But these were still trifles he had not even begun to think about, nor did he have time. He had thought about the main thing, and put the trifles off until he himself was convinced of everything. But this last seemed decidedly unrealizable. At least it seemed so to him. He could in no way imagine, for example, that one day he would finish thinking, get up, and—simply go there...Even his recent trial (that is, his visit with the intention of making a final survey of the place) was only a trying out and far from the real thing, as if he had said to himself: “Why not go and try it—enough of this dreaming!” and he was immediately unable to endure it, spat, and fled, furious with himself. And yet it would seem he had already concluded the whole analysis, in terms of a moral resolution of the question: his casuistry was sharp as a razor, and he no longer found any conscious objections. But in the final instance he simply did not believe himself, and stubbornly, slavishly, sought objections on all sides, gropingly, as if someone were forcing him and drawing him to it. This last day, which had come so much by chance and resolved everything at once, affected him almost wholly mechanically: as if someone had taken him by the hand and pulled him along irresistibly, blindly, with unnatural force, without objections. As if a piece of his clothing had been caught in the cogs of a machine and he were being dragged into it.
At first—even long before—he had been occupied with one question: why almost all crimes are so easily detected and solved, and why almost all criminals leave such an obviously marked trail. He came gradually to various and curious conclusions, the chief reason lying, in his opinion, not so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime as in the criminal himself; the criminal himself, almost any criminal, experiences at the moment of the crime a sort of failure of will and reason, which, on the contrary, are replaced by a phenomenal, childish thoughtlessness, just at the moment when reason and prudence are most necessary. According to his conviction, it turned out that this darkening of reason and failure of will take hold of a man like a disease, develop gradually, and reach their height shortly before the crime is committed; they continue unabated during the moment of the crime itself and for some time after it, depending on the individual; then they pass in the same way as any disease passes. But the question whether the disease generates the crime, or the crime somehow by its peculiar nature is always accompanied by something akin to disease, he did not yet feel able to resolve.
Having come to such conclusions, he decided that in his own personal case there would be no such morbid revolutions, that reason and will would remain with him inalienably throughout the fulfillment of what he had plotted, for the sole reason that what he had plotted—was “not a crime”...We omit the whole process by means of which he arrived at this latter decision; we have run too far ahead of ourselves as it is . .. We will only add that the factual, purely material difficulties of the affair generally played a most secondary role in his mind. “Since I will have kept all my will and reason over them, they, too, will be defeated in due time, once I have acquainted myself to the minutest point with all the details of the affair...” But the affair would not get started. He went on believing least of all in his final decisions, and when the hour struck, everything came out not that way at all, but somehow accidentally, even almost unexpectedly.
One quite negligible circumstance already nonplussed him even before he got down the stairs. Having reached the landlady's kitchen, wide open as always, he cautiously took a sidelong glance to see if the landlady herself might be there in Nastasya's absence, and, if not, whether the door to her room was tightly shut, so that she could not somehow peek out as he went in to take the axe. How great was his amazement when he suddenly saw that Nastasya was not only at home this time, in her kitchen, but was even doing something: taking laundry from a basket and hanging it on a line! Seeing him, she stopped hanging, turned towards him, and looked at him all the while he was passing by. He turned away and walked past as if noticing nothing. But the affair was finished: no axe! He was terribly struck.
“And where did I get the idea,” he was thinking, as he went down to the gateway, “where did I get the idea that she was sure to be away right now? Why, why, why was I so certain of it?” He was crushed, even somehow humiliated. He wanted to laugh at himself in his anger...Dull, brutal rage was seething in him.
He stopped in the gateway, reflecting. To go out, to walk around the streets just for the sake of appearances, was revolting to him; to return home—even more revolting. “To lose such an opportunity forever!” he muttered, standing aimlessly in the gateway, directly opposite the caretaker's dark closet, which was also open. Suddenly he gave a start. From the caretaker's closet, which was two steps away from him, from under the bench to the right, the gleam of something caught his eye...He looked around—nobody. On tiptoe he approached the caretaker's room, went down the two steps, and called the caretaker in a faint voice. “Sure enough, he's not home! Must be nearby, though, somewhere in the yard, since the door is wide open.” He rushed headlong for the axe (it was an axe) and pulled it from under the bench, where it lay between two logs; he slipped it into the loop at once, before going out, put both hands into his pockets, and walked out of the caretaker's room; no one noticed! “If not reason, then the devil!” he thought, grinning strangely. The incident encouraged him enormously.
He went quietly and sedately on his way, without hurrying, so as not to arouse any suspicions. He barely looked at the passers-by, even tried not to look at their faces at all and to be as inconspicuous as possible. Then he suddenly remembered his hat. “My God! I had money two days ago, and couldn't even change it for a cap!” A curse rose up in his soul.
Glancing into a shop by chance, out of the corner of his eye he noticed that the clock on the wall already showed ten minutes past seven. He had to hurry, and at the same time he had to make a detour, to get to the house from the other side ...
Earlier, when he had happened to picture it all in his imagination, he sometimes thought he would be very afraid. But he was not very afraid now, even not afraid at all. He was even occupied at that moment with certain unrelated thoughts, though not for long. Passing the Yusupov Garden, he even became much absorbed in the notion of setting up tall fountains, and of how they would freshen the air in all the public squares. Gradually he arrived at the conviction that if the Summer Garden were expanded across the entire Field of Mars and even joined with the garden of the Mikhailovsky Palace, it would be a wonderful and most useful thing for the city. At which point he suddenly became interested in precisely why the people of all big cities are somehow especially inclined, not really out of necessity alone, to live and settle in precisely those parts of the city where there are neither gardens nor fountains, where there is filth and stench and all sorts of squalor. At which point he recalled his own walks through the Haymarket and came to himself for a moment. “What nonsense,” he thought. “No, better not to think anything at all.
“It must be the same for men being led out to execution—their thoughts must cling to every object they meet on the way,” flashed through his head, but only flashed, like lightning; he hastened to extinguish the thought...But he was already close, here was the house, here were the gates. Somewhere a clock suddenly struck once. “What, can it be half past seven? Impossible; it must be fast!”