Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky [classic children's novels .TXT] 📗

did he see? He has seen it all, that’s clear. Where was he then? And from where did he see? Why has he only now sprung out of the earth? And how could he see? Is it possible? Hm⁠ ⁠…” continued Raskolnikov, turning cold and shivering, “and the jewel case Nikolay found behind the door⁠—was that possible? A clue? You miss an infinitesimal line and you can build it into a pyramid of evidence! A fly flew by and saw it! Is it possible?” He felt with sudden loathing how weak, how physically weak he had become. “I ought to have known it,” he thought with a bitter smile. “And how dared I, knowing myself, knowing how I should be, take up an axe and shed blood! I ought to have known beforehand.⁠ ⁠… Ah, but I did know!” he whispered in despair. At times he came to a standstill at some thought.

“No, those men are not made so. The real Master to whom all is permitted storms Toulon, makes a massacre in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, wastes half a million men in the Moscow expedition and gets off with a jest at Vilna. And altars are set up to him after his death, and so all is permitted. No, such people, it seems, are not of flesh but of bronze!”

One sudden irrelevant idea almost made him laugh. Napoleon, the pyramids, Waterloo, and a wretched skinny old woman, a pawnbroker with a red trunk under her bed⁠—it’s a nice hash for Porfiry Petrovitch to digest! How can they digest it! It’s too inartistic. “A Napoleon creep under an old woman’s bed! Ugh, how loathsome!”

At moments he felt he was raving. He sank into a state of feverish excitement. “The old woman is of no consequence,” he thought, hotly and incoherently. “The old woman was a mistake perhaps, but she is not what matters! The old woman was only an illness.⁠ ⁠… I was in a hurry to overstep.⁠ ⁠… I didn’t kill a human being, but a principle! I killed the principle, but I didn’t overstep, I stopped on this side.⁠ ⁠… I was only capable of killing. And it seems I wasn’t even capable of that⁠ ⁠… Principle? Why was that fool Razumihin abusing the socialists? They are industrious, commercial people; ‘the happiness of all’ is their case. No, life is only given to me once and I shall never have it again; I don’t want to wait for ‘the happiness of all.’ I want to live myself, or else better not live at all. I simply couldn’t pass by my mother starving, keeping my rouble in my pocket while I waited for the ‘happiness of all.’ I am putting my little brick into the happiness of all and so my heart is at peace. Ha-ha! Why have you let me slip? I only live once, I too want.⁠ ⁠… Ech, I am an aesthetic louse and nothing more,” he added suddenly, laughing like a madman. “Yes, I am certainly a louse,” he went on, clutching at the idea, gloating over it and playing with it with vindictive pleasure. “In the first place, because I can reason that I am one, and secondly, because for a month past I have been troubling benevolent Providence, calling it to witness that not for my own fleshly lusts did I undertake it, but with a grand and noble object⁠—ha-ha! Thirdly, because I aimed at carrying it out as justly as possible, weighing, measuring and calculating. Of all the lice I picked out the most useless one and proposed to take from her only as much as I needed for the first step, no more nor less (so the rest would have gone to a monastery, according to her will, ha-ha!). And what shows that I am utterly a louse,” he added, grinding his teeth, “is that I am perhaps viler and more loathsome than the louse I killed, and I felt beforehand that I should tell myself so after killing her. Can anything be compared with the horror of that? The vulgarity! The abjectness! I understand the ‘prophet’ with his sabre, on his steed: Allah commands and ‘trembling’ creation must obey! The ‘prophet’ is right, he is right when he sets a battery across the street and blows up the innocent and the guilty without deigning to explain! It’s for you to obey, trembling creation, and not to have desires, for that’s not for you!⁠ ⁠… I shall never, never forgive the old woman!”

His hair was soaked with sweat, his quivering lips were parched, his eyes were fixed on the ceiling.

“Mother, sister⁠—how I loved them! Why do I hate them now? Yes, I hate them, I feel a physical hatred for them, I can’t bear them near me.⁠ ⁠… I went up to my mother and kissed her, I remember.⁠ ⁠… To embrace her and think if she only knew⁠ ⁠… shall I tell her then? That’s just what I might do.⁠ ⁠… She must be the same as I am,” he added, straining himself to think, as it were struggling with delirium. “Ah, how I hate the old woman now! I feel I should kill her again if she came to life! Poor Lizaveta! Why did she come in?⁠ ⁠… It’s strange though, why is it I scarcely ever think of her, as though I hadn’t killed her? Lizaveta! Sonia! Poor gentle things, with gentle eyes.⁠ ⁠… Dear women! Why don’t they weep? Why don’t they moan? They give up everything⁠ ⁠… their eyes are soft and gentle.⁠ ⁠… Sonia, Sonia! Gentle Sonia!”

He lost consciousness; it seemed strange to him that he didn’t remember how he got into the street. It was late evening. The twilight had fallen and the full moon was shining more and more brightly; but there was a peculiar breathlessness in the air. There were crowds of people in the street; workmen and business people were making their way home; other people had come out for a walk; there was a smell of mortar, dust and stagnant water. Raskolnikov walked along,