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

straight out what you want!” Sonia cried in distress. “You are leading up to something again.⁠ ⁠… Can you have come simply to torture me?”

She could not control herself and began crying bitterly. He looked at her in gloomy misery. Five minutes passed.

“Of course you’re right, Sonia,” he said softly at last. He was suddenly changed. His tone of assumed arrogance and helpless defiance was gone. Even his voice was suddenly weak. “I told you yesterday that I was not coming to ask forgiveness and almost the first thing I’ve said is to ask forgiveness.⁠ ⁠… I said that about Luzhin and Providence for my own sake. I was asking forgiveness, Sonia.⁠ ⁠…”

He tried to smile, but there was something helpless and incomplete in his pale smile. He bowed his head and hid his face in his hands.

And suddenly a strange, surprising sensation of a sort of bitter hatred for Sonia passed through his heart. As it were wondering and frightened of this sensation, he raised his head and looked intently at her; but he met her uneasy and painfully anxious eyes fixed on him; there was love in them; his hatred vanished like a phantom. It was not the real feeling; he had taken the one feeling for the other. It only meant that that minute had come.

He hid his face in his hands again and bowed his head. Suddenly he turned pale, got up from his chair, looked at Sonia, and without uttering a word sat down mechanically on her bed.

His sensations that moment were terribly like the moment when he had stood over the old woman with the axe in his hand and felt that “he must not lose another minute.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Sonia, dreadfully frightened.

He could not utter a word. This was not at all, not at all the way he had intended to “tell” and he did not understand what was happening to him now. She went up to him, softly, sat down on the bed beside him and waited, not taking her eyes off him. Her heart throbbed and sank. It was unendurable; he turned his deadly pale face to her. His lips worked, helplessly struggling to utter something. A pang of terror passed through Sonia’s heart.

“What’s the matter?” she repeated, drawing a little away from him.

“Nothing, Sonia, don’t be frightened.⁠ ⁠… It’s nonsense. It really is nonsense, if you think of it,” he muttered, like a man in delirium. “Why have I come to torture you?” he added suddenly, looking at her. “Why, really? I keep asking myself that question, Sonia.⁠ ⁠…”

He had perhaps been asking himself that question a quarter of an hour before, but now he spoke helplessly, hardly knowing what he said and feeling a continual tremor all over.

“Oh, how you are suffering!” she muttered in distress, looking intently at him.

“It’s all nonsense.⁠ ⁠… Listen, Sonia.” He suddenly smiled, a pale helpless smile for two seconds. “You remember what I meant to tell you yesterday?”

Sonia waited uneasily.

“I said as I went away that perhaps I was saying goodbye forever, but that if I came today I would tell you who⁠ ⁠… who killed Lizaveta.”

She began trembling all over.

“Well, here I’ve come to tell you.”

“Then you really meant it yesterday?” she whispered with difficulty. “How do you know?” she asked quickly, as though suddenly regaining her reason.

Sonia’s face grew paler and paler, and she breathed painfully.

“I know.”

She paused a minute.

“Have they found him?” she asked timidly.

“No.”

“Then how do you know about it?” she asked again, hardly audibly and again after a minute’s pause.

He turned to her and looked very intently at her.

“Guess,” he said, with the same distorted helpless smile.

A shudder passed over her.

“But you⁠ ⁠… why do you frighten me like this?” she said, smiling like a child.

“I must be a great friend of his⁠ ⁠… since I know,” Raskolnikov went on, still gazing into her face, as though he could not turn his eyes away. “He⁠ ⁠… did not mean to kill that Lizaveta⁠ ⁠… he⁠ ⁠… killed her accidentally.⁠ ⁠… He meant to kill the old woman when she was alone and he went there⁠ ⁠… and then Lizaveta came in⁠ ⁠… he killed her too.”

Another awful moment passed. Both still gazed at one another.

“You can’t guess, then?” he asked suddenly, feeling as though he were flinging himself down from a steeple.

“N-no⁠ ⁠…” whispered Sonia.

“Take a good look.”

As soon as he had said this again, the same familiar sensation froze his heart. He looked at her and all at once seemed to see in her face the face of Lizaveta. He remembered clearly the expression in Lizaveta’s face, when he approached her with the axe and she stepped back to the wall, putting out her hand, with childish terror in her face, looking as little children do when they begin to be frightened of something, looking intently and uneasily at what frightens them, shrinking back and holding out their little hands on the point of crying. Almost the same thing happened now to Sonia. With the same helplessness and the same terror, she looked at him for a while and, suddenly putting out her left hand, pressed her fingers faintly against his breast and slowly began to get up from the bed, moving further from him and keeping her eyes fixed even more immovably on him. Her terror infected him. The same fear showed itself on his face. In the same way he stared at her and almost with the same childish smile.

“Have you guessed?” he whispered at last.

“Good God!” broke in an awful wail from her bosom.

She sank helplessly on the bed with her face in the pillows, but a moment later she got up, moved quickly to him, seized both his hands and, gripping them tight in her thin fingers, began looking into his face again with the same intent stare. In this last desperate look she tried to look into him and catch some last hope. But there was no hope; there was no doubt remaining; it was all true! Later on, indeed, when she recalled that moment, she thought