And Pyotr Petrovich handed Sonya a ten-rouble bill, after carefully unfolding it. Sonya took it, blushed, jumped up, murmured something, and hastily began bowing her way out. Pyotr Petrovich solemnly accompanied her to the door. She sprang out of the room at last, all agitated and exhausted, and returned in great embarrassment to Katerina Ivanovna.

During the course of this whole scene, Andrei Semyonovich either stood by the window or paced the room, not wishing to interrupt the conversation; but when Sonya left, he suddenly went up to Pyotr Petrovich and solemnly offered him his hand.

“I heard everything, and saw everything,” he said, with special emphasis on the word saw. “What a noble thing—that is, I meant to say, humane! You wished to avoid gratitude, I could see! And though I confess to you that, on principle, I cannot sympathize with private philanthropy, because it not only does not eradicate evil at the root, but even nourishes it still more, nevertheless I cannot help confessing that I looked upon your action with pleasure—yes, yes, I like it.”

“Eh, what nonsense!” Pyotr Petrovich muttered, a bit disturbed, and looking somehow closely at Lebezyatnikov.

“No, it's not nonsense! A man insulted and irritated as you are by yesterday's incident, and at the same time capable of thinking of the misfortune of others—such a man, sir...though by his actions he may be making a social mistake—nevertheless...is worthy of respect! I did not even expect it of you, Pyotr Petrovich, the less so since according to your ideas—oh! how your ideas still hinder you! How troubled you are, for instance, by yesterday's failure,” the good little Andrei Semyonovich went on exclaiming, once more feeling fervently inclined towards Pyotr Petrovich, “but why, why the absolute need for this marriage, this legal marriage, my most noble and most amiable Pyotr Petrovich? Why this absolute need for legality in marriage? Well, beat me if you like, but I'm glad, glad that it fell through, that you are free, that you are not yet altogether lost to mankind, glad...You see, I've spoken my mind.”

“Because I don't want to wear horns and breed up other men's children—that's why I need a legal marriage,” Luzhin said, just to make a reply. He was especially pensive and preoccupied with something.

“Children? You've touched upon children?” Andrei Semyonovich gave a start, like a war horse hearing the sound of trumpets. “Children are a social question, and the question is of the first importance, I agree; but the question of children will be resolved differently. There are even some who negate children altogether, as they do every suggestion of the family. We'll talk about children later, but now let us turn our attention to horns! I confess, this is my weak spot. This nasty, Pushkinian, hussar's expression is even unthinkable in the future lexicon.^[112]Besides, what are horns? Oh, delusion! What horns? Why horns? What nonsense! On the contrary, in civil marriage there won't be any horns! Horns are simply the natural consequence of every legal marriage, its correction, so to speak, a protest, so that in this sense they are not humiliating in the least. . . And—absurd as it is to think of it—if ever I wind up in a legal marriage, I will even be glad of your thrice-cursed horns; in that case I'll say to my wife: 'My friend, before now I have only loved you, but now I respect you, because you've been able to protest!'^[113] You laugh? That's because you're not strong enough to tear yourself free of prejudices! Devil take it, don't I know precisely what makes it so unpleasant when you're deceived in the legal sort? But that is merely the base consequence of a base fact, in which both parties are humiliated. But when the horns are given openly, as in a civil marriage, then they no longer exist, they are unthinkable, and lose even the name of horns. On the contrary, your wife will merely be proving how much she respects you, by considering you incapable of opposing her happiness and developed enough not to take revenge on her for her new husband. Devil take it, I sometimes dream that if I were given in marriage—pah!—if I were to marry (civilly or legally, it makes no difference), I think I'd bring my wife a lover myself, if she was too slow in taking one. 'My friend,' I'd say, 'I love you, but beyond that I wish you to respect me—here!' Is it right, is it right what I'm saying? . . .”

Pyotr Petrovich was chuckling as he listened, but with no particular enthusiasm. Indeed, he was scarcely even listening. He was actually thinking over something else, and even Lebezyatnikov finally noticed it. Pyotr Petrovich was even excited; he rubbed his hands and kept lapsing into thought. All this Andrei Semyonovich realized and recalled afterwards . . .

II

It would be difficult to point to exactly what caused the idea of this witless memorial meal to be born in Katerina Ivanovna's unsettled head. Indeed, nearly ten roubles had been thrown away on it, out of the more than twenty she had received from Raskolnikov for Marmeladov's actual funeral. Perhaps Katerina Ivanovna considered it her duty towards the dead man to honor his memory “properly,” so that all the tenants would know, Amalia Ivanovna especially, that he was “not only in no way worse than they, but maybe even much better,” and that none of them had the right to “turn up his nose” at him. Perhaps what had greatest influence here was that special poor man's pride, which brings it about that in some of the social rituals obligatory for one and all in our daily life, many poor people turn themselves inside out and spend every last kopeck of their savings, only so as to be “no worse than others” and “not to be condemned” somehow by these others. It is quite probable that Katerina Ivanovna wished, precisely on that occasion, precisely at that moment when it seemed she had been abandoned by everyone in the world, to show all these “worthless and nasty tenants” not only that she “knew how to live and how to entertain,” but that she had even been brought up for an altogether different lot, that she had been brought up “in a noble, one might even say aristocratic, colonel's house,” and was not at all prepared for sweeping the floor herself and washing the children's rags at night. Such paroxysms of pride and vanity sometimes visit the poorest and most downtrodden people, and at times turn into an irksome and irrepressible need in them. Katerina Ivanovna, moreover, was not the downtrodden sort at all; she could be utterly crushed by circumstances, but to make her morally downtrodden—that is, to intimidate her and break her will—was impossible. Moreover, Sonechka had quite good grounds for saying of her that her mind was becoming deranged. True, one could not say it positively and finally as yet, but indeed, recently, during the whole past year, her poor head had been too tormented not to have become at least partially damaged. An acute development of consumption, physicians say, also leads to a deranging of the mental faculties.

Wines in plural and in great variety there were not, nor was there any Madeira; all this had been exaggerated; but there was wine. There were vodka, rum, and Lisbon, all of the worst quality, but all in sufficient quantity. Of food, besides kutya,^[114] there were three or four dishes (pancakes among them), all from Amalia Ivanovna's kitchen, and in addition two samovars were being prepared for tea and punch, which were supposed to follow the meal. The purchasing had been seen to by Katerina Ivanovna herself, with the help of one tenant, a pathetic little Pole, who for God knows what reason was living at Mrs. Lippewechsel's, and who immediately attached himself to Katerina Ivanovna as an errand boy, and had spent the whole day yesterday and all that morning running around with his tongue hanging out, seeming especially anxious that this last circumstance be noticed. He came running to Katerina Ivanovna for every trifle, even ran to look for her in the Gostiny Arcade, kept calling her “pani cborunzina,”^[115] until at last she got thoroughly fed up with him, though at first she had said that without this “obliging and magnanimous” man she would utterly have perished. It was a property of Katerina Ivanovna's character hastily to dress up any first-comer in the best and brightest colors, to shower him with praises, which made some even feel ashamed, to invent various nonexistent circumstances for praising him, and to believe with perfect sincerity and candor in their reality, and then suddenly, all at once, to become disillusioned, to cut short, berate, and drive out the person whom, only a few hours earlier, she had literally worshipped. She was naturally of an easily amused, cheerful, and peaceable character, but continual misfortunes and failures had made her wish and demand so fiercely that everyone live in peace and joy, and not dare to live otherwise, that the slightest dissonance in life, the lease failure, would at once send her almost into a frenzy, and in the space of an instant, after the brightest hopes and fantasies, she would begin cursing her fate, tearing and throwing whatever she got hold of, and beating her head against the wall. Suddenly, for some reason, Amalia Ivanovna also acquired an extraordinary significance and extraordinary respect from Katerina Ivanovna, perhaps solely because this memorial meal got started and Amalia Ivanovna decided wholeheartedly to participate in all the chores: she undertook to lay the table, to provide linen, dishes, and so on, and to prepare the food in her kitchen. Katerina Ivanovna left her in charge when she went to the cemetery, and gave her full authority. Indeed, everything was done up famously: the tablecloth was even quite clean; the dishes, forks, knives, wineglasses, goblets, cups—all miscellaneous, of course, in all sorts of shapes and sizes, borrowed from various tenants—were in place at the right time; and Amalia Ivanovna, feeling that she had done a superb job, met the people coming back even with a certain pride, all decked out in a bonnet with new mourning ribbons and a black dress. This pride, though merited, for some reason displeased Katerina Ivanovna: “Really, as if they couldn't even have set the table without Amalia Ivanovna!” The bonnet with its new ribbons also displeased her: “Is this stupid German woman proud, by any chance, of being the landlady and agreeing out of charity to help her poor tenants? Out of charity! I ask you! In the house of Katerina Ivanovna's papa, who was a colonel and all but a governor, the table was sometimes laid for forty persons, and this same Amalia Ivanovna, or, more properly, Ludwigovna, wouldn't even have been allowed into the kitchen . . .” However, Katerina Ivanovna resolved not to air her feelings for the time being, though she decided in her heart that Amalia Ivanovna absolutely had to be brought up short that very day and reminded of her proper place, or else she would start fancying God knows what about herself, but for the time being she was simply cool to her. Yet another unpleasantness contributed to Katerina Ivanovna's irritation: almost none of the tenants who had been invited actually came to the funeral, except for the little Pole, who did manage to run over to the cemetery; yet for the memorial meal—for the food, that is—all the poorest and most insignificant of them appeared, many not even looking like themselves, just some sort of trash. And those who were a bit older and a bit more solid, as if on purpose, by conspiracy, all stayed away. Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, for example, the most solid, one might say, of all the tenants, did not appear, and yet the evening before, Katerina Ivanovna had managed to tell the whole world—that is, Amalia Ivanovna, Polechka, Sonya, and the little Pole—that he was a most noble and magnanimous man, with the most vast connections and wealth, her first husband's old friend, received in her father's house, and that he had promised to use every means to obtain a considerable pension for her. Let us note here that when Katerina Ivanovna did boast of someone's connections and wealth, it was without any thought for herself, without any personal calculation, quite disinterestedly, so to speak, from a fullness of heart, only for the pleasure of praising, and so as to give even more worth to what she praised. Along with Luzhin, and no doubt “following his example,” that “nasty scoundrel Lebe-zyatnikov” also failed to appear. “Who does he think he is? He was invited only out of charity, and then only because he's sharing a room with Pyotr Petrovich and is his acquaintance, so that it would have been awkward not to invite him.” Absent as well were a certain genteel lady and her “overripe maiden” daughter, who, though they had been living in Amalia Ivanovna's rooms for only about two weeks, had already complained several times of noise and shouting from the Marmeladovs' room, especially when the deceased would return home drunk, of which Katerina Ivanovna had, of course, already been informed by Amalia Ivanovna herself when, squabbling with Katerina Ivanovna and threatening to turn out the whole family, she had shouted at the top of her voice that they were disturbing “noble tenants whose foot they were not worth.” Katerina Ivanovna now made a point of inviting this lady and her daughter whose “foot she supposedly was not worth,” the more so as prior to this, in chance meetings, the woman always turned haughtily away—now they would know that there were “people who had nobler thoughts and feelings, and invited guests without holding any grudges,” and they would see that Katerina Ivanovna was accustomed to quite a different lot in life. This was to be explained to them without fail at the table, as was the governorship of her late papa, and along with that an indirect remark would be made about there being no point in turning away from meetings, as it was an extremely stupid thing to do. There was a fat lieutenant-colonel (actually a retired captain) who also did not come, but it turned out that he had been “out cold” since the previous evening. In short, the only ones who came were: the little Pole; then a miserable runt of a clerk, mute, covered with blackheads, in a greasy frock coat, and with a disgusting smell; and then a deaf and almost completely blind old man, who had once worked in some post office, and whom someone from time immemorial and for unknown reasons had been keeping at Amalia Ivanovna's. There was also a drunken retired lieutenant, actually a supply officer, who had a most indecent and loud laugh, and, “just imagine,” was not wearing a waistcoat! One of them sat right down at the table without so much as a bow to Katerina Ivanovna, and finally one personage, for lack of clothes, appeared in his dressing gown, but this was already an impossible degree of indecency, and, through the efforts of Amalia Ivanovna and the little Pole, he was successfully removed. The little Pole, however, brought along two other little Poles, who had never even lived at Amalia Ivanovna's, and whom no one had seen in the house before. Katerina Ivanovna found all this quite unpleasantly annoying. “Whom were all these preparations made for, then?” To gain space, the children were not even put at the table, which took up the whole room anyway, but had to eat in the back corner on a trunk, the two little ones sitting on a bench, while Polechka, being a big girl, looked after them, fed them, and wiped their little noses “as is proper for noble children.” In short, Katerina Ivanovna had, against her will, to meet everyone with heightened dignity and even condescension. To some she gave an especially stern look, haughtily inviting them to sit down at the table. Considering Amalia Ivanovna for some reason answerable for all those who failed to come, she suddenly began treating her with great negligence, which Amalia Ivanovna noticed at once and greatly resented. Such a beginning promised no good end. Finally they all sat down.