The Dostoyevsky Collection. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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if ever again... you dare to mention a single word... about my mother... I shall send you flying downstairs!"
"What's the matter with you?" cried Razumihin.
"So that's how it is?" Luzhin turned pale and bit his lip. "Let me tell you, sir," he began deliberately, doing his utmost to restrain himself but breathing hard, "at the first moment I saw you you were ill-disposed to me, but I remained here on purpose to find out more. I could forgive a great deal in a sick man and a connection, but you... never after this..."
"I am not ill," cried Raskolnikov.
"So much the worse..."
"Go to hell!"
But Luzhin was already leaving without finishing his speech, squeezing between the table and the chair; Razumihin got up this time to let him pass. Without glancing at anyone, and not even nodding to Zossimov, who had for some time been making signs to him to let the sick man alone, he went out, lifting his hat to the level of his shoulders to avoid crushing it as he stooped to go out of the door. And even the curve of his spine was expressive of the horrible insult he had received.
"How could you--how could you!" Razumihin said, shaking his head in perplexity.
"Let me alone--let me alone all of you!" Raskolnikov cried in a frenzy. "Will you ever leave off tormenting me? I am not afraid of you! I am not afraid of anyone, anyone now! Get away from me! I want to be alone, alone, alone!"
"Come along," said Zossimov, nodding to Razumihin.
"But we can't leave him like this!"
"Come along," Zossimov repeated insistently, and he went out. Razumihin thought a minute and ran to overtake him.
"It might be worse not to obey him," said Zossimov on the stairs. "He mustn't be irritated."
"What's the matter with him?"
"If only he could get some favourable shock, that's what would do it! At first he was better.... You know he has got something on his mind! Some fixed idea weighing on him.... I am very much afraid so; he must have!"
"Perhaps it's that gentleman, Pyotr Petrovitch. From his conversation I gather he is going to marry his sister, and that he had received a letter about it just before his illness...."
"Yes, confound the man! he may have upset the case altogether. But have you noticed, he takes no interest in anything, he does not respond to anything except one point on which he seems excited--that's the murder?"
"Yes, yes," Razumihin agreed, "I noticed that, too. He is interested, frightened. It gave him a shock on 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 Zarasky 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