Crime and Punishment (23 page)

‘It is impossible, they'll both be set free! For one thing, none of it makes any sense; judge for yourself: why would they go and fetch the yardkeeper if they were the ones who had done it? In order to give themselves up, or what? Or because they were trying to be clever? No, that would be a bit too clever! And then there's the fact that the student Pestryakov was seen by both yardkeepers and an artisan woman in the entrance-way as he
was going in: he was with three companions and he left them outside while he went in and asked the yardkeepers if there was any accommodation to be had, though his companions saw him doing it. Well, would he have been asking about accommodation if he'd had a plan like that in his head? And as for Koch, well, he spent half an hour talking to the silversmith first, and went up to the old woman's apartment at exactly a quarter to eight. Now figure it out from that…’

‘Well, if you don't mind my saying so, sir, how is it that there's the same contradiction in both their statements? They say that they knocked and that the door was closed, and yet three minutes later, when they came back up again with the yardkeeper, the door turned out to be open?’

‘That's precisely it: there's no doubt at all that the murderer was in the apartment and had bolted himself inside; and there's no doubt, either, that he'd have been caught there, if only Koch hadn't been stupid and gone to look for the yardkeeper as well. Our fellow must have taken advantage of that breathing-space in order to get down the stairs and somehow sneak past them. Koch eagerly swears that if he had stayed there, the fellow would have jumped out at him and killed him with the axe. He's going to offer up thanksgiving prayers, Russian-style, ha-ha!’

‘And no one caught sight of the murderer?’

‘How could they, in such a place? That building's a Noah's Ark!’ the clerk, who had been listening from his seat, observed.

‘The man's right, you know – the matter's perfectly clear,’ Nikodim Fomich said, heatedly.

‘No, sir, on the contrary. The matter's most unclear,’ Ilya Petrovich affirmed.

Raskolnikov picked up his hat and walked towards the door, but did not get that far…

When he recovered consciousness, he realized he was sitting on a chair, being supported by a man on his right, that there was another man on his left holding a yellow tumbler full of yellow water, and that Nikodim Fomich was standing before him, staring at him fixedly; he had risen from his seat.

‘What's this – are you ill?’ Nikodim Fomich asked, rather sharply.

‘When he was signing he could hardly get the pen across the paper,’ the clerk commented, sitting down in his place and busying himself with his papers again.

‘How long have you been ill?’ Ilya Petrovich shouted from his seat, also in the process of sorting through his papers. He had, needless to say, also been examining the sick man as he had lain unconscious, but had moved away the instant he had come to.

‘Since yesterday…’ Raskolnikov muttered in reply.

‘Did you go out yesterday?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even though you were ill?’

‘Even though I was ill.’

‘At what time?’

‘About eight p.m.’

‘And where did you go, may I ask?’

‘Down the street.’

‘Don't waste words, do you?’

Raskolnikov had delivered his replies abruptly, jerkily, pale as a square of white cloth, and without letting his black, inflamed eyes fall away from Ilya Petrovich's gaze.

‘He can hardly stay standing, yet you…’ Nikodim Fomich began to protest.

‘It's – quite – all – right!’ Ilya Petrovich said in an odd tone of voice. Nikodim Fomich was on the point of adding something, but, glancing at the clerk, who was now looking fixedly at him, too, changed his mind. Everyone suddenly fell silent. There was something strange about it.

‘All right, sir,’ Ilya Petrovich said, winding up the proceedings. ‘We won't detain you any further.’

Raskolnikov went out. After he had left he distinctly heard a sudden burst of heated conversation, in which the questioning voice of Nikodim Fomich was raised high, above all the others… On reaching the street, he came wide awake.

‘A search, a search, there'll be a search without delay!’ he said to himself, hurrying to get back to his room. ‘The crafty devils! They suspect!’ Again he was seized by his former sense of terror, all over, from top to toe.

‘And what if there's already been a search? What if I actually find them in my room?’

But here was his room. There was nothing, no one; no one had called to visit him. Not even Nastasya had been in. But, oh Lord! How could he have left all those goods in that hole earlier on?

He rushed to the corner, thrust his hand under the wallpaper and began to haul them out, stuffing his pockets with them. There were eight items in all: two small boxes containing earrings or something of the kind – he did not pause to look; then four small morocco-leather cases; a chain, wrapped in nothing but newspaper; and something else, also wrapped in newspaper, he thought it might be a medal…

He put everything into various pockets, those of his coat and the one still empty in the right-hand side of his trousers, trying to make it all look as inconspicuous as possible. He took the purse along with all the other items. Then he left the room, this time leaving the door wide open.

He walked with a quick, firm step, and even though he felt that he ached all over, he still had his wits about him. He was afraid of his pursuers, afraid that in a quarter or half an hour's time the instruction would be given for him to be followed; and if that were so, then at all costs he must get rid of all the evidence in time. He must succeed in this, while he still had some strength and powers of reasoning at his disposal… Where should he go?

This he had decided a long time earlier. ‘I must throw it all in the Canal; no one will be any the wiser, and that'll be the end of it.’ He had arrived at this decision during the night, in his delirium, at the moments when he had made his repeated attempts to get to his feet and be off: ‘Quick, quick, go and throw it all away.’ But throwing it all away turned out to be not that easy.

He had now been walking along an embankment of the Yekaterininsky Canal for something like half an hour, or possibly
even longer, several times pausing to take a look at the flights of steps leading down to the Canal whenever he came across them. But it was out of the question for him to carry out his plan: either there were rafts at the foot of the steps, with washerwomen on them washing linen, or there were boats tied up – and people swarmed everywhere; worse still, he would be fully visible from both embankments in all directions, and people would notice what he was doing and think it suspicious that someone should have gone down to the water's edge especially in order to throw something in. And what if the leather cases didn't sink, but floated? Of course, that would be what would happen. Everyone would see them, and him. People were already eyeing him enough as it was when they met him, staring him over as though they could think of nothing else. ‘I wonder why that is? Or is it just my imagination?’ he thought to himself.

At last it occurred to him that he might be better off going to some spot along the Neva. There were fewer people there, he would be less conspicuous, might at least get a chance to do what he had to do, and, most importantly, he would be further away from the part of town he was in at present. And he was suddenly filled with astonishment: how was it that he had been wandering around for a whole half an hour in despair and anguish, in a place that held such risk for him, and yet had not thought of this before? He had wasted a whole half hour on a demented plan for the simple reason that he had thought it up in his delirium! He was becoming thoroughly absent-minded and forgetful, and he knew it. He really must pull himself together!

He set off towards the Neva along V— Prospect; but on the way there another thought suddenly came to him: ‘Why the Neva? Why throw the stuff in the water? Wouldn't it be better to go somewhere very far away, perhaps out to the Islands again, find some solitary place in the woods, under a bush somewhere, perhaps – and bury it there, perhaps remembering the spot by observing the look of one of the trees?’ And although he sensed that he was in no condition just then to make clear and sensible decisions, he could see no flaws in this plan.

But he was not fated to go to the Islands, either; instead,
something else happened: as he was emerging from V— Prospect on to the square,
¹
he suddenly saw on his left the entrance to a yard that was surrounded by completely blank walls. To the right, immediately inside the gate, the vacant, blank wall of a neighbouring four-storey building stretched far into this yard. To the left, running parallel to the blank wall and also just inside the gate, there was a wooden fence that extended some twenty yards into the interior of the yard and then made a sudden turning to the left. It was a dead, fenced-off spot where there were some kind of building materials lying around. Further away, in a hollow of the yard, the corner of a low, soot-grimed stone shed peeped from behind the fence, evidently forming part of some workshop or other. Here there were probably some trade premises – a coachmaker's or a metal works, or something of that kind; the entire area, right from the gateway, was blackened with a large quantity of coal dust. ‘This is the sort of place where I can throw it all away and run,’ he thought suddenly. Observing no one about inside, he strode through the gateway and at once saw, just inside it, a long gutter that had been fitted to the fence (the sort of arrangement that is often found in buildings where there are a lot of factory hands, artel workers, draymen and the like); on the fence above the gutter someone had scrawled in chalk the witticism usual in such cases: ‘
STOPPING OF CARTS PROHIBBITED
.’ This was all to the good, as his having gone in and stopped here would arouse no suspicion. ‘I must throw it all away somewhere and get out of here!’

As he cast another look round, he was already putting his hand into one of his pockets when he suddenly noticed, right up by the outer wall, between the gateway and the gutter, which stood at a distance of just over two feet from each other, a large, unhewn building block, which might have weighed fifty pounds and was resting close against the stone street wall. Behind this wall lay the street and the pavement, he could hear passers-by, of whom there were invariably not a few in this part of town, shuffling past; but he could not be seen behind the gate, except if someone came in off the street, which was quite likely, and was why he had to hurry.

He stooped down to the block, seized the top of it firmly in
both hands, and, mustering all his strength, succeeded in turning it over. Underneath it there was a small hollow; into this he began to throw the entire contents of his pockets. The purse went on the very top of the pile, yet there still remained room in the hollow. Then he again seized hold of the block, heaved it back with one push into its former position, and there it sat, just as it had been, except that it looked possibly a shade higher. But he raked some earth round it, pressing it into place with his foot. Nothing could be seen.

After that he left the yard and made his way towards the square. Again an intense, scarcely endurable feeling of joy, like the one he had earlier experienced in the police bureau, took mastery of him for a moment. ‘The evidence is buried! And who would ever think of looking under that block? It has probably been lying there ever since the building was put up, and it will go on lying there just as long. And even if the things are found: who would ever think of me? It's finished! There's no evidence.’ And he laughed. Yes, he remembered later that he laughed a long, faint, nervous, inaudible laugh, and that he continued to laugh during the whole time he was crossing the square. But when he set foot on K— Boulevard, where the day before yesterday he had had that encounter with the young girl, his laughter suddenly evaporated. Other thoughts came creeping into his mind. He also suddenly felt that he would find it horribly repugnant to walk past that bench, on which, after the girl had gone, he had sat and reflected; it would also, he thought, be horribly unpleasant to meet the man with the long moustache to whom he had given the twenty-copeck piece. ‘The devil take him!’

He walked, looking around him in absent-minded hostility. Now all his thoughts were whirling around a single central point – and he felt that this central point really did exist and that now, only now, was he alone face to face with it – and for the first time since these two months had elapsed.

‘And the devil take
all
of this!’ he suddenly thought in a fit of inexhaustible rancour. ‘If it's begun, it's begun, and to the devil with her, and the new life! Lord, how stupid all that was!… And how much lying and baseness I've sunk to today! How
vilely I cringed and fawned back there in front of that cretin Ilya Petrovich! And in fact that's all a lot of rubbish, too! I don't give a spit for any of them or any of it, not even for my having cringed and fawned! That has nothing to do with it, nothing to do with it at all!…’

Suddenly, he stopped in his tracks; a new, quite unexpected question of extreme simplicity threw him off balance in a flash and bitterly amazed him:

‘If you really did that with all your wits about you and not like some fool in a trance, if you really had a firm and definite goal before you, then how is it you still haven't even looked in the purse to see what you've got, the prize for which you've taken all those torments upon yourself and intentionally done such a base, vile, loathsome thing? I mean, you were going to throw the purse into the water just now along with all the other things, which you haven't examined, either, just now, weren't you?… What's the meaning of that?’

Yes, it was true; every bit of it was true. He had, in fact, been conscious of it all along, and it was not a new question in any way; in deciding to throw everything into the water he had done so without the slightest hesitation or demur, but straight out, as though that was the way he had planned it, and no other way could possibly be imagined… Yes, he had known it all and borne it all in his mind; indeed, it had all been decided yesterday, at the very moment when he had sat over the chest and pulled the leather cases from it… Oh, it was true all right!…