to the organ grinder “Come on,” and both moved on to the next shop.

      “Do you like street music?” said Raskolnikov, addressing a middle-aged man standing idly by him. The man looked at him, startled and wondering.

      “I love to hear singing to a street organ,” said Raskolnikov, and his manner seemed strangely out of keeping with the subject—“I like it on cold, dark, damp autumn evenings—they must be damp—when all the passers-by have pale green, sickly faces, or better still when wet snow is falling straight down, when there’s no wind—you know what I mean?—and the street lamps shine through it...”

      “I don’t know.... Excuse me...” muttered the stranger, frightened by the question and Raskolnikov’s strange manner, and he crossed over to the other side of the street.

      Raskolnikov walked straight on and came out at the corner of the Hay Market, where the huckster and his wife had talked with Lizaveta; but they were not there now. Recognising the place, he stopped, looked round and addressed a young fellow in a red shirt who stood gaping before a corn chandler’s shop.

      “Isn’t there a man who keeps a booth with his wife at this corner?”

      “All sorts of people keep booths here,” answered the young man, glancing superciliously at Raskolnikov.

      “What’s his name?”

      “What he was christened.”

      “Aren’t you a Zaraïsky man, too? Which province?”

      The young man looked at Raskolnikov again.

      “It’s not a province, your excellency, but a district. Graciously forgive me, your excellency!”

      “Is that a tavern at the top there?”

      “Yes, it’s an eating-house and there’s a billiard-room and you’ll find princesses there too.... La-la!”

      Raskolnikov crossed the square. In that corner there was a dense crowd of peasants. He pushed his way into the thickest part of it, looking at the faces. He felt an unaccountable inclination to enter into conversation with people. But the peasants took no notice of him; they were all shouting in groups together. He stood and thought a little and took a turning to the right in the direction of V.

      He had often crossed that little street which turns at an angle, leading from the market-place to Sadovy Street. Of late he had often felt drawn to wander about this district, when he felt depressed, that he might feel more so.

      Now he walked along, thinking of nothing. At that point there is a great block of buildings, entirely let out in dram shops and eating-houses; women were continually running in and out, bare-headed and in their indoor clothes. Here and there they gathered in groups, on the pavement, especially about the entrances to various festive establishments in the lower storeys. From one of these a loud din, sounds of singing, the tinkling of a guitar and shouts of merriment, floated into the street. A crowd of women were thronging round the door; some were sitting on the steps, others on the pavement, others were standing talking. A drunken soldier, smoking a cigarette, was walking near them in the road, swearing; he seemed to be trying to find his way somewhere, but had forgotten where. One beggar was quarrelling with another, and a man dead drunk was lying right across the road. Raskolnikov joined the throng of women, who were talking in husky voices. They were bare-headed and wore cotton dresses and goatskin shoes. There were women of forty and some not more than seventeen; almost all had blackened eyes.

      He felt strangely attracted by the singing and all the noise and uproar in the saloon below.... someone could be heard within dancing frantically, marking time with his heels to the sounds of the guitar and of a thin falsetto voice singing a jaunty air. He listened intently, gloomily and dreamily, bending down at the entrance and peeping inquisitively in from the pavement.

      “Oh, my handsome soldier

      Don’t beat me for nothing,”

      trilled the thin voice of the singer. Raskolnikov felt a great desire to make out what he was singing, as though everything depended on that.

      “Shall I go in?” he thought. “They are laughing. From drink. Shall I get drunk?”

      “Won’t you come in?” one of the women asked him. Her voice was still musical and less thick than the others, she was young and not repulsive—the only one of the group.

      “Why, she’s pretty,” he said, drawing himself up and looking at her.

      She smiled, much pleased at the compliment.

      “You’re very nice looking yourself,” she said.