Crime and Punishment (64 page)

The ragamuffin, returning with the tea and the veal, could not refrain from asking once more, ‘You won't be needing anything else?' and, receiving another negative reply, retired for good. Svidrigailov had a glassful of tea straight away, to warm himself up, but couldn't eat a thing, having lost all appetite. He clearly had a fever coming on. He took off his coat and jacket, wrapped himself in a blanket and lay down on the bed. He was annoyed. ‘Now of all times I'd have preferred to be well,' he thought with a grin. The room was stuffy, the candle gave a dim light, the wind was gusting outside and somewhere in the corner a mouse was scratching away; in fact, the whole room smelled of mice and something leathery. He lay there in a kind of daydream: one thought gave way to another. If only, it seemed, he could hold on to a mental picture of something, anything. ‘That must be a garden down there, beneath the window,' he thought. ‘I can hear the trees in the wind. How I hate the sound trees make at night when it's stormy and dark – such a disgusting feeling!' And he remembered how, walking past Petrovsky Park earlier, he'd been overcome by revulsion just thinking about it. He also remembered ——kov Bridge and the Lesser Neva, and once again he felt almost cold, just like before, as he stood over the water. ‘I've never liked water, not even in paintings,' he reflected, before a strange thought suddenly brought another grin to his lips: ‘You might have thought I wouldn't care less about aesthetics or comfort now, but just look how fastidious I've suddenly become, like an animal bent on choosing a nice spot for itself . . . on just such an occasion. I should have gone back to the park! It must have seemed
too dark in there, too cold – heh-heh! As if pleasant sensations were what I needed! . . . And why haven't I snuffed out the candle?' (He blew it out.) ‘The neighbours have turned in,' he thought, seeing no light through the gap. ‘Just the time, Marfa Petrovna, just the time for you to pay me a visit: dark, the right kind of setting, a moment like no other. But now, of all times, you won't come . . .'

For some reason he suddenly remembered how, earlier on, an hour before carrying out his designs on Dunechka, he'd advised Raskolnikov to entrust her to Razumikhin's care. ‘I suppose I really did say that to taunt myself, as Raskolnikov guessed. What a little rascal he is, that Raskolnikov! What a weight he's carried. He could be a proper rascal with time, once all this silliness is knocked out of him, but for now he still wants to live a bit
too much
! They're all like that, these scoundrels. But to hell with him – he can do what he likes.'

He couldn't sleep. Bit by bit the image of Dunechka, from earlier on, started appearing before him and a shiver suddenly ran down his body. ‘No, this has to stop,' he thought, coming to his senses. ‘I have to find something else to think about. How strange, and ridiculous: I've never felt any great hatred towards anyone, never even had any particular desire for revenge, and that's a bad sign, a bad sign! And I've never liked arguing, never got worked up – another bad sign! But to think of all the things I was promising her just now – good God! Chances are she'd have ground me to dust . . .' He fell silent again and clenched his teeth: once again the image of Dunechka came before him exactly as she was after firing her first shot, when she'd taken a dreadful fright, lowered the revolver and looked at him numbly: he could have grabbed her twice over and she wouldn't have lifted an arm to defend herself, unless he'd told her to. He recalled feeling at that instant a kind of pity for her, as if his heart were being squeezed . . . ‘Damn it! Those thoughts again . . . This has to stop, it really does!'

He was dozing off; the feverish shiver was subsiding. Suddenly, under the blanket, something seemed to run down his arm and his leg. He shuddered: ‘Ugh, damn it! Must be a mouse!' he thought. ‘Shouldn't have left the veal on the table . . .' The last thing he felt like doing was to uncover himself, get up and freeze, but suddenly something scuttled unpleasantly along his leg again; he threw off the blanket and lit the candle. Shivering with feverish cold, he bent down to inspect the bed – nothing; he gave the blanket a shake and a mouse suddenly fell out onto the sheet. He lunged towards it, but the mouse, instead of
running off the bed, darted around from side to side, slipped out from under his fingers, ran up and down his arm and suddenly dived under the pillow; he threw the pillow to the floor, but in the space of an instant felt something jump onto his chest and scuttle round his body, under his shirt. He shuddered and woke. It was dark and he was lying in the bed as before, wrapped in a blanket, the wind howling beneath the window. ‘How disgusting!' he thought in annoyance.

He got up and sat on the edge of the bed, his back to the window. ‘Better not to sleep at all,' he decided. But there was a cold, damp draught from the window. Without getting up, he pulled the blanket and wrapped it round him. He didn't light the candle. He wasn't thinking about anything, nor did he want to think; but one dream-vision followed another, and scraps of thought came and went, without beginning or end, without any connection. As if he were falling into a slumber. Whether it was the cold, the gloom, the damp or the wind howling beneath the window and shaking the trees that aroused in him some sort of stubbornly fantastical mood and desire – but all he could think of was flowers. A charming scene came to him; a bright, warm, almost hot day, a holiday, Trinity Day.
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A splendid, sumptuous country cottage in the English style, overgrown with fragrant flowers planted in rows on all sides; a porch wreathed with creepers and crammed with roses; a bright, cool, sumptuously carpeted staircase, decorated with rare flowers in Chinese pots. In particular he noticed, in water-filled pots on the windowsills, bouquets of white and tender narcissus bending on their stout, tall, bright-green stems and exuding a powerful scent. Dragging himself away from them with the greatest reluctance, he went up the stairs and entered a large, high-ceilinged drawing room, and here too – by the windows, near the doors that opened onto the terrace, on the terrace itself – there were flowers everywhere. The floors were strewn with freshly mown, fragrant grass, the windows were open, a fresh, light, cool breeze entered the room, birds chirruped beneath the windows, and in the centre, on tables covered with white satin cloths, was a coffin. The coffin was lined with white
gros de Naples
and trimmed with thick, white ruche. Garlands of flowers wound around it on all sides. Submerged in flowers, a young girl lay inside, wearing a white tulle dress, her arms folded tight against her chest, as if they were chiselled from marble. But her flowing, light-blond hair was wet, and her head was wreathed in roses. The severe and already rigid profile of her face also seemed cut from marble, but
the smile on her pale lips expressed unchildlike, boundless sorrow, a great, great grievance. Svidrigailov knew this girl. There was neither an icon nor a single lighted candle by her coffin, and no prayers could be heard. The girl was a suicide – she'd drowned.
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She was only fourteen, but her heart had already been broken and it destroyed itself, outraged by an insult that appalled and astonished this young child's mind, that flooded her angelically pure soul with unmerited shame and wrung from her one last cry of despair, unheard and even mocked in the dark of the night, in the gloom and the cold, the damp and the thaw, to the howling of the wind . . .

Svidrigailov snapped awake, rose from the bed and went over to the window. He felt for the catch and opened it. The wind burst violently into his cramped cell and something like rime soon formed on his face and chest, covered only by a shirt. There really did seem to be some kind of garden beneath the window, another pleasure garden by the look of it; during the day there were probably choruses singing there, too, with tea brought out to the tables. But now drops of water sprayed in through the window from the trees and the bushes and it was as dark as a cellar; the most that could be made out was an occasional dark smudge representing one object or another. Svidrigailov, leaning out and resting his elbows on the windowsill, had been staring fixedly into this murk for five minutes or more. Suddenly, from the gloom and the night, a cannon fired once, then twice.

‘Ah, a warning! The water's rising,'
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he thought. ‘By morning it'll have surged onto the streets down there, on lower ground, and flooded the basements and cellars; the cellar rats will swim up, and in the wind and the rain, dripping and cursing, people will start lugging their worthless stuff up the stairs . . . But what time is it now?' No sooner had he thought this than, somewhere close by, ticking away in a kind of frantic hurry, a clock struck three. ‘Ha, it'll be light in an hour! What am I waiting for? I'll leave right now and walk straight over to Petrovsky Park. I'll choose some big bush or other, all drenched in rain – one brush of my shoulder and a million drops will spray my head . . .' He moved away from the window, closed it, lit a candle, put on his waistcoat, coat and hat, and went out into the corridor with the candle, hoping to find the ragamuffin asleep in some box room filled with junk and candle stubs, pay him for the room and leave. ‘The best moment for it – couldn't have chosen a better one!'

He walked up and down the endless, narrow corridor for a long
time without finding anyone, and he was about to call out when suddenly, in a dark corner between an old cupboard and a door, he spotted a strange object, seemingly alive. He bent over with the candle and saw a child – a girl of about five, at most, wearing a little dress as wet as a floor mop, shivering and crying. Svidrigailov didn't even seem to frighten her. She looked at him in dull astonishment with her big black eyes and let out an occasional sob, like children who, after a good long cry, are finally beginning to cheer up, but could easily start sobbing again at a moment's notice. The girl's little face was pale and exhausted; she was rigid with cold. ‘But how did she get here? She must have been hiding here. Can't have slept a wink.' He started interrogating her. The girl suddenly came alive and began babbling something in her childish tongue. Something about ‘Mumsie' and ‘Mumsie thmacking me', about some cup she'd ‘breaked'. The girl barely paused for breath, and it wasn't too hard to work out from all her stories that here was an unloved child who'd been thrashed and terrorized by her mother, some cook never seen sober, probably from this same hotel; that the girl had broken Mummy's cup and taken such a fright she'd run away earlier that evening; that she'd probably been keeping out of sight somewhere outside, in the rain, before eventually making her way here, hiding behind the cupboard and spending the whole night in the corner, crying, shivering from the damp and the dark and the fear that she was due another painful beating. He picked her up, took her to his room, sat her on the bed and began undressing her. Her little shoes, full of holes and worn on bare feet, were so wet they might have been lying all night in a puddle. After undressing her, he laid her on the bed and covered her, wrapping her up from head to toe in the blanket. She fell asleep at once. Having done all this, he sank once more into sullen thought.

‘There was no need to get involved!' he suddenly decided with an oppressive, spiteful feeling. ‘How stupid!' Annoyed, he took the candle, so as to find the ragamuffin come what may and get out of there as soon as possible. ‘Ah, silly girl!' he thought with a silent curse, his hand already on the doorknob, but he went back to take one more look at her: was she sleeping, and was she sleeping well? He carefully lifted the blanket. She was fast asleep, blissfully so. She'd warmed up beneath the blanket and the colour was already returning to her pale cheeks. But how strange: this colour now seemed somehow brighter
and deeper than one would expect of a child. ‘Feverish,' thought Svidrigailov. ‘It's the kind of flush you get from drinking, as if someone had given her a whole glass of wine.' Her scarlet lips seemed to be burning, blazing. But what was this? He had the sudden impression that her long black eyelashes were quivering and blinking, even lifting, and from beneath there peeked a sly, sharp, winking and unchildlike eye, as if she were only pretending to sleep. Yes, that was it: her lips were parting in a smile, the edges quivering, as if still holding back. But now she wasn't even trying to restrain herself; this was laughter, unconcealed laughter; something brazen, provocative shone in this thoroughly unchildlike face; here was depravity, the face of a ‘camellia',
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the brazen face of one of those French ladies of the night. And now, both eyes were opening: they were appraising him with a fiery and shameless gaze, they were calling to him, laughing . . . There was something infinitely hideous and offensive about this laughter, about these eyes, about this vileness in the face of a child. ‘What? A five-year-old?' whispered Svidrigailov in genuine horror. ‘What . . . ? What on earth?' But now she was turning right round to face him, her little cheeks ablaze, her arms stretched out . . . ‘Damn you!' cried Svidrigailov in horror, raising his arm over her . . . But at that very moment he woke.

He was in the same bed, still wrapped up in the blanket, the candle unlit, white daylight already pouring through the windows.

‘One nightmare after another, all night long!' He lifted himself up, angry, broken; his bones were aching. Outside in the thick fog nothing was visible. Nearly five already. He'd overslept! He got up and put on his jacket and coat, both still damp. Feeling in his pocket for the revolver, he took it out and adjusted the cap. Then he sat down, took a notebook from his pocket and wrote several lines in a large hand on the first, most conspicuous page. He reread them and sank into thought, resting his elbows on the table. The revolver and notebook lay right there, at his elbow. Waking up, flies attached themselves to the untouched portion of veal on the table next to him. He looked at them for a long time and eventually began trying to catch one with his free right hand. He tried and tried, but with no success. Finally, catching himself at this peculiar task, he came to his senses, shuddered, got up and walked straight out of the room. A minute later he was already outside.