Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky

saw that. Ah, if only I could bring it all back, change it, take back those words! Ah, if I … but it's nothing to you!"

      "Did you know Lizaveta, the pedlar?"

      "Yes… . Did you know her?" Sonia asked with some surprise.

      "Katerina Ivanovna is in consumption, rapid consumption; she will soon die," said Raskolnikov after a pause, without answering her question.

      "Oh, no, no, no!"

      And Sonia unconsciously clutched both his hands, as though imploring that she should not.

      "But it will be better if she does die."

      "No, not better, not at all better!" Sonia unconsciously repeated in dismay.

      "And the children? What can you do except take them to live with you?"

      "Oh, I don't know," cried Sonia, almost in despair, and she put her hands to her head.

      It was evident that that idea had very often occurred to her before and he had only roused it again.

      "And, what, if even now, while Katerina Ivanovna is alive, you get ill and are taken to the hospital, what will happen then?" he persisted pitilessly.

      "How can you? That cannot be!"

      And Sonia's face worked with awful terror.

      "Cannot be?" Raskolnikov went on with a harsh smile. "You are not insured against it, are you? What will happen to them then? They will be in the street, all of them, she will cough and beg and knock her head against some wall, as she did to-day, and the children will cry… . Then she will fall down, be taken to the police station and to the hospital, she will die, and the children … "

      "Oh, no… . God will not let it be!" broke at last from Sonia's overburdened bosom.

      She listened, looking imploringly at him, clasping her hands in dumb entreaty, as though it all depended upon him.

      Raskolnikov got up and began to walk about the room. A minute passed. Sonia was standing with her hands and her head hanging in terrible dejection.

      "And can't you save? Put by for a rainy day?" he asked, stopping suddenly before her.

      "No," whispered Sonia.

      "Of course not. Have you tried?" he added almost ironically.

      "Yes."

      "And it didn't come off! Of course not! No need to ask."

      And again he paced the room. Another minute passed.

      "You don't get money every day?"

      Sonia was more confused than ever and colour rushed into her face again.

      "No," she whispered with a painful effort.

      "It will be the same with Polenka, no doubt," he said suddenly.

      "No, no! It can't be, no!" Sonia cried aloud in desperation, as though she had been stabbed. "God would not allow anything so awful!"

      "He lets others come to it."

      "No, no! God will protect her, God!" she repeated beside herself.

      "But, perhaps, there is no God at all," Raskolnikov answered with a sort of malignance, laughed and looked at her.

      Sonia's face suddenly changed; a tremor passed over it. She looked at him with unutterable reproach, tried to say something, but could not speak and broke into bitter, bitter sobs, hiding her face in her hands.

      "You say Katerina Ivanovna's mind is unhinged; your own mind is unhinged," he said after a brief silence.

      Five minutes passed. He still paced up and down the room in silence, not looking at her. At last he went up to her; his eyes glittered. He put his two hands on her shoulders and looked straight into her tearful face. His eyes were hard, feverish and piercing, his lips were twitching. All at once he bent down quickly and dropping to the ground, kissed her foot. Sonia drew back from him as from a madman. And certainly he looked like a madman.

      "What are you doing to me?" she muttered, turning pale, and a sudden anguish clutched at her heart.

      He stood up at once.

      "I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity," he said wildly and walked away to the window. "Listen," he added, turning to her a minute later. "I said just now to an insolent man that he was not worth your little finger … and that I did my sister honour making her sit beside you."

      "Ach, you said that to them! And in her presence?" cried Sonia, frightened. "Sit down with me! An honour! Why, I'm … dishonourable… . Ah, why did you say that?"

      "It was not because of your dishonour and your sin I said that of you, but because of your great suffering. But you are a great sinner, that's true," he added almost solemnly, "and your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing. Isn't that fearful? Isn't it fearful that you are living in this filth which you loathe so, and at the same time you know yourself (you've only to open your eyes) that you are not helping anyone by it, not saving anyone from anything? Tell me," he went on almost in a frenzy, "how this shame and degradation can exist in you side by side with other, opposite, holy feelings? It would be better, a thousand times better and wiser to leap into the water and end it all!"

      "But what would become of them?" Sonia asked faintly, gazing at him with eyes of anguish, but not seeming surprised at his suggestion.

      Raskolnikov looked strangely at her. He read it all in her face; so she must have had that thought already, perhaps many times, and earnestly she had thought out in her despair how to end it and so earnestly, that now she scarcely wondered at his suggestion. She had not even noticed the cruelty of his words. (The significance of his reproaches and his peculiar attitude to her shame she had, of course, not noticed either, and that, too, was clear to him.) But he saw how monstrously the thought of her disgraceful, shameful position was torturing her and had long tortured her. "What, what," he thought, "could hitherto have hindered her from putting an end to it?" Only then he realised what those poor little orphan children and that pitiful half-crazy Katerina Ivanovna, knocking her head against the wall in her consumption, meant for Sonia.

      But, nevertheless, it was clear to him again that with her character and the amount of education she had after all received, she could not in any case remain so. He was still confronted by the question, how could she have remained so long in that position without going out of her mind, since she could not bring herself to jump into the water? Of course he knew that Sonia's position was an exceptional case, though unhappily not unique and not infrequent, indeed; but that very exceptionalness, her tinge of education, her previous life might, one would have thought, have killed her at the first step on that revolting path. What held her up—surely not depravity? All that infamy had obviously only touched her mechanically, not one drop of real depravity had penetrated to her heart; he saw that. He saw through her as she stood before him… .

      "There are three ways before her," he thought, "the canal, the madhouse, or … at last to sink into depravity which obscures the mind and turns the heart to stone."

      The last idea was the most revolting, but he was a sceptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel, and so he could not help believing that the last end was the most likely.

      "But can that be true?" he cried to himself. "Can that creature who has still preserved the purity of her spirit be consciously drawn at last into that sink of filth and iniquity? Can the process already have begun? Can it be that she has only been able to bear it till now, because vice has begun to be less loathsome to her? No, no, that cannot be!" he cried, as Sonia had just before. "No, what has kept her from the canal till now is the idea of sin and they, the children… . And if she has not gone out of her mind … but who says she has not gone out of her mind? Is she in her senses? Can one talk, can one reason as she does? How can she sit on the edge of the abyss of loathsomeness into which she is slipping and refuse to listen when she is told of danger? Does she expect a miracle? No doubt she does. Doesn't that all mean madness?"

      He stayed obstinately at that thought.