Текст книги "Crime and Punishment"

Автор книги: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Соавторы: Fyodor Dostoevsky
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Текущая страница: 33 (всего у книги 44 страниц)

“N-no,” Sonya whispered, barely audibly.

“Take a good look.”

Again, as soon as he said this, a former, familiar sensation suddenly turned his soul to ice: he looked at her, and suddenly in her face he seemed to see the face of Lizaveta. He vividly recalled the expression of Lizaveta's face as he was approaching her with the axe and she was backing away from him towards the wall, her hand held out, with a completely childlike fright on her face, exactly as when little children suddenly begin to be frightened of something, stare fixedly and uneasily at what frightens them, back away, and, holding out a little hand, are preparing to cry. Almost the same thing now happened with Sonya as well: just as powerlessly, with the same fright, she looked at him for a time; then suddenly, holding out her left hand, she rested her fingers barely, lightly, on his chest, and slowly began to get up from the bed, backing farther and farther away from him, while looking at him more and more fixedly. Her terror suddenly communicated itself to him: exactly the same fright showed on his face as well; he began looking at her in exactly the same way, and even with almost the same childlikesmile.

“You've guessed?” he whispered at last.

“Lord!” a terrible cry tore itself from her breast. Powerlessly she fell onto the bed, face down on the pillows. But after a moment she quickly got up again, quickly moved closer to him, seized both his hands, and, squeezing them tightly with her thin fingers, as in a vise, again began looking fixedly in his face, as though her eyes were glued to him. With this last, desperate look she wanted to seek out and catch hold of at least some last hope for herself. But there was no hope; no doubt remained; it was all so!Even later, afterwards, when she remembered this moment, she found it both strange and wondrous: precisely why had she seen at oncethat there was no longer any doubt? She could not really say, for instance, that she had anticipated anything of the sort. And yet now, as soon as he told her, it suddenly seemed to her that she really had anticipated thisvery thing.

“Come, Sonya, enough! Don't torment me!” he begged with suffering.

This was not the way, this was not at all the way he had intended to reveal it to her, but thusit came out.

As if forgetting herself, she jumped up and, wringing her hands, walked halfway across the room; but she came back quickly and sat down again beside him, almost touching him, shoulder to shoulder. All at once, as if pierced, she gave a start, cried out, and, not knowing why, threw herself on her knees before him.

“What, what have you done to yourself!” she said desperately, and, jumping up from her knees, threw herself on his neck, embraced him, and pressed him very, very tightly in her arms.

Raskolnikov recoiled and looked at her with a sad smile.

“You're so strange, Sonya—you embrace me and kiss me, when I've just told you about that.You're forgetting yourself.”

“No one, no one in the whole world, is unhappier than you are now!” she exclaimed, as if in a frenzy, not hearing his remark, and suddenly burst into sobs, as if in hysterics.

A feeling long unfamiliar to him flooded his soul and softened it all at once. He did not resist: two tears rolled from his eyes and hung on his lashes.

“So you won't leave me, Sonya?” he said, looking at her almost with hope.

“No, no, never, not anywhere!” Sonya cried out. “I'll follow you, I'll go wherever you go! Oh, Lord! ... Ah, wretched me! ... Why, why didn't I know you before! Why didn't you come before? Oh, Lord!”

“Well, so I've come.”

“Now you've come! Oh, what's to be done now! ... Together, together!” she kept repeating, as if oblivious, and again she embraced him. “I'll go to hard labor with you!” He suddenly seemed to flinch; the former hateful and almost arrogant smile forced itself to his lips.

“But maybe I don't want to go to hard labor, Sonya,” he said.

Sonya glanced at him quickly.

After her first passionate and tormenting sympathy for the unhappy man, the horrible idea of the murder struck her again. In the changed tone of his words she suddenly could hear the murderer. She looked at him in amazement. As yet she knew nothing of why, or how, or for what it had been. Now all these questions flared up at once in her consciousness. And again she did not believe it: “He, he a murderer? Is it really possible?”

“What is this! Where am I!” she said, deeply perplexed, as if she had still not come to her senses. “But you, you, you're so...how could you make yourself do it?...What is this!”

“To rob her, of course. Stop it, Sonya!” he replied somehow wearily, and as if with vexation.

Sonya stood as if stunned, but suddenly exclaimed:

“You were hungry! You...it was to help your mother? Yes?”

“No, Sonya, no,” he murmured, turning away and hanging his head. “I wasn't so hungry...I did want to help my mother, but...that's not quite right either...don't torment me, Sonya!”

Sonya clasped her hands.

“But can it be, can it be that it's all actually true? Lord, what sort of truth is this! Who can believe it?...And how is it, how is it that you could give away your last penny, and yet kill in order to rob! Ahh! . . .” she suddenly cried out, “that money you gave to Katerina Ivanovna...that money...Lord, was that the same money . . .”

“No, Sonya,” he interrupted hastily, “don't worry, it wasn't the same money! That was money my mother sent to me, through a merchant; it came when I was sick, and I gave it away the same day...Razumikhin saw...it was he who received it for me...it was my money, my own, really mine.”

Sonya listened to him in perplexity and tried as hard as she could to understand something.

“And thatmoney...though I don't even know if there was any money,” he added softly and as if pensively. “I took a purse from around her neck then, a suede purse...a fat one, stuffed full...but I didn't look inside, I must not have had time... And the things—there were just some cuff-links and little chains—I buried all the things along with the purse under a stone in some unknown courtyard on V–y Prospect, the very next morning...It's all still there . . .”

Sonya was listening as hard as she could.

“Well, then why...how can you say it was for the sake of robbery, if you didn't take anything?” she said quickly, grasping at a straw.

“I don't know... I haven't decided yet—whether to take the money or not,” he spoke pensively, and all at once, as if recollecting himself, he grinned quickly and briefly. “Ah, what a stupid thing to come out with, eh?”

The thought flashed through Sonya: “Can he be mad?” But she abandoned it at once: no, there was something else here. She understood nothing here, nothing at all.

“You know, Sonya,” he said suddenly, with a sort of inspiration, “you know, I can tell you this much: if I'd killed them only because I was hungry,” he went on, stressing each word, and looking at her mysteriously but sincerely, “I would now be... happy!You should know that!

“And what is it to you, what is it to you,” he cried out after a moment, even with some sort of despair, “what is it to you if I've now confessed that I did a bad thing? This stupid triumph over me—what is it to you? Ah, Sonya, was it for this that I came to you today!”

Sonya again wanted to say something, but kept silent.

“That is why I called you to go with me yesterday, because you are the only one I have left.”

“Called me where?” Sonya asked timidly.

“Not to steal, not to kill, don't worry, not for that,” he grinned caustically. “We're different. .. And you know, Sonya, it's only now, only now that I understand whereI was calling you yesterday. And yesterday, when I was calling you, I didn't know where myself. I called you for one thing, I came to you for one thing: that you not leave me. You won't leave me, Sonya?”

She pressed his hand.

“And why, why did I tell her, why did I reveal it to her!” he exclaimed in despair after a moment, looking at her with infinite pain. “Now you're waiting for explanations from me, Sonya, you're sitting and waiting, I can see that; and what am I going to tell you? Because you won't understand any of it; you'll only wear yourself out with suffering . .. because of me! So, now you're crying and embracing me again—so, why are you embracing me? Because I couldn't endure it myself, and have come to shift the burden onto another: 'You suffer, too; it will be so much the easier for me!' Can you really love such a scoundrel?”

“But aren't you suffering as well?” cried Sonya.

The same feeling flooded his soul again, and softened it again for a moment.

“I have a wicked heart, Sonya; take note of that, it can explain a lot. That's why I came, because I'm wicked. There are those who wouldn't have come. But I am a coward and...a scoundrel! Well... and what if I am! All this is not it... I have to speak now, and I don't even know how to begin . . .”

He stopped and fell to thinking.

“Ahh, we're so different!” he cried out again. “We're not a match. And why, why did I come! I'll never forgive myself for it!”

“No, no, it's good that you came!” Sonya exclaimed. “It's better that I know! Much better!”

He looked at her with pain.

“Why not, after all!” he said, as if reconsidering, “since that is how it was! You see, I wanted to become a Napoleon, that's why I killed...Well, is it clear now?”

“N-no,” Sonya whispered, naively and timidly, “but go on, just go on! I'll understand, I'll understand everything within myself!”she kept entreating him.

“You will? All right, we'll see!”

He fell silent, and thought it over for a long time.

“The thing is that I once asked myself this question: how would it have been if Napoleon, for example, had happened to be in my place, and didn't have Toulon, or Egypt, or the crossing of Mont Blanc to start his career, but, instead of all these beautiful and monumental things, had quite simply some ridiculous old crone, a leginstrar's widow, whom on top of that he had to kill in order to filch money from her trunk (for his career, you understand)—well, so, could he have made himself do it if there was no other way out? Wouldn't he have shrunk from it because it was so unmonumental and...and sinful? Well, I tell you, I suffered a terribly long time over this 'question,' so that I was terribly ashamed when I finally realized (somehow all at once) not only that he would not shrink, but that it wouldn't even occur to him that it was unmonumental...and he wouldn't understand at all what there was to shrink from. And if there was indeed no other path for him, he'd up and throttle her before she could make a peep, without a moment's thoughtfulness! ... So I, too...came out of my thoughtfulness...I throttled her...following the example of my authority...And that's exactly how it was! You think it's funny? Yes, Sonya, the funniest thing is that maybe that's precisely how it was . . .”

Sonya did not think it was funny at all.

“You'd better tell me straight out. . . without examples,” she asked, still more timidly, and barely audibly.

He turned to her, looked at her sadly, and took her hands.

“You're right again, Sonya. It's all nonsense, almost sheer babble!

You see, my mother, as you know, has almost nothing. My sister received an education only by chance, and is doomed to drag herself about as a governess. All their hopes were in me alone. I was studying, but I couldn't support myself at the university and had to take a leave for a while. Even if things had managed to go on that way, then in about ten or twelve years (if circumstances turned out well) I could still only hope to become some sort of teacher or official with a thousand-rouble salary . . .” (He was speaking as if by rote.) “And by then my mother would have withered away with cares and grief, and I still wouldn't be able to set her at ease, and my sister...well, something even worse might have happened with my sister! ... And who wants to spend his whole life passing everything by, turning away from everything; to forget his mother, and politely endure, for example, his sister's offense? Why? So that, having buried them, he can acquire new ones—a wife and children—and then leave them, too, without a kopeck or a crust of bread? Well. . . well, so I decided to take possession of the old woman's money and use it for my first years, without tormenting my mother, to support myself at the university, and for the first steps after the university, and to do it all sweepingly, radically, so as to set up a whole new career entirely and start out on a new, independent path...Well...well, that's all...Well, that I killed the old woman—of course, it was a bad thing to do... well, but enough of that!”

In some sort of powerlessness he dragged himself to the end of his story and hung his head.

“Oh, that's not it, not it,” Sonya exclaimed in anguish, “how can it be so...no, that's not it, not it!”

“You can see for yourself that's not it! ... yet it's the truth, I told it sincerely!”

“What kind of truth is it! Oh, Lord!”

“I only killed a louse, Sonya, a useless, nasty, pernicious louse.”

“A human being—a louse!”

“Not a louse, I know it myself,” he replied, looking at her strangely. “Anyway, I'm lying, Sonya,” he added, “I've been lying for a long time...All that is not it; you're right in saying so. There are quite different reasons here, quite, quite different! ... I haven't talked with anyone for a long time, Sonya...I have a bad headache now.”

His eyes were burning with a feverish fire. He was almost beginning to rave; a troubled smile wandered over his lips. A terrible powerlessness showed through his agitated state of mind. Sonya realized how he was suffering. Her head, too, was beginning to spin. And he spoke so strangely: one seemed to understand something, but...”but what is it! What is it! Oh, Lord!” And she wrung her hands in despair.

“No, Sonya, that's not it!” he began again, suddenly raising his head, as if an unexpected turn of thought had struck him and aroused him anew. “That's not it! Better...suppose (yes! it's really better this way), suppose that I'm vain, jealous, spiteful, loathsome, vengeful, well...and perhaps also inclined to madness. (Let's have it all at once! There's been talk of madness already, I've noticed!) I just told you I couldn't support myself at the university. But, you know, maybe I could have. Mother would have sent me whatever was needed for the fees; and I could have earned enough for boots, clothes, and bread myself; that's certain! There were lessons; I was being offered fifty kopecks. Razumikhin works! But I turned spiteful and didn't want to. Precisely, I turned spiteful(it's a good phrase!). Then I hid in my corner like a spider. You were in my kennel, you saw it. . . And do you know, Sonya, low ceilings and cramped rooms cramp the soul and mind! Oh, how I hated that kennel! And yet I didn't want to leave it. I purposely didn't want to! For days on end I wouldn't go out, and didn't want to work, and didn't even want to eat, and went on lying there. If Nastasya brought something, I'd eat; if not, the day would go by; I purposely didn't ask, out of spite. At night there was no light; I used to lie in the dark, rather than earn money for candles. I was supposed to be studying, but I sold my books; and on my table, on my papers and notebooks, there's a finger-thick layer of dust even now. I liked to lie and think. And I kept on thinking...And I kept on having such dreams, all sorts of strange dreams, there's no point in telling what they were about! Only at the same time I also began imagining...No, that's not right! Again I'm not telling it right! You see, I kept asking myself then: am I so stupid that, if others are stupid and I know for certain they're stupid, I myself don't want to be smarter? Then I learned, Sonya, that if one waits for everyone to become smarter, it will take too long...And then I also learned that it will never happen, that people will never change, and no one can remake them, and it's not worth the effort! Yes, it's true! It's their law...A law, Sonya! It's true! ... And I know now, Sonya, that he who is firm and strong in mind and spirit will rule over them! He who dares much will be right in their eyes. He who can spit on what is greatest will be their lawgiver, and he who dares the most will be the rightest of all! Thus it has been until now, and thus it will always be. Only a blind man can fail to see it!”

Though Raskolnikov was looking at Sonya as he said this, he was no longer concerned with whether she understood or not. The fever had him wholly in its grip. He was in some sort of gloomy ecstasy. (Indeed, he had not talked with anyone for a very long time!) Sonya understood that this gloomy catechism had become his faith and law.

“Then I realized, Sonya,” he went on ecstatically, “that power is given only to the one who dares to reach down and take it. Here there is one thing, one thing only: one has only to dare! And then a thought took shape in me, for the first time in my life, one that nobody had ever thought before me! Nobody! It suddenly came to me as bright as the sun: how is it that no man before now has dared or dares yet, while passing by all this absurdity, quite simply to take the whole thing by the tail and whisk it off to the devil! I... I wanted to dare,and I killed...I just wanted to dare, Sonya, that's the whole reason!”

“Oh, be still, be still!” cried Sonya, clasping her hands. “You deserted God, and God has stricken you, and given you over to the devil! . . .”

“By the way, Sonya, when I was lying in the dark and imagining it all, was it the devil confounding me, eh?”

“Be still! Don't laugh, blasphemer, you understand nothing, simply nothing! Oh, Lord! Nothing, he understands nothing!”

“Be still, Sonya, I'm not laughing at all, I know myself that a devil was dragging me. Be still, Sonya, be still!” he repeated gloomily and insistently. “I know everything. I thought it all out and whispered it all out when I was lying there in the dark...I argued it all out with myself, to the last little trace, and I know everything, everything! And I was so sick, so sick of all this babble then! I wanted to forget everything and start anew, Sonya, and to stop babbling. Do you really think I went into it headlong, like a fool? No, I went into it like a bright boy, and that's what ruined me! And do you really think I didn't at least know, for example, that since I'd begun questioning and querying myself: do I have the right to have power?—it meant that I do not have the right to have power? Or that if I pose the question: is man a louse?—it means that for meman is not a louse, but that he is a louse for the one to whom it never occurs, who goes straight ahead without any questions...Because, if I tormented myself for so many days: would Napoleon have gone ahead or not?—it means I must already have felt clearly that I was not Napoleon...I endured all, all the torment of all this babble, Sonya, and I longed to shake it all off my back: I wanted tokill without casuistry, Sonya, to kill for myself, for myself alone! I didn't want to lie about it even to myself! It was not to help my mother that I killed—nonsense! I did not kill so that, having obtained means and power, I could become a benefactor of mankind. Nonsense! I simply killed—killed for myself, for myself alone—and whether I would later become anyone's benefactor, or would spend my life like a spider, catching everyone in my web and sucking the life-sap out of everyone, should at that moment have made no difference to me! ... And it was not money above all that I wanted when I killed, Sonya; not money so much as something else...I know all this now...Understand me: perhaps, continuing on that same path, I would never again repeat the murder. There was something else I wanted to know; something else was nudging my arm. I wanted to find out then, and find out quickly, whether I was a louse like all the rest, or a man? Would I be able to step over, or not! Would I dare to reach down and take, or not? Am I a trembling creature, or do I have the right...”

“To kill? The right to kill?” Sonya clasped her hands.

“Ahh, Sonya!” he cried irritably, and was about to make some objection to her, but remained scornfully silent. “Don't interrupt me, Sonya! I wanted to prove only one thing to you: that the devil did drag me there then, but afterwards he explained to me that I had no right to go there, because I'm exactly the same louse as all the rest! He made a mockery of me, and so I've come to you now! Welcome your guest! If I weren't a louse, would I have come to you? Listen: when I went to the old woman that time, I went only to try...You should know that!”

“And you killed! Killed!”

“But how did I kill, really? Is that any way to kill? Is that how one goes about killing, the way I went about it then? Some day I'll tell you how I went about it. . . Was it the old crone I killed? I killed myself, not the old crone! Whopped myself right then and there, forever! ... And it was the devil killed the old crone, not me...Enough, enough, Sonya, enough! Let me be,” he suddenly cried out in convulsive anguish, “let me be!”

He leaned his elbows on his knees and pressed his head with his palms as with a pincers.

“Such suffering!” burst in a painful wail from Sonya.

“Well, what to do now, tell me!” he said, suddenly raising his head and looking at her, his face hideously distorted by despair.

“What to do!” she exclaimed, suddenly jumping up from her place, and her eyes, still full of tears, suddenly flashed. “Stand up!” (She seized him by the shoulder; he rose, looking at her almost in amazement.) “Go now, this minute, stand in the crossroads, bow down, and first kiss the earth you've defiled, then bow to the whole world, on all four sides, and say aloud to everyone: 'I have killed!' Then God will send you life again. Will you go? Will you go?” she kept asking him, all trembling as if in a fit, seizing both his hands, squeezing them tightly in her own, and looking at him with fiery eyes.

He was amazed and even struck by her sudden ecstasy.

“So it's hard labor, is it, Sonya? I must go and denounce myself?” he asked gloomily.

“Accept suffering and redeem yourself by it, that's what you must do.”

“No! I won't go to them, Sonya.”

“And live, how will you live? What will you live with?” Sonya exclaimed. “Is it possible now? How will you talk to your mother? (Oh, and them, what will become of them now!) But what am I saying! You've already abandoned your mother and sister. You have, you've already abandoned them. Oh, Lord!” she cried, “he already knows it all himself! But how, how can one live with no human being! What will become of you now!”

“Don't be a child, Sonya,” he said softly. “How am I guilty before them? Why should I go? What should I tell them? It's all just a phantom...They expend people by the million themselves, and what's more they consider it a virtue. They're cheats and scoundrels, Sonya! ... I won't go. And what should I say: that I killed but didn't dare take the money, that I hid it under a stone?” he added, with a caustic grin. “They'll just laugh at me; they'll say I was a fool not to take it. A coward and a fool! They won't understand a thing, Sonya, not a thing—and they're not worthy to understand. Why should I go? I won't go. Don't be a child, Sonya . . .”

“You'll suffer too much, too much,” she repeated, stretching out her hands to him in desperate supplication.

“Still,maybe I've slapped myself with it,” he remarked gloomily, as if deep in thought, “maybe I'm stilla man and not a louse, and was being too quick to condemn myself...I'll stillfight.”

A haughty smile was forcing itself to his lips.

“To bear such suffering! And for your whole life, your whole life! . . .”

“I'll get used to it . . .” he said, grimly and pensively. “Listen,” he began after a moment, “enough tears; it's time for business: I came to tell you that they're after me now, trying to catch me . . .”

“Ah!” Sonya cried fearfully.

“So you cry out! You yourself want me to go to hard labor, and now you're afraid? Only here's what: I'm not going to let them get me. I'll still fight them; they won't be able to do anything. They don't have any real evidence. I was in great danger yesterday, I thought I was already ruined, but things got better today. All their evidence is double-ended; I mean, I can turn their accusations in my own favor, understand? And I will, because now I know how it's done...But they'll certainly put me in jail. If it weren't for one incident, they might have put me in today; certainly, they may stilleven do it today...Only it's nothing, Sonya: I'll sit there, and then they'll let me go...because they don't have one real proof, and they never will, I promise you. And they can't keep anyone behind bars with what they have. Well, enough...I just wanted you to know...I'll try to manage things with my mother and sister somehow so as to reassure them and not frighten them...My sister now seems provided for...so my mother is, too...Well, that's all. Be careful, though. Will you come and visit me when I'm in jail?”

“Oh, I will! I will!”

The two were sitting side by side, sad and crushed, as if they had been washed up alone on a deserted shore after a storm. He looked at Sonya and felt how much of her love was on him, and, strangely, he suddenly felt it heavy and painful to be loved like that. Yes, it was a strange and terrible feeling! On his way to see Sonya, he had felt she was his only hope and his only way out; he had thought he would be able to unload at least part of his torment; but now, suddenly, when her whole heart turned to him, he suddenly felt and realized that he was incomparably more unhappy than he had been before.

“Sonya,” he said, “you'd better not visit me when I'm in jail.”

Sonya did not reply; she was weeping. Several minutes passed.

“Do you have a cross on you?” she suddenly asked unexpectedly, as if suddenly remembering.

At first he did not understand the question.

“You don't, do you? Here, take this cypress one. I have another, a brass one, Lizaveta's. Lizaveta and I exchanged crosses; she gave me her cross, and I gave her my little icon. I'll wear Lizaveta's now, and you can have this one. Take it...it's mine! It's mine!” she insisted. “We'll go to suffer together, and we'll bear the cross together! . . .”

“Give it to me!” said Raskolnikov. He did not want to upset her. But he immediately drew back the hand he had held out to take the cross.

“Not now, Sonya. Better later,” he added, to reassure her.

“Yes, yes, that will be better, better,” she picked up enthusiastically. “When you go to your suffering, then you'll put it on. You'll come to me, I'll put it on you, we'll pray and go.”

At that moment someone knocked three times at the door.

“Sofya Semyonovna, may I come in?” someone's very familiar and polite voice was heard.

Sonya rushed to the door in fear. The blond physiognomy of Mr. Lebezyatnikov peeked into the room.