“But maybe it's this gentleman, this Pyotr Petrovich! You could see from what they said that he's marrying his sister, and that Rodya got a letter about it just before his illness . . .”
“Yes; why the devil did he have to come now; he may have spoiled the whole thing. And did you notice that he's indifferent to everything, doesn't respond to anything, except for one point that drives him wild: this murder . . .”
“Yes, yes!” Razumikhin picked up, “of course I noticed it! He gets interested, frightened. He got frightened the very day of his illness, in the police chief's office; he passed out.”
“Tell me about it in more detail this evening, and then I'll tell you a thing or two. He interests me, very much so! I'll come and check on him in half an hour...There won't be any inflammation, though . . .”
“My thanks to you! And I'll wait at Pashenka's meanwhile, and keep an eye on him through Nastasya...”
Raskolnikov, after they left, looked at Nastasya with impatience and anguish; but she still lingered and would not go away.
“Will you have some tea now?” she asked.
“Later! I want to sleep! Leave me . . .”
He turned convulsively to the wall; Nastasya went out.
VI
But as soon as she went out, he got up, hooked the door, untied the bundle of clothing that Razumikhin had brought earlier and had tied up again himself, and began to dress. Strangely, he seemed suddenly to become perfectly calm; there was none of the earlier half-crazed delirium, nor the panicky fear of that whole recent time. This was the first moment of some strange, sudden calm. His movements were precise and definite; a firm intention shone through them. “Today, today! ... ” he muttered to himself. He realized, however, that he was still weak, but emotional tension, so strong in him that it had reached the point of calm, of a fixed idea, gave him strength and self-confidence; he hoped, all the same, that he would not collapse in the street. Having fully dressed, in all new things, he looked at the money lying on the table, reflected, and put it in his pocket. There were twenty-five roubles. He also took all the five-kopeck pieces left as change from the ten roubles Razumikhin had spent on the clothes. Then he quietly unfastened the hook, stepped out of the room, went down the stairs, and peeked through the wide open door into the kitchen: Nastasya was standing with her back to him, bending over the landlady's samovar and blowing on the coals. She did not hear anything. Besides, who could imagine he would leave? In another moment he was in the street.
It was about eight o'clock; the sun was going down. It was as stifling as before, yet he greedily inhaled the stinking, dusty, city-infected air. He began to feel slightly giddy; a sort of wild energy suddenly shone in his inflamed eyes and in his pale and yellow, emaciated face. He did not know and did not think about where he was going; he knew only one thing—that “all this must be ended today, at once, right now; otherwise he would not go back home, because he did not want to live like that. “ Ended how? Ended by what? Of that he had no idea, nor did he want to think about it. He kept driving the thought away; the thought tormented him. He simply felt and knew that everything had to change, one way or another, “no matter how,” he repeated with desperate, fixed self-confidence and resolution.
By old habit, following the usual course of his former walks, he headed straight for the Haymarket. Just before the Haymarket, on the sidewalk in front of a grocery shop, stood a dark-haired young organ-grinder, turning out some quite heartfelt love song. He was accompanying a girl of about fifteen, who stood in front of him on the sidewalk, dressed like a young lady in a crinoline, a little cape, gloves, and a straw hat with a flame-colored feather—all of it old and shabby. She was singing a love song in a cracked but rather pleasant and strong street singer's voice, hoping to get two kopecks from the shop. Raskolnikov stopped alongside two or three listeners, listened for a while, took out a five-kopeck piece, and put it in the girl's hand. She suddenly cut off her song on the highest and most heartfelt note, as with a knife, shouted a curt “Enough!” to the organ-grinder, and they both trudged on to the next shop.
“Do you like street singing?” Raskolnikov suddenly addressed one not too young passer-by, who had been standing with him near the barrel-organ and looked like an idler. The man stared at him wildly and with amazement. “I do,” Raskolnikov went on, looking as if he were not talking about street singing at all, “I like hearing songs to the barrel-organ on a cold, dark, and wet autumn evening—it must be a wet evening—when all the passers-by have pale green, sickly faces; or, even better, when wet snow is falling, straight down, with no wind— you know?—and the gaslights are shining through it . . .”
“I don't know, sir...Excuse me . . .” the gentleman muttered, frightened both by the question and by Raskolnikov's strange look, and he crossed to the other side of the street.
Raskolnikov went straight on and came to the corner of the Haymarket where the tradesman and the woman, the ones who had been talking with Lizaveta that day, had their stand; but they were not there now. Having recognized the spot, he stopped, looked around, and addressed a young fellow in a red shirt who was yawning in the doorway of a miller's shop.
“That tradesman and the woman, his wife, keep a stand here at the corner, eh?”
“All kinds of people keep stands here,” the fellow replied, looking Raskolnikov up and down superciliously.
“What's his name?”
“Whatever he was baptized.”
“Are you from Zaraisk, too? What's your province?”
The fellow gave Raskolnikov another look.
“Ours isn't a province, Your Excellency, it's a district, but the strict one is my brother, not me, so I couldn't say, sir...Therefore I hope you'll be so magnanimous as to forgive me, Your Excellency.”
“Is this a cook-shop, the place upstairs?”
“It's a tavern; they've got billiards, and princesses on hand...oh-la-la!”
Raskolnikov crossed the square. There, on the corner, stood a thick crowd of people, all of them peasants. He made his way into the very thick of them, peering into their faces. For some reason he felt drawn to talk with everyone. But the peasants paid no attention to him; they were all cackling to each other, bunching together in little groups. He stood, thought a moment, then went to the right along the sidewalk, in the direction of V------y. Once past the square, he found himself in an alley.
He often used to take this short alley, which made an elbow and led from the square to Sadovaya. Recently, he had even been drawn to loafing around all these places, when he was feeling sick at heart, so as to make it “all the more sickening.” But now he was not thinking anything as he entered it. A big building there was given over entirely to taverns and other eating and drinking establishments; women came running out of them every other minute, wearing whatever was worn “around the neighborhood”—bareheaded and only in dresses. They crowded in groups at two or three places along the sidewalk, mostly near the basement stairways, where a couple of steps led down to various rather pleasurable establishments. In one of these, at that moment, a clatter and racket were going on for the whole street to hear—the strumming of a guitar, singing, and great merrymaking. A large group of women crowded around the entrance; some were sitting on the steps, others on the sidewalk, the rest stood talking together. A drunken soldier with a cigarette was loafing in the street nearby, swearing loudly; he seemed to want to go in somewhere but had apparently forgotten where. A ragamuffin was swearing at another ragamuffin, and there was a man lying dead drunk in the middle of the street. Raskolnikov stopped near the large group of women. They were talking in husky voices; all of them were wearing cotton dresses, goatskin shoes, and nothing on their heads. Some were over forty, but there were some younger than seventeen; almost every one of them had a black eye.